Nyx (ON HOLD)

Aislingate, Part II

PREVIOUSLY: "I put my hand on the filigreed brass knob, and opened the door."

Or, rather, the knob turned freely beneath my fingers - but I was already stepping toward the wall of wood as I realized it was still firmly shut, and my right shoulder collided with the coal-black door with a jarring bang.

"Ow!" I was more startled than hurt, but the formidable series of locks girding the Victorian house's threshold was a reminder that I hadn't so much as remembered to knock.

The button that seemed to grow out of the dark doorjamb had almost escaped my notice, but I pressed it and was rewarded with the muffled sound of ringing within - the familiar ding-dong chime that begged entry at a hundred thousand houses in this part of the world. For a moment I almost convinced myself I heard footsteps approaching, creaking over ancient wooden floorboards, but no silhouette darkened the door's frosted window panes.

I switched the sagging cardboard box back to my other hip and knocked on the front door, hard enough to make the begrimed glass panels rattle in their sockets. The box hadn't seemed heavy when I got out of the taxi, but now my arms were starting to tingle with exhaustion from holding it. Zoë had assured me she'd been in touch with Mom's mother, Adaline, and that the other woman knew to expect me - so where was she?

Mentally, I cursed Zoë. She'd probably just forgotten, and thought she'd reached out to my grandmother when she really hadn't. I hadn't been expecting her to get so emotional over Mom's stuff at the old place; they only saw each other for maybe a week a year, and with her caravan palace Zoë never seemed like a stuff person. Maybe she was so torn up that it had slipped her mind.

It didn't matter; I'd reluctantly saved a new contact for the phone number Zoë read off to me at the fog-laced bus station this morning, and dialed it now. I almost hung up again as a quiet cacophony rose beyond the solid front door again, and it took me a minute to realize what was happening.

What sort of a person had a landline as their only phone number?

Iron bands of anxiety tightened about my ribcage as I banged at the door, more insistently now that I was reasonably sure no one was home. What could be so important that a person who could claim me as their only living descendant wouldn't be here to even say hello when I arrived? From the way Mom had spoken about her, it sounded like my grandmother had wanted to keep up a relationship even in the weeks after she first ran away; but what if she didn't want to see me?

The box slipping awkwardly from my grasp was decision enough; I caught it against the angle of my knee and then settled it awkwardly on the narrow porch, around a protruding angle of the tower. Surely no one driving by would see it there - or if they did, it would simply look like a bunch of junk with the phrase Si Señor Squash scrolled on the side in faded orange letters. My backpack was drab enough to blend in with the raven-colored house, so I used it to further camouflage the cardboard box and headed down from the porch to take stock of my surroundings.

The opposite side of the road and the line of the property that faced town were hemmed in with a pine forest; unless my grandmother proved to be a hunter, it was unlikely she was off in either of those directions. The other side of the black Victorian monstrosity was more promising; some kind of scraggly, waist-high hedges separated this house from another, perhaps a hundred or so yards away. The next-door house was of a similar design, sporting its own cylindrical tower and curved archways that embroidered the second- and third-storey windows. The neighboring house was even skinned in the same scalloped shingles as the somber monstrosity beside me - but these were painted in vibrant shades of violet, aqua, and sunshine yellow instead of Hades-black. Some sort of intricate wooden edging hung from the edges of each roof like embroidery, and I stared at the house dumbly for a few seconds, struck by its crazed beauty.