annotated floorplan - simple floorplan
Lennox took a chance on the sandwiches. It happened to be chicken salad, with a leaf of crisp lettuce as well. Briefly, he reflected on the fact that it was actually delicious, the bread fresh with more flavour and texture than basic white bread without being overwhelming, the salad made with some mix of ingredients that balanced just right to make it savoury and rich.
It was probably safe, and that was good enough. Tasty food was unnecessary.
But it was tasty.
He waited a few minutes, but he was hungry and nothing was happening, so he scarfed more of them without counting.
After another couple of swallows of the whiskey, he decided that enough was enough and left the room. A brief check on his wagon reassured him that no one had touched the contents at all, which was some comfort since he didn’t think he could realistically pull it around with him for the rest of the night.
That weird suit of armour was still blocking the front doors.
He backtracked through Richard’s office and, with only a minimum of getting turned around, located the small door he’d tried to open from outside. It wasn’t budging, and it had a deadbolt lock with the key nowhere to be seen. That was probably a fire hazard—what if someone needed to get out in an emergency?—but he didn’t think these people cared.
There was probably a way out near the kitchen, some kind of service entrance, but he doubted they were going to let him near it.
The library was open, and so was what seemed to be some sort of games room beside it, but whatever lay next to that was locked tight. Both doors had decorative glass panels in them, but they were mosaics of small diamonds in various shades of greens and blues, and he couldn’t see anything through them.
Those portraits on the walls were bizarre, with those little twists on a normal boring one but they were things that couldn’t be real.
The next room he came across held a huge piano and some other instruments, including a weirdly modern drum kit and equally out-of-place guitar rack holding an acoustic guitar next to another with an electric guitar and a small amp. He didn’t even want to know what was powering that. It also had a life-sized statue of a dancing woman near the windows. Not far from her was a harp taller than he was, carved with a human figure as part of the upright main post, whatever it was called, all inlaid with shiny bits in jewel-like colours except for the skin being left golden wood. There was even a cozy little corner with a couple of those uncomfortable-looking couches and a trio of chairs around a coffee table.
Motion made him spin around.
What he’d taken for a statue was moving, lowering her arms and turning to face him with a smile. The gauzy white clothing she wore covered little while drifting dramatically around her, but then, did she need more with the scales under it that must be a bodysuit or something?
The carved wooden figure on the harp moved too, and that was harder to explain, since it stepped away from the harp and laced the fingers of both hands together in a stretch. That one looked like a young man, in close-fitting pants that were all soft-edged diamonds of deep blue and green and purple, and a matching short jacket with sleeves that fit close up to mid forearm but bloused out from there, with a minimal black shirt of some kind under it. His skin had a strange texture, more like highly-polished golden wood; his short hair had a bit of curl to it, and was reddish-dark but didn’t seem to move much.
“Hello,” the woman said.
“Hi,” the man said, almost the same instant. “Anything we can do to help?”
“Find me a way out?” Lennox suggested.
“That’s one of the few things we absolutely can’t do,” the woman said sadly.
“Sorry,” the man agreed, with a sigh. “We know, it’s hard.”
“I thought I sent out word to close doors and avoid,” Richard said from the doorway, with no particular force behind it. “I checked on the others, they’re listening. Except the kitchen, unsurprisingly, and it’s difficult for Jake to find a single door to close.”
“It’s all right, boss,” the young man said. “It’s not like he’s trying to hurt anyone. He’s just scared and disoriented. Nobody’s at their best like that.”
“Words only hurt if you allow it,” the woman said. “And we know better than to allow words to do that when someone is just having a very bad day. Lennox? Would you like to come sit down?” She offered one slim hand; with the other she gestured towards the couches. “We’re good at listening.”
For just a heartbeat, Lennox hesitated. It sounded like a sincere offer, and both looked sympathetic. They were apparently even ignoring instructions in order to make that offer at all.
But they were part of this madness that was keeping him confined after destroying his simple planned investigation.
But they might not be behind it, and that kindness might have some truth to it.
So instead of inviting her to self-fornicate, he simply said, “Not on your life,” and strode towards the nearest door.
Behind him, he heard the man sigh and say, “We tried. But we can keep the doors open.”
On the other side of the great hall, which he’d come into so innocently not long before, was what was clearly a dining room. There were two of them, actually, one much smaller and with a crazy number of windows. Past that was a weird room that was entirely shelves of dishes above a polished counter with drawers under it. One cabinet was lockable, and turned out to have metal dishes, maybe silver, and some admittedly artistic glassware, but it obviously wasn’t locked at the moment.
He didn’t really want to take the doorway that led to two voices talking—they sounded like old friends, he heard one laugh. He didn’t need more of that right now. He went out the other door, and immediately spotted a narrow steep stairway leading upwards.
