Page 67 of Awry
Shouldn’t I have contacted them?But I … I haven’t called anyone, reached out to anyone … I’m not …
Three weeks is a long time for my aunt and me to be completely out of contact.Not unprecedented, but —
“There’s no one else on the property, Rath,” Doc murmurs.“No one … alive.”
“It’s a big fucking property, Zephyr,” Rath snarls.“With a fuck-ton of essence-wrought shit that even your senses can’t necessarily penetrate.Stay here, and get your hands on Zaya the moment she lets you —”
I turn left down the second-floor corridor, leaving their conversation behind.I’ve never thought of the house as particularly dark before.But I haven’t turned on any more lights, and the dark-wood wall paneling over aged-oak flooring is … almost claustrophobic.Oppressive, even.
I cross by four closed doors — more dark wood.Then I’m hovering outside the open door to my aunt’s bedroom.The extra-large, overwrought, curtained and canopied four-poster bed is perfectly made.The fireplace is empty and cold.The room is tidy.Not a thing seemingly out of place.I don’t step in.
I continue to the final door set near the end of the hall.The door leading to the turret.A door that I never noticed as a child, maybe never even saw, until my aunt first invited me into her office, her inner sanctum.As with the key in the gargoyle’s hand, more of my aunt’s directedintentionobscured it from casual sight.
But I can see the carved, heavy door and its ornate brass handle clearly now.
That handle yields to my touch, turning easily for me though it never has before, not without an invitation.Beyond, an intricately carved staircase spirals up the turret’s outer walls.Creatures of mythology — or of a world long past, as some would claim — form the posts and rails, rendered in more dark wood.Walnut, I think.Running alongside the stairs, the entire space is lined with bookshelves.Thousands of books stretch up around me, easily eighteen or even twenty feet, not including the conical roof.Fiction, nonfiction, manuals, spellbooks, plus journals and keepsakes collected by my ancestors, fill the shelves.
I don’t bother with the lights.Even though my mind is alternating between numb and whirling, my body knows these rooms, these halls, these stairs.The memory is buried at a subconscious level, but I don’t falter, don’t question.
I take the steps, ascending into the turret.Into my aunt’s sacrosanct office.Though I really have no idea what she did up here every day.We had always trained in the ground floor multipurpose room, which the original builder had likely called a ballroom, or in the expansive workshop in the barn, or on the bluff, or on the beach, or in the grass fields.
Maybe it’s the disconnect I’m still navigating, have been navigating since the last time I died.Maybe since even the time before.Because even though my body knows where to step, the house feels foreign around me, not just the turret.I haven’t returned since the summer of my seventeenth year, but I’ve spent months of my life, adding up to years of my life, between these walls.
Shouldn’t it feel different?
Shouldn’t it feel like … coming home?
Something itches at the back of my mind, almost like a touch of intuition or even the touch of a skilled telepath.But nothing comes from it.Just that itch telling me that more isn’t right here, possibly even more than my aunt’s abrupt demise.Her transition beyond this plane of existence.
Maybe I am still re-forming, still becoming, but my aunt always indicated that she could feel the one who came before her when she became the Conduit.I thought she meant her ancestor, her mentor.But I feel no connection to theAfter.Or to theBefore, for that matter.
I shove the unhelpful thought away — the thought of being alone and suddenly not understanding my purpose as well as I thought I did.
A small circular room opens up at the top of the spiral staircase, the domed cupola ceiling in shadow above.A massive dark-wood desk sits at the very center.The desk has cabinets on one side and three slim drawers with ornate keyholes on the other.
I become aware that I’m still clutching the key to the house in my hand.And that I have no other keys with which to open other locks.I tuck the house key in my back pocket.
A matching wooden chair on rollers sits on the far side of the desk.The bulk of the walls are lined with books, though the shelves near one side of the desk are slightly less full.
A massive, curve-fronted armoire fills a rounded section of the room between two of the windows.It’s constructed out of a lighter golden wood.Maple, maybe?But not so darkened with age.The armoire’s double doors are inlaid with symbols or glyphs cut out of mahogany and rosewood, at best guess.The bulk of the glyphs surround the armoire’s two wooden handles.
No keyholes.
No keys.
I’m drawn to the armoire, though seeking it wasn’t my original purpose.But the doors don’t yield to my touch.
Abandoning it somewhat unwillingly, as if there might actually be something beckoning me from within, I cross around the desk.A notebook sits open on a forest-green blotter.A half-finished entry in my aunt’s handwriting covers three-quarters of one page.
The ambient light is too low to read it, but before I can reach for the desk lamp, atugpulls my attention in another direction.I look toward, then cross to the window instead.
Outside the window, the sky is still darkening into evening.Across the expansive backyard, the craggy bluff juts into the open ocean, barren of trees and grass.From this higher vantage point, I have a clear view of the coastline, stretching out seemingly endlessly from either side of that bluff.The tide is halfway up the beach, with roiling, whitecapped waves pummeling the gray sand.
To the right of the bluff, at the edge of the beach, Rath is hovering in the dark, open doorway of the beach house.He’s already turned on some of the exterior property lights, so the stone pathway between the main house and the beach house is sporadically and softly lit.
Without moving, he reaches inside the beach house and flips on the light, just staring but not stepping within.He’s so large that he fills the doorway.
As if feeling my gaze on him, he pivots and looks up, all the way up to the turret window.He looks right at me.
