annotated floorplan - simple floorplan

The labcoat-clad resident of the room held up a test tube and stroked the head of one of the many-coloured long, thin snakes that substituted for her hair. “Just drool a little into there for me, pet, if you don’t mind.” The copper-coloured snake obliged, some sort of clear liquid dripping into the tube, and she gave its throat a gentle tickle. “Thank you.” The scientist looked towards the door. Tinted goggles worthy of a steampunk cosplayer covered her eyes. She was perched on a stool that looked like it might be stainless steel, which seemed out of place for the setting. “Well? You have questions? Come in and ask them, then. I’m Ophelia. Who are you and what do you want to know? There’s another stool over there, help yourself.”

Those couldn’t be real snakes. That had to be cybernetic, right? It was clever and looked very convincing, but there was no way it could be actual snakes.

“I’m Lennox. I’m a professional sceptic and debunker,” Lennox said, finding his voice. “I find things and places that superstitious people think are somehow supernatural, and I investigate and figure out what’s really going on, and then I explain it.” Warily, he perched on the stool, which was wood, not steel, and planted his safety-booted feet on the rungs.

Ophelia nodded, the snakes bobbing. “Commendable, and I share that goal of investigation into the world to understand and explain things. Some are harder to explain than others. It’s okay, Wanda, I’ve got this. Go find out what kind of cookies Tarragon made or something.”

“All right,” Wanda said. “I hope you can be more help than I have. Good luck, Lennox.”

“Um, thanks,” Lennox said distractedly.

“So?” Ophelia said, carefully pouring the snake-derived contents of the test tube into a second one that already held something greenish. The whole thing turned intensely yellow-green, practically glowing. “Hm, that’s interesting, and not what I was expecting. So what can I help you explain?”

“How someone can be invisible in person instead of in a video?” Lennox said. “And how you’re doing that trick with the snakes?”

“You’re a male bipedal terrestrial tetrapod with a large brain and no fur to speak of and the dentition of an omnivore, and you’re visible all the time. Wanda is all of those things with the exception of being female, which is in fact slightly more common statistically, and invisible to you and sometimes to her family, which is much less common. I am all of those things, except female and I have snakes and you would not want to meet my eyes if I took my goggles off. Natural variation exists.” She set the test tube in a holder and held up an empty, clean one, sorting through snakes until she isolated a blue-black one. “There you are. Drool in this for me please, sweetie.”

“Natural variation means skin comes in a lot of different shades of browns, and people are different heights and weights, and some seem to have natural innate aptitudes for some things. It does not include being invisible or having snakes for hair!”

“Your version of reality is a total drag.”

“It isn’t a version. Any scientist should know this. Spooky shit isn’t harmless. Well, I guess individually it sometimes can be. But that kind of illogical, non-scientific cognitive distortion tends to become a pattern. If people believe in one thing, they usually believe in more things that run directly against science, and that’s when you get governments and school boards cutting funding or insisting on teaching so-called creation science as a real theory or people believing that you can use the Bible to make universal decisions and things like that. There’s no such thing as the supernatural. Just the natural.”

“Depends on how you define natural, but I’m actually with you. I am absolutely in favour of people seeing the world around them as it is, without being biased by what they believe.”

“Which means that you, and Wanda, and whoever else is running around in a freaky costume, are all faking it somehow.”

“Nope. Bad science.” She used a pipette to delicately add a single drop of the newly-acquired liquid to the brilliant yellow-green liquid, and watched it change to a more golden colour while growing more literally luminescent. “Neato.” She set the tube in a holder and pulled a notebook into reach so she could jot something down.

“What do you mean, bad science?”

She set down the pen and turned to face him directly. “You’re using exactly the approach to science that you were just complaining about. You have already reached conclusions, and now you’re looking for evidence and methods to justify those conclusions, regardless of whether that’s the direction that the evidence points towards. If that means having to find a way to reconcile current evidence with previous evidence that appears to be incompatible, well, that’s how science works. Somewhere in the solution is the reality, or at least, something closer to it than before. Real science involves having an open mind and letting the evidence lead you to the conclusions even if they’re uncomfortable.”

“Everything everyone has ever established about the electromagnetic spectrum says that solid objects reflect visible light. And it isn’t like she’s reflecting non-visible light, since I can see things behind her. That is ridiculous.”

“Yep. It is. But does a lack of an explanation invalidate the evidence?”

“And biology does not work that way, no one can have living snakes on their head! What on earth were you doing with those test tubes, anyway?”

“Oh, they drip chemicals for me. Not everything, just some basic ones that have a liquid usable form, and only in very small amounts, only around one to two ccs a day, depending on which one. This one does acetic acid, this one does glycerin, this one over here does absolutely pure H2O. They don’t actually need to eat as long as I do, but they enjoy treats. This one here, the violet one, loves whole grapes, but I have to keep an eye on the blue one beside it when I’m eating chicken because it will try to steal bites off my fork. They can have a surprising reach, too.”

“That is insane. Every part of it.”

“Nope. Bad science. You can’t declare that unless you test it and there’s at least enough evidence in favour of that conclusion to make it a reasonable contender against other hypotheses.”

“Stop telling me I’m doing bad science!”

