Isabelle

Curiousity. III

Isabelle, not familiar with this door looked at it strangely, observing its knob she pulled. Surprisingly enough it didn't open, her eyes caught hold of a key hole beneath the door knob and began to wonder.

"What's a door doing in my garden? Does anyone know about this?"

"And". She pulled "Why". She pulled again. "Wouldn't". She pulled yet again "it open". With a huff in frustration she sat back on her knee feeling tired from all the raking she had been doing and pulling.

"A door in my garden."

She still couldn't believe her latest discovery. All her years of being alive and living in the mansion, never has she ever come across this or heard any conversation surrounding this door.

She stood up with the book in her hand still staring, slowly backing away, she returned the rake and made her way back to the mansion where she was served with pancakes and syrup by Clara.

Isabelle watched as Clara poured the syrup on the ten thin layer pancakes wanting to bring up a conversation with her but decided to keep her thoughts to herself, instead she asked,

"Where is Mrs. Noel?"

This question was directed to Mr. Orlando who was staring at the edge of a table, with a dust cloth in his hand and a glove protecting his hands from the dust.

"She's gone to the supermarket to buy some things" Orlando said still staring at the dust, wanting to swipe it away without hitting the vase.

"She didn't inform me." She recalled no prior conversations.

"She saw you going towards the garden, perhaps she didn't want to interrupt your reading." He finally swiped the dust off the table after meticulous watching.

Isabelle kept wondering,

'Could the key be somewhere in the house?' She thought.

And then the east wing of the mansion came to mind, that was where her mother's home office and things were located. Somewhere she hadn't been to for a long time, even when her mother was alive for some reason she couldn't understand. She grew up getting used to the west wing of the mansion.

Lots of question began to build up and the one way these questions could be answered is to look for more clues. Asking the workers in the mansion was an option Isabelle did not want to resort to.

After eating, she went back to the wooden door hoping she could get something off of just staring and she very much did. Staring for a few minutes revealed clues she didn't quite notice before. Some writings were engraved, they were small but they seem to appear clearer as she came closer to observe them, the writings were not in English.

"Kharosthi script." She murmured and blew away the dust so she could read it.

Everyone thought Isabelle had gone nuts when she'd lock herself up in the library all day. She read different books in different languages. Kharosthi script alongside other ancient writings being hard, it took her a lot of time to understand.

"At night, when the moon is high,
under the willow it lies".

The two sentences written in two different ancient writings.

"Using Hieroglyphs and Kharosthi script to depict a message so not everyone could understand, nice." she said to herself.

The writing, reading it out loud sounded really familiar. She had heard it somewhere and it took her some time to recall. It had something to do with her mother's lullaby.

She sang the song and realized it was the exact same words used at the beginning of the lullaby her mother used to sing to her when she was a child. The lullaby was about a gateway to another world.