The Kalbrandt Institute Archives: Book I: Hauntings

By Chris H. Chelser

Ancient books, rare artefacts, reports of paranormal phenomenon: the Kalbrandt Institute archives surpass Eva’s wildest imagination. Here, her ability to ‘read’ objects on touch isn’t considered weird – it is why they hired her.

But examining the reports of her predecessors, she finds their memories speak louder than words on paper. The Institute harbours secrets, dark secrets that will cost Eva her life. And now her boss knows what she found out...

Eva’s discovery explores five unique and inventive ghost stories. A wonderfully written work that will hook you immediately!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris H. Chelser
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9789492194091

Chris H. Chelser

Reading can be a transformative experience. Any story, whatever genre or purpose, has the potential to show new perspectives. You can't put an upfront price tag on such discoveries, only a token of appreciation afterwards. If you have enjoyed my stories, please visit my website and let me know. :)"Chris Chelser writes dark paranormal fiction about ghosts, monsters, history and the human soul. Preferring dark stories to ‘happy ever after’ since she was a child, she began writing in her teens and never stopped. She lives in the Netherlands with her family and the demons under the bed."

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The Kalbrandt Institute Archives

Book I: Hauntings

Copyright 2015 Chris Chelser

Published by Azera Publishing at Smashwords

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The Archives

BOOK I: HAUNTINGS

F/44197/FCT - New York State, USA, 2014

F/41923/SM - Kingussie, Scotland, 1985

F/25852/YA - Paris, France, 1849

9796/N(xxiv) - Valley of the Kings, Egypt, 1601

F/15046/K(i) - Kastri, Greece, 1721

Archives Trivia

About the Author

BOOK II: MONSTERS – To be disclosed

BOOK III: ARTEFACTS – To be disclosed

BOOK IV: MONUMENTS – To be disclosed

Book I: Hauntings

August, 2015

Veste Malsaulenberg,

somewhere in the Bavarian Alps

The moment she opened the ancient carved doors and stepped across the worn granite threshold, Eva’s jaw dropped.

The hall before her was nothing short of immense. Large windows, each three stories tall, let in bright strips of sunlight that highlighted the coloured marble patterns on the floor. All around wooden ornaments graced the countless bookcases. Every inch of the walls was taken up by books, books and more books, all the way up to the painted ceiling. An intricate network of shelves, showcases and niches on all three levels were connected by balconies and stairs. Thousands of books! And as from a few hours ago, Eva was allowed to read every single one of them.

She spun around and around, dancing into the vast library like Alice in Wonderland, stopping only when she got dizzy. A giggle of childish amazement slipped out before she could stifle it. Forget her parents’ books, her grandfather’s collection of oddities, or her brother’s misgivings. This had to be what Heaven looked like!

‘Sorry, Ludvík. I wouldn’t want to miss this for anything in the world,’ she whispered in awe.

After her initial enthusiasm had subsided, Eva reminded herself that she hadn’t been sent here to gawk. Collecting herself, she ventured further into the hall with more sense of purpose.

A surprising number of people buzzed about the bookshelves. Eva assumed they were either agents preparing a mission or researchers looking for sources. Her sneakers squeaked on the polished marble floor as she approached the person nearest to her: an older man with tanned skin and a big scar down the side of his face.

‘Excuse me, sir? Can you help me?’ When he looked up and didn’t seem too annoyed at the interruption, she showed him the badge she had been given. ‘I’m new here, and I think I’m lost.’

The man smiled showing teeth that were yellow with nicotine. ‘Ah, fresh blood!’ he managed to exclaim while keeping his voice low. ‘Which department?’

Eva had to think twice before she understood what he meant. She glanced at her badge. ‘I haven’t been assigned anywhere yet, but I’m an, uh, E.S.P. trainee, according to this.’

‘A new psychic? Good, good. Welcome to the club.’ He extended his gloved hand. ‘José Pérez. Biologist, from Peru.’

She accepted his white satin handshake.

‘Eva Novotná, Czech Republic.’

From the corner of her eye, she glanced at the set of scrolls that lay open on the table he was working at. ‘May I ask what you are researching?’

‘You can always ask. It is getting answers that can be more troublesome.’ José winked, but motioned her to read the scroll. She couldn’t. It was written, by her best estimation, in Greek.

‘I’m trying to sort legends from fact,’ he explained. ‘A difficult business when written accounts go back at least two and a half thousand years and newer sources are only less accurate than the originals, not more.’

Eva stared at the scroll. It seemed a wall of letters without punctuation. Some lines were apparently even written backwards. ‘You can read this?’

