THE SONG BENEATH HAWTHORNE BLUFF

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The Tragic Love of Penelope Hawthorne and Tindr Tryggstad

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Long before Penelope Hawthorne became the wandering ghost of Hawthorne Bluff, she fell in love with something that had already been dead for centuries.

Tindr Tryggstad had once been a Norse skald—a poet, musician, and keeper of stories whose songs had been heard in firelit halls along the northern seas. Vampirism preserved both his life and his music, but over the centuries he gradually withdrew from the world.

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When Tindr came to Gravesbury Park in 1802, he was immediately drawn to the strange supernatural currents surrounding Hawthorne Bluff. Beneath its cliffs he discovered forgotten chambers and caverns where neither daylight nor curious townspeople could easily reach him.

There, he entered a long torpor.Decades passed.Then, sometime in the late 1860s, something awakened him.

A voice.

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From his resting place beneath the bluff, Tindr began hearing a young woman singing in the Hawthorne house above.

Her name was Penelope Hawthorne, the comely daughter of Gravesbury Park businessman and mayor Silas P. Hawthorne. In her twentieth year, Penelope had developed a reputation for her love of music and possessed a remarkably beautiful singing voice.

Night after night, her songs drifted over the bluff and somehow reached the ancient chambers below. For the first time in decades, Tindr wanted to see the moon again. He emerged from his tomb and eventually saw the young woman whose voice had awakened him.

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At first, Penelope knew him only as a mysterious stranger who appeared near the grounds after sunset. He carried an old lyre and spoke with an accent she could never quite place. Sometimes he played for her beneath the trees while she listened from the garden.

Their meetings became more frequent. Penelope sang for him and Tindr played for her.

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What began as fascination and perhaps nefarious seduction slowly became affection, and over the following year and a half an unlikely romance blossomed between the young mortal woman and the ancient vampire.

But Penelope began to suspect there was something unnatural about her nocturnal suitor.

Tindr never visited during daylight.

 

He never joined her at church, attended public gatherings, or accepted invitations to the Hawthorne house during ordinary hours. He seemed strangely unfamiliar with things everyone else took for granted, while occasionally speaking of distant countries and historical events with the intimacy of someone who had actually witnessed them. And always, he disappeared before dawn.

Penelope never confronted him directly because perhaps some part of her already knew.

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For Penelope, Tindr composed a melody unlike any he had written during his mortal life. He played it for her on the cello in the darkness overlooking the sea—a melancholy love song without words that Penelope soon learned well enough to hum.

It became their song.

Then one night everything changed. During one of their meetings, Tindr finally surrendered to the feelings he had spent more than a year attempting to control. He kissed Penelope passionately and for a moment, centuries of restraint disappeared. His fangs broke the skin of her lip. He tasted her blood.

Tindr recoiled in horror as Penelope saw what he was.

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Terrified—not of her, but of what he might do to her—Tindr fled Hawthorne Bluff without explanation and returned to the chambers beneath the earth. He did not come back.

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Penelope waited.Days became weeks.Weeks became months.Heartbroken and believing herself abandoned, Penelope eventually allowed another young man to court her. He was a recent arrival in Gravesbury Park: charming at first, attentive, respectable, and eager to make himself indispensable. But his affection quickly became possessiveness and Penelope could not forget Tindr.

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Eventually she began making excuses to avoid her new suitor. When pressed, she admitted that her heart still belonged to someone else.The rejection enraged him.

One evening the two argued on Hawthorne Bluff. Penelope attempted to leave, but the young man followed her toward the cliff.In a moment of jealous fury, he pushed her. Penelope fell from Hawthorne Bluff into the churning sea below.Her body was later recovered from the water and returned to her devastated father.The young suitor professed complete ignorance of what had happened and for a time, Gravesbury Park believed him.

Tindr did not.

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Word of Penelope’s death eventually reached the darkness beneath the bluff.The vampire emerged from his tomb and began searching.

Two weeks later, Penelope’s former suitor disappeared.His belongings remained untouched. His clothing, money and possessions were all discovered exactly where he had left them. No evidence was ever found that he had boarded a ship or left Gravesbury Park. His body was never recovered.

According to one version of the legend, Tindr carried the murderer into the ancient crypts beneath Hawthorne Bluff.

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There, in the darkness where he had once awakened to the sound of Penelope singing, Tindr drained him of every drop of blood. He left nothing for the sea to claim.Tindr returned to his tomb afterward and disappeared from Gravesbury Park society for many years. But Penelope did not entirely leave him.

On moonlit nights, visitors walking along Hawthorne Bluff occasionally report seeing the pale figure of a young woman with long blonde hair standing dangerously close to the cliff’s edge.

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Sometimes she walks slowly among the trees. Sometimes she simply looks toward the sea. And sometimes she sings. Those who have heard her describe no words—only a soft, mournful melody carried on the ocean wind.

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It is the same melody Tindr Tryggstad composed for Penelope Hawthorne more than a century and a half ago. Older vampires of Gravesbury Park claim that Tindr still possesses the cello upon which he first played it for her.

And on certain nights, when Penelope’s ghost is heard humming upon the bluff, another sound can sometimes be heard rising faintly from somewhere beneath the earth.

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A cello.

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Playing along with her.

 

 

 

 

 

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