curse:
“Best mind your head, Calliope Reaper-Jones.”
four
I got back to my room without further incident, though it did take me twenty minutes to find Casa de la Luna, the building that housed the guest suite I was sharing with Runt. I had to wander through two more sculpture gardens full of ancient Roman statuary—misshapen marble ladies and gentlemen without their arms, and in some cases heads, perched precariously among an assortment of flowering greenery—before I finally stumbled onto the main path.
It was once true that all roads led to Rome—and to borrow the adage: At the Haunted Hearts Castle all paths led to Casa del Amo, or the Master’s House.
Aptly named, it loomed large over the rest of the compound, a quiet sentry composed of a bland limestone gray façade, but offset by a backdrop of startling azure sky. Inside, it housed a library, a massive room lined from floor to ceiling with dark wood bookcases, each crammed full of rare tomes from every continent, including an original vellum copy of the Guttenberg Bible sitting on a glass-enclosed pedestal near the door; the kitchen—the only modern space in the whole Castle—which was a bastion of efficiency with its stainless steel fixtures and industrial ovens, and the capacity to serve over seventy-five guests at one time; and, lastly, a formal dining room with heavyAfrican blackwood paneling and a long, rectangular oak table that could comfortably seat up to fifty.
There were over ten guest rooms in the Castle, as well as Donald Ali’s master suite, which took over the whole of the top floor of the building and was only reached via a twisting, hand-carved circular oak staircase near the front entrance. I hadn’t been up there, but from what Jarvis said, it was like a Moroccan palace—lots of Moorish details and hand-painted mosaic tile work mixed with medieval tapestries and curling Oriental rugs.
Built by a World War I war profiteer named Ezra Aaron Hearts in 1921, the Hearts Castle had been conceived as a Frankenstein’s monster, if you will, of old-world architecture; a cannibalization of the most famous buildings and antiquities Ezra Hearts had collected during his many travels, so that he might admire them all in one glorious setting.
As a poor orphan eking out a hardscrabble existence as a breaker boy in Western Pennsylvania, he’d sworn that one day he would be rich beyond his wildest dreams, thus affording himself the opportunity to become the master of his own dominion. This was a seemingly unattainable dream for a dirt-poor boy from Pennsylvania, a boy whose life should never have included the realization of such a lofty goal, yet with the inception of the Hearts Castle, the confluence of all those fantabulous childhood imaginings was made real.
Ezra had chosen the site, a large outcropping of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean on one side and the small harbor town of Saint Simon, California, on the other, for its majestic views and plentiful grazing land—he had high hopes of bringing the American buffalo back from the brink of extinction by mass breeding them for commercial meat consumption, but sadly that vision, among many others, was never realized.
A construction worker discovered Ezra’s body on the grounds of Casa del Amo early one morning in 1929. The mysterious nature of his death—had he jumped from the building’s second-story turret window or had he been pushed—was never unraveled, but work was immediately halted on the munificent Castle. And when it was revealed that Ezra Hearts was bankrupt—even a war profiteer wasn’t immune to thefluctuations of the stock market—the property sat like an empty shell, unfinished and unloved, until 1955, when a young entrepreneur named Donald Ali saw it while on vacation in Saint Simon and fell in love with the dilapidated structure. He bought the compound and all the adjoining land, using the original architectural plans to finally finish
“Best mind your head, Calliope Reaper-Jones.”
four
I got back to my room without further incident, though it did take me twenty minutes to find Casa de la Luna, the building that housed the guest suite I was sharing with Runt. I had to wander through two more sculpture gardens full of ancient Roman statuary—misshapen marble ladies and gentlemen without their arms, and in some cases heads, perched precariously among an assortment of flowering greenery—before I finally stumbled onto the main path.
It was once true that all roads led to Rome—and to borrow the adage: At the Haunted Hearts Castle all paths led to Casa del Amo, or the Master’s House.
Aptly named, it loomed large over the rest of the compound, a quiet sentry composed of a bland limestone gray façade, but offset by a backdrop of startling azure sky. Inside, it housed a library, a massive room lined from floor to ceiling with dark wood bookcases, each crammed full of rare tomes from every continent, including an original vellum copy of the Guttenberg Bible sitting on a glass-enclosed pedestal near the door; the kitchen—the only modern space in the whole Castle—which was a bastion of efficiency with its stainless steel fixtures and industrial ovens, and the capacity to serve over seventy-five guests at one time; and, lastly, a formal dining room with heavyAfrican blackwood paneling and a long, rectangular oak table that could comfortably seat up to fifty.
There were over ten guest rooms in the Castle, as well as Donald Ali’s master suite, which took over the whole of the top floor of the building and was only reached via a twisting, hand-carved circular oak staircase near the front entrance. I hadn’t been up there, but from what Jarvis said, it was like a Moroccan palace—lots of Moorish details and hand-painted mosaic tile work mixed with medieval tapestries and curling Oriental rugs.
Built by a World War I war profiteer named Ezra Aaron Hearts in 1921, the Hearts Castle had been conceived as a Frankenstein’s monster, if you will, of old-world architecture; a cannibalization of the most famous buildings and antiquities Ezra Hearts had collected during his many travels, so that he might admire them all in one glorious setting.
As a poor orphan eking out a hardscrabble existence as a breaker boy in Western Pennsylvania, he’d sworn that one day he would be rich beyond his wildest dreams, thus affording himself the opportunity to become the master of his own dominion. This was a seemingly unattainable dream for a dirt-poor boy from Pennsylvania, a boy whose life should never have included the realization of such a lofty goal, yet with the inception of the Hearts Castle, the confluence of all those fantabulous childhood imaginings was made real.
Ezra had chosen the site, a large outcropping of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean on one side and the small harbor town of Saint Simon, California, on the other, for its majestic views and plentiful grazing land—he had high hopes of bringing the American buffalo back from the brink of extinction by mass breeding them for commercial meat consumption, but sadly that vision, among many others, was never realized.
A construction worker discovered Ezra’s body on the grounds of Casa del Amo early one morning in 1929. The mysterious nature of his death—had he jumped from the building’s second-story turret window or had he been pushed—was never unraveled, but work was immediately halted on the munificent Castle. And when it was revealed that Ezra Hearts was bankrupt—even a war profiteer wasn’t immune to thefluctuations of the stock market—the property sat like an empty shell, unfinished and unloved, until 1955, when a young entrepreneur named Donald Ali saw it while on vacation in Saint Simon and fell in love with the dilapidated structure. He bought the compound and all the adjoining land, using the original architectural plans to finally finish
Similar Books
