by Cege Smith
Air filled her lungs and she took a deep breath. It was like she hadn’t taken a breath in a long time, and a sharp cough rattled her chest. She curled on her side as that cough was followed by another and then another. She felt heat on her face and saw that it was coming from the fire in the fireplace before her. She may not have known where she was before, but she knew where she was now: the library of the Bradford mansion. She stubbornly refused to think of it any longer as “Linda’s house.” Linda had been nothing but a charming illusion hiding a century-old soul-sucking monster that had once gone by the name of Lillian Bradford.
Lillian, as Linda, had pretended to be Ellie’s friend. Somehow she had gotten past Ellie’s deflective shield and lured her into a trap, as neat as any spider. Now Ellie was tied to the Bradford mansion as surely as Lillian had been. Ellie felt a small amount of vindication, though, that Lillian had got hers in the end, after Ellie made a deal with Lillian’s demon and sent Lillian and her equally nasty husband Joseph straight to hell.
As the coughs finally subsided, Ellie sensed a presence behind her. Her body screamed in protest, but she managed to roll over to her other side while simultaneously pushing herself backward to sit up. She didn’t know who she would encounter here, and while she hoped it would be David, she knew that she wouldn’t be so lucky. As she felt the cool and prickly surface of the stone fireplace against her back, she saw that her intuition had not been wrong; Ellie wasn’t alone in the library.
A shadowy figure detached itself from the far wall and approached her slowly. The shadow took on features and a man’s form finally appeared carrying a tray with a teapot and teacups on it. Ellie knew him: it was Jeffrey, Lillian’s butler. It never occurred to Ellie that she would see the man again. In her mind, he was tied to the world she remembered, a place she desperately wanted to go back to and forget Lillian Bradford had ever existed.
“Good to see you, Ellie. How are you feeling?” Jeffrey asked pleasantly as he set the tray down on the coffee table between the two facing sofas that were just a few feet away from the fireplace. “I took the liberty of starting the fire and making you some tea. I knew that you would be a bit disoriented from your transition.”
Ellie was still trying to process what had happened to her in the last few minutes. “Transition? Where was I?” She looked down and noted that her clothes were the same jeans and sweater that she knew she was wearing the night Lillian and Joseph attacked her. “How long have I been...gone? Where’s David?”
Jeffrey chuckled as he poured tea into one of the cups. “So many questions. Always the same. Come, have some tea. You may want to get acclimated again before diving into all of that. You’re weak and you need to give your body a bit of time to rest.”
Ellie had no desire to drink tea or do anything but try to make sense of what was going on. “I’m not drinking anything that you’ve made. You were working with Lillian to trap me. She was going to kill me. What makes you think that I’d trust you?”
Jeffrey smiled at her as he settled onto one of the couches and threw his arm up on the back of it. With his white hair, heavy cowled sweater, slacks, and boat shoes he looked just like what Ellie envisioned a grandfather would look like. Both sets of her grandparents had died when her parents were young, so she had never known them. She shook those thoughts from her head.
“Ellie, I think you are mistaken. I provided services for Lillian, but I did not work for her. For a long time, our interests were aligned,” he said.
The tingle of an idea grew in her mind and the thought filled her with dread. “You work for him,” she said. “The Third.”
Jeffrey’s smiled broadened in confirmation. “Everyone has a master, Ellie. He is mine. But why the formality? That would distress him. You may call him Mikel.”
“I would call him a monster,” Ellie said, trying to keep her voice even.
“That monster saved your life,” Jeffrey said. “Yours and David’s if I recall correctly. I think you may be judging too harshly, Ellie. Perhaps you should gather all the facts before you make up your mind about Mikel. There is so much you don’t know, and it is unfortunate that Lillian colored much of that with her own scheming. Lillian was the monster there, not Mikel.”
