Someplace
The magician crossed the hall and into a second room, this one just as empty as the rest.
Can you hear it? She whispers. Can you hear me? Behind her – a room away – the grandfather close chimed. An answer in itself but not to the question she had asked. The magician could hear the world beyond her own but could they hear her?
Her feet carried her through this new room. It's door hanging on it's hinges from where the shadow can passed through. And like the shadow, she met no resistance, moving around the charred remains of furniture, of structure. The magician angled her head. Rolling her shoulders, clenching her jaw.
The last of the chimes echos. It rings around the room and through her bones, weary but strong. But the sound didn't come from above the destroyed staircase, it comes from the edges of her vision where the world lands into her peripheral. Where the structure remains solid and exposed.
"Can you hear me?" She says like a chant on her lips. She steps onto the mantel, sinking into a bow before the immaculate stone. The hearth cut into precise works of stone. Untouched by the fire. Untouched by flame and soot but not by hands and flesh. "Very clever, Whitfield. It's a nice try at least."
A proper trick. The magician traces a thumb over the letters, the name an echo on her tongue: capti. The symbols etched into the four corners were quarters of a ouroboros, winding against it's self to pull into a circle. Four broken symbols. Drawn with ink, and smudged in corners. The spell-work slightly faded, time worn. But time passed differently here.
Her fingers come away stained. It's then that she feels it, the brush of a breeze on her skin because the ink wasn't wet on her side, she was touching the stone beyond her. The magician took a deep breath and tasted magic in the air. Another beings magic, power.
The women drew her face into a smile. She raised her body and cast her gaze behind her, patient and still. She could feel the prick of something else–someone else. Did it belong to that voice? The one out in the darkness. She'd waited, listening to the bow and ease of the house around her until –until... the voice like shadow in a though spoke, again.
What are you doing? It said – she said.
"Can you hear me?" The words came out desperate and cracked.
You're going to hurt yourself this way, come off of there, said the voice again.
"Who are you?" She tried again, reaching her hands back towards the mantel. Towards the only spilt in the world around her. The magician pressed her finger back into the smudge of ink and stone and magic and tried again, "Can you hear me?"
Please hear me, she begged silently. The delicate pitch of the voice slipped back into the sounds of the fire burning at the edges of this side. There was only the fire, the wood and the silence. Thick as smoke. The magician threw a fist at the hearth, sticking the stone with a force of will.
Under the cracking of the burning wood there was a scrap of stone as her first knocked a piece loose.
Is someone there? said the voice again. Clear and sharp.
_
End of Part One
YOU ARE READING
The House of Hidden Things
ParanormalCharlotte Whitfield had always known the people who raised her were mad and she had spent her entire adult life trying to distance herself from the reputation of it - from them. From the ridicule that seemed to stick to her skin even as Charlotte wo...
