Mystery Noir

Little Monsters Part 3

The box I had pulled off of the shelves was exactly where I had last seen it, which shouldn't have surprised me. No one else came and went from the basement other than to check for flooding while I was away. But there had been a growing feeling of foreboding in my mind for some reason, as if things weren't quite how they had been before.

I could not identify the shift, but it was not in the contents of the dusty brown banker's box with the mismatched white lid that sat slightly askew on it. I had done that all those years ago when I had shoved my mother's letter into the box without looking in the contents. Now, I merely tapped the lid to resettled it before picking the box up and carrying it upstairs, followed dutifully by Penny.

I placed the box down on the coffee table and stared at it while Penny moved around off to the side, putting another log in the fire. Without speaking, she moved to the kitchen where she began making noises like she was cooking supper. The box wasn't unique from other boxes, two hand holes, the brown fake wood look and a small white space with ruled lines, made for labels. There, scrawled in writing I recognized as my grandmother's, was my mother's name.

Moira.

Rolling my eyes at myself, I pulled off the lid and placed it to the side, seeing the crumpled and half-charred remains of the several pages of scrawling that she had sent to my grandparents before abandoning me.  I picked it up carefully, turning the sheets over in my hands and shuffling them until I had them in the right order. 

Most of the first page was destroyed.

Whatever my mother had written there, I could only guess it was an introduction, maybe more of an explanation than the last line of the writing talking about things progressing since we had returned. 

My mother and I had travelled a lot while I was growing up, I couldn't remember spending much time with my grandparents, aside from a couple visits here or there. I did not know what trip we would have returned from that was remarkable to her.

I scanned the pages of burned holes, sketches of things that could almost be construed as Runes or possibly Indigenous writing, but it was mangled together in such a haphazard way that it looked like the raving chicken scratch.

There were occult symbols that I recognized now, some of them harmless and others sketches of what I could only recognize as doorways or summoning gates. Then the letters turned back to my mother talking about needing to find 'him' again. There was more damage near the end, the last page nearly as destroyed as the front one.

When Penny rejoined me, I traded a plate of supper for the letters and sat down to eat silently as I stared into the fire flickering in the wood stove.

"Well, it's impossible to discern anything useful out of this, which is a shame. There's a lot here that indicates she... knew something." Penny offered cautiously, drawing my attention.

The other woman's expression was careful, as if expecting to have upset me.

I nodded once, frowning and turning back to finishing my supper. I didn't taste it, though it was good enough that I finished the whole thing. And when I was done, I had a hard time remembering what I had eaten, as the actions had been automatic. I took mine and Penny's plates to the kitchen and washed them and the pots as I struggled through an oddly blank mind.

Finally, I sighed and offered a shrug. "We can look through her other stuff. There are a couple boxes. Maybe there's more information. This is the only place she kept anything. Maybe the source of her knowledge is here."

"After we scope out our job tomorrow?" Penny offered, before yawning and giving me a hopeful look. "I'm exhausted."

I was too.