by P. T. Phronk
My hand rested on a doorknob to steady myself. The doorknob was very old and made of glass—this was it, the room with the laptop, which Caleb said he never went into.
I took a deep breath.
It’s all in your mind, it’s all in your mind, it’s all in your mind. I focused on the words in said mind like a mantra. If I could calm down and grab that old computer, I could fix this mess and get out of here.
My nose itched as I exhaled. I could hear faint squealing all around me—surely only the wind whistling through cracks in the older parts of the house.
I closed my eyes and put my hand on the doorknob, picturing what the computer looked like to prepare myself to spot it as quickly as possible. Then I hesitated—why did Caleb refuse to go in this room? After all this, perhaps he had a good reason.
All in your mind.
I swung open the door. The giant stood in front of me.
Jack was there too, stepping off the top of the beanstalk before spotting the giant. For a stained glass window, it was quite detailed, though the perspective was off. Jack’s face was portrayed as facing either sideways or head-on, depending on which piece of glass I looked at, like an unintentional Picasso. Additional details were painted on the glass, like the fine eyebrows showing the fear on Jack’s face, and the giant’s long eyelashes.
I stepped into the room. It was only a window. I must have seen it from the outside when I first got to the house. How else would I have hallucinated a giant in the bathroom window? In fact, it all made more sense now, didn’t it? A giant in the stained glass window, a giant in the bathroom window.
Two other panels surrounded the one illustrating the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. To its left, the story of Sleeping Beauty was represented by the prince, wearing an elaborate hat with a feather in it, hovering over the poor unconscious girl while fairies around her seemed to be locked in an argument. And to its right …
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” I muttered out loud. I refused to look at it for long, because that would solidify it, make it more real. The three little pigs, depicted with hollow eyes and sideways noses thanks to that odd misunderstanding of perspective, would soon wish they could ignore it too. The wolf. Big, bad, shaggy, its fur was painted in detail, arcing off the edges of each tiny shard of glass in little swirls of black and grey.
I rummaged through the junk haphazardly arranged in the room, piled on top of unused antique furniture. I knew I was getting close when I came across the electronics, where a line of iPods chronicled every version released since the very first. I suppose those would be considered antiques now too.
When lightning flashed, I spotted the characters from the stained glass windows staring at me from the periphery of my vision. Their painted eyes seemed to follow me around the room, while simultaneously keeping an eye on each other, Picassoing in every direction at once.
There it was—Trista’s computer, placed precariously on top of old computer manuals, covered in dust. I confirmed that it had the right Ethernet port on the side, grabbed the power cord beside it, then sprinted from the room.
Part of my mind told me to just keep running, but a stronger part told me to close the door, so that room would not just be open to the other parts of the house. The safer parts of the house, my mind automatically labeled them.
So I stopped, and reached into the room for the doorknob.
On the next flash of lightning, every eye in the stained glass mosaic stared directly at me.
Chapter 5
Craig saw the panic on my face. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve just gotten off a roller coaster.”
“Where have you been for so long?” Caleb asked, before returning to staring out the window.
Marcus and Jasmine were on the couch, engaged in another conversation. She nodded as she listened intently to her father, whose deep voice and gentle touch seemed to be backing her away from the edge of panic. The bond between them gave me a silver of hope, which calmed my racing heart enough for me to speak.
“I have the computer,” I said, holding it up. “Are there tools in the basement?” I looked at Ash, but he just stared back at me blankly.
Craig raised his eyebrows at him. “Ash?”
The caretaker sighed. “There are tools in the basement, but some might be missing. Caleb keeps taking the hammers.”
Caleb didn’t even look up; he’d been at the window the whole time, peeking through a gap in the curtains into the darkness.
“I won’t need a hammer. Jasmine, can you handle an Ethernet cable?” The girl looked like distraction would do her good. Her dark skin sparkled from sweat, and her hands twitched like she didn’t know where to put them. I’d been that way for weeks after what happened with my family, and she’d just come across her best friend’s body. Distractions helped me—even though my brand of distractions always left me with fresh new problems.
Ash put his hand up like he was in school. “Is there a reason for this?”
“For what?” Craig asked.
“All this.” He looked right at me. “This futile quest to get in the safe room, when we know we can wait until morning and deal with it then. We’re running around and fucking with an incompetently-constructed security system when we could be asleep.”
Marcus shot to his feet. “Asleep?” He put a hand on Ash’s chest. Ash recoiled, knocking over a picture of the family on the fireplace mantle. “Craig lost his daughter and you’re talking about having a God damn nap?”
Craig stood. “Marcus, it’s fine. We’re all on edge. This isn’t normal. None of this is normal.”
Marcus backed down. He wasn’t a large man, but he moved with a bold confidence that suggested muscle under his flannel shirt.
“I lost my family a couple of years ago,” I blurted out, talking to buy myself time to think. “I would have given anything to have been there. Even if I couldn’t have done anything to stop it, just being there … it would have put some finality to it. It may not seem like it now, but years from now, when this day haunts you—and it will haunt you—you’ll wish you did everything in your power to get some closure. All of you will.”
