9.
Penny blinked a few times, trying to clear the glaring
sun out of her waking eyes. It was mid-afternoon; she could hear the sounds of
insects buzzing and the distant tinny warble of old-sounding music. There was a
low buzz of conversation somewhere nearby and, as she sat up, she cast about
for the nearest people. Sure enough, not ten feet away, a small group of oddly
dressed people from a wide range of ages sat placidly around a patio table,
chatting idly about nothing distinguishable. On the other end of the Garden was
a tall swing set, one of its swings occupied by a young girl Penny could swear
she had seen before. The girl was humming to herself and hadn’t noticed Penny looking
at her yet.
As she tried to get her bearings, she noticed there
was a large tomcat sunning himself nearby, a set of croquet mallets, and an odd
series of differently sized rings. It was then that she realized what she was
actually looking for: off in a secluded corner of the yard, Eric sat hugging
his knees, his shoulders scrunched up as though he was trying to hide from
someone. Penny jumped up and ran to him.
“Eric! Eric, what happened?” she tried to shake him
but he ignored her completely.
“You should leave him alone for now,” said a voice
behind her. Penny whirled around to face the speaker. It was the young girl
from the swing set. She smiled at Penny and she realized it was the girl she
had seen in the House – and in her TV. A chill went down her spine, but she
mustered her courage.
“What’s wrong with him?” Penny demanded.
The girl gave Eric a pitying look, “It is something we
all must go through, even you.” She looked up at Penny and smiled sunnily
again. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t last long.” The girl turned and skipped away,
joining the others at the table.
Frustrated, Penny marched after her. “What doesn’t last long?”
The little girl turned a cold look toward her. “The
pain.” She turned away again, pointedly ignoring her as she sat at the Garden
table.
Letting out a growl of frustration, Penny gave up and
decided to go sit on the swings, since there didn’t seem to be any room at the
table. Not that she wanted to sit there anyway. When she got to the swings, she
realized that the girl she had been speaking to was not the one who had been
swinging. This girl, identical to the first, smiled at Penny as she sat on the
swing next to hers.
“You’ll have to excuse my sister. She can be a little
impolite. You wanted to know what is wrong with your friend?” the girl said,
rather than asked. Penny nodded. The girl sighed, “He is having a moment. It is something we all must
face. Made of our fear and pain, it is a window into the room where we have
locked our sorrow. Each of us visits that window once a day.” The girl sighed.
“You will understand.”
She tried to put the girl’s comment as far from her
mind as possible. “He’s having a moment”
like he was simply having some sort of middle-school tantrum. Forget that he
looked like he was dying inside.
“What is this place?” Penny asked, her curiosity
getting the better of her.
“Don’t you recognize it?” the girl asked. “This is the
Garden, and that is the House.”
Penny looked toward the House. There was something
familiar about it…Was that really the O’Hallaran House? It looked…different.
New. She took a step toward it, but the girl stopped her. “Be careful,” she
cautioned. “There are things in that House you may not wish to find.”
Penny frowned, but the girl tugged her away from the House
and toward the patio table where the others sat. There was a teenage girl who
looked like she had stepped out of Andy Griffith, an elderly woman that looked
like all elderly women Penny had ever seen, two middle-aged men who looked
vaguely related, and the twin girls. They all sat around the table drinking tea
and picking at little sandwiches. It reminded Penny of the scene from Alice in Wonderland when Alice had tea
with the Mad Hatter and his friends. She smiled at the thought.
However, this was far from the same. First of all, no
one was singing. She was okay with that. Second of all, no one even remotely
resembled the Mad Hatter. That was another thing to be grateful for. But it
still had that dreamlike quality she felt when she had read the book and even
when she had watched the movie. Somehow, it seemed that if she was to pick up a
teacup, it would simply disappear in her hand. One of the twins handed her a
teacup and pointed to a chair, so Penny decided that everything was probably
real and sat. None of the others looked at her, which was slightly
disconcerting. They all seemed lost in their own little worlds.
Turning to look at Eric, she saw he had not changed.
He was still huddled in the corner, shaking and muttering. Whatever was wrong
with him, she hoped it didn’t last long. They might not be friends, but at
least she knew him. The rest of these people… Penny looked, really looked at
each of them in turn. She recognized the girls, that was for sure, but the
rest? She supposed the older men must be Archie and Randolph. Who was the old
lady? Or the girl?
“Who are these people?” she whispered to the girl who
had given her the teacup.
“Travelers, like you,” she answered. Her voice was
sad, as though she regretted the fact.
Penny nearly growled in frustration but kept it to
herself. “Travelers? What does that even mean?”
Before the girl could respond, another of those
sitting at the table addressed her. “If you wait too long, Penny, that tea will
be cold.” It was the teenage girl who had spoken. She gave Penny an expectant
stare that looked somewhat familiar, though she couldn’t place it. Penny took
another sip of the tea. This seemed to satisfy her and she turned away again.
