“Do you smell that?” Lila spoke in an even quieter whisper than before, as if afraid to waken someone—something—residing in the depths of the darkness. “Is that...?”
Ella gave a small sniff. Then another.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Chocolate?” Lila asked herself as much as she was asking Ella. The scent was faded and hazy, tenuous, but nonetheless present.
“Chocolate,” Ella affirmed, with a final sniff. “Definitely chocolate.”
The house should have smelled of dust and mold and age and disuse. Lila had been in sufficient numbers of such places to know what to expect.
But chocolate?
Her mind was so busy trying to sort out the impossible report being communicated to her brain by one of her senses that she didn’t consciously notice her hand reaching out to touch the darkened wall, at just the spot one would expect to find a light switch.
Nor did she register the fact of her finger flipping the switch upward, to the ‘on’ position.
She did, however, respond with a small cry and a short step backward—inadvertently treading on Ella’s toes, so close was the other woman to her—to the sudden, utterly unexpected glow of a single light bulb depending from an antique-looking fixture in the middle of the hallway.
“Oh, my,” Ella breathed, as stunned as Lila.
“But...but that’s impossible,” Lila said. “There isn’t...there can’t be....”
But there was.
As if to test her unbelief, Lila flipped another switch. Up ahead, from a sconce on the wall near a dark staircase, a second light glowed. She tried a third switch. This time the glow came from the top of the staircase, revealing a portion of hallway paneled in what looked to be identical dark wood.
By this time, both women had stepped far enough into the main hall to see that on both sides, sets of tall, wide, polished pocket doors were built into the walls. The doors looked to be identical.
Behind them, the front door swung quietly to, the mechanism catching with an audible snick.
Ella yelped and turned to try the knob.
“At least that’s something,” she said after a moment. “It’s not locked. We can get out of this place whenever we want.”
But Lila did not want to.
Even though her briefcase still sat in a patch of sunlight on the back seat of her rental, still containing all of the papers relating to the Stevenson place, Lila did not want to leave, not even long enough to retrieve her official justification for being there.
It was as if the house called to her.
Nonsense, she thought. That’s ridiculous. It’s just an interesting old place, that’s all, a farm house like all of the others, with a rather atypical design, perhaps, but just an old house after all.
Yes, came an answering voice, one she didn’t quite recognize, with exploding windows and impossible electricity. Just a regular, run-of-the-farm old house.
“Lila, look at this!”
Ella’s voice tore Lila from her trance.
The other woman was standing next to the pocket doors on the left-hand wall. One of them had slid back two or three inches.
“There is a lock here, but the door opened anyway.” She pushed on the panel, then on the other one, until they stood a yard apart, wide open enough for the women to see into the room.
Into the parlor.
Because that was undoubtedly the room’s purpose. Enough light spilled through the doorway from the hall for them to see the rounded curves of an old-fashioned settee—Lila would have been willing to bet anything, to bet the farm, that it was upholstered in deep crimson velvet...or what would have to pass for deep crimson after years of use. An end-table stood at one side. Both sat only a few feet from the front window, heavily curtained in material so thick that no light seeped through from the outside. Even though both of the women knew that a broken pane lay hidden on the other side, neither could see the slightest hint of movement in the draperies.
Ella stepped inside and, as Lila had done in the hall, reached out to where a light switch should be. Lila heard the click and saw the multi-armed chandelier in the center of the ceiling flicker into life.
She had been right. The sofa—and the curtains—had been a deep wine color, faded now to a hideous red-grey-brown, almost like dusty, crusted blood. Puce, possibly, Lila thought, knowing the word but never actually having seen anything that pretended to the grandeur of such an exotic name.
Or such an ugly name.
The wooden parts of the sofa, and the end-table, looked to be mahogany, dark and secretive and old. Everything in the room looked old, although there wasn’t much. A footstool in front of the sofa, almost touching where the heavy curtains pooled on the worn, dark floral design of an old carpet. A single bookshelf containing no more than a dozen books along the far wall. A small desk and matching chair on the wall opposite the window. A fireplace that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned since the invention of the electric bulb, to judge from the accumulation of soot and dust on the hearth and on the painted bricks that surrounded its open maw.
That was it.
Even though the room could easily have held twice the number of pieces—and during Victorian times perhaps three or four times as many, given the period’s penchant for creating dark labyrinthine interiors, that was all.
It gave Lila a sudden chill.
She stepped into the parlor and walked slowly around, running her fingers along the stiff velvet nap of the sofa, touching the top of the end-table with as much care as if it had been as fragile as a soap bubble.
From there she moved to the single bookcase, also in age-darkened mahogany, standing nearly to her shoulders but empty save for a handful of books on the top shelf and a single volume lying on its side on the second.
She glanced at the upright titles. An ancient bible, its black leather spine pitted and torn by use, the gilt of its title nearly rubbed away, leaving little more than the ghostly imprint of nine capital letters. Several more volumes, also bound in black or brown leather, so old that nothing remained of their titles. She felt an odd reluctance to touch them. The last book, canting against the others as if too weak to carry on the struggle against gravity on its own, was thinner than the others, bound in what appeared to be a faded floral brocade. Tender Thoughts: Verses was just legible on the spine. Lila could imagine the kind of poetry that might rest between the covers. Saccharine, maudlin, or both. It did not appeal to her.
She dropped her gaze to the single book on the second shelf.
The cover was dusty, smudged, almost unreadable, but enough remained of the gilt title for her to make out the word Journal impressed in unduly ornate letters onto the brown leather.
Journal.
Whose?
She had raised her hand to pick up the book when a thought intruded. She turned around, ready to ask Ella....
But the question never came.
Ella was not there.
The parlor was empty, save for Lila and the scattering of furniture.
There was not even a second set of footprints in the light dust obscuring portions of the carpet.
“Ella? Ella, where are you?”
Lila crossed the room and entered the hall. She tried the pocket doors on the opposite wall but they were firmly locked. No amount of pulling or pushing moved them at all. So. Ella hadn’t gone into the second room to explore.
Lila continued down the hall until stopped, just past the stairway, by another door, this one hinged to open outward...and