The idea that she had misjudged a demon made Ellie’s body shake with mirthless laughter. The entity who called himself The Third had the power to condemn Lillian and Joseph to hell, and could bind anyone he chose to do his bidding. He had presented Ellie with an impossible choice after it was revealed that he had had an active part in driving her ex-husband, Jake, to madness. Jeffrey must think her naive to think that Lillian had been acting on her own accord.
Ellie felt sick. The strains of a migraine were instantly there, and she put her hand to her head. Her skin was slick and clammy. “I don’t feel very good,” she said. Her stomach was starting to roll and she wondered if she was going to be sick.
Then Jeffrey was kneeling on the floor next to her, peering into her face with what looked like great concern. His ice-blue eyes twinkled, and looked friendly. She wished she could read his aura, but Jeffrey’s had always been blank to her, just like Lillian’s and Joseph’s. If only she had known that was a sign, a bad one, maybe she would have been better prepared. The Voice had been right in that regard; Ellie’s ability, or at least her understanding of it, was often flawed.
“I told you that some tea would make you feel better. Your body has been in a place where time, space, and matter don’t exist. You are going to feel disoriented. It takes time to reacclimate,” Jeffrey said. He gently took her arm and helped her to her feet.
Once standing, Ellie felt woozy and cursed herself for having to lean against Jeffrey for support. He felt sturdy and strong, which belied the elderly impression he gave off. It made her wonder how old Jeffrey actually was. He slowly guided her across the carpet and lowered her gingerly onto the couch. Waves of nausea threatened to overwhelm her and she took several deep breaths to calm her stomach.
Even though her hands were shaking, Jeffrey set a teacup in them and helped her bring it to her lips. With him being just inches from her, she smelled cigars and cloves. Staring into his eyes, Ellie was terrified that something bad was about to happen, but as the warm liquid passed her lips and traveled down her throat a feeling of peace came over her. Her stomach settled immediately and she felt a warm flush cross her cheeks.
“Better?” Jeffrey asked.
She nodded warily, and brought the cup up for another sip. It tasted heavenly. Jeffrey seemed satisfied. He rose and took a seat on the sofa across from her. She was relieved not to have him in her immediate vicinity; she had never liked having anyone in her personal space, much less someone that she distrusted so strongly.
Her cup was empty a few moments later, and Jeffrey gestured for her to bring it forward so that he could refill it. Ellie didn’t resist. Her body was starting to feel normal again.
“You have no reason to be afraid of me or Mikel, Ellie. He is happy that you are here, and part of my job is to help you be happy here as well. This is a magical place. You’ll see soon,” Jeffrey said, seemingly intent on continuing his previous train of thought.
“I can’t believe you are trying to convince me that he is anything other than what he is,” Ellie said.
“Which is?” Jeffrey asked. His tone was still friendly, but he frowned.
“Evil,” Ellie whispered.
Jeffrey leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. He stared intently at Ellie until she felt uncomfortable. She brought her feet up under her and squirmed.
“We hope to convince you, Ellie, that what you think you know and what is actually the truth are two entirely different matters. Good and evil. Light and dark. Right and wrong. None of these things can exist without its twin; its opposite. And each has a bit of the other in it. What seems so easy to pass judgment on from the outside, when you sit within, can take on many shades of gray.”
Ellie said nothing for a moment and considered his words. He
r thoughts were jumbled. “I’m not anyone special, Jeffrey. I’m just a woman who owns a coffee shop and was trying to live her life just like any other normal person out there. I didn’t ask to be part of...whatever this is.”
Jeffrey spread out his hands, palms to the air, and shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps you think it’s semantics, Ellie. But you did ask to be here. You did consent.”
“To save my life,” Ellie argued. “To save David’s life. That’s hardly the same thing as coming to this willingly. And speaking of David, it would great to know that he is okay. That was part of the bargain.”
Jeffrey smiled and sat back again, as if the topic shift relaxed him. “Mikel is a man of his word. David is safe and sound. As is someone else you care about. Why don’t you go look out that window?” Jeffrey pointed at the dark window beside the fireplace.