“Then stop doing bad science. Or at least stop pretending that you’re doing good science and that others are doing bad science if they have more open minds than you. They might actually be doing good science. Admittedly, it’s unlikely for a lot of people making a lot of kinds of claims. I mean, if something has already been thoroughly proven, like the planet being approximately a ball or vaccines saving countless lives, then continuing to argue the contrary is not good science. And sometimes the evidence is just poor quality and not at all conclusive, like most stuff with aliens on Earth, say. But some things that aren’t really given thorough proper investigation, that’s another matter. So tell me, when did you last see a scientific paper written on the theoretical existence and biology of a gorgon?” She grinned at him.

“No serious scientist would bother. It would be a waste of time and destroy his reputation even to try to speculate about it.”

“Uh-huh. And when some things are off-limits for a serious scientist to speculate about, holes get left in the overall picture that no one even admits to being able to see.”

“This is... this conversation is idiotic. You’re just arguing the opposite of anything I say.”

“I am? I’m pretty sure I’ve agreed with you at least a couple of times. Look. You came here expecting to search for phenomena that make people believe the Mallory house is haunted, right? I bet you brought a ton of cameras and gear with you. Still downstairs somewhere, I assume. And you stumbled into the living house, not the dead one, and you cannot make any sense of anything, and you’re frustrated as hell because your investigation is trashed and the house being a living home doesn’t make any sense and Wanda and I don’t fall within your worldview, and all of that is making you angry because you cannot find explanations for any of it that make any sense to you and it feels like there’s a joke you’re being left out of. Believing it’s real would shatter your comfortable beliefs about what’s possible and what isn’t, and that’s frightening and threatening and all that jazz, but nothing you know is giving you any alternatives. See? I actually do get it. But oh boy, have I got bad news for you. We’re here and really what we look like, the house is real, and your beliefs about what’s possible only apply as long as you’re strictly in one world. Any contact with the other side changes the rules, and we’re currently sitting halfway between, with some of one, some of the other, so much so I’m getting unexpected results while messing around with basic chemistry. I am not trying to piss you off. I am not trying to give you a runaround. I am not... what’s that new word? Trolling you. I’m not doing that either. I’m honestly feeling really sorry for you right now, and I wish there were a way to make it easier. Short of taking off my goggles so you basically skip from now until sunrise, I don’t think there is, and I’d be breaking rules to do that because it takes away your chance to prove yourself.” She heaved a sigh. “You’re going to have to figure out how to cope on your own.”

“I thought you were supposed to have answers.”

“Yep. And I do. See that cabinet over there to your left with all the books in it? Those are my notes on a bunch of different subjects. The problem is, the answers you want involve more fundamentals than I can possibly give you in a brief summary that will in any way make sense. We are sitting halfway between two worlds right now, did you get that part of what I said? If you don’t know the physics of both sides, then trying to explain the behaviour of light and how invisibility can occur isn’t going to work. In its simplest form, people refer to it as magic for a reason. I’ve spent longer than you’d believe unravelling questions like that, and I don’t have absolute definitive answers but I have some very solid hypotheses backed by substantial evidence. You can look in the books if you want. The one labelled Properties of Light and Biology will have what I know about Wanda’s invisibility. But unless you know what a negative spectrum is, to start with, it’s not going to be much help.”

Lennox got up and stomped over to the cabinet. Just to call her bluff, he pulled out a different book and opened it.

It was indeed filled with neat small writing, and drawings as well, sometimes charts and graphs, sometimes sketches—in this one, of wings of various kinds.

The one she’d named did indeed mention Wanda and invisibility, but, maddeningly, it read like sci-fi technobabble around that. Something about negative colours that cancelled out positive ones.

“We’re not out to get you,” Ophelia said gently. “From our side, we’re living our regular lives, and Hallowe’en comes along once a year and opens the door, and then we usually have one or more strangers roaming around the house. Sometimes friendly, sometimes curious, sometimes scared, sometimes aggressive, we never know what to expect. We don’t fit within your understanding of the world. But we exist and we’re generally pretty sympathetic to how much of a shock it can be. Just try to meet us halfway, okay? Everyone gets through this their own way, by holding on to something that matters to them. We had one who made it through the night because he had his sketchbook with him and he kept seeing things he wanted to draw. We all did a lot of patient posing that night. We literally had one spend the entire night in the lady’s reception room on her knees praying. Since that gave her comfort more than we could, we slipped food and drink in the door and left her alone. If science is your thing, then far out, that can really work, but only if you have a bit more open a mind, okay? Because the next... what time is it? Idunno, thirteen hours, give or take, will involve a whole lot of dividing by zero otherwise.”

Lennox slammed the book closed, tossed it on the nearest flat surface, and strode out of the room. This was all insane and he’d had enough. These people were either so out of touch they believed their own lies, or so determined to pull their prank that they weren’t going to give an inch. Either way, for his own safety and sanity, he’d had enough.

The broad stairs were easy to find; he stormed down them, and grabbed both GoPros from their tables. On the way towards his wagon and good camera, he flipped over each in turn, scanning swiftly through the recorded data. It wasn’t really a surprise that there was absolutely nothing on them except static. He stuffed them into their respective cases, deposited them in the wagon, added the GoPro from his chest harness and the small wrist camera, and started unscrewing his good camera from the tripod.

Enough was enough. Time to leave.