A/N:hey sorry for the wait ive been a litte bit sick but im getting better. also i would like to thank all of my reviewers. as always R&R
CH: The Choice prt1
Despite the fact that she had to be at school in the morning Sam wasted no time in her rush to solve this puzzle. She paused only long
enough to grab a flashlight as she headed down to her moped. Less than five minutes after she had left the study she was on her way. It
was strange, Sam didn't know how she knew where the mansion was but it was as if its location was writ upon her soul. As the night
flashed by her thoughts turned to something her father had said, "there are things about this family that you were never told little wraith."
Little wraith was dads pet name for her when mom wasn't around, he had always been the darker of that pair. Fighting back a fresh
wave of tears at this thought she quickly turned back to what had caught her attention at first. He had mentioned family secrets, what
secrets? She knew her grandfather had invented the machine that twirled cellophane around toothpicks and she had always been told that
this was the source of the family fortune. But she had done the math, that income accounted for less than ten percent of the total Manson
accounts. Her grandfather would have to have already been a multi-billionaire. Both her mother and her grandmother had come from
middle class families and they had married young so that didn't explain the discrepancy. Despite the fact that the Mansons were
meticulous record keepers she couldn't determine where the other ninety percent of the accounts had come from. The only answer her
father had given her when she had asked him was that it was, "the spoils of a father and son's journey." A frown formed on her face as
she blew by Danny's house hardly even noticing this fact. Now that she thought about it that was the most Jeremy had ever said about his
father. Even Ida had never spoken of him. All Sam knew about him was that his name had been Leon Manson. But in the same way that
she knew were the mansion was she also knew that he had lived there, here. She had arrived. Before her loomed an ornate wrought iron
gate set in a massive black stone wall topped with iron spikes. As the gate creaked open her eyes were drawn up the drive which was
bordered on both sides by hedge mazes to the large, stone cross. The drive split and curved around the elevated base of the gothic
edifice, which sat in the middle of the drive directly in front of the house, and gracefully dipping out of sight. Rounding the base of the
cross she saw that the drive descended into a deeply shadowed recess beneath the mansion. Sam quickly climbed the stairs that flanked
this end of the drive. The front porch was covered in debris from eighteen years of neglect. After carefully picking her way over to the
main door she studied it, unable to determine if it was fashioned from cut black stone or solid black ash. Giving up she quickly fitted the
key into the door, hesitating almost imperceptibly, unlocked and opened it. Glad that she had remembered a flashlight she looked in,
flicking it on… and distantly felt her jaw drop. From the outside she knew the house was huge, five stories with three towers the tallest of
which looked like it topped out at eight stories all of it a Goths paradise, but she hadn't anticipated the shear scale of the entrance 'hall'
she now walked though. Looking up she saw a network of catwalks trailing through the air linking the balconies together. As she
approached the door at the other end of the entrance hall she studied the grand staircases which flanked it and led up to the balconies.
Causally she opened the door and found herself staring down a wide hallway which came to a 'T' about ten feet in. Slowly she walked
down the hallway. When she reached the 'T' she heard a dull thump and a sudden sharp creak. Spinning back to face the way she had
come from only to see that the hallway ended in a blank wall two feet from where she stood. "Oh, Shit"
Jeremy sat back after removing the section of his radius he had cut from his left arm. Thirty minutes passed as he watched the bone
regrew where he had removed it and the muscle and skin knit closed over it. After another few minutes of rest he picked up the three inch
cylinder of bone and began to carve.