She wasn’t sure what he wanted to show her, but Ellie slowly stood up and made her way to the window. As she approached it, its opaque surface started to crystallize into a scene that she knew was different than the one that should have been on the other side. The Bradford mansion had been nestled in a wooded lot on the Lake of the Isles. It quickly became obvious that she wasn’t there any longer. She was looking out at an immense green field. The sun was shining, and she could hear excited barking. Her heart stopped as she pushed her nose to the window. A bolt of brown fur went by the window, chasing a butterfly.
“Skipper,” she whispered. She wanted to open the window, grab him, and hold him close. The little dog had made so much of her life bearable. She smiled as she traced a line on the window trying to pet him. As if he sensed her, he stopped and turned around, staring in her direction. His tongue fell out of his mouth and he was panting hard but it was like he was smiling at her. Suddenly the window darkened and she was looking at nothing but her reflection in the gray glass. Skipper was gone.
“While this place is no place for pets, Mikel ensured that your Skipper is well looked after. He is happy and free. You could not have wished for a better life for him,” Jeffrey said.
“Except for him to be with me,” Ellie said with a lump in her throat. The corners of her eyes burned with unshed tears. She was glad that Skipper was safe, but it didn’t make it any easier for her to know that she had to let him go. Another casualty of her rushed decision.
“I’d like to see David,” Ellie finally said. “You have to realize that I won’t believe he’s safe until I see it for myself. If you are willing to show me Skipper, why can’t you show me David as well?”
“I felt, and Mikel agreed, that it would be better for you to get settled before you were possibly distracted.” He held up his hand to stop Ellie from protesting. “I hope you would agree that given the conditions of your arrangement with Mikel, it is important that you understand your role here and what is expected of you. Understandably, it would upset him if you didn’t take your responsibilities seriously.”
Ellie shivered at the word “responsibilities.” She wondered if those would entail what Lillian and Joseph were doing and the thought made her ill. But until she found a way to get her and David out of there, she didn’t have much choice. And the thinly veiled threat made things abundantly clear. Ellie had to prove that she was going to uphold her end of the bargain. Finding an escape plan had suddenly become much more difficult. She returned to her seat and picked up her cup. She sipped on her cooling tea and tried to think. Adapting to hostile situations wasn’t completely unknown to her; it had just been a long time since she had allowed herself to be in one.
“Are we ever going to be allowed to go home?” She hated that she was so weak to let that desire show through, but that one question was the question. She thought of Kevin and wondered if he was taking care of the shop for her. He would be so worried about her. She imagined that Melanie was busy scribbling at her favorite table in the front corner by the window, probably writing a novel based on Ellie’s disappearance. She thought of her small apartment, and how empty her life had been there. The last time she truly remembered having a home was at her parents’ house.
For the first time during the whole conversation, Jeffrey seemed tense. “Ellie, this has always been David’s home. And I thought you understood; now this is your home too.” He leaned forward and poured tea into the other cup. Then he picked it up and lifted the tea cup from the saucer in a mock toast. “Welcome home, Ellie.”
CHAPTER THREE
Sweat pooled on David’s brow and then slowly trickled down the side of his face. His shirt stuck to his back. The wall of heat that seemed to surround him pressed against his chest and made it difficult to breathe. His skin felt dry and shriveled. Every so often, the barest breath of a cool breeze would flitter by and for one-tenth of a second he felt the sweat harden and his skin tingle in anticipation of returning to its natural state. And then it was gone, and he was left with just the heat and the sweat and the blank hole in his head where his memories should be.
He’d stopped trying to calculate time ages ago. Now he measured its passage only by the nanoseconds he felt cool, and the far larger majority of time when he didn’t. He wondered if this was what it was like to go insane. Then he wondered if he was insane already. It was only the fragile thread of the fact that Ellie existed that kept him grounded in any kind of reality. Ellie, who would be left alone in this madness if he went insane. Ellie had made an insidious choice for both of them, and if he left her then she would have damned them both for absolutely no reason.
