2
“Do we have any more Dunkaroos?” Alyssa called from inside the tent, momentarily revealing the muted beam of a flashlight from underneath the sleeping bag she had thrown over herself, at Chalayne's insistence, when she had insisted she was bored with watching the 'dead house' and wanted to read instead.
“See for yourself. The bag is right outside the bug flap.” Chalayne whispered over her shoulder. Her gaze did not waver from the house as she said this; she had become ensnared within the fanciful web she had spun herself, as her imagination traced and tracked all sorts of motion she might potentially see through the window. Even the window itself caused her to stir with curious agitation, for it seemed cut with almost unexplained precision when compared to the hand lain stone defining the house's shape. She envisioned all sorts of weird and impossible forms materializing within, framed by the window's perfect squareness—it was the regularity contained within the irregular, perhaps, that drew her forward. Almost pulling her. Or was it vice versa? she found herself wondering.
She was positively enthralled by the mystery of the place. And yet she still had not seen any movement—it really was a 'dead house', as Alyssa said. And thus, to herself, she muttered almost desperately, “Come on already.”
“There's one pack left. Do you want some?”
“What?” Chalayne asked, her focus torn away. She looked back at the tent. Alyssa waved the blue plastic snack container at her. “No, go ahead.”
In the moment before her eyes reclaimed the silhouette they sought, as she turned her head—emptied of the house's presence and thus transiently clear—Chalayne finally acquiesced with the inevitable idea that had been born within her about two hours ago. Her gaze narrowed fixedly upon the house as if now it were a target she aimed for, and she said resolutely to herself,
“We're going in.”
She called to Alyssa:
“We're going in.”
Alyssa's head shot out of the tent door immediately, the flashlight she held in front of her carefully muffled by her hand.
“What? Are you crazy?”
“There's no other way to find out.” Chalayne insisted.
“No way! Maybe in daylight I'd go, sure. But it's like—“ she disappeared for a moment and allowed the flashlight to flood the tent with an orange glow. Then she clicked it off and came out again, this time with her face lit from underneath by the blue light of her cell phone, “It's passed one! It's almost witching hour!”
At this plaintive cry, and for a reason that was known only to her, Chalayne herself drew back from her suggestion as superstition clouded her decision. Her fanciful imagination had only been intensified under the half moon as the night waxed and she continued to shrug off sleep. A vivid flash of a cackling old woman with knotted hair and coal black eyes rose up within her, projected through the window like so many images before. And then the image vanished, and the window was left empty, blacker now than. . . well, anything she had ever laid eyes on before.
“We must go in!” Chalayne insisted, recovering herself. She moved swiftly, at a crouch, toward Alyssa. Into the tent she began throwing the snack wrappers and books and electronics that had been taken out of her backpack and left scattered. She moved to zip close the door flap, but Alyssa remained stubbornly within—with much of the garbage and odd trinkets Chalayne had carelessly thrown strewn upon her lap. Her expression was despairing.
“In the morning we'll go, I promise.” she said. “What's the hurry? For three weeks you haven't seen anyone, so what's one more night?”
“I think you're right: I don't think anyone is home! We should go in now, while we know there's nobody home—because the people who live here might come back tomorrow!”
“But isn't that just what you wanted to do? See the people living there? Not the house itself?” Alyssa said, and her expression narrowed in shrewd contemplation as she tried to muster many more reasons to convince her friend that her plan was nuts.
“I'd like to do both, if I can.” Chalayne said after a pause. In that case, Alyssa began, she should go herself, but Chalayne stopped her with a wave of her hand and said, “Just come with me! Please? If we're together it will be alright.”
Alyssa made a pouting face that was lost on Chalayne in the darkness.
“I guess I won't let you go in there alone. All right, I'm coming. But I just want you to know: the ideas you get sometimes are crazy Chalayne.”
And with that the two began a crouched approach toward the house. Their initial aim was the base of that lone tree, its trunk wide enough that it would easily conceal both of them standing side by side. The house seemed to grow ever more dark as they drew nearer, its presence looming and ominous. And it was silent as a grave—a heavy silence, pressing down on their shoulders.
“Can you feel that?” Chalayne whispered, her voice so quiet Alyssa would have missed her question if not for the fact that, in her fright, she remained as close to Chalayne as she could get.
“Spooky.” was her choked, distracted reply. At the base of the tree the pale glow of the moon illuminating the field around their tent was cut off completely by the thick branches extending overhead, and when Chalayne looked backward at her tent she felt as if they had entered another world: one of darkness, surrounded by a world of light that seemed so far away, far beyond the density of the atmosphere of the strange dwelling. It seemed to take more effort even to breathe the air here, and both girls' hearts began to pound in their chests. Looking at Alyssa with eyes opened wide and reflecting many and conflicting emotions, Chalayne silently mouthed,
“Ready?”
