House of a Thousand Rooms

Chapter 25

Cora felt a visceral tugging inside her chest as though an invisible string was pulling her toward the levitating hand and the breathy voice attached to it. She moved closer to the ghostly appendage, trance-like and half-enthralled, as Cerberus watched with fascination.

"Who are you?" Cora asked in wonder. "Have we met before?"

"Me aliquando cognovi vos, quia vos me et iterum..." whispered the voice.

You knew me once, you will know me again...

"Might you be... Lianna Butters?" Cora inquired softly. "Or perhaps your name is Theodore?"

The voice released a rustling sigh. "Et loqueris nomina sunt pulcherrima. Scivi cum eis."

The names you speak of are beautiful. I knew them once.

Cora's eyes flickered with shock. "Truly? You are familiar with Lianna and Theodore?"

"Veni mecum..."

Come with me...

A faint white light materialized before them. The pale silvery hand began to drift towards the muted luminescence.

Cora cast a pert look in Cerberus' direction. "Well? Are you coming or not?"

"I am coming, of course," he answered readily. "I would not miss this for the world, Cora dear! I sense that we are about to encroach upon something momentous! Those fluttering fingers carry the scent of despair and wretchedness... They smell like you, and you smell like them!"

Cora sniffed. "Must you always tease me so?"

"Always, little gatekeeper," her crimson-eyed companion contended. "Poking and prodding until you reach the highest levels of vexation is quickly becoming a favorite pastime of mine."

Cora grunted at Cerberus in displeasure as she trailed after the beckoning hand. Cerberus plodded behind them with a chuckle. They entered through the light and exited out the other side as easily as one might step across an archway or threshold. The experience was nothing like the hair-raising, flailing descent into oblivion that Cora had been subjected to in her portals.

The mysterious hand had guided Cora and Cerberus into a grand foyer of sorts inside a beautiful house. Gone was the bottomless void of the epicenter. Cora and Cerberus now stood upon glistening mahogany wood floors. A bronze and crystal chandelier dangled above their heads. Large oil portrait paintings in ornate gold-leaf frames of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies hung from dark burgundy walls. A heavy staircase made of solid wood curved upwards to the second floor.

The hand glided over to another hazy white light beside the staircase. Its fingers curled and unfurled in a way that gestured for Cora and Cerberus to follow. They hurried into the brilliant glow and emerged with the hand in the middle of a large hedge maze. The two of them were confined from all sides by neatly manicured boxwoods that stood at a height of nearly five feet. Cora could barely see over shrubbery while Cerberus' head rose high enough over the top of the labyrinth to see the entrance.

He frowned and sniffed the air. "Smells like death here."

"Do not be rude!" Cora chided. She did not smell anything at all. "We are here as guests."

"What? It is true. The stench clings to the air like maggots and feces."

"Cerberus!" Cora growled warningly.

Cerberus sighed as though he had been wronged. "Very well, little gatekeeper. Breathe in this rancid air if you must, but do not say I did not try to warn you!"

The dim white light opened once more. The hand passed through and disappeared before Cora could catch it.

Cora cried out, "No, wait, come back! I do not understand why you brought us to these places..."

She received no response. The light faded, and the hand was gone.

"Well, that is what I would consider to be rude!" Cerberus muttered. "She did not even stop to say goodbye."

Cora ignored Cerberus' grumbling. An eerie sense of familiarity was suddenly prickling her senses. Upon closer inspection, Cora felt as though this wasn't the first time she had seen this particular house or this particular hedge maze. Yet, the memories didn't feel like they belonged to her. She recognized them from the "childhood" that Circe and her sister had implanted in her mind. The déjà vu felt... borrowed? The long, lonely days and nights that she remembered spending in Haywood Park weren't actually her lived experiences at all.

Every single mental image and emotional attachment to the grand old house and the lovely gardens existed within her as brightly as the sun could shine, but she knew, just as a reader might live vicariously through a character in a well-written novel, that she was only catching a glimpse of someone else's story.

The question that rankled her now was, To whom did these memories belong?