It wasn’t like David to feel the overwhelming anger that threatened to consume him when he thought about the ramifications of Ellie’s choice. She couldn’t have known that she was condemning David to this hellish prison. He had nothing to do other than sweat and think. And pray for relief.
When David focused on the room around him, it didn’t seem like a place that would occupy space in hell. After thinking on it for a long time, David didn’t know where else he could be. The house, the Bradford mansion, was a gateway to hell. The beautiful house looked so normal from the outside, but then the smoke and mirrors cleared, and the truth was revealed. It was nothing more than a gilded mousetrap that drew them in, and once it had them, it had snapped its jaws shut around them.
David’s prison cell was a medium-sized room that looked like it could have been a room in any house that dated from the early 1900s. It was old, but the details were still visible. The walls were covered in peeling blue floral wallpaper. Two wingback velvet chairs sat in front of a massive stone fireplace that ran from floor to ceiling. Occasionally a fire would appear roaring inside of it, and the memory of that intense heat made David twitch. He thought it couldn’t possibly get any hotter in the room than it already was, but that fire, when it appeared, threatened to melt his skin from his bones.
The focal point of the room was a large four-poster bed. It was adorned in heavy lace around the top and a light blue blanket coverlet. Of the sparse furnishings in the room, the bed looked the most inviting, but David quickly learned that it was all an elaborate facade.
The only time that he had tried to lie on the bed was right after he woke up inside the room. He spent hours pounding on the walls of the windowless room, screaming for Ellie until he was exhausted and beaten. He wanted to lie down for just a few minutes to gather up his stamina again, but just as he felt the softness of the mattress beneath him, the bed simply disappeared and dumped him onto the floor. When he tried to sit on the chairs, the same thing had happened. The room’s furnishings were nothing more than an illusion of the minimum creature comforts. In all actuality, he had nothing but the floor to lie on. No comfort at all.
The room had only one door, which led to a small washroom. The maker of the room’s taunts continued there. The shower offered no relief from the heat. Naturally, the only water that came out of its faucet, as well as the one in the small sink, was scalding hot. David couldn’t get away from the heat.
It didn’t take long to accept the fact that he was stuck. He believed that Ellie
was in another room just like this one, trapped just like he was, and there was nothing that he could do to help her. They would have to wait for the one who drove the bargain to make his move. Those kinds of thoughts made him angry again.
David stood up and started to pace, careful to skirt the bed and the chairs. Although he wasn’t allowed to sit or lie on them, they were as real as he was when it came to appearance, as he found when he tried to walk through them. He had tested the boundaries and limits of his prison cell in every way he could, but had yet to find any way of an escape. He was tired. His emotional state was tenuous. More often now, he found himself hoping for it all to end.
In those moments, he would poke around that empty space in his head. If what Lillian had said was true, he had somehow grown up in the Bradford mansion. That made him wonder if he had spent his childhood doing exactly what he was doing now. The thought was scary and sobering at the same time. In such a short time, his whole existence was thrown into question. Before Ellie, it summed up to being used and abused as a means to an end by those with dark and sinister intentions. It all began because David had the misfortune of being born at the wrong time in the wrong place—on the eve of the blood sacrifice of his parents, almost a hundred years ago.
David knew that he was focusing on the wrong things. He needed to be figuring out a way out, but then it would hit him again that even though he thought he was twenty-nine, he was in fact almost a century old. How was that even possible? Then the never-ending circle of thoughts and diatribes would begin again. He wanted to remember, if for no other reason than to regain some semblance of who he was.
The pacing made him even warmer, so David stopped to lean up against the wall in his favorite corner, which was as far away from the fireplace as possible. His eyes had just closed when he felt that cool breeze again. It hadn’t come by in so long that he had almost forgotten what it felt like, and he sighed. What caught his attention and brought his thoughts back to the present was when the breeze continued for more than thirty seconds.
