Prequel to the Red Room - H G Wells

The Traveller - a Prequel to The Red Room by H G Wells- Hamish MacRae

I stopped. A pallid silence came over the clearing as I was stepping out of the dilapidated old carriage. I began to survey my surroundings through the falling leaves. Silvery ghostly illuminations shimmered in the light from the sunbeams piercing the canopy. I thought to myself, this cant be so bad, where is the sinister silhouette of Loraine castle that I came to see.

The rather monosyllabic carriage driver grunted something to himself, I turned to face him but he became silent. It would of appeared that he knew something I didn’t about the local legend of Lorraine castle. He suggested we were to continue. As the carriage bumped along the cobbly road which was in tandem to the windy river to my right. As we made the mysteriously quiet journey up the path with the only noise coming from the trees creaking and murmuring to each other.

The weather seemed to change instantaneously, from being a bright crisp day to a dreary windswept one. I shivered, a chill went up my spine as I pulled my dress coat over my shoulder and did up the buttons. I wondered what it was that made the weather so melancholy and dejected so quickly, but then I realised. The Castle. The castle, like a dark sombre guardian looking over the land.

I felt an atmosphere of macabre as I got ever closer to what now was a daunting and more menacing task than I had previously anticipated. Nether the less ...

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I felt an atmosphere of macabre as I got ever closer to what now was a daunting and more menacing task than I had previously anticipated. Nether the less I had to keep my promise to my recently deceased father. At this moment I passed a rather odd looking obelisk at the gates of a very depleted graveyard. This Graveyard was a place a place of evil. The menacing stares of the gravestones .This wasn’t particularly welcoming to me and for once I really started to doubt myself, more than I have ever done before. As I finally got a good glimpse of the castle I realised how surreal it was, massive. . Again, that same feel of doubt came back to me once more and I kept repeatedly thinking that there was something I hadn’t been told. As I left the carriage my feet crunched against the crisp blanket of snow. I wandered up to the big gothic door knocker and rasped on it three times in succession. The double doors swung open together with a creaking

sound ,Revealing some drafty echoing passages. As I made my way down this maze of passages I felt the atmosphere to be very frigid and deathly chilly as I made my way towards some sort of light at the end of the damp, musty but by this time rather humid tunnel. As I stepped out of the alcove of what used to look like a grand fireplace, staring down on me with its mighty withering stare. There was a women. She was about seventy, hard to tell, because she was covered up with an old tattered scarf that covers almost half her face. Without a word, the dishevelled old women gestured for me to sit, she then left the room and a man around the same age, but with a more respectable attire without greeting me just started engaging me in covosation about the story of the red room. A shadow of doubt was casted over me. Could i, could I really do it.

Could I spend a night in the red room?