Chronicles of the Lost: The Warrior

The Attic is Calling

My head was starting to feel much better and didn't sting with pain at every movement. I took this as a sign to check out the attic since it was 'normal' during the day. It had been almost a week since I had been up those stairs. This time I was hoping for a better outcome.

My hand trembled as I reached for the door. Maybe Tristan was right and if I pushed myself too hard I would end up like him. Pulling back, I shook my hand, hoping it would calm me down a little. It didn't. My hand still trembled, shaking the knob loudly as I opened the door to the attic.

As I looked up to the landing, I didn't see any stone walls. For a moment, I thought this was a shared hallucination. Perhaps the trip up to the attic had been so traumatic for both of us that we were now trying to make it feel benign and imagining it was. Then again, he was the one with all the psychology knowledge.

I walked up the steps, slowly, preparing to take in the surroundings. As I reached the landing, I saw the attic had two windows that faced the back of the house. No sign of heavy stone anywhere. There was an old fireplace in the corner which would explain the second stack I saw the night we arrived. An old rocker sat up against the wall next to the stairs. Stacked beside it were two old branches, leaning into the framing, which had not been finished with sheetrock or covered in any way.

Moving further into the room toward the middle, I saw a large, dusty rug but couldn't make out the designs on it. They looked intricate. Walking across it kicked up an enormous amount of dust. I sneezed uncontrollably, each one hurt more than the last, not just in my throat but my head rocking back and forth started to illicit a dizzy response. I settled for sitting in the rocker until the fit passed.

I contemplated as I sneezed. Was it possible we both had a hallucination that night? And if so, what the hell did I trip over to get this head wound? There was nothing here that would cause a catastrophic fall like the one I experienced and I know I fell in the attic, not down the stairs as Tristan had tried to convince me of in the last few days. I was up here alone and I fell down stone steps.

The sneezing fit passed and as I stood up, I noticed there was a little nook between the two windows. A well-camouflaged curtain hug in the doorway. I stood and gingerly tiptoed across the dusty rug only to throw more dust in my face as I pushed the curtain aside.

This room was much bigger than I had expected. It has one window on each side of me. More dusty rugs hung on the wall ahead of me, three of them. They were probably tapestries. I rushed to that side of the room but I was unable to decipher a design through the dirt they had accumulated over the years. This reminded me a little of the basement.

It felt warmer and brighter and somehow less creepy. In this space, I had a surprising feeling of belonging here. As if this was the place I was always headed to or meant to arrive. No explaining those feelings. They were just...inside me. I suddenly didn't feel apprehension or fear. I felt at home. Like this was where I was always meant to be.

I breathed in deep, forgetting dust coated every surface and started sneezing again. Such powerful sneezes, they knocked me sideways into a wooden podium. And on the podium sat a very old, leather-bound book. As I knocked into it, the podium teetered precariously, tossing the book to the floor. Its spine hit the floor with a heavy thud, forcing it open, pages held in from the force to separate as it settled on the floor. I dropped to the floor, catching the podium in one hand to steady it.

The book rested on pages about a third of the way through it. The pages were stained yellow with age. One page was covered with a sketch, looking almost like a map but the landmarks weren't familiar which made the directions especially cryptic. On the other page was a different sketch. For a moment, the tears from sneezing so hard made the sketch blurry. I leaned in closer to the book and found it was of people.