A/N: Chapters one and two have been revised with all the corrections you all have pointed out to me. Once again though, if you find moreI strongly encourage you to point them out.

Summary: When Drake receives an ambiguous letter telling him his grandmother has died, he decides to go to the town she lives in, Winter Park, and try to get some answers. When he arrives in Winter Park, however, he is wrapped up in a mystery so complex, that he may go insane before he can solve it.

A/N: This is my second attempt at a short story (for the first one see Tradition), and I would really like some input on it. I've written it in chapters for the moment because I needed too for the story to work, so I guess it would be more of a novella then a short story. Anyways, I hope you enjoy it.

A Winters Requiem - Chapter 1- Letters And Questions

Dear Drake Valley,

I regrettably must inform you that your dear grandmother has died. Although the cause of her death at this point is still unknown, funeral services have started to be arranged, and you, being the only surviving member of her will, are summoned to the Valley Mansion to help attend to her affairs. I am deeply sorry for your loss and will personally make sure that your visit is as pleasant as possible during such a depressing time. Please take the time to visit us as soon as possible if you intend to, because her funeral is scheduled three days from now, and there are still many things to be done before she can permanently rest in peace.

Sincerely yours,

George Brayko

-Head Caretaker

Drake stared down at the paper in disbelief, gnawing on his lower lip as he watched the mailman disappear around the corner. He couldn't believe it. His Grandmother, his Grandmother was dead. He'd lost other family members before, actually, he'd lost them all, but the cold indifference he had always felt for them was now replaced by a burning sorrow deep within him. None of them had loved him like she had. None of them had ever bonded with him like she had.

His mind was racing, with his emotional brain asking more questions then his logical one could answer. How could she have died? Sure, she was old, but she was always full of life when he visited her each month. In fact, he'd seen her only six days before and she was in perfect health then. What could have happened in six days?

Any number of things, he thought. His mind suddenly floated back to the second sentence of the letter. The cause of her death at this point is still unknown… How could they not know? She was 67 years old for heavens sake, how many things could possibly be wrong with her?! Part of him realized he was becoming frantic, but the rest of him didn't seem to care. Standing up from the couch he had been laying on, Drake started pacing the length of the floor.

"I must calm down. I must calm down. I must calm down.," he chanted to himself. Gradually it began to help and within minutes his mind had stopped asking questions long enough for him to process what to do next. He stopped pacing and sat back down on the ugly green couch.

"I have to go to the Mansion." He thought. That was the only reasonable thing to do. George asked him to come right away and he was going to do so. He looked back down at the letter in his hand. It was torn and wrinkled so badly that you could barely make out the short sympathetic message from the caretaker. He had been clutching so tightly while he was pacing, that the letter looked more like a ball then a sheet of paper to him.

"Valley Mansion, here I come."

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He was quite literally bouncing around the house grabbing things he would need as he thought of them. "Jacket, food… no, no they'll have food at the mansion, car keys, what else do I need?" he was doing it again, getting too anxious to think straight.

"Calm, calm, calm." he recited again, grabbing one more thing, his favorite lighter. "There, that looks like everything," he said as he rushed out the door.

A few minutes later, Drake climbed into the small black car she had given to him, and pulled out of his driveway. He was going back there. The sheer knowledge of it excited him, yet made him anxious at the same time. He hadn't been to the actual mansion in years, not since he was eighteen. He had just graduated from school and she had thrown a party for him at her home. He remembered it being a splendid event, and the mansion being a gorgeous place. Her house had been gleaming then, with tall intricately carved pillars supporting the massive home and billowing sheets of white lace hanging in all the corners of the room, as if they were clouds filling up a sun-filled sky.

Ever since then though, she'd met him somewhere in the city outside her home when he went to visit her. They always had a great time in the little town in the mountains but that didn't keep him from sometimes wondering what she might not want him to see at her home, or what she could be hiding from him. He figured if he was ever going to find that out it would be in the coming days.

The hour and a half drive it took to get to the mansion from his home in Denver was drastically uneventful, with only a few cars passing along him as he traveled down the old country roads. The town his grandmother lived in, or rather just outside of, named Winter Park wasn't heavily populated, and it was his assumption that the inhabitants didn't leave their homes very much.

