1.03
It was hard to sum up my feelings as the van drove up the long driveway to Hillsglade House. It was supposed to be sanctuary, but it felt like the opposite. Layered in snow, branches of the overlarge trees bent with snow and ice, the house was pale against a dark gray background. The light siding only accented the effect. If I closed my eyes enough to let my eyelashes blur the view, it looked almost like the windows were floating there.
It was ominous, and it was a symbol of everything messed-up that had just happened to me. Maybe all the bad things that had happened to me from the start.
“You going to be alright?” the woman in the driver’s seat asked me. She had a weariness to her that made me suspect she’d been getting up too early for the majority of her life, but she had been kind and exceedingly gentle, and her idle questions and conversation had helped ground me, distracting me from the possibility that the bird things could catch up and stop this car like they had mine. With the snow, it looked to be a slow day at the rest stop, and she’d asked her boss if she could give me a ride.
“I don’t know. Probably not,” I said, honestly. I felt indescribably weary, and it had little to do with the exhausting run or the fact that I’d woken up four hours after I’d turned in. Rose, in the rear-view mirror, didn’t look any better than I felt. I fished for my wallet. “But that doesn’t have much to do with my getting lost in the woods, or a few scratches.”
“No money, it’s not necessary,” she said, as I pulled a twenty out of the wallet.
“For the cost of gas,” I said.
“I did it to get out of the prep work, that’s enough for me.”
“Then buy yourself and your boss a few beers after you’re done for the day, tell him thank you for letting you drive me,” I said. I tucked the bill into the cluttered space in the dash, by receipts, crackers and kleenex packages. Before she could give it back or argue, I opened the door and grabbed my bag.
I was closing the door when she said something. I had to open it and poke my head down. “Sorry?”
“Do you want me to wait, make sure you make it inside okay?”
Could I make it inside? I didn’t have a key, and there was the possibility that something could happen to me in the distance between here and the house.
“Yes please,” I said.
I closed the car door, making my way up to the front of the house. There was something like a bike lock attached, with a container built into it. Four digit combination.
I kicked at the doormat until I found a plastic bag with a thick manilla envelope attached, a pad of paper within.
The first sheet had only a simple message, penned in a curling script I almost envied. ‘Birth date’.
I tried the year I’d been born. It didn’t work.
Day, month? One-eight-oh-one.
The container opened. Two keys rattled within. One was older, the other a standard door key.
I opened the door with the usual key, then waved at the good Samaritan.
I stood inside the house, watching her pull down the long driveway. When she was gone, I closed and locked the door.
It didn’t feel like enough of a barrier.
“Molly!” I hollered, loud enough I should have been audible throughout the house. “Anyone!?”
No response. Somewhere, in my general confusion and the mess of stuff I didn’t know or understand, I’d hoped that Molly being alive would be one of those things that caught me off guard.
When I had first visited, the house had been my grandmother’s. She’d marked every surface with some token of her particular tastes and personality. Molly, it seemed, had been systematically dismantling those touches. Boxes sat by bookshelves, filled with books, paper-wrapped knick-knacks stowed away in the spaces between the books. Pictures were gone from the walls, neatly packed into more boxes, some stacked and shoved into the spaces beneath the few bookshelves that weren’t built into the house.
It wasn’t yet done, and it wasn’t an organized process, either. Some books here, some books there. A few shelves on one bookcase, another shelf across the room. Most seemed to be centered around the living room.
Near the center of the living room, Molly had set up blankets and pillows on one couch.
“Blake,” I heard, so quiet it was barely even a whisper.
I looked up. In this quiet, mundane setting, free of the delirium of sleep, I was a little unnerved to see Rose’s vague shape reflected in the black screen, instead of my own.
“There’s a mirror in the bathroom at the end of the hall,” she said.
I let my bag drop to the floor, then tossed the pad of papers and envelope onto the coffee table. I pulled off the hat I’d been lent, running my fingers through sweat-soaked, unwashed hair. A rub of my chin suggested a light scruff.
I hated being unshaven and unwashed.
I hated the feeling of being overwhelmed. Of feeling like I was out of the loop. There was too much to take in, here. I felt more than a little confused as I made my way back to the hallway and figured out the direction I needed to go. I moved slowly, taking everything in. The things of my grandmother’s that Molly hadn’t put away, the things that Molly had left behind. There were clues here, stories, and I didn’t want to miss any details.
The layout of the books made me think of a ruin. The layout of the books that remained were like the weathered remains of a brick wall that only partially stood. Patches. There were only traces of the personality that had once infused the place, like any ruin might hint at the people, culture and purpose that it once held.
I found the bathroom, but I left the mirror where it was, above the sink. I could see Rose there as I dug through the medicine cabinet and found a few things I needed to take care of the cuts.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
“Been hurt worse,” I said.
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
I slowly opened and closed my hand. The cut throbbed in the wake of the movement. “I can move my fingers. It’s not the injury that’s spooking me, here. Those things were dirty, their fingernails especially, and they got me a few times.”
“What can I do?” she asked.
I began unbinding the setup that was supposed to keep the bandages in place. I got the needle and thread out of the kit and set them aside. “I don’t know. You helped, didn’t you? With the ice?”