Chương 37: Chapter 36 - The Hunt

The great hunt began.

"It'll have to be something old," Iset explained.

"Something from the time before Big Jacky bought the house. If there's any doubt at all, bring it to us." Conrad and Igor were assigned to go through all the rooms on the second floor. Mrs. Park, Iset, Kappa, and I worked on the third floor. We started with the storage rooms—after all, that was where Big Jacky had stored all the stuff that had come with the house. To say the job was difficult was like saying zombies were gross.

Such extreme understatements were dragged across the vast and muddy pits of "Duh," through the canyon of Near-Sarcasm, and lifted, at last, into the Realms of Humor. We had only five feet of vertical space to move in. Mrs. Park, Iset, and I had to work hunched over or sitting on the ground while desperately trying to avoid thinking about how close we were to the top of the barrier. Only Kappa could be comfortable.

He didn't fully understand what was going on, and a five-foot ceiling is plenty high when you're only two-feet tall. He helped us move the debris from the collapsed roof out of the storage rooms. I had to sit at the door and inspect every armful he hauled out. It was a whole lot of garbage with no magic to speak of. An hour into our work, Igor brought Mrs. Park and I food and ordered us to eat. It was the tomatoes and toast from the lunch we'd skipped.

The food was cold and unappetizing, but Igor reminded me, while glaring at me with his smaller eye, that I'd need energy for the work ahead. I knew he was right. Humans got energy from food and sleep, and—god knew—I hadn't been getting enough sleep. Kappa and Iset kept bringing me armfuls of garbage and antiques to inspect while I ate. Hours later, we finished the storage rooms. The only interesting thing (magic-wise) that we found was a silver handheld mirror. I held it up in the sunlight and stared at it.

"Another mirror," Mrs. Park noted.

"Emerra?" Iset said. I continued staring. Eons later, I muttered, "You said the magic would be active, right? Like, I should be able to see it pretty easily?"

"Yes." I shook my head and lowered the mirror. Kappa was hunched beside me. He leaned in and started snoofling his reflection.

"I don't think this is the anchor," I said.

"But you do see something?" Iset asked.

"No, I—I don't…think so." Iset watched me for a second, then nodded slowly and held out her hand to take the mirror.

"We'll put it aside." Kappa squawked when I passed it to her.

"That isn't what we're looking for?" Mrs. Park asked. She was wringing her hands together.

"I don't think so," Iset said, "but it could be another trigger."

"Ah. Then please put it somewhere safe. I don't want to know what else Mr. Northrop had up his sleeves." Mrs. Park groaned, put both hands on her low back, and leaned over them. Then she wiped her cheekbone, leaving a smear of dirt behind.

"I'm sorry. I don't think I can do this anymore. I'm getting old. All this bending and crouching." She sighed and wiped her face again, leaving another streak. She's wiping away tears, I realized. I don't know why I was surprised. There was enough dust and dirt in the air to make a statue's eyes water. Or she might have been crying from exhaustion and stress. She didn't bawl like I did, but maybe you learned to be more subtle as you got older. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

"Of course," Iset said.

"Go downstairs. Take some painkillers and lay down for a while."

"I'd rather search," Mrs. Park said.

"We all have to rest sometime. Take ten minutes now. I'll be down to help you figure out where to look next." Mrs. Park gave a weary nod and left.

"Emerra," Iset said, "can you check the rest of the third floor?" I also gave her a weary nod. Those seemed to be the only kind left.

"Most of the other rooms should be empty—we cleaned them out when we moved in—but please look at the walls and the floors, just in case, and there might be a few antiques in the long gallery." My stomach swooped, and my hands tightened into fists.

"The long gallery." The gallery was one of my favorite rooms in the mansion. In all the chaos, I hadn't thought about it, but the collapsing roof must have destroyed most of its contents. Realizing it now, when I was so tired, hit ten times harder than it should have.

"Yes." Iset watched me for a moment.

"Are you okay, Emerra?" I almost laughed. That absurd question followed the same path as the extreme understatements.

"I'm as okay as I can be." I pulled my legs out from under me and rose to my hunkered height. Kappa tried to dodge the dust and debris that rained down when I beat out my jeans. The poor little guy. He hated dust, but he'd never uttered a word of complaint. Not even a grumpy hum! That was perfect hero behavior as far as I was concerned.

"Have we looked at everything in this room?" I murmured. We had, and I theoretically knew we had, but my sluggish brain was having trouble processing the fact.

"Yes," Iset said.

"What about the pipe and the—""What pipe?" I turned my head to glance at the short chest of drawers across the room. The late afternoon light poured in from the wide-open ceiling, falling across the top of the dresser and casting tight, angled shadows along the edges and sides. The sunlight and Kappa's footprints were the only things on the surface.

