Blackwood Manor: The Archivist

This story is by Iris Lau and won an honorable mention in our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Iris Lau is a Hong Kong-based writer, translator and language educator who transforms urban life into imaginative narratives. She can write in Chinese and English. Her debut award-winning story, Imagined Electric Street, was published by Hong Kong Public Libraries and self-translated into English. Her other works can be seen on Short Story Lovers: https://www.shortstorylovers.com/irislau

Elias Vance, in his fifty-seventh year, was defined by the dry, precise comfort of the archive. Air was messy, full of humidity, pollen, and unpredictable scents. Archives were dry, labeled, and governed by the immutable laws of evidence. That preference made his current location—Blackwood Manor—not just a chore, but a profound insult to his meticulous nature.

The manor was a colossal, decaying Victorian house, huddled against the relentless coast of Maine. It was less a home and more a coastal fortress, its gables sharp and its windows empty, perpetually scarred by the salt spray and winter gales. The dense, old forest pressed in from three sides, its massive, silent pines seeming to judge the rot. Elias, dressed in a practical charcoal suit and white cotton gloves, had returned here after his estranged father’s death to do what he did best: inventory and liquidate. His father, Arthur Vance, hadn’t been a man of history, but a man of accumulation—a hoarder who used baroque furniture and obsolete knowledge as a heavy, physical insulation against reality.

“A shame,” Elias murmured, the word echoing in the cavernous, dust-choked entry hall. The house was not history; it was a memorial to a petty, solitary life, and Elias was determined to dismantle it piece by clinical piece.

His focus narrowed on the library, the heart of Arthur Vance’s mania. It was a vast room where every mahogany shelf bowed under the collective weight of forgotten things—books, taxidermy, navigational tools, and vials of chemicals. As Elias began the tedious, multi-day process of cataloging, assigning each relic a provenance and a price, he noticed a disturbing pattern in his father’s chaos.

The shelves weren’t just full; they were stacked with unnatural precision. Large volumes, particularly those dealing with obscure subjects like nineteenth-century maritime law and coastal engineering, were placed specifically against one section of the far wall. This arrangement created a visual and intellectual barrier. When Elias used his laser measure to check the room’s dimensions against the original floor plans he possessed, he found a discrepancy: the wall behind the maritime law section was thicker by nearly ten inches than its counterpart across the room.

Elias’s own memories of Blackwood were fragmented, sparse, and permeated by a low-grade, persistent anxiety that had stalked him since childhood. He remembered the smell of his father’s pipe tobacco, the long, quiet afternoons of enforced silence, and the occasional sickly-sweet, medicinal taste of a tonic his father insisted he take for “nervousness.” Elias remembered no mother, no spontaneous joy, and certainly no sister. He remembered only a suffocating stillness.

But the house, an archive of the unfiled past, was fighting back.

As Elias systematically removed the heavy, obstructive books, his fingers brushed against something unnaturally smooth beneath the ornate, flocked wallpaper. Not the rough lathe-and-plaster of the old walls, but cold, hard stone.

He retrieved his scalpel from his kit and carefully peeled away a four-foot section of the paper, his historian’s curiosity overriding his ingrained aversion to mess. Beneath the paper was a thin, hastily applied layer of grayish mortar, easily chipped away. Below that, a row of old, soot-stained bricks, laid not professionally, but amateurishly, filling in a space. It was not a repair; it was a deliberate erasure.

Elias paused, leaning back on his heels, his heart beginning the frantic, heavy beat that signaled one of his nameless headaches was imminent. Why build a wall here? Why obscure a feature not mentioned in the plans?

He worked for over an hour, the rhythmic chip-tap-thud of the chisel and hammer swallowed by the manor’s enormous silence. When the final bricks tumbled inward, they revealed a narrow, unlit cavity. It wasn’t a crawlspace; it was a small, square room running perpendicular to the main corridor, just large enough for a child.

He pulled a high-powered flashlight from his tool case. The beam cut through the dry gloom, revealing a space that hadn’t been forgotten, but meticulously preserved in a state of arrested development. The air was stale, yet clean—cool, and utterly without the cobwebs or dust motes of the rest of the manor. His father hadn’t sealed it up to forget; he had sealed it up to memorialize a ghost.

It was a child’s room.

Elias stepped inside, crossing the threshold of thirty lost years. The walls were a pale, smooth green. On the tiny, iron-framed bed, covered with a thin, faded quilt, lay a single item: a worn, handmade wooden doll with bright yellow yarn for hair. Next to it, placed as if the owner had just taken them off, was a pair of tiny, scuffed leather shoes, one sole worn soft at the toe.

A fresh wave of vertigo and nausea hit Elias, sharper than any of his headaches. He moved his light beam over the smooth plaster. There, etched low into the wall—scratched deep by a child struggling to reach—were two messy, uneven words: Elias + Clara.

Clara. The name was a deafening sound, a key turning violently in the deepest, rustiest lock of his identity.

He sank down onto his knees, the wooden doll pressed against his chest. His father’s meticulous control—the careful concealment, the ongoing, obsessive maintenance of this forbidden space—shattered Elias’s own rigid reality. He wasn’t just emotionally reserved; he was manufactured.

A memory—a flash of light and sound—split his consciousness. Not the stillness he remembered, but a high-pitched, infectious giggle followed by the roar of the dark, churning ocean below.

His father hadn’t just been a collector; he was a retired chemist, a man with the means to manipulate substances. Elias finally understood the sickly-sweet “tonic” he had taken as an anxious child. It wasn’t to calm him; it was to erase her. Arthur Vance hadn’t merely repressed his own memory of the accident; he had performed a lobotomy on his son’s young mind.

The pieces slammed together with a force that stole his breath. Thirty years ago, there hadn’t been a solitary man and his only son at Blackwood Manor. There had been a grieving man, a child terrified of his own shadow, and the devastating, deliberate absence of a little girl, Clara, who must have died tragically on the dangerous, tide-swept coastline they were forbidden to approach.

The full memory surfaced, searing and complete: Elias was six, small for his age, holding Clara’s mittened hand. They were playing a forbidden game on the slick, black rocks. The tide, always aggressive here, rushed in. Clara, her yellow yarn hair bright against the gray sky, laughed, then slipped. He saw her small hand tear from his grip, the sudden terrifying plunge, and then the terrifying scream of his father, standing too late at the cliff edge.

Elias, the man who lived by unassailable facts, finally felt the crushing, physical weight of a past he had been disallowed. He didn’t just feel grief for Clara; he felt a raw, elemental rage at the sterile, controlled life his father had forced him into—a life built on a lie of historical omission.

He picked up the doll, the shoe, and a small, smooth skipping stone lying on the quilt. He walked back through the hole in the wall, past the books his father had used as shields, and into the suffocating library. He collapsed against a shelf, and for the first time in his life, Elias cried—not the quiet tears of an orderly, but the messy, painful, visceral sobbing of a little boy finally released from his prison of forgetfulness.

The truth was buried, not beneath the earth of Blackwood Manor, but beneath the plaster, the wallpaper, and the chemical suppression of a desperate, selfish father. Now it had surfaced, corrosive and painful, but finally real. Elias stood in the dust and the decay, holding the small remnants of his sister, ready to write a new, honest history in which Clara Vance was finally remembered. He knew then that he wouldn’t be selling the manor. He was going to reclaim it, piece by piece, and turn the house into the monument she deserved.