They stared at me. Nobody knew what to say. I’d left out the part about the word Trista had written in her own blood beside her, which provided another obvious reason for entering the room as soon as possible: it would identify her killer. Their faces didn’t give away who had spotted the writing and had the same thought, if anyone.
“Let’s get that room open then,” Craig said, finally.
Ash nodded, biting his lip, defeated.
The family agreed that splitting up into two groups would be okay, as long as everyone was being watched by someone else. I convinced Jasmine and Craig to follow me into the basement. Marcus had shown me that he could overpower Ash if he needed to, and he could probably lift Caleb with one arm. I realized that I had already formed a theory in my mind about who the suspects were in Trista’s murder, even if my theory was based purely on personality rather than evidence. Still, I felt safe with Jasmine and Craig, and felt good about Marcus watching over Ash and Caleb.
The deflated bouncy castle in the basement writhed as if something were living under it. I watched it from the hallway for a moment. Perhaps there were rats under there, in a nest lined with soiled dental floss stolen from Craig’s bathroom, feeling very lucky to have always lived in a castle. Perhaps the castle was itself alive, its printed skin still twitching from the muscle memory of when Jasmine, Caleb, and Trista bounced around in it after begging Craig and Marcus to drag it from the basement on a sunny spring day. I could just imagine the castle’s rubbery towers thrashing back and forth as the children bounced around inside—while from the real mansion towering above, the stained-glass giant, fairies, and wolf watched.
Perhaps the deflated castle was just moving from a draft.
“Amy? Are you okay?” Jasmine lightly touched my shoulder.
“Sorry, I’m fine.” I lowered my voice and dropped back wh
ile Craig charged ahead. “Jasmine, have you ever seen anything weird around here?”
“Weird?”
“I mean … it’s an old mansion. I’m talking about, maybe, well you know how people say places like this are haunted.” I spilled it out quickly, perhaps hoping she wouldn’t understand what I said. “Sorry, you probably get this all the time.”
A pained smile formed on her face. “The first time I came to visit, late at night after Dad was done for the day, I was totally spooked. I didn’t even want Mom to take me out of the car. I still remember this feeling I got, when I looked at the place—like it was watching me. I thought I saw people in the windows, watching us. When I looked, there wasn’t anybody there, of course not, but I’d spot movement at the next window, but then when I looked there wasn’t anybody there either. Then there’s a shadow at the next window, and … you can see where this is going. Rinse, repeat.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. It was Trista who said it was nothing, that stuff like that happened all the time. She said that it was nice to have someone watching over you, whether it was her dad or her brother or an army of hollow-eyed spirits.” She laughed, though her cheeks sparkled with tears. “Hollow-eyed spirits. Who says that? She was so fucking positive all the time, you know? No, you don’t know, you never met her. I just can’t help thinking that she was too trusting, and maybe that’s what—”
“You guys coming?” Craig asked.
Jasmine opened her mouth like she wanted to finish her idea, then thought better of it and continued ahead.
At the safe room, Craig was already at the keypad again, trying new combinations. Were they random at this point? Was it even possible for a man to produce randomness, or would his fingers always betray him, revealing hidden corners of his psyche?
I sighed. “That’s fine, you keep doing that. Jasmine, can you grab those tools? I’ll get the computer set up over there, behind the room.”
Behind the room. An unusual thing to say, only possible in this extenuating circumstance of having a room within a room. I opened a panel at the back of the cube-like structure, then tapped into the power supply from the battery inside the room and plugged in Trista’s old laptop. That was a special feature of the room—in case you needed to go out into the nuclear wasteland where your house used to be and plug in your Christmas decorations. It could be disabled from inside, but thankfully in this case, was not. The computer booted up and bathed me in the blue glow from the desktop wallpaper: Trista and Jasmine, cheek to cheek, a few years younger. My bet on the consistency of the family’s lack of good security practices held true again; she hadn’t set a password.
Trista’s desktop was a mess. As if she hadn’t heard of folders, the picture of her and Jasmine was almost completely covered by files, each with a name like Week 5, September 12 - 19, and Christmas 2009.
I made sure Craig was still occupied, then double-clicked one of the files.
Trista had kept a poorly-organized diary. Skimming through the files, I spotted archetypal teenage tales that could have been my own. Drinking too much, eating too little, wars between school cliques. She wrote in a sort of code, perhaps giving away some awareness of the fact that anyone who opened up this computer could read everything. Friends and enemies were referred to by initials. Two regulars, appearing on nearly every page, were referred to only as HE and SHE.
Another weekend in town. SHE brought weed, so we smoked under the bridge again, and talked about the future.
…
HE is always there. I feel him staring even when he’s outside.
…
When I bring HIM up, SHE gets uncomfortable. We don’t fight about it, because I don’t think we ever fight, or could fight, but she pushes harder about getting out of here, and that makes me uncomfortable, but maybe I’m uncomfortable because she’s right.
I leaned in close and pretended to type something to hide my snooping as I got closer to more recent entries.
We researched universities together. The way SHE looks at me … omg, sometimes it scares me so much. I don’t even know what to do with myself. I’m crying, what a mess!
