Refraction of Beauty

We were all ravenous; stuffing ourselves with sandwiches till we could stuff no more, despite Annie eating the sandwiches as if they were some exotic delicacies she was never to receive again – she was insatiable, snatching away Joe’s share too because she ‘is way more beautiful than us simpletons and so deserves more’, conveniently eating up from Roxy and Del’s share too. I got full quickly– lots of things didn’t sit well with me at the moment. Anyway, after the little meal we returned back to the bedroom, and for a while, stayed quiet. Of course, Annie, Roxy and Del were informed about the mysterious room with the intriguing ‘activity’, but none of us talked about it again. Truth is we began to feel scared of Aunt Cora. It was like she was something incredibly gruesome on the inside, but painfully tried to conceal it, and it was like she had to keep on reminding herself of something that kept us alive. Or else, her eyes alone would have sliced us off. Uncertain of what to do, or where to go, we just stayed put. The day was no help either. It was extremely gloomy outside and the hours froze solid. Amid all this excitement, Joe and I had a fight. We fought over the shade of a pencil. I said it was silver – which it was, but Joe persisted it was grey. Anyway, it quickly heated up and Joe left the room, and instead moved into the one that was a few blocks away, with her spare hoodie, torch and basketball. Annie fell asleep – out of boredom maybe, poor child. Or her other reason, ‘Well, I can’t look as dead as all of you now, can I? Obviously not. I need my beauty sleep to preserve all that’s left of me!’ Right, so for the sake of my sanity, I believed the first reason, as I’m sure you will too. Roxy picked up a book, ‘My love, my love’ which was all about a girl finding her love, and Del began skimming through ‘work’ notes in her bag – which we believed was a façade when she was actually going through pictures of Ricky.

  I, on the other hand, was thirsty. I took candlelight with me and made my way down to the spare kitchen. Joe was in her room and was sitting angrily on her bed, bouncing her basketball back and forth against the wooden walls. Her room was themed yellow, with a golden carpet and golden bedcovers with golden curtains to match. Joe was dashing her basketball against the brittle wooden wall so much that as she dribbled away, the ball broke through it, with shards of broken wood flying across here and there. Desperate and gasping to look at the damage, it slowly disappeared from her mind, because the wall opened into a long and narrow passageway, too. Tingling with adventure and gripped with reckless bravado, as I have so many times been victim of, she grabbed her torch, broke off the loose panels of wood, and went ahead to investigate.

  Downstairs, I was plagued by a sudden desire that completely overpowered me; to go and pluck one of the oranges from the orange trees outside, and to squeeze myself some fresh juice – we were really addicted to it. Leaving the candlelight inside the house, I opened the massive main entrance, and immersed myself in the chilly atmosphere outside. It was nice and windy…though the trees shook fiercely, causing the dense clouds to sway over the sky like fast waves. I went over to the millions of dancing branches to choose the perfect fruit for myself, but to my disappointment, there were no juicy, healthy oranges to be found anywhere. After rummaging through the tempestuous trees, a truly gorgeous orange finally caught my eye, I reached out for it, but my grasp wasn’t strong enough and it fell, rolling away – with me, hot on its trail. It went and hit a small underground cupboard door, at the back of the Manor, that was in front of an unusually tall tree. I couldn’t remember why that tree felt like déjà vu, but it just did, making me feel intimidated without proper reason. The cabinet door was faded emerald green with scathed blotches of wood peering onto the surface. It had a large lock on top of it, with the icy cold rusty iron bars producing a loud tapping sound when I held it to assess the potency of its lock. The little door seemed odd and peculiar…and what it harboured had to be revealed. I didn’t want to go all the way back into the manor to get help, and then come all the way outside again, so I looked around the vast gardens and discovered right next to some colossally wild bushes behind me, a pair of orange-rusted shears, and began to smash the area around the lock in order to simply cut it out, as the wood was not only considerably venerable, but also damp from the rain earlier on. After much deliberation, I was successful, and so, breaking apart the door was a piece of cake, however, messy. Inside the darkness, a staircase was revealed that led its way down the dark recesses of the forbidden and locked up room – a theme the entire Manor seemed to execute rather brilliantly. The room was large…but it wasn’t empty. There were numerous rectangular shaped objects, aligned in a set of rows, packed very, very closely. The only space was the small circle that the objects made right in the middle…intentionally set that way…it seemed. I turned one of the shady thingamajigs towards the door to face the evanescing light and discovered it was…a mirror. I looked around more keenly and realized how surrounded I was by them. Why were so many mirrors taken from God knows where…and stacked away into the pit of the giant house? However, before I could ruminate over that, I sensed the scary little feeling at the pit of my own stomach, when the mirror began to crack from the bottom. I immediately pushed it back into the caliginosity with its brothers and sisters and made a run for it…back to the Manor…without my orange.

