PART 3
“I feel like colors aren’t as bright since they died,” Jack told Ethrym, a tree spirit. “And not that I really remember how time passed before… uh, well, before that day, but I get the sense it’s been slower lately.” Jack’s voice was calm, steady, devoid of childlike emotion. It had started to crack as of late, but even so, it was a voice closer in affect to an adult than a child’s.
“Interesting,” said Ethrym, settling its deer body and bobcat head into the grass. “I wonder why that is.”
When Jack awoke on that cursed day, he was on a stretcher, being carried into an ambulance. “You suffered a reaction induced by shock,” the doctor would tell him. He didn’t know what that meant. He wouldn’t get a good explanation for what happened to his parents, nor what happened to his dogs. Chief Rawlings of the Sleepy Grove police wasn’t very helpful about things, his one conversation with Jack was regarding the next steps in finding him a foster home. As a result, Jack was left with a multitude of questions.
In the place of answers, he gained a new ability: he could now see and converse with the spirits of the Sleepy Grove woods. And in the last three years, they’d become his closest friends.
“I read about the idea of repe… repred…”
“Repressed memories?” Ethrym offered.
“Yeah, that. Thing is, as far as I know, I don’t have em’.”
“You wouldn’t know if you did, right?”
“I… I guess not, but that’s not my point. It’s like, I remember it all. That something felt off when I got home. That I couldn’t find my parents. I remember… my dogs, too.”
“Do you wish you could forget those things?”
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s alright, I don’t think you have to be.”
Jack picked a stone out of the grass and turned it over in his hand.
“Hey Ethrym, am I crazy?”
“What, because you can see me?”
“Yup.”
“Perhaps, but how am I supposed to know? All I can tell you is that I exist regardless of whether you’re thinking of me or not, but then again I could just be telling you that. So the best you can do is take my word for it.”
“I’d rather think I’m sane than think I’m crazy.”
“Seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”
“Well alright then,” Jack said, brushing grass and dust off his shorts, “now that we’ve got that settled, I think I’m heading home for the day.”
Jack had a room in the small home of his former teacher, Tanya Reed. She was extremely kind, and compassionate enough to offer Jack a home when it seemed as though he’d have to go through the foster care system. With this being said, Jack thought he made Ms. Reed uncomfortable. He wandered the forest alone each and every day. He didn’t make friends easily, and he wasn’t much of a conversationalist at meals. If anything, Jack seemed to bask in being alone. This was a difficult proposition for the teacher to accept.
Jack entered through the front door, made sure to lock it shut, and shuffled into his room wordlessly. Spaghetti, Jack thought as he took in the smell of the boiling pasta. That’ll be nice. For the most part, he stayed out of Ms. Reed’s way, and she stayed out of his. Jack didn’t think this was so bad. In fact, he thought Ms. Reed was a genuinely good person. He hoped for the best for her, despite knowing the ‘best’ likely involved him moving out.
Jack collapsed onto his bed. He heard a sliding, tapping sound approach his room from down the hallway, and instinctually braced himself. The noise drew closer, closer, until it was just outside his door. Frantic scratching on the wood floor, Jack knew the scene all too well. He opened his eyes to find Ms. Reed’s dog, a golden retriever named Bridges, attempting to stop its momentum. The golden retriever finally built the inertia to launch itself toward Jack, tackling him upon his bed.
Jack still didn’t know how to feel towards dogs. If he knew one thing for sure, it was that he didn’t experience the emotional swell that he used to upon seeing his own pets. It was just… different, somehow. As though with his own dogs, some part of his soul had died with them.
Regardless, Jack found the beginnings of a smile forming on his lips as Bridges tackled him. He was a good boy.
A notification blinked on his computer monitor. It was his fourteenth birthday. Jack waited for some sort of an emotional reaction to manifest within him, and continued to wait a full five minutes. Then, he surmised he probably wasn’t going to feel anything at all, nudged Bridges off his comforter, and took a nap.
*****
Sleepy Grove Christian employed exactly one security guard, and an argument could be made that even this was a waste of funding. The worst act to ever be committed on school grounds was when a group of high school seniors pulled down their principal’s khakis as their senior prank, revealing the principal’s tendency to go commando. A litany of paperwork was to follow, of course.
