The Underground

Chapter 6 - Images of the Past

Elizabeth ran up and into her father's room. She knew what she would see on the dresser, she knew how sad she would feel when she looked at it, but she looked anyway. It was a photograph of her parents at their wedding. Her mother, elegant and beautiful in her long white gown, and her father, not exactly neat in his suit, but happier then he ever was now. Both people were blissfully happy, and their happiness made Elizabeth sad. She wished that she had known her mother, but she had died just after she had been born. She wiped a tear from her eye and turned away, ready to leave before someone found her crying over a picture, but something caught her eye and she turned. 

Her father's case was open on the floor. 

Suddenly she decided to go inside it, after all her father had given her permission to go in whenever she liked. She stepped down the ladder and into the room at the bottom without difficulty, and found more pictures on a shelf on the wall. Some were of her from last year. One had her and Thomas laughing by the lake they had visited when they let the kelpie go. Another had her holding her favorite book on the sofa. As she looked, she saw herself in the pictures get younger and younger. One had captured her throwing her duck at Jonathan during a bath, another was her asleep under a quilt. Still others came, one of her learning to walk, one more of her crawling. And now the Elizabeth in the pictures was a baby, asleep in her crib, sucking her fingers, smiling at the camera. One caught her eye though. It was a picture of her and her father outside against the sunset. He was holding her gently, leaning in and letting her pull his hair. It was hard to see their faces, but she must have been laughing. He was kissing her hand and she was cuddling against him, happy. 

That was where the pictures ended. There were no pictures of her mother, or from before she was born. It was as if the past didn't exist, or it was being hidden from her for a reason. She searched the case for any other evidence that there had been a past, but found next to nothing.The thing she did find was a picture of her father as a child. His hair was just as messy as it was now, but it was shorter and slightly lighter in colour. He looked unhappy about having his picture taken, which was not unnatural, and was not exactly looking at the camera. The date scrawled in the bottom left was 1902, thirty seven years before the war began. 

She knew about the war, everyone did, but the events leading up to it were shrouded in mystery. She knew her father had played a small role in the building up of tensions in the magical world with his books and the accidental escape of several of his beasts in New York. This she had gleaned from her aunt during the evenings around the radio when everyone was still awake. But there were still so many things that she didn't understand... She would have to ask Thomas and William, they might know more. 

She left the case as she had found it, and hurried to ask her cousins, but was caught halfway down the stairs by Uncle Jacob.

"Bedtime." He said shortly, "We've all been looking for you! Where were you?"

"I was in my room." Elizabeth lied quickly, "Can I say goodnight to Daddy?"

"Sure, but then up to bed Young Lady."

Elizabeth ran down the stairs and hugged her father out of his sleepy trance. Yawning, he hugged her back, whispered "Goodnight." and ruffled her hair before sending her off to bed. 

Elizabeth lay awake late into the night, with her quilt wrapped around her. She was watching the frame that Thomas gave her. The images inside took the form of her mother, smiling down at her. Her hair short and straight, not at all like hers. But her eyes were the same, dark brown, but with a fiery glow inside them. Her father often called her "My little Salamander" because of her eyes, salamander eyes. She was proud to have salamander eyes, like her mother. Tina.