"I guess your mom must get that a lot, huh?" Andie asked as they walked, the pace quickening a bit at the sound of each syllable. Cissy was a girl on a mission, and that mission seemed to be to get Andie out of her hair as quickly as possible so she could return to whatever it was had been interrupted prior to her arrival. At the hour it was, Andie assumed likely sleep.
"Or maybe it's just occasionally, but enough that it bothers her?" Andie tried again, the pace approaching light speed as she kept talking. "Or maybe it's just me, or you I guess, as she seemed happy to see me when I first got here." The house was cool already, which Andie enjoyed, but the temperature in the hallway seemed to have dropped a few more degrees as they continued.
Andie felt like she was back in her apartment talking to the furniture, except for the unusual aerobic exercise she was putting her body through as they walked. They finally started to slow down when Cissy stopped abruptly and gestured toward a partly open door. Andie assumed this was where she was supposed to stay for the night and entered, nudging the door enough that she could comfortably walk past and hoping to allow the dim hallway light to filter in so she could manage to find a wall switch.
After not so much as uttering the smallest of sounds during their walk, not even a heavy breath to recover from their speedwalking, Cissy broke her silence selectively.
"So, I guess that makes me Wednesday." Cissy said to Andie as she left the doorway and walked down the longest corridor Andie had ever seen inside a house before, realizing they had just traversed most of the same expanse in record time.
"Thanks for walking me home!" Andie mock shouted as Cissy had already disappeared into the darkness, somewhere on the other side of the house. "Fucking weirdo."
"I heard that." A voice came back from the darkness of the hallway.
She turned back to look at her room just wanting to sleep at that point, but couldn't find a light switch anywhere. She fumbled in front of her feeling for furniture or walls, but realized the room was just as large as everything else in the house and she had taken almost ten paces before her hand brushed against a heavy bedcover of some sort. It almost felt like velvet, or maybe crushed velvet, Andie wasn't exactly a connoisseur. Then she remembered her cell phone in her pocket, she still had no service at all which was not really a surprise, but her flashlight worked.
Once she turned it on, she was half wishing she hadn't as it was a bit much for her tastes. She decided medieval fantasy decor, bordering on the macabre, worked better in games or art pieces than the room she was supposed to fall asleep in. She loved gargoyles, again in fantasy artwork, but not staring back at her from the crown molding, the wallpaper, the four-poster bed and everywhere else as the decor seemed to go on forever. It was a mix of various things you would expect in the Vincent Price Museum, some skeleton figures here or there, what were probably vampires, some tombstones and the obligatory ravens. She sat for a moment trying to recall something of the poem, but her mind was a blank and she had never really committed much of it to memory.
The bed was fantastic otherwise, and after peeling off the heavy layer of old that sat atop it, the rest of the linens were like what she imagined angel's tits felt like. She knew if she could keep her eyes closed and not freak herself out, she would sleep forever under the covers. Looking around the room again, she assumed she might be sleeping forever before daybreak anyway, but ignored that thought and just settled in to collapse after the evening she had just experienced.
......
She awoke to a loud knocking, and sprang up at first. She had just about forgotten the previous day and had assumed everything from the game on had been a bad dream, but when she settled herself again in her thousand angel tit thread-count sheets, she knew she wasn't home. The room was still almost pitch black from the heavy drapes that concealed the windows and Andie realized she had no idea what time it was. She reached for her phone, but it wasn't on the small table where she had placed it at night. She panicked and got out of bed to look around the floor and tossed the covers all over looking for it.
The door opened after the visitor grew tired of waiting for an acknowledgement to the knock request. Cissy walked in and over to the panicked Andie and handed her the missing phone.
"Figured you might like having it charged. Here's a cable you can plug in later if you start to run low again." Cissy said in the most dreadfully monotone voice Andie could remember hearing from a living human, not that she had much experience with the other kind.
"Thanks, where would I plug in the other end?" Andie asked.
"Knowing what I do of my Great Aunt, I would guess there's a gargoyle's ass somewhere with an adapter in it. Be creative where you look." Cissy replied, her expressionless face and lack of emotion starting to creep Andie out a bit. "Dinner is at six, since you slept through the other two regular meals of the day I assume you will join us for at least one of them?" Cissy added as Andie was still wondering whether she should be laughing at any of this or if she was always this serious.
"Sorry, late night last night and it took me some time to finally wind down and crash. Should I dress up or anything?" Andie recovered enough to ask.
