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Logan Castle Ch. 2

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When Rebecca woke up the next morning she couldn't believe what she had done the night before, if she hadn't been so tired she probably would have been terrified. Although it did make her wonder if the ghosts came back and she at least acted like she wasn't afraid if they would eventually give up trying to scare her off.

After eating some breakfast she started exploring the rest of the castle. On the first floor she found a kitchen with big stone and brick ovens and two large fire places, each large enough to hold two large cooking kettles which still hung from the hooks in the fire places.
There was a water pump, when Rebecca tried to use it she found that, although stiff from years of not being used, with a lot of effort it still worked. The cupboards where still full of dishes. It thrilled her to think that these where the same dishes that her many greats grandparents had eaten off of hundreds of years ago.

She had always loved to see things that other people had that had been passed down through their families for years. Her own family didn't seem to have many heirlooms like that, so knowing her ancestors had lived in the castle and many of their belongings where still in it nearly brought her to tears she was so happy. It also made her even more determined that she would keep the castle, live in it and make sure that everything in it was properly preserved and cared for. Although it seemed that it had survived just fine for hundreds of years. So she decided she would clean out a few rooms for her to use and just dust the rest and leave everything else the way it had been left the last time someone had lived there. Just because she wasn't allowed to turn the castle into a public museum didn't mean she couldn't turn it into her own personal museum.

Also on the first floor was a large ball room with three large chandeliers with hundreds of crystals on them. The crystals caught the light from the windows and reflected rainbows all over the room. Even with the dust and cobwebs, the rainbows and light made the room feel magical and welcoming, unlike the rest of the castle which was dark and rather creepy.

When she opened the last door in the long hallway she gasped, it was a huge library; each of the four walls looked about sixty feet long, one of them curved out, no doubt it was under one of the turrets. Thousands of books lined the walls and balconies rimed the room at each of the next three stories up. As she walked to the far side of the room she could see where doors entered from the upper floors. Several chairs were set in the room and under one of the windows was huge, satin cushion about thirty feet around. She walked over to it trying to figure out what it was for and noticed that, unlike almost everything else in the castle there was no dust covering it, almost as if someone still used it. Then as she looked around the room she realized that the floor and many of the books were also clean. She walked over to one of the dust free selves, pulled out one of the books, opened it and was glad she had learned to read Latin even though she had been told it was a dead language. Most of the books were about dragons, their history, biology, legends and customs, everything imaginable. She was absolutely thrilled. She had spent years looking for nonfiction books about dragons and had found very few, so to have books about dragons that where hundreds of years old, maybe even written by people that had actually seen real ones was thrilling. Although most people thought she was crazy, she had always believed that dragons were real or at least had been.

She finally moved on to the upper floors and found hundreds of bedrooms, all of them huge. Most of the rooms had beds in and a few of the largest rooms had more of the huge satin cushions like the one in the library instead of beds. Most of the rooms had a sitting room and through that a bedroom, all of the rooms had the same beautifully caved wood work covering the walls that the first floor had had.

When she got to the fourth floor she was shocked to find that it had narrow hallways around the outer walls with one huge ballroom taking up most of the floor and the ceiling in the ballroom had to be at least twenty five feet high with balconies around the walls where the next floor would be. The ceiling above was supported by thick stone columns with dragons carved around them. At the far end of the room, towards the back of the castle were huge heavy wooden doors that nearly reached the ceiling. The walls of this ballroom where the first walls in the castle she had seen that didn't have the wooden carvings on the walls. Instead there was intricately carved wood trim around the top and bottom of the walls and the rest of the space was filled with hundreds of paintings, most of people, each with a name plate identifying the people in the picture. There were also paintings of dragons which also had name plates, then she noticed one with a beautiful young woman sitting on the back of a magnificent dragon. On the name plate under the picture it said William and Mary Logan on the day of their wedding 15 of April 1074ad.

Rebecca could hardly stand still she was so exited. For years she had told her family she thought they had dragons in their family tree. Of course they never believed her, but it was always something she had felt and believed, so finding this picture proved, at least to her that she had been right. From what the attorney had told her William Logan was the man who was said to have built the castle. No one had ever been able to find out who his parents had been or any record of him before he married Mary McFerrin though. Any time Rebecca couldn't find a grandparent's parents she would say they had been dragons and that's why there were no further records on their family, at least this time, it seemed she had been right and it made her wonder about other brick walls she had hit with other grandparents.

