There are places with so much presence of their own that you wonder how they can contain what’s there, let alone you and all of your own potential.\u00a0 Places you’ve made your marks on count, whether they’re places you’ve lived, or the place you proposed and where she rejected you, or the place in the Alaskan outback where you lost your virginity to that bear, or even the time you had that discussion with your Dad, and you can’t help but think of the rum raisin ice cream he shared with you afterwards.\u00a0 Haunted houses are just one of these places, full of the leavings of previous lives, some of the more deleterious elements like fear and pain absorbed directly into their walls… of course, a house just isn’t haunted without some kind of portal, which is why I actually know of this place.<\/p>\n
She hadn’t bothered to park the bike; just laid it down on its side.\u00a0 I flinched.\u00a0 That meant either she just simply didn’t know better, or she planned on leaving a less traditional way than, “The way we came.”<\/p>\n
“The path into the dark realms?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“It is a path you are familiar with, I have sensed.” Her eyes were even more carefully hidden from me in this darkness.<\/p>\n
I wanted to make an excuse.\u00a0 I certainly hadn’t been asked to close this portal.\u00a0 I’ve known about it for years, but I’ve never been inside.\u00a0 The people within had been hounded by the media, and I couldn’t come up with an excuse, and it would have been rude just to gawk.\u00a0 I am not a trained exorcist, but I made a mental note to start coming up with money for the lessons.\u00a0 (I know, harsh, isn’t it?\u00a0 You’d think we’d trade something more esoteric, like the ectoplasmic skin of a ghost ferret or something, but no, even great dispellers of undead need to eat.)<\/p>\n
“Familiar with in a very vague sort of way.\u00a0 What kind of, um, dark realm are we dealing with, here?”\u00a0 I asked.\u00a0 I’d like to say I didn’t gulp in a very cartoon-y sort of fashion, but a witness might not have backed me up on that one.<\/p>\n
Truth was, I was hoping that the kind of dark realm we’d be visiting would be one where a flashlight would make all the difference.\u00a0 Maybe kind of a, “We just forgot to pay the electric bill,” dark realm.\u00a0 I could think of all sorts of darknesses I liked.\u00a0 Dark skin, dark hair, chocolate, tight we–, let’s just say I can think of yummy darknesses that would be all right with me, and I had a feeling that this was “dark” in that, “gloom and despair” sort of way.\u00a0\u00a0 You know, pits of bones, never enough light to read by (although my mother would have said that was a constant) and probably something out there with an aura of, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to eat your face.\u00a0 Might you have some fancy mustard on you?”<\/p>\n
“There is enough darkness in any mortal simply in its being such, but I believe this one will have ways to the outstretched hand our guide encouraged us to find.”<\/p>\n
I considered it.\u00a0 “The outstretched hand being one that wishes to make a bridge,” I nodded.\u00a0 “You’re thinking,” and I didn’t voice how many “you” might have been being referenced, “to start with a haunting that wants to tell its story, as a bridge between life and death, and then to use that as a portal.\u00a0 Where were we supposed to go from there?”<\/p>\n
“We are to duck beneath its fingers.”<\/p>\n
“We cannot make the story happen, but we have to offer our own power to do it,” I said.\u00a0 “I like the Questor.\u00a0 How did he know what you were going to ask, anyway?”<\/p>\n
“He is one part of an old magic that almost lost itself when the Storm Crow came.\u00a0 There are also the Guides, but besides the cats, none of those have been called to him yet.\u00a0 He may yet bring it back.\u00a0 But that is one of our stories.”\u00a0 I nodded as if I understood.\u00a0 What do the fey call fairy tales they tell their children?<\/p>\n
I followed her around the house.\u00a0 I expected her to just use the same trick she used on the bike to get through the back door, so I was surprised when she stopped there.<\/p>\n
“The threshhold,” she said, making a gesture.<\/p>\n
This one I got.\u00a0 I nodded and tried the door.<\/p>\n
This was one of the places where having no real power was actually a plus.\u00a0 The guys in the big leagues could be hampered simply by not being welcome somewhere, depending on how well the place was warded, and by what.\u00a0 Some creatures could simply never walk in unless the door was opened metaphysically.\u00a0 (I was tempted as a youth to write a book about, “How to keep a vampire waiting,” but then supernatural romance kind of killed the genre.)\u00a0\u00a0 Me, I could only be brought down by an advanced security system.\u00a0 Or, heck, a simple twist lock.<\/p>\n
“It will not be locked,” she said. I wondered how she knew, and then realized that she could have a million pixie spies for all I would be aware, and any one of them could beguile someone to leave the house and forget that they hadn’t locked the back door.<\/p>\n
I tried the door handle just to…prove her right.<\/p>\n
Of course, it proved me wrong.\u00a0 I could be brought down by an advanced security system, or a house so full of…feeling… it was bursting at the seams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Haunted houses are just one of these places, full of the leavings of previous lives, some of the more deleterious elements like fear and pain absorbed directly into their walls… of course, a house just isn’t haunted without some kind of portal, which is why I actually know of this place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-two"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}