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Renegade Harmony Drifter
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After getting turned around again, I find a room only a little off the front foyer that appeals to me.
It’s not a bedroom, I think all those are on the second floor. Only one I know of off the top of my head is the Master Suite and I’m good on that, thank you. The map doesn’t have something legible here, but I think this is probably a living room style deal. It has the benefit of being across the hall from a small guest bathroom, so I don’t have to wander around looking.
A fireplace sits cold and gated off, and there’s a big soft couch long enough for me to lay down on, so I claim it. My laundry baskets go on the floor near the wall, and I wonder if there’s a laundry room here, and if it’s modern or has washtubs. Hopefully modern.
My tattoo machine in it’s carrying case goes in a corner. I’m not planning on doing anything with it but it’s the most valuable thing I own so it doesn’t stay in the car.
A couple cardboard boxes with the miscellaneous rest of my junk sit near another wall, and my TV went on the coffee table that I pushed slightly back from the couch to reach an outlet.
There. It’s home.
In fact the room is bigger than my apartment was, which continues to be weird to me. This is the strangest situation I’ve ever been in, and I used to do drugs and hang out with some real weirdos in my early 20s.
So I acclimatize with a simple thing: After setting up the TV and my streaming stick (and discovering a lack of wifi in the house means I’m using phone data), I sit down and watch some cat videos online.
This relaxes me enough that I can get to the business I need to get done.
First, a call to my landlord to let him know I’m moved out and won’t be renewing the upcoming month. He’s not happy about it, and threatens to withhold my deposit if I fail to clean the place perfectly, in an attempt to get me to stick around.
Since I’ve never heard of anyone getting their deposit back from this jackass in my two years living there, I write that off and tell him this is acceptable. Everything I want is already in this house.
Secondly, a call to my job at Sherrie’s, the restaurant I’m supposed to be at work at about now. The actual Sherrie sold the place probably before I was born, but they kept the name.
I explain I won’t be in tonight, or ever again because I’ve moved. The manager says that I’m making a stupid decision, whines about lack of coverage, and then tells me that if I want my final check I’ll have to come in and get it since he’s not mailing it.
I only have to think for a second to realize I’m only out probably $30 since he paid me the minimum allowed and expects my tips (which he takes 20% for himself) to cover the rest. It’s not even worth the gas money to drive my car back to pick it up even if I thought the asshole would give it up.
Strangely relieved of those burdens, I make it my third task to call Sasumo’s and order myself an extra large meat lovers pizza. The guy on the phone is pleasant and says there’s no issue with delivering out to my house. His voice is faintly accented, and I wonder if this is Hiroshi. I don’t ask.
I’ll handle more exploring and doing stuff like cleaning out the fridge tomorrow.
-
Evening comes, as does my pizza. Thankfully I manage to get out there to the pizza guy without getting turned around, and in return for being cool Jerry gets a generous tip. I don’t plan to order out a lot but I figure it’d be best to not annoy anyone who voluntarily drives out to this place for me.
Food in hand I settle in for the night. What’s left will keep until morning on the side table in my freshly claimed room, and I decide to just put on some mindless TV shows I’ve seen before. I need a thorough unwind.
The hours stretch past, and in the room only lit by the glow of my TV, I doze off.
-
I wake to find my bladder letting me know that I definitely drank too much of the 2-liter I ordered alongside the pizza. Autoplay on my TV has stopped, asking me to confirm if I’m will watching, and I use the light of that to grab my phone and check the time. Almost midnight.
Midnight in a creepy mansion. Great.
But it’s my damn mansion, and it’s not like I was awoken by the ghost of my dead uncle or anything. I’m not really the type to give in to those sort of nerves. Easier to give the world the middle finger.
Heading across the hall, I hit the bathroom. It’s weirdly quiet when I step back out, noting that the heavy door muffles the last sounds of the toilet flushing really well.
After that, it’s silence, in a hallway lit by my cell phone light.
Okay maybe a little nerves. I’ll put on some youtube videos to pass out to properly.
So I push my way back into my room... only to find it isn’t my room. It’s a smaller room, with couches in a circle.
It’s way, way too easy to get turned around in here. I’m lost going across the hall to the bathroom. This is incredibly dumb.
I try the next door over, but it opens onto a room with multiple desks set up with hard wooden chairs. There’s no light coming in through the windows, and I remember it being a new moon tonight or at least so close to it that it might as well be.
“Fucking hell, I didn’t walk that far.”
I step back out, and trail back down the hallway past the room I’d checked before, and open this door.
A pan of my phone light across the walls shows another room that’s not mine, but that was apparent the moment I noticed the lack of TV glow.
This room has lushly paneled wood walls, multiple high-backed chairs each with a single small table with an ashtay on it, and a strange horn shaped hood hanging on one wall. The room smelled rich in a weird way, but it was the sight of a large glass fronted wooden cupboard in one corner that made it click. I’d actually seen one of these before, as my ex was really into smoking.
“A humidor. It’s a cigar room. I have a cigar room in my house.” I sigh, and then get indignant.
“Where the fuck is my room?”
Leaving the smoky smelling room behind, I look up and down the hallway and decide to reorient myself. My room was only three doors down from the foyer, so I’ll just walk until I get to the foyer again and then count the doors back. Easy.
It’s a quiet walk down the hall, and it clicks to me that it’s especially quiet because there’s no ambient noise outside. I’m at the edge of town away from any traffic. I doubt many people are in the local neighborhood either based on the looks of nearby buildings.
I reach the foyer after what seemed like a weirdly long walk past too many doors, and pause. It’s big enough that my phone light doesn’t illuminate much of it, and I consider the lights.
