Chapter 4
Nick’s POV
I have never been one to wish for a do-over. No matter how bad things have been, I have always faced them head-on instead of wishing for a do-over. But this time was different. I found myself wishing for a thousand instances where I could use a do-over.
I could have one with asking Millie Johnson out for coffee, because ultimately it started all this trouble. I could have used one when I stubbornly refused the out Shawn had given me before entering the house. I could have used one when I lied to Daisy. I could have most definitely used one when I kept the necklace in my pocket.
No use in dwelling in the past. My mind screams at me. Get a move on. We need to get out before things worsen. Although I didn’t want things to worsen, I couldn’t come up with a single scenario that was worse than my present situation. At least Shawn was out. Lucky bastard! With a sigh, I prepared myself to face all sorts of horror.
The first thing I realized was the utter darkness. A snort escaped at the clichéd situation. I was stuck in a dark attic. A part of me wondered if this was a sign of me going crazy. Perhaps this craziness would help pass the time if I failed and was stuck here with Daisy. Don’t be a pessimist. My mind rebuked me.
I take a step forward and crash into a wooden wall in front of me. “Ow!” Just my luck, I haven’t even started and I am crashing into walls. It is then I realize, I have no idea how, that I am standing the wrong way. I turn around and search for even a sliver of light to shine in this dark. Guess this is the first puzzle. The dark attic. Oh, well. No need to give up. There was more than enough time to make it through this place.
I take a step in what I hope is the forward direction but immediately freeze as a large creaking noise beneath my shoe echoes in the attic. Guess this means the wood would collapse in unexpected places. I was never a religious person but in this moment, I prayed more than even a fanatic. It helped though. The first time I did step on rotten floorboard, there was a small moment of suspension where everything was unstable. That small moment passed very quickly and I yelped as one leg of mine fell through. The pain that flared up in my leg was quite a lot and I barely managed to control it as the surrounding wood chips scratched through my jeans. This is not normal. I shouldn’t be hurt. What’s going on? The answer came soon enough when I felt the floor begin to reseal around my leg and I pulled it out again, despite the pain that flared. This is her work. After this, I decided to try to avoid any more such hurt.
It was a foolish decision, I realize moments later as I stumble onto my eighth such rotten floorboard on my exactly fifteenth step. No decision to be smart enough is good when you have already been stupid enough to make a ghost angry. I kept stumbling into them as my mind kept counting how much valuable time I lost in this very first room. Both of my legs were filled with wounds, wood chips and blood trails. To let my mind calm down from all the worries, I decided to become reckless and take my time, even if it took fifty years.
It was as if the choice was the key to exit. It still took a long time, that felt like hours, to find the exit but I didn’t fall into any ghostly pits, though I did fell into a number of actual pits. How did I know? They didn’t begin to close-in around me. And, fine I admit it, these holes actually helped as some light seeped in and helped me beat this dark puzzle at the end. I was glad at this sudden cheat at the game. Finally I found the door, which frustratingly enough, was right next to my starting point. As soon as I touched the door, three things happened.
First, her voice screamed “Cheater!” in the attic. The sound really echoed and left me momentarily deaf. Second was the sudden lighting up of the lamps of the attic and I was blinded as well. But it was really the third that disheartened me the most. I was lifted in the air and was shaken like a soda bottle before getting down again. Disoriented, I tried to reach for the door again. I should have been more attentive. I grasped only air. For several minutes I flailed my hands around, hoping that what I feared wasn’t true, that I was just turned in some other direction. But even my mind didn’t accept this. I cheated. So she reset me. I have to start the puzzle from the start again.
I can honestly confess to myself that it nearly broke my will to leave. How could I ever expect myself to make it through if any sort of help was wrong? I was no omniscient. But I am also glad to announce that there was a part of me that didn’t give up. And I screamed that at her. “I AM NOT GIVING UP!” I had a pretty good suspicion that she could hear me. I wanted to make a point that she didn’t scare me. That though she was unfair, I wasn’t anymore. That doesn’t mean my legs didn’t bleed.
The intention to make a point died a tragically hilarious end as my first step turned out to be on a rotten floorboard. Let’s restart. My brain offered a helpful out and I grasped it. It must have taken me an hour, or more likely two, before I finally figured out a way to get out of the room. As I gripped the door once again, I momentarily feared that something bad would happen again but thankfully nothing happened. I opened the door and stared outside. Then I had to control myself from shutting myself in the dark, but safe, attic.
Outside of the attic, in the small room that contained the stairs to the first level of the building, was one giant spider web. There isn’t any need to explain what sat on it, now is it? Daisy must have some serious mental damage to even letting things like that breed in her house. Who kept a pet spider as big as a room? I can, once again being honest, confess that THAT sight made me seriously consider giving up.
Then logic kicked in. She can’t have a spider as big as that. She must be playing with my head. It isn’t real. It’s an illusion. Reality is what we choose to believe in. And I chose to believe that the spider in front of me was not real. Now for a terrifying, not-at-all-fun fact, I can tell you that my spider-that-didn’t-really-exist was a scary black thing. When it saw me approaching confidently, okay, I think I am walking at a level slightly above from that of a scared person about to have a panic attack, it opened its – mouth? – at me. I swear, the nightmares of every arachnophobic is made out of this sight. And all my beliefs that it wasn’t real fled into the darkness of the night. I really wish I behaved in a composed way and walked back for another plan but in honesty, I ran back to the door with a scream that would have made a banshee hang her head in shame.
