The Durst Household †

Who

Gustav and Elisabeth Durst, their children Rose & Thorn, a baby son, and their maid. The golden windmill on everything in the house was their crest.

Where

Death House, which went back into the mist once we left it.

Status

All dead long before we arrived. We buried the children and the maid. Elisabeth we destroyed.

First met

Session 1, as a family portrait on the landing.

We met the Dursts backwards: first as a painting, then as bones and ghosts, and last as the thing in the basement wall. The house they left behind was a trap that lied about everything, and the family's story came out of it in pieces. The mother ran a cult. The father let her. The children starved in the attic. The baby went down to the altar and did not come back.

The portrait

Over the hearth on the second-floor landing hung the family: an aristocratic father cradling a swaddled baby, a mother looking at the baby with thinly veiled scorn, and two smiling children. The plaque named Mr Gustav and Mrs Elizabeth Durst, "with their two children Thornboldt and Rosavalda." Three children were painted. Fëanor looked at the baby for a while. "I know what it's like to feel like you're not there."

The letter we found in the study made sense of the mother's face. It was from the devil, to the lady of the house: "Your husband took solace in the bosom of another woman, sired a bastard son, and drove you to abandon love for madness." Drew put it together at once: "Well, that'll be why they don't like the baby then." See The Letter from Death House.

The maid

She stepped out of a bedroom mirror, apologised for the mess and told us not to disturb the master's rest. "We have guests? I wasn't told about guests." She told Drew the year was 400 BC, which meant nothing to any of us. She loved the baby: "He's not wanted, but he is loved… The mistress, she may not appreciate him, and she may have said some bad things, but, oh, you could not love a child more." When Sirius asked whether she knew she was a ghost, she laughed and told him not to play tricks on a servant. Drew swept a broom handle through her, respectfully, and she fled through the wall, giving away a hidden door as she went.

We found her again in the attic, beside her own skeleton in its maid's uniform. Sirius told her that her eyes looked lovely that evening. "Thank you. You're right. I'm dead." Then she told us the truth:

"I believe the mistress took him to the basement. I've never been allowed in the basement. Honestly, it's a cult. I'm pretty sure, literally, it's a cult. I didn't want to speak ill of the master and mistress. I don't even think the master was too involved. He seemed very reluctant. It was mostly the mistress."

She asked us to take her bones too, and to bury them a little away from the children: "out of yelling distance." Fëanor told her the afterlife was a nice place with a great deal of afternoon tea and no servitude at all. "And this is what the Morning Lord preaches?" It was the first time any of us had heard the name. "I just want to stop being in this horrible house." We buried her with the children, and she came back with them to say goodbye.

Elisabeth

The mistress. Rose said Mama brought bad sorts into the house who did magics, and that before she locked the children in she talked about using the baby for "innocence and sacrifice." The maid called it a cult. Downstairs we found the cult's quarters, its relics and its logbook of people it had tried to change, every one marked unsuccessful. (Fëanor threw the logbook down the well.)

In the family crypt, her coffin was the one full of biting insects. Everyone agreed that was fitting.

She came for us herself in the cult leaders' bedroom, bursting out of the earthen wall just as we finished reading a note: a dead woman with her ribs open and a black heart beating in her chest. "Intruders, what are you doing here?" Sirius hit her before she could finish the sentence. Every wound let out a poisonous reek. Between blows she gave us the name the whole valley would use for us:

"Mistwalkers. You may get me, but my creature will get you."

Fëanor's fire bolt went through the black heart and she crumbled. Soon after, the crying we had heard since we came down the stairs stopped. We know her now for Elisabeth herself.

Gustav

The master. The maid thought him reluctant. He fathered the baby on another woman, which is the one thing everyone, including the devil, agrees on. We found him hanging above the bed in the cult leaders' quarters, a skeleton in the clothes from his portrait, a crumpled note in his hand. We cut him down out of respect. His coffin in the crypt was empty.

The baby

The will we found in the study named Rose and Thorn and nobody else. In the nursery a black shroud hung over the crib. Inside was a small, still bundle, and when Sirius touched it, it collapsed into swaddling hundreds of years old. If anything baby-sized had been in there, it had gone. All the way down through the cellars we heard a baby crying somewhere to the west.

On the altar at the very bottom lay a bundle of very small bones, the same size and shape as the one upstairs. Thirteen faceless figures chanted "One must die. Only one." Lancelot, the starving dog we had pulled out from under a harpsichord, was the obvious offering. We refused, struck the altar instead, and at midnight the thing the cult had made came crawling out of the refuse: a mound of bodies with a crystal heart. Osric broke the heart. The figures screamed and were gone.

We left the little bones on the altar. The house took them with it.

What we still don't know

• Who was the baby's mother?
• What did the cult's ritual do? Fëanor read the chamber of relics and said only that whatever it had been for, it was already done.
• Why were there a white feather and a lump of amber among the thirteen relics, so like two of our heirlooms?
• What is in the yellow spellbook from the footlocker in the cult leaders' room? Nobody has read it yet.
• What happened to the master and mistress, in the end? Fëanor asked the maid, and she never answered.