‘Well enough. Work for the Institute long enough and you learn to master at least several languages, half of them long dead. An occupational hazard.’ He grinned, pleased at a joke she didn’t get.

‘May I touch the scroll?’ she asked.

‘Only with gloves.’

‘Oh. I’m not sure if I can, ehm, do what I’d like to try while wearing gloves.’

‘In that case I’m afraid that—’ He stopped as if distracted by something behind her. Then he pursed his lips. ‘Well, maybe a careful finger or two wouldn’t hurt.’

Eva chirped with glee, but made a show of calming down before, very carefully, placing two fingertips on the edge of the scroll.

A moment’s concentration opened her mind and tapped into the story beyond the frail papyrus. She searched for sounds, sights, recollections of the writer buried by ink in the fabric of the scroll. But to her dismay, all she found were faint outlines, like sun-bleached photographs. The information itself was fragmented, too. Only one notion was repeated over and over.

‘Is it about mani… No, manti...chora. I’m sorry, most of it must have faded with age, but it’s about a beast, and the word ‘mantichora’… which is not the right word, because the real name is something else, but I can’t pronounce it.’

‘Martyaxwar?’

She mouthed the sound to herself. ‘Could be. Yes, could well be.’

José’s friendly wrinkles stilled, scar and all. ‘Can you tell what that thing is, or where it comes from?’

Eva closed her eyes and tried to make sense of what little meaningful information she found. A sting at the back of her head made her let go of the scroll.

‘Sorry, I can’t. The best I get is somewhere east from here.’

Very slowly, José nodded. ‘Nice. I can see why they hired you.’

‘Was I right? Or at least right-ish?’

‘This scroll was written over two thousand years ago. It’s a Greek account of a story about a creature that the Persians called martyaxwar, but which you will know by some derivative of its Greek name. In English it’s called a manticore. A creature of legend, or so legend would have it. They were first reported to have been seen in India and Persia. In other words, well east from here.’

‘Oh wauw!’ She nervously scratched her neck to hide a blush of excitement. ‘I never tried reading anything that old before. I wouldn’t have thought it could work. Well, it didn’t really, since you already knew whatever I came up with.’

‘Don’t worry,’ José said. ‘Can’t have you doing my job, right? Besides, it was you who asked me for help first. What can I do for you?’

‘Oh, that’s right, I nearly forgot. I need to go to the archives?’

His brown eyes flitted, and he smiled again. ‘You say you’re new here?’

‘Just signed the paperwork this morning.’

‘Then let me tell you a secret about Malsaulenberg, Eva. You see, this castle is a bit like a tree. It’s very old, and it keeps growing and growing as time goes by. And like a tree, its roots have grown as big as its canopy.’

Eva gazed up to the ceiling. ‘But the castle is enormous!’

‘So it must be to house everything it does. You need to go to the cellars. See that winding staircase at the back of the hall? That goes further down, to the vaults and the archives. When you get to the door, just type in your badge number and push the green button.’

‘Thank you, Mr Perez. Good luck with that research!’

‘Please, José will do,’ he said, and he waved her goodbye.

Crossing the long hall, Eva noticed that the staircase José had pointed her to looked out of place in this antique setting. It had a lovely banister of carved wood around the winding steps, all the way from the top balcony two storeys higher, but when she came closer, she discovered that the steps spiralling into the underground stairwell were made of steel. Despite her efforts to be silent, the rubber soles of her sneakers still caused a metallic echo to bounce off the walls below every time she put her foot down.

She counted the steps as she descended. By her calculation, she was almost seven metres below ground-level before she came to a cool, dry-walled corridor that extended both to the left and to the right. In both directions the corridor turned a ninety-degree angle after about ten metres, so she couldn’t tell where either end led. Directly ahead of her, however, was a metal frame surrounding a glass sliding door. A numeric keypad had been mounted beside it, along with a green button. Just like José had described.

As instructed, Eva typed in her badge number, hit the button and stood back. With a soft hiss, the glass door slid to one side and the typical smell of conditioned air poured out. A little apprehensive, she stepped through the doorway.

The entrance’s technical finesse aside, the archive was quite unimpressive compared to the splendour of the library above. It had nearly the same floor surface, but was completely void of non-functional ornaments. The straight walls and occasional pillar were all the same indistinct off-white colour, while the floor tiles were so worn that their glazing had been scraped off everywhere but in the corners and along furniture edges, where they revealed that they had once been decorated with a simple brown-and-grey repetitive pattern of compass stars. Along the walls, near the low ceiling, ran pipes, fans and wires for the evident climate control system. Its instalment clearly post-dated the room, but no effort had been made to hide them from sight. Rather pointless, perhaps, as the soft whirring noise in the background betrayed the presence of modern equipment anyway.