"Suit yourself." Cissy replied as she started to head for the door.
"I wasn't thinking of anything that formal." Andie quipped, recovering enough to let her old self shine a bit.
Cissy stopped in the doorway and turned to stare blankly at her at first with Andie returning the stare, waiting for her to blink and wondering if she had just entered into an unwinnable contest. Finally, Andie looked away and rubbed her dry eyes.
"You would have liked my dad." Cissy said without a hint of fondness.
"Wait, what am I supposed to do until then?" Andie asked, a little panicked at being all alone in the room again.
"I'll be down in the library for a while, but I can't say for how long." Cissy said as she turned away and left.
Andie was so enamored by her wit she forgot she didn't have any other clothes until she remembered a passing comment the mom had made and she went to investigate the wardrobe and dressers. She had never seen so many clothes in one place before, other than at a store.
As she flipped through the assortment of clothes in the wardrobe, or really an entire wall masquerading as one, she assumed most of the clothes had been selected by Cissy's mom, Divinity. She said the name out loud, lingering on it as she did. It rolled off the tongue surprisingly easy, and for some reason Andie was having thoughts she hadn't planned to entertain as all she could think about were those legs. Cissy certainly didn't seem too inviting and Andie wasn't sure what she was supposed to make of her, but Divinity certainly seemed happy with Andie.
Andie shook her head and went back to perusing the selection of clothes. While they were nice in their own ways, they weren't exactly Andie's style. She couldn't remember the last time she wore any kind of dress, and hadn't shaved her legs in at least two weeks, so she wasn't sure she wanted to show them off anyway. She found some casual, but nice looking, slacks with some blouses in the last section. She grabbed the least lacy of the ones she saw and changed into the outfit she selected and then threw her sneakers on to complete the look.
She looked in a mirror, wishing she hadn't as she saw more of the creepy decor along the frame. It wasn't exactly decor; it was more like the mirror was yawning or screaming at her as the frame looked like a hideous face stretched around the silver. She startled at first, but calmed down enough to do a quick zhuzh of her hair and realized that she badly needed a hair appointment as her roots were getting long and the buzzed side was way too furry for her liking.
Andie was just about to head out when she realized she would need a GPS to figure out where the library was, or anything for that matter as she became aware of another need she had neglected since waking up. Suppressing that need for a few seconds, and crossing her legs just in case, she opened her phone and mindlessly accessed her contacts, forgetting that she had no idea really who these people were and wouldn't have them in her phone. Except when she looked at her contacts, there they were. Divinity, Cissy and even Horace had been added to her contacts list, and her wallpaper had been changed to a raven. How cute she thought, she was now part of their unkindness it appeared, or maybe they were a conspiracy. She somehow hoped she would never find out.
"That's just fucking great!" She yelled to the gargoyle overhead, casting a glance at the mirror wondering if it could speak anymore or if the demented face was just some piece of artwork and not the relic of a tormented soul. "They probably installed a bunch of other crap on my phone like a trafficking app." Andie smacked her forehead hoping to wake up her brain a little. "Tracking app, you idiot, not trafficking, stop foreshadowing your own doom." She decided to look at that later and pulled up Cissy's contact info. It was just as useless as the info that showed up on her phone when Horace called her from the parking lot. It was mostly zeros with a couple numbers that was probably just Cissy's basic ID in the system.
"Hey! Sorry to bug you, but where is the library?" Andie typed out in her message and waited, but started out into the hallway to look for the facilities. As she neared the end of the room, she saw another door just to the side of the entrance and decided to open that. She wasn't used to houses that had ensuite bathrooms for guests and gawked at the massive space that contained an old fashioned clawfoot tub, but larger than any she had ever seen, plus ornate double pedestal style sinks each with its own vanity and an actual water closet at the end, separate from the rest of the room. The whole bathroom was almost the size of her apartment, and she started to wonder just how large the entire compound was, and who needed that much space for two people, plus a handful of staff.
After several minutes with no response, Andie was getting a little peeved, but remembered Cissy hadn't actually invited her to join her in the library, just mentioned she would be there. At least she had taken care of problemo uno, but now she was still just waiting around. She could just wander and see what she found, but that seemed rude given how nice the house was and how proper everything seemed there.
She finally saw the typing dots show up and a message came through.
"Here..." was all it read and then a link popped up next.