…
HE is planning something.
This felt like meeting Trista’s ghost.
Yeah, you read that date and time right … it’s 4 in the morning. I’ve written about the spookiness here before, but ghosts never scared me. HE is something different, the way he haunts the house. Does he not sleep? It’s the middle of the night, and I heard the creaking outside my door again, and again my door was open even though I shut it, I’m sure I shut it. The whole hallway smelled like black cherries. It must have been HIM.
“Fixed it yet?” Jasmine appeared beside me. I snapped the laptop shut, which was about the dumbest thing I could do to avoid appearing suspicious. I tried to smooth it over by pretending I needed two hands to lean in with the flashlight and inspect the screws that held the back panel in place, even though I could recite the model number by heart.
“Hopefully this’ll do it,” I said. I asked her to hand me the correct screwdriver, opened the panel, and together we got to work. Jasmine was good with tools, and even better with computers, so it didn’t take long to hijack the room’s outgoing communications. It seemed to get her mind off of things, too, and the tremble in her hands disappeared.
Getting my mind off things was more difficult. Jasmine could be SHE. Craig could be HE. The girl who had last been frightened of SHE and HE lay dead just metres away.
“There!” I said, willing confidence into my voice. “Craig?”
“Mmm?” He was still tapping away at the keypad.
“Okay, just keep doing what you’re doing. That’s great.”
Jasmine leaned over to look at him. “Won’t he mess it up?”
“That’s exactly what we want him to do. After every ten attempts with a wrong passcode, the room will send a warning and an email with a code to reset the password. We catch it on this laptop by intercepting the email to Craig, send the reset code back, choose a new password, and we’re in.”
Jasmine handed me the end of the Ethernet cable coming out of the room, anticipating the next move before I even said anything. “A Janus attack.”
“I haven’t heard that term since my training courses. Yeah, also known as a man-in-the-middle attack, like you said earlier. You’re good, girl.”
Jasmine smiled politely. Her hands were steady as she passed the cable to me. “I like the Roman god name better. The dude with two faces, in charge of beginnings and endings, looking to the past and the future at the same time. I guess that puts us right in the middle.”
“Stuck in the middle with you,” I sung, horribly out of tune with the old song.
Jasmine smirked and groaned. She got my dumb reference. I was starting to like this girl.
SHE.
We watched Craig, his face glowing in the backlight of the keypad, as he continued trying passwords. It would be just my luck if he finally got the right one just now.
He leaned back every time he tried one, his mouth agape in anticipation, waited a second, then tried another. I counted the attempts. Four, five, six.
Grab a crucifix.
Someone shouted upstairs. The muffled voice was followed by thumping footsteps, accompanied by the creak of the floorboards above.
Craig shook his head like he was coming out of a trance. “Was that Caleb?”
“Oh no, what now?” Jasmine said.
“You two go,” I said. “I’ll finish this, then we can all go in together and figure out what happened.”
Craig gave one last forlorn look at the keypad before Jasmine gripped his elbow and led him upstairs. I was alone, as I preferred to be whenever I was working on something complicated. I took Craig’s place at the keypad and tried some more incorrect passwords, much more efficiently than Craig had. 000, I typed, then hit enter. It flashed red: incorrect.
More shouting came from upstairs, then more stomping. The creaking of the floor se
emed to go on a bit too long. It turned into a deep growl, and it wasn’t coming from above. I whipped around and aimed the flashlight into the corners of the room, but in this carved-out basement, there were too many corners, too many jagged shadows.
It’s nothing, I told myself. There are no ghosts, just teenage girls thinking up fantasies in an old house. The ghosts are no more real than the bouncy castle in the other room.
I tried more codes. 111, 222.
The darkness seemed to close in on my peripheral vision. Not real, not real, not real, I chanted to myself, but the bouncy castle was real even if it wasn’t actually a castle, and the growling sounded like it was right behind me, and my ponytail tickled like it was swaying in a light draft. A lover’s breath.
333. Enter.
Refusing to look back, I ducked around the safe room to the computer behind it. I checked my Janus program for the email. Nothing.
Padded footsteps approached from the darkness, but it wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, so I double checked my hack, tightened every connection. If an email had been sent to the Craig’s email address, I’d have intercepted it. I didn’t.
It meant someone had messed with the settings. Someone had intentionally changed the backup email address before any of this happened. It wasn’t a mistake, or a messy coverup of a mistake—it was premeditated sabotage in service of a careful plan. Someone had meant for Trista to be in that room, and for us to be unable to get to her.
A chill caused my whole body to clench. I inhaled sharply. A smell like rotting meat filled my nostrils.
I raised the flashlight. Canine eyes reflected back, glowing. The shaggy black dog lunged, sending a flurry of yellow teeth at my face.
My body acted on instinct. Luckily, instinct was smart enough to bring the flashlight with me as I turned and bolted. The shadows jumped around me with each step. The basement around the safe room was full of junk that I hadn’t seen before; my impression of the place had been all wrong. There was even another door I didn’t know about—Door #2, leading who-knows-where.
