Exploring the House

Last night I dreamt that I was lying in bed. Exciting, I know. I couldn’t remember why, but I felt incredibly exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that seeps into every part of you, to the point where even thinking feels strenuous. Someone in my dream was knocking at the door and calling for me. I wanted to answer them, but couldn’t gather the will to get out of bed. As their calls grew more concerned, I noticed the sound of water near me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the room slowly filling with water. I wondered if I should be worried, but I was just too tired to feel afraid. And so I laid there as the water rose, until it had completely submerged me.

I woke up as Matthew opened the door to my room. “Hey, Sara, I’ve been knocking for five minutes!” He said. “Rosa says it’s time to wake up.”

Ah yes, “Time to wake up.” That, along with “Time to go to sleep,” are two of the most tyrannical mandates that Rosa has put on me. If god had meant for man to go to bed at 10, then he wouldn’t have made midnight so interesting. Along with controlling when I can and can’t sleep, Rosa’s also had a tight leash on what I eat. The food she serves isn’t bad, it’s just… boringly healthy. I would murder for a double decker cheeseburger. Or a crate of French fries. Or maybe just give me a gallon of grease, I’ll drink the whole thing in one go.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain too much. I am getting free room and board, after all, which is a definite improvement from before. Well, I’m still going to complain a lot, but at least I can acknowledge the nice stuff. Like this new bedroom. Twice the size of my old room, and without the strange mold and smells that I had in my apartment! Got a nice window view of the gardens around this place. Well, I say “nice view,” but so far it’s been a really cloudy and foggy view. I don’t think I’ve seen the sun once since coming here. But hey, the garden’s nice. Got topiaries and shrubberies and shit.

So far I feel like I’ve been coping pretty well with the change.  The hardest part has been adapting to this house. I don’t even think it’s right to call it a house. It’s more like five completely different architects all had their own idea of what kind of building they were making and they just jammed together all their projects without any regard for how much sense the arrangement made. That creepy void room I woke up in? There’s an entire hallway of those called the “Quarantine Wing.” It really looks like someone just ripped a hallway out of an old hospital and put it there. Then you walk to the end of the Quarantine Wing, open the door, and suddenly you’re in the most stereotypical old rich person mansion you can imagine. Then there was one time I took a wrong turn while lost and for a few rooms I was in some kind of old fashioned wooden hunting cabin before I found my way back to the mansion.

Yeah, I get lost here. A lot. But more on that later.

So the big mansion part is called the “Living Areas,” ‘cause that’s the part actually fit for human habitation. My new bedroom’s there, conveniently placed only a short walk from the kitchen. Which would be a much happier arrangement were it not for the scheduled diet I have, but you take what you get I suppose. At least I’ve been able to make it feel like a home, after Matthew brought all my stuff from my apartment.

Oh yeah, Matthew? Great guy. I think I’d have spent a lot longer freaking out if he hadn’t been here to help me adapt. He seems to be some kind of odd jobs handyman around the place. I asked him about that, and all he told me was that he helps Rosa take care of the house. Trying to dig any further than that was useless, since he claims he doesn’t remember anything before waking up here one day.

I met the fourth and last member of this household while I was exploring some rooms I hadn’t been in. I know Rosa doesn’t like me wandering around the place, but she just has to learn to deal with it. Not like I can go very far; most of the doors here are locked anyways. But back on topic, Sphynx and I were wandering through a room in the wood cabin sections of the house, looked like some kind of reading room, when I realized someone else was in there with me. They had been dusting the bookshelves that ran along the walls so quietly I hadn’t even noticed them at first. It was another woman, maybe a few years older than me, with short blond hair and wearing a weirdly stereotypical maid uniform. Frills, skirt, apron, headdress, everything. She hadn’t reacted to me entering, so I cautiously said, “Um… hello?” to catch her attention.

The look she gave me was…. I’ve never seen anyone look at me with such pure hatred before. If looks could kill, then the one she gave me would have reduced me to dust. I was stunned into silence as I tried to think if there was something I needed to apologize for to get her to stop glaring at me. Sphynx, who had been walking behind me for most of my journey, trotted over to the maid and sat down next to her feet. She scowled at him with the same anger she had shown me, and reached down towards his neck. I almost shouted for her to stop, but all the woman did was begin to gently scratch him. Sphynx purred happily as he rubbed against her legs, and I felt some of my concern fading away. “So… do you like cats?” I hazarded to say.

Once again she silently looked at me with that expression of pure rage. “Sorry!” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to, I mean, I’m sorry for… um… sorry?”

I heard Rosa’s voice behind me as she entered the room. “Stop scaring the kid, Joyce.”

I was wrong to call the woman’s expression “pure rage” or “hatred” before. The way she had looked at me was friendly compared to the raw loathing she looked at Rosa with. It looked as if she wanted nothing more than to strangle Rosa to death with her own hands.

In spite of this, Rosa remained nonplussed. “She do anything to you?” She said to me as she lit up a cigarette.

“No,” I said, keeping my eyes on Joyce. “She’s just been… quiet?”

“Yeah, she does that. Joyce, show Sara why you don’t talk.”

Joyce ripped her eyes off Rosa to look at me. Then she opened her mouth, wide enough for me to see in. It was filled with thin metal wires that crisscrossed her mouth, and were sewn into every part of it, from her teeth, her gums, and even her tongue. “You may close your mouth now.” Rosa said, and Joyce snapped her mouth shut. “Now get back to work.” Joyce did a sharp about face, and resumed dusting the shelves.

“Sorry you had to meet Joyce like that. She’s not a people person.” Rosa said, acting as though Joyce wasn’t still in the room with us.

“It’s alright. Sphynx likes her. Um… what… happened to her?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had to ask.

“About how sick are you of hearing ‘I don’t remember’ as an answer?”

I crossed my arms and frowned at that. “It is starting to grate on me a tad.”

“Well get used to it, because that’s your answer here as well.” Rosa took a puff on her cigarette and glanced at Joyce with bored curiosity. “I don’t remember a thing about who Joyce is or why she’s here. All I know is that she does everything I tell her to and she really doesn’t like me.”

“And you’ve never tried to remember why that is?” Because to me that sounded like the kind of big mystery you’d want to unravel.

“No.” Rosa said with certainty. “Nothing good ever comes from digging into the past. Now let’s get you back to your room. It’s easy to get lost out here.”

And that kinda sums up my first few days here. It’s actually felt more like a weird vacation than being quarantined due to magical poisons. And wasn’t wandering around a mysterious house looking for mysteries a childhood fantasy for all of us? I just wonder how long it’ll take before being stuck indoors drives me crazy and I start crawling through the walls like a ratman.