When he pulled onto the main road through Winter Park he slammed on his breaks so hard his car almost flipped. What lay before him was so grotesque that he could barely look at it.

Hanging only three feet away from him on an old power line was a dead dog.

'Well,' he thought, 'dead isn't quite the right word for it.'

In front of him hung a butchered dog. It was missing a leg and one of its ears, and appeared to have been completely gutted. The worst part about it though was that it had no hair, as if it had all been torn off, and with a certain touch of disgusting finality he noticed that the poor creature had no eyes. Its as if something had taken a sharpened spoon and scooped them out, he thought, leaving only two bloody holes to remember them by. Then a smell wafted into the car, a smell of something that had been dead for a long time, the smell of death itself. He almost vomited when it reached him and he backed the car up several yards to escape it.

Drake was mortified, "How could something like this have happened?" he whispered to himself. "Who could have done something like this?" and most importantly, "How could no one have noticed it and taken it down?" He looked at the dog again and noticed that flies were beginning to swarm around it, showing that it had at least been there for a few days. His stomach flipped, turning in on itself and he looked away, instead focusing on looking for someone, or something, that could be responsible for the dogs demise.

With the exception of the dog, everything was how he had remembered it being only days before. The businesses were perfectly normal, with most of them still having an OPEN sign up, the cars where exactly as they had been, and the streets looked exactly the same. Even the snow-covered trees by the sidewalk were undisturbed. There was only one thing wrong with the whole town:

There were no people.

Atingling fear crept up his spineas his mind grappled with the awful realization. Suddenly, he felt a lot colder than he had when the trip first begun, and he turned the heater up to full blast hoping that it would help.

What was going on here? How could an entire town of people simply disappear? His mind swiftly came up with an answer that seemed logical; they were all at home…it was some sort of holiday. But then, why would they have left all the open signs up? Why would they have left all their cars parked in front of the stores?

The wind suddenly gusted outside and somehow worked its way into his car, instantly chilling him with its sad howling noise. He turned the radio on in an attempt to drown it out.

A newscasters voice came over the air, filling up his car with its thundering echo, and sounding as fake and uncaring as every other one on his radio. The voice, which was clearly a female's, was giving a report on the weather

"A cold front from the northwest and a warm front from the south may cause some problems for all you travelers in Denver tonight. The cold front, which is moving at an alarming speed, is expected to collide with the warm front later tonight somewhere over western Colorado, producing strong winds, heavy rainfall, and a good chance of snow for all you people up in the Rocki-"

He shut it off. He hadn't been paying any attention to it anyways, since it was only the weather; if there was one thing he disliked more than commercials on the radio, it would have to be the weather. Besides, the wind had died down for the time being and he needed to get away from that dog. Forget that, he needed to get away from this city. The total emptiness of it was giving him the creeps. The only problem was, he couldn't decide whether he should go to the mansion or just go home.

If he went home, he would be in a familiar place with a sense of security that he no longer had in Winter Park, but he wouldn't be any closer to getting the answers he so desperately now needed. On the other hand, he could proceed to the mansion in hopes of meeting George and getting some answers. The thought of George reminded him of the letter and he pulled it out of his jacket. He read through it once more just to make sure he hadn't missed something.

It was all as he remembered it: his grandmother's death, George's condolences, and George's request for Drake to attend to his grandmother's affairs. This time through though, something else caught his eye, it was a small scribble in pencil at the bottom right hand corner of the page. So small that he could barely make out what it said. Only three words, short, simple, and yet more question raising then anything else he'd seen all night. There in the corner, scribbled in George's own handwriting were the words she's still alive, and all at once Drake knew he wasn't going home.

A/N: I know it may seem a little dull for the first chapter, but I hope there was enough intrigue in it too still make it interesting to any of you readers. I've already got the second and third chapters done and I they have more action in them. I will post the second one in a day or two if I get some comments from you guys that like it, so please make sure to read and review!

Thanks again,

DragonsDream