Mystery Noir

Little Monsters Part 10

"It smells like magic." Enzo murmured after a few moments, before he put his book down on his lap, turning his gaze to mine. "Powerful magic, I would argue that wherever that book was created, it wasn't Earth."

I frowned and glanced down at the book in his lap. "And that one doesn't?"

Enzo paused long enough that I looked up to him, noticing a bemused expression on his features. "It's different. I think if the note book was made somewhere else, it hasn't been there in a while. But that book you have... it smells as if it is still connected to wherever it was from."

His nostrils flared, and he got a pained, slightly distant expression that made me wonder if he was trying to figure out the smell. I nodded and turned back to my mother's book and flipped the first page, finding a simple sketch of a mountain sunset.

I tried to search my memories for a hint that my mother could or did draw, and could find nothing within them. As I continued going through the book, I found that I remembered the scenes that she had sketched on the pages. They were all a part of the constant travelling we had done in the last couple of years before her disappearance.  Nearly every scene, from one of the ocean, to another of the Sedona Dessert, were all of sunsets as if my mother had a fascination of them. 

Halfway through the book, I got to a picture of a gazebo.  I did not see anything strange about it until I realized that there was no sunset in the picture. The gazebo was shaded red and white, and despite being unable to identify the memory of it the day before, the picture brought back a scene from my childhood.

The gazebo at the castle had been blue and yellow before age had rotted the wood, but the one in the picture was exactly like the memory that was now clear in my mind.  I drank in every detail of the scene of a gazebo in the summer sunshine, searching for a reason that it didn't fit the sunset pattern until I saw the detail of a pair of bright red sneakers hanging off the edge of the gazebo floor.  It was obvious they were being worn by someone, though only their red shoes were visible.

Having pulled the book up close to my face to inspect those shoes, I frowned when I noticed that there were symbols faintly etched into the ground below the gazebo, in the same hand that had written the notebook Enzo was looking through.  And scrawled in my mother's hand, so light that it merely looked like the shading of grass was her response.

We miss you too.

Those were my shoes. A pair that I'd received not long before my mother had disappeared.  I had worn them religiously after my mother had agreed to buy them for me, straight up until the day my grandparents told me that she probably wasn't coming back. I had kept them clean and as well cared for as a kid could, hoping that if I only did, she would come back.  But when my grandfather had told me that my mother was gone for good, I had thrown them into the fire.

Biting back a wave of emotion, I flipped to the next page, finding in it another scene of daytime, this one just a field of flowers with a kite flying above it. If I unfocused my eyes and allowed my imagination to see the subtle shading, I could make out a small form hidden in the tall flowers. I allowed my fingers to trace the kite, a pink thing depicting my favourite cartoon character in my childhood.

I had loved that kite until a gust of wind had snatched it out of my hands.

The tips of my fingers hummed where they touched the page, almost like a slow moving electric shock that went up my arm until I snatched my hand away. Ignoring Enzo's look of concern, I flipped through the book quickly, seeing depictions of all my favourite things and places, everything about my life without ever showing me until it ended with a simple picture of a garden gate. On one side there was a column of writing with several lines of script. One line being the unknown symbols in that strange hand, the other being my mother's writing, and they alternated down the page, as if she had been having a conversation.