The Careful Implementation of External Pressure

Case #5: Cindy Mccoy.

Case #5: Cindy Mccoy.
Sunday/April/14/2019/1:23PM

Cindy Mccoy was not a negative person. She had seen many things in her seventy years of life, and had come to the conclusion that while evil was a part of human nature, so was kindness.

She was an open minded woman, who scowled when she overheard the bigoted chatter of others her age, and did her best to make sure the small neighbourhood she lived in was as welcoming as a white-picket-fence suburban street could be. She had no children, nor was she ever married. She did not watch the news because she did not like surrounding herself with the retelling of sad stories and bad happenings.

She had one cat, who had once been a neighborhood stray, and she was not afraid of people.

But, there was something strange, something wrong, with the children from that house.

She didn't know how many of them there were, and that unnerved her.

The house itself was normal enough, if a little old for the neighbourhood, older than Cindy herself, but she had grown up across the street from it, and it was as it always had been. It wasn't until recently the children started appearing in it, on and off and sometimes gone for months at a time.

Sometimes, she could see a young one, with short brown hair and darker skin, playing with a stuffed rabbit in the front yard. The girl was definitely old enough to go to school, they all were, but none of them went, and according to the principal of the local high school- who she was good friends with- they weren't even enrolled.

Once, she had been roused from her sleep by the troubles of old age- creaky bones and aching muscles- and had slipped on her blue slippers to shuffle into the kitchen for a glass of water. When she had glanced out the window, she found herself peering at a scene totally unlike that of in the day.

There was one figure on the highest roof, hunched over with the light of a flashlight illuminating the space around them, reading. On the opposite side of the roof, another shadowy figure appeared to be re-painting one of the chimneys, and another was sitting in one of the lower window sills, the second floor, the flow of smoke rising off the lit cigarette in her hand visible in the pale moonlight, sometimes backed by a figure milling about in the room with her.

The black pillar of smoke from the chimney that wasn't being painted danced towards the stars, and it was obvious there where more of them still awake inside the house, hidden beyond its walls and rusty iron fence.

There were times, disturbances in her leisurely old lifestyle, where her hearing would play tricks on her, making her think she heard something like gunshots, impossibly faint, and driving her to wonder if her hearing was finally giving out on her.

She became almost embarrassingly dedicated to watching them, observing what she could see of the house, and at some point or other she starting writing about them in her daily journal entries.

It wasn't until she nearly ran into two of them at the bookstore that she began to truly understand them. Cindy was never fond of eavesdropping, but she had retained her curiosity from her days as a young woman and, at the time, was tired of fearing the young ones who ducked in and out of the fence surrounding that house.

She stilled when she heard their voices, ones she had caught on the nights wind or days sun-rays often enough to be able to identify, and found herself leaning against the ends of a bookshelf, listening in on their words.

"C already has a copy of Othello, right?" A strangely mature voice asked, older than the ones Cindy had heard before. The confirmation that there were, in fact, more people in that house that she had seen made her curl her fingers around the books in her arms tighter.

"Yes, I believe she got it back in France," the second voice, younger, replied, and there was the soft shuffle of paper as one of them re-shelved a book.

She risked a glance around the corner and found that she was half correct. The first, the older, she did in fact not know. They had soft red hair that, despite being straightened, only reached their shoulders, and glasses that were set slightly crooked on the bridge of their nose. The second was one Cindy had seen before and found especially unnerving. She gave off an air of knowledge Cindy had only seen in people who had lived full lives and clutched a notebook in her hands the way one would hold the secret to immortality.

"You guys were in France?" the older questioned, almost lazily, as they returned to browsing the classical literature shelf, their back to the younger.

"Indeed, you would know that if you stuck around more often, Dyl." The younger said, a hint of teasing and amusement lifting her otherwise deadpan expression.

"I'm sorry," the older, Dyl- short for Dylan?- drawled, just as good-naturedly, "I get busy infiltrating the government and all."

"We all get busy infiltrating the government, and we still make it home for dinner," the young replies, a bit more honestly, with a little more heat, as she shifts to lean against the sturdy bookshelf behind her, bringing her hands together to hold her notebook in front of her.

Dylan looked like they wanted to say something, but the younger continued before they could, softer, "we miss you," a pause, and then again, louder, as if correcting herself, "Cookie misses you."

Dylan laughed a little, their shoulders shaking, but they didn't turn around nor straighten their head from the angle they had taken to so as to read the spines of the books lining the shelf.

They were silent for a moment when their laughter died out, before, a bit sadly, they said, "I miss you guys too, Mars."

After that, Cindy took a breath and walked in the other direction. It wasn't her place to listen in.

Still, she stopped at the grocery store on her way home with plans to bring a plate of cookies to their front door later.

They were just kids, after all.

-0-0-0-0-

Fanta gave the old woman at the door a kind smile as they accepted the pate of cookies handed to them, the sky behind the woman dipping with the first strokes of the red of the sunset, and invited her in for tea.

It was a bad idea, in truth, because the living room was still a mess from the last impromptu sparring match, and there were still bullet holes in the couch, but they didn't want to be rude.

There was also the fact that Ty and Shwam had once again teamed up for a science experiment, and combining science and dark magic was a risky past-time. That didn't stop the two of them, however, and with Shwam busy, Cookie had been free to spread havoc across the entire house, made worse by the fact that Dyl seemed to be sticking around for the long haul this time. There was no telling what disaster was around the corner that Fanta had no idea was currently occurring.

They made a mental note to do a head-count after the elderly woman left.

The woman politely declined, and Fanta tried not to be too grateful the woman was leaving, and made sure to extend the offer to a time the woman was free.

The woman had been putting up with them, after all.