But the only switch I remember is near the doors, and I don’t want to leave lights on all over. It seems silly but I don’t know how much this place costs to power. I can’t afford to light the building just because I got turned around at night.
Tomorrow. Signs on every door. Walls too.
Sighing, I locate the front doors to get my bearings and make sure I’m headed in the right direction, and then backtrack down the hallway and count off the doors. I feel faintly ashamed that I managed to get lost while going to the bathroom.
I open the third door down, my room.
It’s a bathroom. Salmon pink walls, fluffy towels, and a fluffy pink seat cover on the toilet. It’s fairly small and cozy, with a frosted glass window above the tub.
“What the fuck.”
Okay no, this doesn’t make any sense. I feel like I’m being screwed with.
So I try the door across the hallway.
It’s another bathroom. Executive looking, with chessboard tiled floors. Literally chessboard, with symbols of each piece in the opposite color on each tile. The towels are varied black and white, and there’s no tub but a large open standing shower, with a window paneled back and forth between frosted white glass and shaded darkened glass. The fixtures are all polished chrome.
Wait. That doesn’t make sense. Both sides of the hallway can’t have windows. There’s no courtyard or anything, the interior rooms don’t have windows.
My heart is beating in my ears from what feels like an impending panic attack, but I bash that down. I’m not gonna do panic here. I don’t panic.
Instead I decide to get pissed. I’m being fucked with.
I don’t know how or who, but I’m being fucked with.
So be it, assholes.
I walk with a determined pace back down the hallway, not bothering to count off the rooms. I’ll begin at the foyer and I’ll turn on the lights and just open every damn door down the hall until I find my room. And then I’m staying there until morning. I’ll figure out what to do after that.
I reach the foyer, thoroughly annoyed, and make a beeline straight for the switch next to the doors. I tell myself I shouldn’t have to turn on the lights to deal with this shit.
When I reach it, I discover that somehow that choice has already been taken away. The switch is gone.
I eyeball the front door, and consider sleeping in my car.
But my stuff is in here, as well as my blanket and pillow. Plus I’m pissed off at this now. I was always told that getting angry and stubborn was a bad habit but in this case it drives my footsteps forth as I walk back to the hall to begin opening doors. There can’t be that many in my house, even if it feels like a maze.
But when I enter the hallway, I find a lack of doors. There simply aren’t any on either side, heading back into the darkness beyond what my phone light can show me.
“Fuck you!” I call out into the darkness, before heading down the hallway.
It goes on for far further than I thing fits in my house, and I wonder if maybe I’m on some prank show. Maybe someone hauled me to a TV set with moving rooms while I was passed out, and this whole mansion deal was a lure in to film the dumb waitress being lost and scared.
If so I hope I’m ruining the experience. I probably should have read all the paperwork to make sure I hadn’t signed up for something stupid.
I keep expecting any door to appear, but instead I find myself walking out into what seems to be the foyer again, from the other side.
I walk out into the middle of the large space, staring out into the room only lit by a single LED on my phone.
“What the fuck do you want?” I call out into the darkness.
Nothing answers. The house is as silent as the tomb. Which I decide is a dreadful metaphor in this situation.
I raise my voice and shout out.
“If you’re trying to get me to leave, fuck you! I quit my job, I’ve given up my apartment, and I’ve got nowhere else to go! I’m staying!”
The silence drags on, and I grit my teeth.
“I inherited it, so this is my home now.” I say to myself, a lot quieter.
A click sounds from across the room.
Raising my phone in that direction, I see the double doors between the stairs are standing open. They definitely hadn’t been before.
If I’m being haunted, whatever it is just gave me a clear message of where to go, and I might as well follow. So I head through toward the Rear Foyer.
However, instead of a hallway connecting the two, I find myself in a large circular room.
My light pans across, and I can see two couches facing each other in the center of the room, with a coffee table between. The floor is hardwood, with an intricately patterened rug centered beneath the furniture.
It’s all in shades of purple. Even the wood floor, which I didn’t know came in purple.
I’d wondered about it, and now I’d found it. I’m guessing this is the Purple Parlor.
I look toward the walls, expecting the two things the Black and White Parlors had, but am surprised to find two grandfather clocks at opposite sides of the room. They’re both a deep purple color, but one has black trim while the other is white.
These clocks don’t need to be restarted. They’re ticking steadily, easily audible in the otherwise silent house.
A wobble of my phone light draws my attention upward, and I see the ceiling. I found the picture.
The ceiling is slightly domed, arching above the room gracefully. The painting on it isn’t the same monocolor as the other rooms, however. It’s a full mural of the house, in blacks, whites, and purples. Vividly done, it’s hypnotic to look at with a strangely 3D depth to it.
As I stare up in wonder, I hear another click that draws my attention back down.
The doors across from me were open, leading to the Rear Foyer. This time I can see more than darkness beyond, as the light of the moon outside shines through what I recognize to be the violet stained glass of the rear door. I’d remarked on it as we passed by.
However...
There wasn’t a moon out tonight. It was pitch black out there. If so then what’s that light?
I feel like I’m being lead somewhere, but where? And why?
What other choice do I have, beyond following this?
But as soon as I wonder this, I hear a click behind me. I’m getting kinda sick of those by now.
As I whirl I see that the room around me has four more doors, in opposite sides of the room around me. With those, the clocks, and the foyer doors this gives me a sort of eight-pointed compass in this room.
But the noise hadn’t been any of those opening. It’d been the front door.
I look across the Front Foyer, and see the porch. It’s lit by a light above, and the doors stand open for me. It’s an offer, another choice. Along with the other four doors.
The question is, what door do I take?
Exit out into the night air and take a breather, try any one of these doors around me, or open the rear door lit in purple?
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