“No one knows,” said Lucas. “There aren’t any surviving photos of him. Which, weirdly enough, fits with the curse. It was supposed to have obliterated all images of him. Because, as the story goes, he was unusually handsome.”

“Oh yeah?” I muttered more to myself than to either of them.

“Curse?” Dad asked. “No one’s said anything yet about a curse.”

No one but Erik himself.

“When Erik turned sixteen,” Lucas continued, his stare lingering on me in confusion before returning to my father, “he started meeting in secret with schoolmates. Sons of other wealthy socialites. It was said that they called themselves the Order of the Mothmen because Erik, who had an obsession with bugs, thought that moths were the ultimate masters of disguise. It’s rumored he resented both his looks and his station, since they contributed to so much of his life and future being written out and orchestrated for him. So as the Order began to grow, the members took to wearing masks during their meetings. In a way, I think wearing a mask allowed Erik to become something else, you know? Someone else. Someone more in control of his own fate.”

“So you’re saying Erik is supposedly one of the ghosts haunting this place?” I asked.

“Um,” Lucas said, “not exactly. The legend says that, when Erik was seventeen, he enrolled in university. His parents wanted him to study medicine. Erik agreed so long as he could continue his music studies as well. Apparently, he played the piano, the violin, and also sang really well. Like, at prodigy level. Anyway, during the following winter, after Erik turned eighteen, Erik’s family made a return visit to England without him. Erik held a secret masked ball here at his parents’ estate. A mummy-unwrapping party.”

“A mummy what?” I asked.

“At the time,” Lucas said, “there were a lot of amateur archeologists traveling to Egypt. Brits and Americans who were excavating near the pyramids and in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “They gutted a lot of the tombs. Egypt is still trying to get their artifacts back.”

Lucas nodded. “And mummies, of course, were everywhere. Abundant and considered to be worthless by the foreign excavators. That was, until high-society people started buying them and having them shipped to England and the States. From there, the mummies became the center of lavish parties.”

“Don’t say it,” I muttered, my stomach giving a flip. “They unwrapped the mummies for fun.”

“Pretty horrible, huh?”

“Not to mention totally irreverent,” I added.

“And this Erik kid held one of these parties here?” Dad asked.

“Legend states,” replied Lucas, apparently throwing caution to the wind on the whole “the less you know” approach, “that the mummy the Mothmen had procured for their unwrapping party had been an ancient priest of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the afterlife. Supposedly, this priest had also been a mystic and magician. Basically, all those traits that the members of the Order of the Mothmen, and Erik specifically, sought to emulate.”