Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

The room is hundreds of years old, with a morbid history. My great-great-grandfather was a renowned doctor in the early 1900’s, known as the Beast of Bramwell Estate. He was arrested for the very gruesome experiments he performed on prostitutes looking for abortions. The stories terrified me growing up, and I often had nightmares about him, which kept me out of the west wing of the mansion where his portrait hangs beside the other Bramwell men. His crimes plagued two generations of our family, up until my grandfather helped to develop a vaccine against a virus, saving thousands of lives. My father says that was when we finally crawled out from under the Bramwell curse and were once again respectable.