It’s September 1901, and the small village of Cleverley is
gripped with panic. It started with children telling wildly improbable stories –
a sinister face pressed against a window, a man appearing out of nowhere from a
mysterious greenish fog, a sinister figure seen near a cemetery undoing the
knots on a piece of string… But when a young girl narrowly escapes a vicious
assault, the villagers gather at the cemetery and make a shocking discovery. One
of the family crypts has been left wide open, and two of the coffins inside
have been vandalized. The corpses inside have been impaled through the heart
with a wooden stake… and although both have been dead for many years, one of
the bodies looks like it has been dead for only a few weeks.
The two vandalized corpses are the two deceased wives of a
Russian count, the subject of many a malicious rumour in the village. It is
said that his wives, before their deaths, developed a taste for human blood,
and one of them even was implicated in the death of a child. And wife number 3
is looking alarmingly pale lately… and has taken to wearing a scarf around her
neck.
Never fear, for Owen Burns is nearby. He is investigating
the death of a Catholic priest, whose last act was to hear a dying man’s
Mysterious Last Confession. He makes a connection to an unsolved murder case
which took place in a locked-room. Before long, a similar locked-room murder takes
place, sending Owen Burns and his partner-in-crime, Achilles Stock, to
Cleverley. There, they discover that the main suspect in the locked-room
mystery is our friend the Russian count… an alleged vampire!