She finally headed up to the fifth floor which was wrapped around the upper half of the ball room. Beyond the balconies there were several large rooms full of weapons. Swords, bows and arrows, battle axes and dozens of other weapons. At different places around the fifth floor were staircases that led up into the towers, in each one there where bows and a good supply of arrows.  

Rebecca just couldn't understand why everything looked like the people had left planning to return and then never had. Not to mention how everything was so perfectly preserved. Most castles that had been abandoned for that long would have been empty and the plaster and woodwork wouldn't have survived the years.

She finally decided to walk to Katherine's and see if she could tell her anything more about the castles history.

Katherine was out working in her garden when Rebecca got there. Katherine saw her coming and walked out to meet her.

"So how did it go last night?" Katherine asked.

Rebecca laughed and told her, "I was tired and cranky, not to mention a little crazy because of being so tired and the ghosts gave up after a while."

"What exactly happened?" Katherine asked raising an eyebrow.

By the time Rebecca had told her everything that had happened, they where both laughing.

"So as long as you're too tired to care, you shouldn't have any problem staying there?" Katherine asked.

Rebecca grinned, "Exactly, although I am a little nervous about being there when I'm awake enough to realize what's going on. But I love the castle and would be content to live there the rest of my life, so it'll take a lot to get me out of there."

"Well I hope you can stay, it would be nice to have a neighbor out here, but what about your family back in America?"

"I can go back to visit them once in a while, I will miss them, but I already feel so at home here I can't imagine not staying," Rebecca told her.

"So why did you come here? I can't imagine you walked over a mile just so I could ask about last night."

"I have some questions about the castle and was hoping you could answer a few of them," Rebecca told her.

Katherine smiled and said, "Of course, what do you want to know? My grandfather use to tell me stories about it all the time, though I don't know how many were true."

"How long has the castle been abandoned and why was it abandoned?" Rebecca asked.

"It was abandoned around fifteen fifty, but no one knows why. Grandpa used to tell me a story about why it was, but I assume he made it up."

"Could you tell me about it?"

"Sure. Lets see, it all started when William Logan fell in love with Mary McFerrin. According to grandpa William was a dragon. He and Mary met when her horse was startled by something and ran off with her still on its back. William heard her screaming for help, turned himself into a human and stepped in front of the horse as it ran passed where he had been and calmed it down. William walked Mary home, they talked all the way and by the time they got there they where already falling in love, but Mary was betrothed to a man she had never even met. So they started meeting in secret. William had no land or title so he couldn't ask her father to let him marry her instead. When he told his parents that he had fallen in love with a human and needed their help so he could marry her, they told him that, if he told Mary that he was really a dragon and she still loved him and wanted to marry him they would make sure that her father would agree to let her marry him. But since William would live as a human most of the time and some of his descendents would most likely live among humans, his decedents would only be able to live in the castle as long as they lived in peace and treated the dragons with respect and no differently than they would treat other humans.


"He told Mary and she said she didn't care what he was as long as she could be with him.
So his parents, who where actually the king and queen of the dragons had the castle built and a large treasure room filled with more treasure than any human had ever seen.
Just a month before Mary was to be married William went and asked her father if he could marry her. At first her father said no because she was already betrothed, then William opened the chests of gold and treasure he had brought with him and offered it to the king.

"The king asked him how he would be able to provide for his daughter if William gave him so much gold and asked where they would live. William took him and showed him the castle and the treasure room and the king finally gave in.

"They were married and lived quit happily and for five hundred years the Logan clan and the dragons remained close friends.
But then the lord of the castle's daughter fell in love with a dragon and he refused to let her marry the dragon. When she tried to remind him that they were in fact part dragon themselves he said that it had been centuries ago and that they where no longer part dragon because of all the generations of marrying humans and he would not let his daughter marry a monster.
She told the dragons what he had said, but unless they had another witness they couldn't do anything.

"After months of trying to convince him to let her marry the dragon, the lord offered to let a knight marry his daughter if he killed the dragon she wanted to marry. Luckily his daughter over heard them and warned the dragons. When the knight attacked the dragons they were ready for him, they captured him and took him back to the dragon king where he was asked why he had tried to attack them. He told them about the lord's offer, it was all they needed to be able to take the castle away from him and chase him off of the land.