"I…" I closed my gaping mouth and shook my head.

"Nothing. It's nothing." I put my thumb and index finger over my eyes and gently pressed. Kappa chose to stay with me. I did the other rooms before confronting the devastation in the long gallery. They didn't take much time. We removed any pictures or decorations that had survived the cave-in so I could inspect the walls. Then I had Kappa shove the debris around while I looked at the floor.

We were interrupted every ten minutes or so when Conrad or Iset called me over to the stairwell to look at a box of objects they'd brought up from the floors below. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Each time I came to look at their boxes, Conrad and Iset would ask me with increasing concern if I was all right. I blamed the dust in the air.

If my eyes were red and blurry, that was the reason, and if I was dragging, it was because enough of the dust was clinging to my clothes to add fifty pounds to my outfit. Then I missed Iset calling me. She found me in the long gallery, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the southern wall with a pile of ceramic vase shards in my lap. Kappa had put his head on my knee. He was peering up at me with wide, sad eyes.

"Emerra?" Iset walked toward me, slightly bent over. I drew in a deep breath and looked up at her.

"Iset. I'm sorry. Did you call me?"

"Several times."

"I can come." I tried to talk myself into getting up, but I couldn't decide which to remove from my lap first: Kappa's head or the vase shards. While I was still working up the energy to make a choice, Iset sat down beside me.

"You're tired," she said. Another weary nod. With an extra side of weary.

"Nightmares?" she asked.

"Zombies are good for those." I made a face.

"Or bad for them. One of those two. At least tonight I should dream about Igor's life story, which—oh, wait! —has even more zombies."

"No small achievement." Iset reached out and touched the largest vase shard.

"Was there something special about this?"

"Yes—I mean, no. There's no magic or anything."

"I would've been shocked if there was." Iset sounded amused.

"Mrs. Park brought it in for us around seven years ago. It was only meant to be temporary."

"Temporary?"

"There was another vase on that cabinet, but it broke. The empty space offended Darius's sense of balance, so he asked Mrs. Park to bring in something until Big Jacky inevitably collected another object. I believe she bought it second-hand for five dollars. Originally it was mass produced and sold by a cheap department store." My scoff came out my nose as a grunt.

"That figures."

"Oh?"

"It was my favorite." I'd meant to say it as a joke—Ha-ha! Look at Emerra. She's got cheap taste! —but there was no playfulness left to inject into my voice. It came out sounding quiet and serious. Iset reached out and put her hand on my arm. It felt cool, but the kindness of her touch made me feel warmer.

"Tell me why you liked it," she said. I told her—or I tried to tell her. I went on about how it was simple and elegant and how it had a nice shape, but none of those things quite covered it. It was a cheap off-white vase. There was no design to make it stand out, and it never pretended to be anything other than what it was. Yet it somehow managed to look right at home in a room filled with priceless art pieces and pristine antiques. It made the whole room look more real.

Without it, the long gallery would've been trying too hard and I wouldn't have felt welcome there. I realized how pointless it would be to try to explain that and how stupid I'd sound if I tried, so I cut off my own awkward rambling.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"This is—this isn't important. I should be finding that spell, not sitting around, moping over a five-dollar vase."

"You're tired and nervous," Iset said.

"We all are. Sometimes it's easier to fixate on the small things when that happens."

"Conrad's scared," I mumbled.

"He told me. He said he's more scared than he's ever been in his life." Iset scooted closer and put her whole arm over mine. I wondered if she would've touched people more if her body wasn't so delicate.

"It takes a lot to kill a lycanthrope," she said.

"This is probably one of the few times he's been in real danger."

"Are you scared?" I asked.

"Terrified." Her head rose as if she was looking at the sky that had replaced our ceiling.

"Three thousand years still isn't enough. I don't know if I'll ever be ready to die." Kappa let out a meep. I lifted my other hand to pet his head.

"But you've already died," I pointed out. At first, Iset didn't answer. A silence crept between us.

"Emerra," she whispered. I had to strain to hear her.

"Do you remember anything from when you died?" Oh. So that's where the silence had come from. I knew that one. It was the same silence I felt in my head whenever I tried to remember what had happened while I was dead. Everything between the moment I slipped away from all the pain and the moment I opened my eyes to find Big Jacky standing over my open casket, ready to welcome me into my new life, was gone.

I could sense that something like time had passed, but when I tried to retrieve the memories, all I found was emptiness and silence. I shook my head.

"I thought as much," Iset said.

"I wondered…but—yes. That makes sense."

"How so?"

"I don't remember anything either. Most revived don't—""But some do?"