A few minutes later,
Penny realized she was staring. She was looking at the House; frowning
to herself, she turned away and tried to focus on the group around the table.
Somehow, she just couldn’t. Finally, she turned to the girl sitting beside her.
“What is your name?”
The little girl turned mournful eyes to her. “Violet
O’Hallaran.”
“So that’s your House,” Penny said. The girl nodded.
“And your sister Rose is over there?” Again, the girl nodded. “How did I get
here?” Violet cocked her head to one side as though Penny had asked what color
the sky was.
“You came through the House, of course.”
Penny stood, putting the teacup down on the table. She
couldn’t stand the feeling that she was only being told half of the story.
There was something she was missing. Violet tried to pull her back, but her
curiosity overcame her; pulling herself free from the girl, she stepped into
the House.
The first door she entered, coincidentally, the same
door she and Eric had entered when they first arrived there. When she went
inside, everything seemed to have a sheen to it, as though it wasn’t really
there. The counters and old-fashioned appliances looked new, the paper on the
walls wasn’t peeling, even the floor looked newly-varnished. It was as though
they had only seen the House at night and it was now day. If Penny hadn’t known
better, she wouldn’t have known it was the same House.
First, she found the first door. She tried the handle,
but it was locked. There was nothing on the handle, however. It was just a
regular, brass knob. When she made her way to the stairs, she felt different
than she had before. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular – she
wouldn’t have known where to start – but she wanted to see what she stumbled
on. Slowly, she started up the stairs.
How had this been different before? It seemed to her now that this was the way
the House had always been.
When she reached the top landing, she looked at the
door that stood there. It was closed and – when she tried it – locked. That was
when she remembered the key she had in her pocket. Curious, she pulled it out.
It had started to glow in an ethereal sort of way.
“I wouldn’t do that,” a voice said from down the hall.
Penny turned and saw an elderly gentleman staring down
at her from the darkness of the hall beyond. “Why not?”
“You may not like what you find.”
“So I’ve been told,” she muttered. Making a snap
decision, Penny jammed the key into the lock and opened the door.
Immediately, she was sucked into a whirlpool of light.
That is, at least, how it seemed. She hadn’t moved from the doorway, but beyond
was nothing but a strange, spiraling pattern of what she almost thought were
stars. In fact, the longer she watched, the more she became certain that was
exactly what they were. They seemed to be moving at millions of miles per hour,
colliding, exploding, imploding. Penny did not understand anything she was
looking at, but it was mesmerizing. Soon, she was falling through space toward
the center of the chaos before her.
Suddenly, a force slammed into her, knocking her
backward out of the door and back into the hallway, only saved from tumbling
down the steps by the presence of that old man behind her. The door slammed
shut. Penny felt very cold all of a sudden. What had just happened.
“I told you.”
“I…” Penny found she couldn’t really express just what she felt. He helped her up and turned
her toward the stairs.
“Perhaps you would like to play a game of croquet.”
“Croquet – what? No, I don’t.” Penny pulled away from
the kindly gentleman and strode confidently past him. “I need to know.”
The man sighed and started down the steps. “You won’t
find what you’re looking for.”
Penny bristled. What did this man know about what she
wanted. “I’d like to see that for myself.”
He nodded. “I could have guess as much. Good luck.” He
turned and descended. She watched until he was gone and, taking a deep breath
and squaring her shoulders, she started off down the passage.
Penny did not pause to consider how to leave the House;
she didn’t want to. She also didn’t think about how she got where she was. That
was boring. What wasn’t boring were the doors. There must be thousands of doors
in a House this size. There had to be something interesting behind most of
them. She put the first on out of her mind, not wanting to think about what she
had seen.
All of the unlocked doors were boring: bedrooms,
closets, et cetera. One was so full of stuffed animals and dolls that there
wasn’t even room to sit. It was a weird collection. She didn’t care about that
either. She would have said she wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but
that was because she didn’t really know what she was looking for in the first
place. Surely, if she saw it, she would know.
She was in a room near the back of the second story
when she heard her name being called from the Garden.
“Penny! Are you around here somewhere?”
Eric – he must have snapped out of whatever was wrong
with him. She had forgotten the weird loneliness she had felt earlier, too
interested in her fruitless search to think about it. Now, she rushed back out
to the Garden, eager to tell him what she had found so far in her search of the
House. As soon as she stepped into the backyard, however, her head split with
the worst headache she could ever remember having. Wincing, she closed her eyes
and tried to rub her temples. But, when she closed her eyes, darkness was not
waiting for her. It was a scene all too familiar to her, one she had replayed a
thousand times in the last few months.
She was sitting in the back of her parents’ car as it
sped down the road to their deaths.
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