Chronicles of Mystery

A Mysterious Journey

It was morning. A cold, rainy winter morning. A morning that seems to last a whole day. One of those days when the sun doesn't have the courage to rise and prefers to leave the world in permanent darkness.

The sky was covered with a layer of dark grey clouds. They seemed to accumulate above the earth, pressing, pushing each other to try to touch it. A silvery mist disturbed the contours of each thing, making the landscape blurred, opaque.

Everything looked lost, abandoned, dilapidated, in the fog that covered them. It seemed to want to swallow up everything, to make everything disappear between its thick masses.

It was as if the wind had taken shape, had become dense and thick to cover everything.

The world looked like a huge kettle under pressure.

On this freezing morning, a coach ran on the roads. It was a black coach, without ornaments, which cracked the frozen air as quickly as the muddy roads filled with ruts.

At the front of the coach, swinging to the rhythm of the holes and hollows of the road, was hung a lantern that shone dimly. Surrounded by fog, it barely managed to bring its light more than two meters ahead of it. It struggled valiantly, the little lamp beaten by the wind.

A coachman, whip and reins in his hands, his back bent, his fists clenched and his bones stiffened by the cold, guided the coach on his way. He leaned forward, his face closed, his eyes pleated, hoping to see something in front of him. His black wool jacket was all wet from the humidity. The coachman could feel the chill and the rheumatism coming. From the tongue he hailed his horse, he pressed it, pushed it to keep moving.

The brave beast was a most common horse, brown dress, ebony mane. Large black wells, soft and affable as eyes, she galloped with all the strength of her four big old legs, dragging the heavy coach alone. Her breath blew in the air clouds of steam that came to join their big sister the mist.

Time seemed to have stopped. Silence as thick as fog. Only the muffled sound of the hooves against the earth disturbed this morbid calm.

In the fiacre, two passengers, all of whom did not know what they were doing that day, in such a weather, on these desolate roads. It was indeed a day to stay at home, sheltered in many sheets, facing the fireplace to warm up, with a feeling of well-being that brought even more heat than fire. In spite of everything, these two weirdos, for some unknown reason, had decided to make a little trip, pushing a coachman to freeze his fingers and his butt and a horse to get lost in the mist. Without forgetting the suffering of the little lamp, which was not the least.

These two passengers were curious phenomena. One couldn't have imagined a more unlikely duo.

A man whose age could not be determined. A vampire pale and drawn features. Little eyes, bright with intelligence, which never ceased to observe what surrounded them. They had the same colour as the sky that morning, a dark grey and cloudy... His face seemed to display a closed expression all the time. His face was emaciated, his features marked, drawn with a knife. Above his eyes, thick black eyebrows darkened his eyes. He had short ebony hair, fine and well combed, so well combed that one could almost see the traces of the comb. They were folded back onto his long, narrow skull. No gale, even the strongest, could have dislodged them from their position. He had a tight, thin mouth that formed a line on his skin.

He was very tall and very thin. He wore a long thick blue night coat on a pearl grey vest. His shirt and collar had a mother-of-pearl tint and were of impeccable cleanliness. His trousers were of the same colour as his vest and reached his elegant white and black shoes, so well polished that one could see oneself in it as if it was a mirror. His adornment was completed by a pair of black gloves, which underlined the silhouette of his long, thin, bony fingers, and a gold pocket watch, which he held in his hand and kept staring at, in the hope that maybe the needle would start to run differently.