That…spider…is…REAL! Even my brain had to take pause to declare it to the rest of me. I could feel a full-body shutdown approach and I needed a plan, any plan to kill the beast, before I passed out. Because I doubted I would wake up before the night ended. And then my eyes fell on the thing next to me as the giant spider beast still bared its fangs at me. An idea struck me as I realized that I didn’t need to kill the beast, and hope the necklace wasn’t in either of these two rooms, but simply get away from it. And knowing Daisy, she wouldn’t put something like this in a dirty place like this.
So, feeling glad that no one could see me, I grabbed the abandoned broom and shook it at the spider. “Go away! Shoo! Shoo!” Honestly, this moment would forever be in my list of most embarrassing actions. I could hear Daisy’s disbelieving laughter as I worked on getting this spider away.
Surprisingly - yeah I am of that little faith - it worked and the spider retreated. I ran under the web, staying far out of the reach of the spider, and onto the stairs. I tried to stop on the first stair and slipped, falling down on my rear as I held onto the shaking stair below me for balance. As soon as I felt the coldness though, I knew I was in trouble. Because Daisy couldn’t even leave the poor stairs out of her game, I now stood on slippery frozen stairs with a layer of ice thick enough to ensure a nasty fall.
The masochist part of me looked down and my heart stuttered. It is another one of Daisy’s illusions that made it feel like the one or two feet height at which I am standing is actually a hundred feet. I knew I had to play by Daisy’s rules and so I barely controlled my urge to jump down and just get this over with.
Feeling that the broom was no longer useful at the moment but might be
necessary if I have a reset, I threw it back where I found it, barely missing the spider – much to my sadness - into the corner of the room. A moment later, I prayed that I wouldn’t need the broom again.
I tried to stand up but my shoes began to slip even before I was off the stair and I knew this was the way only for serious injury. So settling back into the icy seat, I began to think of my escape strategy. As I went through various strategies, including one that involved taking my jacket off to use it as a more frictional surface but was discarded because I actually liked the jacket, I didn’t realize that I had put too much pressure on my legs by bending forward. I realized this mistake, however, when both of them slipped and I nearly fell down. Still, I must have slipped three stairs down before the realization kicked in. Of course, slide seat by… err, slide stair by stair to get down. And so began the slow task of getting down the twelve stairs.
I knew that if I ever told about this to anyone, they would laugh at me, wondering how long it took me to get down twelve icy stairs. They would be idiots. I would like to know how quickly they could have done it in my place – with no railings for safety, with ice so slippery beneath me and with a fear of reset or worse making me question my every move.
By the time I was done with the stairs, I felt like I had just been through twelve stages of hell. At each stair I progressed, my fear of falling and being hurt or reset increased until I wasted two whole minutes on that last stair fearing a reset. Thankfully, nothing had happened, though I suspected that I may have once used the side of the stairs accidentally for support, which was kind of cheating. I guess I was lucky I wasn’t caught.
Now I stood in the same corridor where I first met Daisy. There was nothing in sight and I could stare clear across the corridor to the other side. Every inch of my being knew this was a scary trap, if not the scariest, because sometimes it isn’t the visible we need to fear. If she hadn’t spared the attic stairs, I reasoned, she definitely wouldn’t leave a corridor, especially this corridor empty. But as I took a few careful steps towards the main stairs, nothing happened. I didn’t let my guard down though. It was a good thing to do.
“LIAR!” The voice came from my right all of a sudden and I jumped as the sudden scream shattered the scary silence. In one moment, I knew what was happening. This was where I had spoken, where I had lied to her. Now it was her time to speak. And she spoke a lot, always screaming just as silence would begin to settle. It was spooky. “THIEF!” “TRAITOR!” “LIAR!” “CHEATER!” “CRIMINAL!”
At each of her screams, I kept getting more spooked but I didn’t respond. How could I when all she claimed was true? I had lied to her, betrayed her trust and stolen her prized possession. As she screamed “BETRAYER!” at me, almost as if she screamed exactly in my ear, I let out my apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” Unfortunately it didn’t help.
Now her voice was all I heard. It came from all directions, throwing accusations at me that I deserved. Tears fell as sanity began to fall under her words. My mind wanted to shut itself down, to protect itself from her words and their impact. My body collapsed onto the ground but still the screams continued. And what had come out as a desperate shout in the beginning now become a chant. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
People speak that when a mind closes itself to the noise, only then they can hear the whispers. I don’t know what or who inspired this thought but I do know that Daisy heard them. She heard my whispered apology as the screams died away. And I whispered once again as I cried while sitting on the dirty ground. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Are you really?” She spoke and then appeared in front of me in solid form. We looked at each other in the eyes and I flinched at the pain and hurt I saw in her dead eyes. They were there because I hurt her.
“I’m sorry. I really am.” I apologized in a whisper and then I looked at her, seeing her as she was for the first time. She was no longer a scary ghost who wanted to torment me. She was no longer the ghost who had haunted the abandoned McCain mansion. She was just a young girl, scared and hurt, who hadn’t wanted to be without those she cared for, even if it meant there would be no heaven for her. A girl who had been stuck in this realm once all she cared about were gone. A girl who was still hurting. Only my actions had contributed in increasing her pain.
I wasted time and my brain kept pointing this out. But my heart didn’t care. It sympathized with this lonely girl and didn’t want me to interrupt this one moment of being honest with her. Even if it meant losing the game. Even if it meant never going home again. Even if it meant staying with her for as long as she existed.
And in that instant, I realized that I didn’t really dread the thought.