The Late Bird's Tale: A Tale of the Floating World

Part 1 || 3 | Judy | A Bookworm, A Dreamer

Written on 1/3/21. Winter Season, January 2021 edition (1st scene).
Written on 2/2/21. Winter Season, February 2021 edition (2nd scene).
Judy Windermere (picture reference).

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Part 1 || 3 | Judy

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A Tale of a Bookworm

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After talking with Grace Ransom on Screen Chat in her bedroom, Judy "Late Bird" Windermere went downstairs, fixed herself a steaming bowl of ramen for dinner, ate it, and chased it down with orange juice. She then went back upstairs, changed into her pajamas, and came downstairs again to spend the rest of her evening reading. On this particular evening, after talking with her friend about their crazy slumber party at Franklin's house over the summer and her own crazy dreams later that summer, she ventured through the kitchen past the dining area into the family room and turned on a floor lamp next to the sofa, splashing a line of bookcases in a warm glow along the wall, where a TV and stereo set would've been in any other household. Those bookcases, filled with rows of books, beckoned her with a familiar tug in her chest, asking her to partake of more thrilling adventures from the classic mystery and detective section of her house.

And so, with orange juice still tangy in her mouth, she scanned a row of spines below the level of her bosom, looking for something pulpy to read from Sax Rohmer, one of her favorite authors. She pulled out Rohmer's The Green Eyes of Bâst and cracked it open to the first page, then took it with her to the sofa next to the floor lamp.

She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and began reading the first chapter. In it, Jack Addison led a constable to a certain Red House to enter and lock the doors, before going back to his bungalow and seeing a shadowy figure tailing him to his abode. And in the last lugubrious paragraphs of that chapter, after Jack entered his house and peered out the window into the garden just as the light of the moonlight faded into darkness, he turned to light the lamp on his desk . . .

". . . during such a dark spell and at the very moment," she read under her breath, "that I turned aside to light the lamp that I saw the eyes."

She looked up from the page and stared at the closed blinds of the sliding glass doors obscuring the patio outside. She slid a bookmark between the pages and put the book on the sofa, got off the couch and stalked towards the blinds obscuring the glass sliding doors, then reached out her hand to pull a blind aside and peaked into the lighted patio beyond.

No pair of eyes glared back at her, but she caught the scent of cherry blossoms and peach blossoms lingering there.

So she let go of the blind and headed back to the sofa, where she had left The Green Eyes of Bâst in the glow of the floor lamp, and paused for a moment.

Judy's mind was turning now, turning over a set of mental associations gleaned from watching horror and supernatural anime and listening to creepypasta readings on MeTube and reading a certain book that Judy suspected was tainted with influences of the eldritch variety.

Instead of sitting back down, Judy passed the dining area and kitchen and headed into a living room with just one window next to the entrance door. From that entrance door, bookcases lined the walls up to the edge of the hallway, where a china cabinet would've been in any other house. She stalked towards one corner of the living room, running her finger along the spines of gothic titles, and pulled out Bram Stoker's Dracula and returned to her place on the sofa in the family room.