What Lies Beneath

Chapter Three: Karen's Letter

It had been four years to the day since Karen's entire family perished in that house fire. During those four lonesome years she had been passed around group homes and foster homes. Most of them were just in it for the money, while others seemed to genuinely care, though not enough to try and adopt her. They had tried to contact her aunt in Tulsa, but she had gone off the grid and joined a nudist colony.

For the past five weeks she had been living in a girls group home waiting for her eighteenth birthday to arrive. Ever since the night of the fire she has hated her birthday, for obvious reasons, but this one she could get behind. This birthday meant that she was out of the system.

She didn't have any real plans on what she was going to do, but she was free and that was all that mattered.

The nuns who ran the home were very kind and they threw a little goodbye party for her that day. They had even made her a cake that said, "Happy Birthday and Good Luck!". After the party was over, they handed her, her bag and a letter that had arrived in the mail that day before kicking her out. They weren't the best nuns.

Karen smiled as the sun touched her now free skin.

She made it around the corner before her curiosity got the best of her. She found an abandoned bench and sat down to open the letter.

The letter was in a white envelope and was written with old timey looking cursive, like what you would see in old Shakespeare movies. When she turned it over to open it, she found that it was sealed with wax. In the wax, there was a picture of an old house. She lightly touched the dark red seal before she tore through it.

When she unfolded the letter inside, she found that it wasn't in English, though that didn't seem to matter, because the longer that she stared at the letter the more she understood it.

There is no other way to explain it than this, the letter is sealed with a wax seal that can only be opened by the one that the letter is addressed to, but if for some reason that doesn't stop someone else from opening it, then the language on the paper will prevent anyone who is not supposed to read it from, well, reading it. When the right person opens the letter and tries to read it though, a translation will play inside their minds, it is almost like a prerecorded message of sorts. However, when the message is finished, the readers mind will warp the entire experience into a memory in which they are reading a normal letter, all magic forgotten.

When the message was done playing in Karen's mind, she knew that she had a choice to make. The letter was an invitation to a house just outside of Connecticut in a small town. Karen didn't know why, but she was drawn to this place. It was like it was calling her name and only she could hear it. Still, she couldn't shake the bad feeling that said that it wasn't a good idea, however she still felt as if she had to go.

Having made up her mind, she set off towards the house with her bag in one hand and letter in the other.