Alyssa nodded wordlessly, her voice lost. For her, it wasn't so much that they were breaking in to the place that had her so fearful—she didn't believe anyone lived inside—it was the house itself: from the outside it was not much larger than maybe half the main floor of her own house, but it seemed to bestow a magnetic pull of some kind upon everything around it, and these things seemed to wilt in their approach. She did too, as if what usually sustained her life energy outside of the parameter of this yard and this house had been sucked out of the space around her, like she had entered a vacuum. Chalayne, meanwhile, was even a little intoxicated by that same feeling.
Gingerly they approached the window, and unconsciously their breathing stopped as they listened intently for a stirring inside, but there was not a sound. In a swift but cautious motion, Chalayne peeked above the windowsill and found the place empty; not just of people, but of furniture too. Utterly devoid of any sign of life upon first glance. When her eyes adjusted to the stifling darkness within, however, she spotted a door in the wall directly across from the window, and, like the window, curiously cut with that same precision, into the irregular stone wall. She motioned Alyssa to come up to see.
Through the window Chalayne went first: eagerly, nervously, and all the more quietly, and when her feet dropped down onto the floor she felt the stone was ice cold, and this she felt even through the soles of her sandals. The silence was even heavier within, and its oppression did not dissipate even as Alyssa noisily clambered in after Chalayne, her shoes scraping upon the stone as she tried to find purchase for her push up and over the high set window.
The sounds Alyssa couldn't help but make sparked a sense of urgency within Chalayne—they needed to do what they came to do, then get out fast. She wasted little time moving toward the door. The handle was silver in colour and simple in shape and, turning it, she found it was unlocked. The door swung toward them on silent hinges, and they found themselves peering down a spiral staircase.
“You were right!” Chalayne couldn't help but gasp. The harshness of her voice echoed off the stone walls. “There's an underground!” she added in a lower tone, but her voice was still harsh and ringing in the silence. Second thoughts came pouring into her mind as she looked at Alyssa, this time her eyes wide only with fear: if there was an underground, someone could have been here this whole time, and she wouldn't have known. This realizat
ion was manifest on Alyssa's face too, who up until now had been finding courage in her belief that the house was abandoned.
And yet, somehow the magnetic pull they both felt upon nearing the house was stronger in the stairwell, and it was drawing them down. She expected Alyssa to call her crazy and urge her to leave, but when she suggested they continue with a wave of her hand Chalayne heard no objection from her friend—instead she felt a hurried tap on her shoulder and, when she turned to look, Alyssa nodded.
After the first slow, agonizing step, both girls seemed to tumble down the rest of the narrow passage; they were quite suddenly at the foot of the landing with little recollection as to how far down they came. They found themselves within a cavernous room, and though there was light, it was soft and barely reached them and it was more convincing in its purpose thanks to the blurred shadows it threw from all directions upon the dark red carpet under their feet—shadows blurred, but nonetheless suggestive of swooning and even delicate contours, cast by a sparse but carefully placed arrangement of seemingly worldly objects: there was a carved vase that glittered gold; three statues of fantastical creatures which seemed curiously ancient and yet unmarked by time; as well as various and much more recognizable figurines made of many different materials likely found around the fields outside, and modelled after the animals who call those fields home.
The soft golden light was emitted by small lanterns regularly spaced between gilt-framed paintings hung on the two walls that stretched across the considerable length of the room. There were perhaps thirty paintings in total, and all were either of landscapes or crowded city streets, the flow of the figures depicted within morphing into each other uninterrupted, like a dream. The frames were all the same size, though the canvases they contained varied, as did the minute details of the frames themselves. Like the carpet, the wallpaper was also of a hue similar to richly oxygenated blood. The air was cool and pleasant, and its weighty density seemed to have been alleviated slightly. When Chalayne noticed this a sigh of relief escaped her lips, and it was taken up by the space around and amplified by the walls and ceiling, and the room carried her words down to the other end, where they lingered. Desperately she wished she could snatch them back, and with them the noise they made. Alyssa put a frantic finger to her lips to beckon Chalayne to keep quiet, and still. Every sound they made was intensely disturbing to the room; they were careful not to brush their clothing as they looked around. Unheeded, Chalayne wandered farther in, and Alyssa, though starting to feel that entrancing feeling Chalayne had so far been taken in by, began to suggest it was time they leave with desperate muttering under her breath,
“We shouldn't be here. We shouldn't be here. We shouldn't be here.”
And then a voice replied: “No you shouldn't, and yet here you are.”
At the end of the room a shadowed figure had emerged from behind a curtain that blended in with the wallpaper; the curtain continued to sway behind the apparition, gently stirred, but silently as if made of silk. Both girls let out terrified screams.