  Returning to the kitchen, I found some water and turned to face the massive lounge as I drank promptly. My eye caught the many pictures set on the fireplace, and I urged to look at them again…though I knew, my prolonged stay ran the chance of the Aunts finding me…but, defying time, I still made my way to the fireplace, leaving the glass half full on the counter. The pictures were all in black and white, and all the frames were torn and in terribly shabby condition. The picture of the old lady struck me, it was the biggest picture there with a large frame and she had the same eyes as mom and Annie’s, and greatly resembled them too, though of course the former’s eyes were permeated with sickness. The wind was now blowing fiercely outside, and the windows shook. My candlelight also went out. Apprehensive of the grey-dark, I quickly shuffled through my pocket, successfully producing a matchbox, and tried to alight it again. In my hurry, I dropped the matchstick, burning with the tiny flame of fire at the tip, which hit one of the coals in the fireplace. The coal it hit was the second right one in the third row of coals that triggered a sequence. The coals suddenly began swirling in a cyclone and the fireplace moved backwards, revealing a flight of stairs downwards. Adrenaline pumping in my veins with a mixed feeling of fear, I grabbed the candle, blazing with the hazy blue-orange flame that transients into the yellow one, and descended the stony stairs into an abyss of darkness. The fireplace closed behind me. Unnerved, I walked on, and entered a small room filled with boxes of memoranda; scattered all around the floor. Light falling on the walls, I found a switch that lighted a single bulb above my head, projecting a depressing yet illuminating cast. I bent down on my knees to survey through the boxes, with the slight chill of the stony floor penetrating through my legs, like that part of my body being dipped in ice-cold freezing water. I pulled close a box, and found old documents, concerning the Manor and its days of construction. I remembered Aunt Sora telling us about the Manor belonging to her friend; which would mean her friend was 400 years old, since the date of the house was 1577. Several documents stated numerous couples’ pledges to leave the Manor immediately given to ‘strange happenings’. Many newspaper articles had also covered up stories on the mysterious disappearances of the seventeen couples’ daughters and often wives too; and how they were just ‘taken’ and never returned. I turned over the stack of papers that crinkled due to their ancient age, and noticed how each time a woman or daughter was taken, they all had recurring symptoms like the victim’s eyes turning bright red. An interesting thing about the complaints that were registered against the place was of insidious cracks that appeared in the mirrors and glass frames they had around them. Reports thus dubbed the house haunted, as each time an adversity befell, it was followed by the cracks in the mirrors and shadowy ‘things’ passing over the room. I also f
ound this miniature key…that looked like a white shard of wood stained with blood. Curious, I put the key in my jacket pocket.

  After exploring the box full of the documentations, I switched to the other boxes. They all contained pictures. The pictures were of a multitude of beautiful women, with beautifully thick hair, gorgeous smiles and gay eyes. I later realized that the pictures were odes to deceased lives. Each and every one of the girls pinned in the albums were dead, with their dates of departure scribbled at the bottom of the photographs. These pictures were assorted into picture albums that were laden with dust and cobwebs. Such practices were common in the nineteenth century, if I recall correctly. I spent a great deal of time going through the many pictures of the several ladies, and felt, though they were all beautiful, none of them stood a chance against mom and Annie. I then turned my attention to the last photo album and turned over its leaves, where I saw three pictures that were loose and not fitted into the slots of the album yet. Fixing the loose strands of my hair, I turned them over, and drew back in horror. My hands began to shake and took seconds before I consciously began to take control over myself. The pictures of the dead girls were of Aunt Cora, Sora and Nora. The dates were scribbled at the back; 1967, and looked just like them except they didn’t have the penetrating eyes. If those really were them, then it would have to be physically impossible to retain such young looks for such aged people – as they ought to be. It became too much for me, I hurriedly put all the albums back into the boxes and took my light up the fireplace, which opened up, quickly scurrying outside. I turned to look at it once more and saw the giant portrait of the four sisters hanging over it. With that last glance I ran upstairs, back to Annie, Del and Roxy, who had gotten seriously worried at the time I took. Joe made no responses to us calling her…and so, another tension remained. Meanwhile, the portrait above the fireplace did not remain the same, because minutes later, there could be seen; a crack on the side. Some thing had been there after me…again.

  -- CHAPTER 10 --

  Getting Hotter