Cordis-Frange House: The Lover’s Final Embrace
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Cordis-Frange House was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry materials, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining heart/feeling with break/shatter, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of human connection, now embodying its own absolute termination of sentiment. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled intimacy, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated empathy-testing cells, soundproofed emotional withdrawal chambers, and meticulously designed atmospheric stabilizers intended to eliminate all external variables that might corrupt a pure feeling.
The final inhabitant was Lover Master Affectus Vacuum, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master psychologist and relational theorist of the late 19th century. Master Vacuum’s profession was the study of empathy, attachment, and the fundamental nature of love, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent emotional state that was free of all pain, change, or subjective bias. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Love’—a single, perfect, flawless emotion that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known psychological principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of connection, free of all joy, sorrow, or measurable response. After realizing that the very act of feeling required vulnerability and change (a duality of emotion), proving that absolute, independent and secure simplicity was impossible, shattering his faith in fixed emotional law, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero Love was to understand the ultimate absence of all feeling. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of emotional finality.
The Attachment Chamber
Master Vacuum’s mania culminated in the Attachment Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not loving, but deconstructing the act of connection itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no detectable emotional content. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning non-reactive states and the theoretical limits of pure apathy, were found sealed inside a hollow metal wedding band. He stopped trying to define the perfect feeling and began trying to define the un-felt, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Love was to eliminate the need for any form of internal response whatsoever. “The tears are a solvent; the laughter is a distraction,” one entry read. “The final love requires the complete surrender of all vulnerability and all response. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect void.”
The house preserves his systematic rigor structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated acoustic and thermal stabilizers built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-interfering environment for abstract emotional contemplation.
The Final Sentiment in the Abandoned Victorian House
Lover Master Affectus Vacuum was last heard working in his chamber, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy wood tearing and metal snapping (from the loveseat and the music box) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the chamber was cold, the Attachment Chamber sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the black rubber. It is the final sentiment—the Zero Love achieved, representing the cessation of all emotional existence and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken picture frame and blank rubber ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, felt world. This abandoned Victorian House, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master lover who pursued the ultimate, pure form of connection, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Response, vanishing into the un-felt, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.
