The House

Chapter 33 - Day 3: Furniture Ghosts

En route to the stairs, I insisted on making a quick detour to grab a poker from the fireplace.

I'm choosing to ignore the hazards of allowing myself to be in possession of dangerous weapons. If something or someone whispers in my neck again or makes shoe noises in the dark, I'm swinging to strike, whether it is a shadow, a branch or a ghost. I am armed, and I'm not afraid to... Well, I'm a little afraid to use it...

I've had it with this place.

David runs his eyes over the poker I'm holding, cocked and ready at my shoulder and I don't blame him for looking nervous. I would be terrified if I were him. He has no idea what levels of klutziness I'm capable of.

We walk up the stairs using the required amount of stealth. Well, actually, according to David, the requirement seems to be zero, because he is climbing the stairs as if he's in a friggin' mall and not in a house with disappearing rooms and secret passages where the clocks attack you with sound, and someone might be lurking upstairs.

Much more sensible, I'm very carefully sneaking up the steps, which is causing me to fall behind, until I decide to sacrifice some of my superior stealthiness to catch up with him.

We stop at the short dark hallway, and David flips the light switch, bathing the entire first floor in jaundice light. There is a light switch at the start of both the flanks up here; they both control all the lights outside of the rooms.

I watch David reach out to the first door on our left.

"We don't have a key to that room," I tell him, and he lowers his hand.

"Oh, that's right, it's been gone forever," he says. "It used to be my father's room when he was a kid."

Oh great, the room of the little boy who sleepwalked and thought there was a woman wanting to take him away. Just where I want to be right now. I take one hand off the poker so that I can use it to cling to David's arm.

"What was it before it became his room?"

"I'm not sure; I think it was always the nursery. The farmer who rented the place after my grandparents moved out never used this room. He didn't use most of the rooms; he was more interested in working the fields. Actually, I think he lived in the cottage, not the house."

"What cottage?"

"The old groundskeeper's cottage at the western edge of the orchard. Cannot see it from the house. I'll show you when the weather clears up, and we can go outside again."

Making up his mind not to go down his family's memory lane right now and stir up more ghosts and strangeness, David holds up the bunch of keys, searching for the one we need.

"You marked them," he observes, and there is an appreciative smile in his voice. Yes, I can be very useful to have around in a crisis if some light admin work is required, such as filing and marking keys.

"The one you're looking for will be 1R2. That's for floor one, right, room two." I had a system... it might not make sense to anybody other than me.

Stepping closer to the door, he hesitates near the small table at the end of the corridor, just outside the room, which I wish he'd just unlock so that we can get this super fun activity over with. Turning, he gazes across the length of the hallway to the twin table at the other end, and then he is giving me a rather odd look.

"What?"

Glancing past him, my eyes fall on the sailor and his lady still lovingly gazing into each other's eyes on the table next to David.

"They missed each other," I shrug, and he is not laughing at me; there is a slight frown on his brow, and his eyes have softened in a way I haven't seen before.