There wouldn’t be any exits upstairs, but he did want to see if everything was really locked up that tightly. Mad scientist Ophelia was up there.
He climbed the stairs, and tried to orient himself.
Off to his right, he heard heavy footsteps, and a huge bull-headed man, in tattered cut-off denim shorts and a paint-streaked sleeveless khaki t-shirt, positioned himself in the mouth of the hallway.
“Not this way.” There was nothing hostile in the tone, but it didn’t sound like there was room to negotiate either.
That bull head looked extremely realistic, the ears flicking, the large dark eyes tracking him—even tilted slightly so one eye could get a better view straight ahead. And the man himself was well over six feet tall, with a build that would make bodybuilders weep. And how had they done those divided hooves, broad as they were?
“Fine,” Lennox said in exasperation. “Not that way. Is that home base for your little special-effects-slash-kidnapping party you guys have got going on? Whatever, I’m not arguing with anyone who could break me in two. I’m trying to remember where Ophelia’s room is. It was right at the corner, wasn’t it?”
The big head dipped in a sort of nod. “Door is locked. All upstairs is.”
“Overreact much? I’m not the one who’s dangerous, I’m just not playing along with your stupid game.”
“You’re rude to my family. We don’t want to listen. Scared is fine. Understand lots of kinds of scared, here. Tantrum is not. Seen lots of guests. Always...” He snorted. “Usually scared. Even scared, almost all understand kindness and let us help however we can. Very few get violent. Ophelia takes her goggles off for them. A few more like you. Certain you know everything. Certain it’s all a trick. Certain it’s all about you. Don’t like you.”
“It’s mutual.”
The huge bull-man shrugged, and leaned to one side, resting his weight against the wall. He looked like he had no plans to speak further or move out of that narrow hallway behind him.
Lennox decided to ignore him and went past him, out to the main upstairs corridor.
Every door he tried was locked: knobs turned but the doors didn’t budge. Even had he been inclined towards trying to put a fist through one in sheer frustration, he would never have been able to do so: the doors in this house weren’t the flimsy hollow-core type that proliferated in the modern world, they were heavy solid wood. He doubted the locks would simply yield, either.
He went down the main stairs. He could see his wagon below him, in the short entrance hall that led to the front door.
He stopped there and sat on one of the steps mid-way down, then took out his phone. A few taps and swipes got him what he wanted. He held it up, hoping the picture wouldn’t be too unsteady, but then, that wasn’t the point right now.
“I have no connection at all while I’m recording this, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to set it up so that it uploads automatically as soon as it’s back in a location where it can get a connection. It sounds stupid and dramatic but I’m not at all sure that I’m going to survive and maybe this will help solve it. I came to the Mallory house on Hallowe’en night to do a ghost investigation, the same kind of thing that I do all the time. I realize that the ownership is a bit unclear and I was unable to get definitive permission, but I ran out of time to find a new location and I had no intention of doing any damage at all and I was still hoping I could get retroactive consent. I shouldn’t have done that, I know, but I wasn’t expecting anything like what I walked into.”
He did his best to summarize everything he could about what had been happening, hoping to keep it reasonably concise but not leave out any essential detail.
“I’ll try to get pictures of them without being noticed but I’m not very confident that I can, and those won’t be included in the video, just stored on my phone to upload to my cloud storage. I don’t know what these people are doing, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to find out since they’ve sort of declared war and have me locked out of a lot of rooms, but I really can’t interpret their intentions as being anything but hostile at this point. So if you actually see this video, bring it to the attention of the nearest authorities, preferably Canadian ones, okay? Signing off, I hope on something no one else will ever see.” He saved it and watched the first few seconds. It seemed to have recorded, despite what he’d been told. That gave him some hope. He slipped the phone into a thigh pocket but didn’t fasten the snap—if he got the chance, he didn’t want the sound of undoing it alerting someone he was taking a picture.
Maybe at least that would help solve the mystery of his disappearance. Lots of people knew where he’d intended to spend the night, but the more information, the better.
The question was, what now? He had no intention of cooperating with the people holding him prisoner in the house with no sensible explanation for why and going to insane efforts at making themselves look like supernatural creatures, while either pretending or genuinely believing that it was all for real.
It wasn’t real, right? Some of it seemed awfully realistic...
It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It made absolutely no sense and had no rational explanation at all. It had to be a hoax. Even questioning that meant that some of their insanity was starting to touch him.
Probably he should just go back to a methodical search of the ground floor for any outside access. He hadn’t really tested the huge windows along the great hall or the dining rooms to see whether any of them might actually be a way out. He didn’t particularly want to deal with the cook, but there might be a way to explore that part of the house, the area that would have been for servants dealing with all the everyday stuff, without having to interact with them, and there just might be a service door over there that could have been overlooked, or something like that.
This house was big. It seemed unlikely they could really have it sealed up as tightly as all that. There had to be a way out somewhere.