"One did," Iset said.

"There was one person who came back and remembered. Big Jacky brought me her notes." Iset muttered something in another language. My gift of understanding translated it into the equivalent profanity.

"I have to pick out the protected books. Not that there'll be much chance of protecting them." I was too eager to let her change the subject.

"Those notes—did she say what it was like being dead?"

"No. And she never explained the omission either. She only said that she remembered."

"But how could she remember when neither of us can?"

"She didn't die a natural death like you and I did. She was a witch. The event was centered around a spiritual magic spell that went badly wrong. Obviously I can't know for certain, but I suspect at least part of her soul stayed behind while the rest went into the passages. You and I, we just passed on." I smiled—mostly to myself, but Kappa saw it and his butt wiggled.

"Passed on," I said.

"It sounds so peaceful when you put it like that. Not like dying of cancer. Or getting crushed by a barrier. Or being mauled by a super zombie." Iset laughed, and it felt like someone had slathered my heart with a balm.

"We do that, don't we?" she said.

"In every language, in every era, we talk about death in the gentlest ways possible. I think we're trying to take some of the fear away."

"Is that why you asked me if I remembered anything?" I asked. She nodded. I nodded back. Lots of nodding. Like a Bobblehead convention. We both understood. That was why she'd asked me if I remembered, and that's why I'd been so eager to know what that revived witch had written. It was nice to know that there was something after death, but it might quell some of that stomach-churning fear if we also knew that "something" was worth looking forward to.

I snickered at how silly we looked, nodding like that, then said, "You know, I didn't think you'd be the type to get scared."

"Why would you think that?" Iset sounded more amused than ever. My shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated shrug.

"I dunno. I've never seen you get scared before." Iset let the back of her head rest against the wall behind us.

"I do get scared, but it's usually on behalf of other people. The life I have with Big Jacky is very safe." She added, almost in a whisper, "Perhaps that's the problem."

"How so?" I said.

"Igor is right. I'm too cautious. Too careful. It's a habit that's ossified over the millennia." I would've asked her what "ossified" meant, but the mood was too fragile to interrupt, and I thought I could guess its meaning from the context. She went on, "It makes me blind in some ways—in the ways that matter most. I've always felt that. For everything I've learned, I still don't know much about life. I worry that, someday, when I try to help Darius or Big Jacky, I'll be inadequate." My tender heart lurched.

She pulled her arm back to her lap.

"I wonder if I could've done better in this situation if I'd had any kind of experience at all." I would've thrown my arms around her and squeezed, but there was that issue about her body never healing, and Igor still had the ax. Instead, I leaned against her.

"You don't have to be perfect all by yourself, Iset. Your job is to know stuff. Igor's got all the experience. Conrad is super strong, and Kappa is super cute." Kappa smiled and rubbed his face over my jeans.

"The goal," I said, "is to put together the perfect team."

"I notice that you didn't mention your role in this perfect team." Iset said.

"Oh. Uh, yeah. I thought the team was generally put together to, you know, fix whatever stupid thing I get us all into." Iset laughed again, then patted my knee.

"Come on, my little seer. Conrad and I have brought up some things for you to look at. Then you need to take a break. Igor has some snacks and coffee ready in the kitchen." My nose wrinkled up. It does that when I find something funny but I don't have the energy or opportunity to laugh.

"That grump. The sky is literally falling, but there will be food on the table!"

"And what would we do without him?"

"Die hungry." I kissed the tips of two fingers and laid them on Kappa's forehead.

"Come on, buddy. We have to get back to work." Kappa stretched, then hopped around to get his blood moving again. I started to lay the shards of the vase aside, but Iset stopped me.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"Bring them with you. We'll take them downstairs. If we survive, it should survive."

"Iset, it's a five-dollar vase that's already broken." She bent down and started stacking the smaller pieces onto one of the larger, easier-to-carry pieces.

"And it's your favorite." I watched her for a moment, then helped her gather the rest of the shards. There was no sign of any magic in either of the boxes Iset and Conrad had brought up. While I was inspecting them, I saw a hint of ivory and black at the far edge of my vision. I ignored it. I'd seen it enough times that afternoon, I knew its only purpose was to give me whiplash. Every time I turned my head, there was nothing there.

But as I finished passing Iset the vase shards to put inside one of the boxes going downstairs, I idly turned my head and finally saw what had been teasing the corners of my eyes. It was a human skull without a jaw. Lying in front of it was an ivory and black smoking pipe. When I blinked, they were gone. Every last hair on my body stood on end. Hairs I didn't have tried to stand on end, giving me ghostly goosebumps.

"Iset," I said while trying to sound calm, "does anyone in this house smoke?"