The archive itself was equally uncompromising in its identity: row upon row of dark wooden bookcases ran from where she stood to the far end of the room, the aisles between them just large enough for two people to pass each other. The rows had been numbered by means of brass plates attached to the side of each row. Below each plate, at eye height, smaller brass numbers and letters had been tacked. A part of the index system, Eva suspected.

‘Which file do you need?’ a brisk voice demanded.

Eva all but jumped out of her skin. Turning around, she found a stocky woman with pasty complexion and a scowl standing behind her.

‘I said, which file do you need?’

‘No file in particular,’ Eva confessed. ‘My mentor told me to come here, but she gave me no specific assignment.’ She held up her badge with an apologetic face. ‘I’m new here?’

Unlike José a few minutes ago, this woman gave no sign of sympathy for Eva’s predicament. She simply pointed first at the rows of bookcases and then at the wall of floor-to-ceiling cabinets to the right of the door.

‘There are 44,231 files on record as of this morning,’ she stated. ‘The card index accommodates searches by unique file number, surname of an agent or specific phenomena. The file numbers are sequential, the first letter denotes the department with exception of file numbers 1 to 9,824, which predate the departments. The last letters are the

initials of the agent involved, surname first.’ She gestured towards the far end of the room. ‘Files predating 1750 AD are kept in the specifically conditioned section in the back, which is accessible only to authorised personnel. Reports filed up to 1634 AD are in Latin, those filed between 1635 and 1870 AD are in French, and those dating from 1871 AD onward are in English. If you require the use of dictionaries, a slide projector, microfilm projector, audio device, VHS recorder or screen, you can request such equipment from me.’

Eva blinked a few times, trying and failing to process the cascade of monotonous information, never mind determining whether any of it was relevant to her. She had lost the thread at the mention of the card index. She opened her mouth to ask how to work with it, but the stocky woman had already disappeared into the forest of bookcases.

At a loss, Eva glanced at the index cabinet. It was more than twice as long as it was high, and the front of each drawer was only the size of her hand. She opened the nearest drawer. It was filled front to back with dozens and dozens of scribbled index cards.

‘Where do I even begin?’

She looked around for the woman she assumed was the librarian, but the stocky woman was nowhere in sight. For an instant Eva considered asking for help from the younger man who had just come in, but she held her tongue. She wouldn’t bother her new colleagues with basic start-up problems when a healthy trial-and-error approach and some extra work would do the trick just as well.

With renewed courage she flipped through the cards. Picking one at random was tempting, but felt like cheating. Her mentor, Sanvy Kaur, had explained that because of her ability, her first few weeks would be spent assisting the specialists of the paranormal departments. If she was going to pull her weight there, her focus should be on that part of the archive.

Scanning the oval labels on the drawers, Eva found the section where the cards were filed by department.

‘Artefacts, archéologie, fantômes, monstres, phénomènes paranormaux… Clearly the departments were created when people spoke French here. Oh well, could be worse. Could be Latin, like the librarian woman mentioned. Let’s see, do I want to start with ghosts or paranormal phenomena?’

She opted for the first and opened the drawer with the highest numbers of the fantômes department. As a test to herself, she selected one card from the drawer on instinct. F/44197/FCT, it said. Not sure if she was allowed to take the card, she committed the file number and corresponding location to memory, and put it back.

The smaller numbers on the bookcases turned out to be the location indicators she had taken them for. To her surprise, the bookcases themselves were in fact racks of broad shelves which were filled with cardboard boxes from both sides. Gazing between the shelves she could make out the next aisle and, after some peering between the contents of the next bookcase, the aisle after that, too.

Each side of the bookcases was divided into sections, again marked with brass numbers on the vertical standards. Her search for the file she had selected brought her to a row where the shelves to either side were still partly empty. The section she needed was only the third section of this row that was in use. Archive boxes of various sizes sat lined up on their shelves. Some boxes were only big enough to hold as much paper as fitted inside an A4-sized file binder, but the others were actual boxes with a lid.

And contents. Plenty of contents.

Innocuous as the boxes seemed, to Eva it was a nightmare to be this close to them. Usually she needed to touch an object before it grabbed her attention, but this many stories packed so tightly together was like walking into a room full of screaming children crying their loudest to be heard. To be read.

To be understood.

Eva reverted to the precautions she had taught herself and dimmed her awareness. The world became a muted fog to her mind, if not to her other senses. Through that haze she focused on finding this one file among the rest of them.

Thick, black letters made by felt-tip pen marked each box with the corresponding file number, sometimes one number for multiple boxes. At the bottom of the section that had been recorded on the index card, Eva found one of the smaller folders labelled