"His daughter ran away that night, married the dragon and lived with them the rest of her life. As for the lord of the castle he and most of his family where chased off. One of the lords sons had helped his sister run away and for that was the only one allowed to stay in the area. He's the one grandpa always said we where descended from and the one who started the tradition of how the castle was passed down.

"The place has been abandoned since then and only a few people have ever gone all the way inside and they usually leave within a few days at the most.

"I know it all sounds pretty crazy but that's what my grandfather always told me," Katherine said as she finished the story.

"It doesn't sound crazy to me, not after what I found in the castle," Rebecca told her.

"What exactly did you find?"

Rebecca told her about how perfectly preserved everything was and about the paintings and asked, "Would you like to come see them?"

"I don't know its starting to get late and…"

Rebecca smiled and said, "It's alright, maybe some other time. Your right it is getting late, I should get back."

"Do you want a ride back?" Katherine asked.

"No, thank you, the walk will give me some time to think. I'll see you later."

On her way back Rebecca started to wonder why the castle would be haunted. From what Katherine had told her it sounded like everyone that had lived there had had relatively peaceful lives until the humans had been forced out. Most hauntings she had heard of were because of someone dieing a violent or unexpected death, there where a few that the people had simply loved a place and ended up haunting it, but then why wouldn't they want someone to care for the place. The only other explanation she could come up with made her nervous and excited. She ran the rest of the way back to the castle and nearly ran into the old man she had met the night before as she came around the corner of the outer wall. She gasped and stopped just in time and tried to catch her breath.

The old man asked, "What are you doing back here? I thought you had smartened up and left."

Rebecca replied, "I live here and I'm not leaving any time soon."

"You're not afraid of the ghosts?"

Rebecca smiled and a lot more confidently than she felt said, "I think they are more afraid of me than I am of them, either that or they decided I'm too crazy to scare off. After some stomping around and levitating a wooden dragon they left me alone."

"Sounds to me like they're just warming up," the old man told her.

"Well I can't wait to see if they do any better tonight. Good night," she said as she opened the door and went into the court yard."

When she got inside she moved her things in to the library. The large cushion looked much more comfortable than her air mattress and maybe she could find out why it looked like the library was still being used.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Rebecca woke up to the sound of something hitting the wall behind where she was sleeping. She turned her flash light on just in time to see a chair fly across the room and smash in to the wall above her. She quickly pulled the blanket over her head as pieces of the chair fell on her. After a second she peeked out and watched as two more chairs were thrown at the wall above her. She was terrified, if she tried to move she could be hit, but she didn't want to stay in this room any longer. Then a large table lifted off the floor and was slammed into the wall above her, some how none of the lager pieces hit her as they fell. One of the legs from the table landed inches away from her face, it had to be at least five hundred years old, possibly almost a thousand if it where from when the castle had been built. These where things that had belonged to her ancestors, something was smashing them and she wasn't going to stand for it. She started to get up and a voice echoed through the room. "Who's afraid of whom now?"

"If you don't stop destroying my ancestor's belongings I'll give you something to be afraid of," Rebecca yelled, not really sure of what she could do, but she had to make it stop somehow. As soon she had slid down off of the cushion strong arms wrapped around her from behind, one pinning her arms down, the other around her neck so she couldn't turn her head to see who had her.

"Why don't you just leave and save your self a lot of stress?" the person holding her said, but it wasn't the same voice that had spoken before, both where male but this one sounded younger and more like he just wanted her to leave instead of wanting to scare her.

She slipped her hand into her pocket as she said, "Why don't you let me go before you get hurt?"

He laughed and said, "What are you going to do? You can't move and do you really think you can hurt a ghost?"

"I can try," she replied as she flipped open the pocket knife she had slipped out of her pocket and swung her arm back as forcefully as she could, imbedding the knife into the man's leg.

He gasped and his grip loosened around her enough that she could pull away. When she turned around he was gone.
She grabbed her flashlight and looked around the room, but saw no signs of anyone being there. Then she looked at the knife; it was covered with blood, whatever the man had been, he was alive. If her theory was right, she hoped she hadn't hurt him too badly.
Chapter 1: [link]

Chapter 3: [link]
Chapter 4: [link]
Chapter 5: [link]
Chapter 6: [link]
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DHBW's avatar
live guy or a FREAKING bleeding ghost???