Emily’s hard at work on her mural throughout the tour. She doesn’t find the presence of others the least bit distracting – on the contrary, she enjoys the warmth they bring to this environment. And if nothing else, it’s another attraction for luring and stimulating these guests.
When Denise materializes at her elbow, in the course of making random rounds all over the property, Emily’s only half paying attention. Even as her sister rambles on at length about some conversation with that witty kid from the Fairlawn Diner. In actuality, Emily is focusing to a much greater extent upon Tom’s latest workshop, to a classroom full of adults, in the front room down the hall.
“…yes and so as you can see, it’s a good practice to rub several coats of linseed oil into the canvas, allowing a couple of days for each coat to dry,” he is explaining, while Emily herself paints away, having by now moved onto the likeness of Liam Blodgett.
“Are you even listening?” Denise questions, “he said there’s a reason we don’t have any locals living here.”
“Hmm? Yeah, of course. But he’s not really telling us anything we don’t already know. And did he give any specifics, anyway?”
“What do you mean he’s not telling us anything we don’t know!?” Denise protests, “I never thought about this before. You’re saying you have?”
But by now, Emily’s mind has already drifted down the hall again, where she hears some crotchety sounding older gent, with a bit of a wheezy if authoritative voice say, “excuse me, but if you don’t mind my asking…”
“Of course,” Tom says, encouraging him.
“But how did you decide to put those…greenish black circles on every painting? Is that like, what you’d call a personal signature, like a conscious decision?”
“Umm…heh heh,” she hears Tom chuckle, explaining, “it’s interesting you should ask that. This is what you might call my first significant process change in, I don’t know, twenty years. This is something I just started doing, this week. I’m not sure what to tell you – it just felt right?”
“Are you kidding me?” Emily mutters, and begins shuffling, almost without conscious thought herself, down the hall.
“What?” Denise questions, though follows right behind, a couple of steps in her older sister’s wake.
The two of them materialize in the hallway, and Tom shoots them a pleased, though vaguely perplexed looking smile. Particularly as Emily continues to stand smack in the center of the archway, paint brush in hand and mouth agape. Yet it is indeed just as he’s described: not only are the bird shapes gone from his most recent paintings, in favor of greenish black circles, but he’s gone back to older ones and painted over the bird shapes on those, mostly in corners or other somewhat concealed spots, and replaced them with those weird ovals as well.
Hours later, long after the last guest has left and every other soul on site, as far as she can tell, has dropped off into the land of dreams, Rebecca finds that she is unable to do so. Twice, just on the brink of sleep, she has found herself snapping, however suddenly, fully awake again, and remaining so for who knows how long before the drowsiness returns. In both instances, plagued by this weird, foreign experience.
It’s this vague state where she both half-dreams that she’s heard someone screaming at her, yet also awakens with a start certain that she was the one who just screamed it. And not only that, but in this borderline sleepwalking state, she feels there is someone in bed with her. To then fully awaken and discover that, sadly, this is not the case.
Well, it’s only natural that she should still mourn Jen’s sudden abandonment. And in some sense to feel that she remains here, in spirit, or whatever that means. But now, after a third such episode, sweaty and with her heart pounding, Rebecca concludes that there’s no way she’s going to fall immediately back to sleep, despite her exhaustion from this grueling tour day.
She picks up her phone and observes that it’s 3:17am, which would explain this deathly silence here in the main house. While she can’t remember – never mind that it had seemed so insanely vivid at the time – the specific words spoken, those first two occasions she woke up tonight, this most recent one sticks with her. It was an unfamiliar female voice screaming, look up! Which in turn, yes, led to jolting awake with a start, believing that she had just screamed this, in that nonsensical-yet-making-perfect-sense realm particular to dreams.
Lying still for a number of minutes and hearing not another peep in the house, however, convinces her that she hadn’t actually screamed anything. Yet, sleep will not come again easy, she knows. Thinking that some tea right now might do the trick, she flings back the blankets and steps out of bed, finds her way across the room and down the hall without turning on a light, not even that of her phone, so as not to disturb any others.
Rebecca has no sooner rounded the corner, to begin descending the stairs, when the first peculiar flash erupts before her. Well, this is certainly strange. It looks like someone is taking pictures downstairs, that kind of quick flashing motion, except only if the camera in question used some weird neon green-blue flash instead of the customary whitish one.
Now she’s really glad she woke up when she did, because this her attention is fully riveted. Who knows what kind of weird things have transpired in this house, after everyone has gone to bed? She could really stumble onto something outrageous here – although it’s difficult at the moment to imagine what this might be, exactly.
It happens a second time, before she’s reached the bottom of the stairs. She pauses upon reaching the ground floor, looking every which way, but sees nothing. Her mind begins to race in the absence of any abnormalities, and this is when she realizes, with considerable disappointment, that this actually must be some sort of malfunctioning toy. Of course. That would make total sense, considering all the dolls and fire trucks and plastic guns and other oddities collected all over the place down here, the tubs and endless shelving along every wall.
She turns and makes her way back to the café counter, the little nook in front of it with a microwave, a water dispenser, tea boxes, and other essentials. As her eyes have adjusted, with an assist from the microwave’s digital display, she’s able to make out a chamomile packet and prepares this, pouring a healthy coat of honey into the mix. It certainly helps that Ben has left the office light on, too, which suffuses the general area, if not shining upon her directly. Although, come to think of it, this is kind of odd, even if Denise was telling her the dude has passed out in there at the desk at least once already, in the course of his endless, late night number crunching.
As her water heats in the microwave, Rebecca takes a step in that direction, toward the swinging, western saloon type door separating the counter from the café, and that’s when another of those greenish-blue neon flashes erupts, directly before her. Spookier still, that burst of light had blown out of the open office door, she’s sure of it.
The lightheartedness of this adventure has all but evaporated in this moment. In fact, she feels more like her heart just plummeted somewhere near the bottom of her stomach, and she has difficulty swallowing. As the timer on the microwave dings, like a bomb dropping into this otherwise dark and eerie stillness – apart from that office light, anyway – she remains right where she is, unable to move. At least until another of those flashes flares up, this time more peripherally, to her left somewhat, deeper back within that kitchen.
Rebecca has this sinking suspicion that she shouldn’t look, but can’t seem to help herself. Cringing at how loud that creaking, swinging door sounds this hour, certain it will wake up every person asleep right now, she nonetheless summons enough nerve to keep going. The office lies just a slight zigzag to the right from here, to where she can peek around the corner, and glance in that hot, cramped, tiny office that Ben has seemed curiously partial to from day one.
At first, as if by willful, subconscious omission, because there’s really no way to miss this sight, in such a small space, all she observes are the boxes of paperwork along the wall, and the calendar pinned above the desk, the adding machine and clutter upon it. But then, of course, it’s eventually impossible to ignore the most glaring, out of place, and just plain horrific sight: this sticky looking puddle in the middle of that wooden desk. It’s bright green but with swirls of what looks like human blood intermingled throughout.
And this is when she really does start screaming, and awakens the entire house.
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