61 Boulder Road is the location of Edward William Allan's secondary estate. Arthur, John, and Oscar investigate a way to stop Mr. Scratch before he must claim a new host.
Description[]
The house sits on a large property at the end of a long gravel driveway near the woods. There is a barn in the back of the property, to the left of the main house. The property is in disrepair, overgrown and littered with fallen trees.[1]
The main house is a two-story farmhouse with a broken wrap-around porch. The front steps leading up to the door are rotten. The front door opens into a hallway. The walls appear to once have been white, but now are filled with cracks and places where the plaster is peeling off to expose brick underneath. To the left is an archway leading to a den, immediately beyond which is a set of rickety, sagging stairs hugging the wall. Behind the stairs is a hatch leading to the basement, which has wisps of violet smoke coming off of it, invisible to the naked eye. To the right is the kitchen, and down the hallway leads to the back door. The den has a small wood stove, and it is otherwise sparse with furnishings. The floor is worn down in places.[1]
The upper floor's walls are almost entirely exposed brick, with pools of plaster along the floor. The landing has a small sitting area with a broken wooden chair and a window overlooking the backyard. On the left is a small bedroom, and on the right is a short hallway that leads to two doors. One of these doors was once a bedroom, with a mattress against the far wall, a washbasin, and a shattered wooden dresser. It has a large amount of furniture stacked next to the door, with marks on the floor implying it was used to barricade the door. There are a number of scratches on the wall by the mattress, as if to track the passage of time. The other door, towards the front of the house, may have once been an office. The chimney in this room is fallen over and has collapsed the ceiling at some point. There is a table against the wall and a small wood stove that was once connected to the chimney. Above the table is a painting of a woman with pale skin and black hair.[1]
The Barn[]
The barn bears an arcane shadow similar to the one encountered at Marie's home at East 83rd Street. John describes it as a haze that clings to the barn, and makes it difficult for him to discern between the shadow and the surrounding darkness of night. The barn has large double doors.[1]
Inside, there are no animal stalls. The ceiling is blackened as if by fire, but the ground is not. A symbol is carved into the floor of the barn that matches the one in the secret room in Marie's house. The floor surrounding the symbol is stained with red and yellow, as if fluid was spilled. Also on the floor and in the corners of the barn are frozen pustules the size of human heads in groups of three. Long, hair-like ropes hang from the ceiling. The right wall is covered in open-celled combs like those of wasps, built into the wood, with a mud-like multilayered outer shell.[1]
When this room is used to open a gateway, the ropes thrum with violet light and the frozen pustules glow blue.[2]
The Cellar[]
Beneath the hatch, a set of thin steps leads down to a root cellar with earthen walls and floor. A tunnel is carved in the wall of the cellar, opening up into a wider room beyond. Wooden slats hold up the walls from collapse, and strips of wood form a pathway on the frozen, muddy ground. The larger room is excavated as if by hand. A wooden partition splits the room to support it, and the floor slopes downwards. There is a metal stove in this cavern. In the middle of the sunken floor is excavated stonework, covered in carvings and writing in a strange script. There is a desk here, and in the center, a stone vault, big enough to hold any number of objects, but at minimum, big enough to hold a book. Across this room is another tunnel that leads back to the barn.[2]