The World of Lore: Dreadful Places (The World of Lore #3)

by Aaron Mahnke

Today, Leap Castle is being restored by the current owner, with work being done to rebuild the two wings that extend out from the original tower house. But it’s something else, something that was discovered decades earlier, that might be the most chilling revelation of the castle’s last century. Upstairs, just north of the Bloody Chapel, workmen stumbled upon a secret chamber. Think of it more as a pit, because it was only accessible from a trapdoor. The room below was small, barely larger than a closet. These sort of rooms were called oubliettes, a French term that loosely means “place of forgetting.” Unwelcome visitors or betrayed family members might be led over to the trapdoor and tossed inside. If the fall didn’t kill them, the large spikes protruding from the floor certainly would. And this oubliette, it turns out, was filled with skeletons. So many skeletons, in fact, that when the workmen began to remove them, they quickly filled up their cart. Three cartfuls later, they had finally moved all the bones out. When they were finished, though, they found something else in the pit: a watch. A pocket watch, to be precise. And after studying the maker’s marks on the watch, researchers were able to estimate its age. According to them, it had been manufactured in the 1840s—mere decades before it was rediscovered. Which raises a very interesting question. If the oubliette had stopped being used when the Darbys took over the castle in 1659, how did the watch get there two cen...