Each day, he’d patrol the halls of the school, just enough to remind everyone on the premises that Sleepy Grove Christian does, in fact, employ a security guard.
The man was not particularly hard working, and he rarely, if ever, watched the security tapes from the nights prior. If he’d watched the footage from this particular evening, he would have noticed a strange occurrence on an otherwise uneventful night. A 10 year old boy in baby blue swim trunks clandestinely entered the facility, injected himself with an unknown substance, and fell into a pool. He would have seen the facility doors open just two minutes later. He would have seen two similarly sized boys walk through the doors, pull the first boy out of the water, resuscitate his recently deceased body, and leave.
But the security guard was lazy. It was for this reason that Toby Dawson’s secret experiment would remain just that.
*****
Ace’s cell phone flashlight illuminated the depths of the staircase. Said depths stretched farther than her flashlight could show her. Perfect, Ace thought, the best secrets are always buried the deepest. She switched the light off with a tap, and crept downward. She descended at a snail’s pace, as though judging each step’s propensity to fall before setting her weight on it.
When Ace was a child, she meticulously un-carpeted her staircase because of the carpet’s tendency to muffle footsteps. Her parents arrived back from a parent-teacher conference to find their staircase torn to shreds.
“If I’m gonna be attacked,” Ace said, “it won’t be without some preparation. And for preparation, I’ll need to be able to hear the perp walkin’ up the stairs. Really, I’m just doing all of us a solid. You’ll thank me later.”
Ace went back to slicing up the carpet with a pair of kitchen scissors. Her parents exchanged a good, long look at each other, and internally decided it was probably better to never speak of this, as long as they should live. Once they reached that understanding, they took Ace into their living room, and lectured her about putting gum in Franky Martinez’ hair.
Now, Ace was thankful that more people didn’t think like her. She was able to move as silently as an especially stealthy mouse.
At some point, she noticed the sound of a gentle, steady water current. She couldn’t really tell where it came from, the sound seemed to echo around the unknown boundaries of the darkness.
Then, she ran out of stairs to sneak down. Some time had passed, at least five minutes by her estimation, and the police had yet to join her. Ace decided it was unlikely they could find a needle in a stack consisting exclusively of needles.
She explored the wall adjacent to the staircase with her hand, hoping to find some sort of a light switch.
Bingo.
Ace waited a few more moments for any other errant noises that might signify danger, and heard nothing.
She took a deep breath, and flipped the switch.
The room wasn’t as large as she’d assumed. It was roughly the size of an average classroom. Pale, sterile walls encased a deep, velvet carpet. Several banners with strange glyphs hung from the walls, and two bookshelves stood sentry on either side of the wall opposite to Ace. In the center of the chamber was what looked to be some sort of an altar made of marble. Ace walked over to it, laying a hand on the surface. The marble was far cooler than the rest of the room, it gave her goosebumps. A single, leatherbound book sat squarely in the center of the altar. Ace picked it up, weighing it in her hands, then opened to the first page.
The Ace kept flipping, flipping, flipping, an increasingly disturbed expression settling on her face. She got to the last page, took a deep breath, and set the book back on the altar.
Inside were drawings, sketches. All of which done in deep red ink (at least, what Ace hoped was ink). The book contained anatomical diagrams of the nerve endings of dozens of animals. Human beings included.
Ace took a step away from the altar, then another for good measure. She sat on the floor, crossed her legs, and allowed the gears in her head to run free. Blood cult, religious hunters, witches, Ace thought, but none of it explained how little was to be found in this damned room. No one constructs a staircase this deep just to hide a few books.
As she continued to process, she heard the trap door open above her.
“Ace, you down there?” McIlroy bellowed.
“Yeah, come on down, bring a couple of the others with you!”
“You okay?”
A moment of silence.
“Shouldn’t you have asked me that first?”
McIlroy’s embarrassment was palpable.
“You’re a real pain in the ass, Ace,” McIlroy said as he left the doorway.
“Alright,” Ace ordered, “your job is simple: run your hands across the walls, push everything you can push, stomp the floor everywhere you can. I’ll bet you boys a pizza at Skippy’s that this ain’t the only room. There’s a pressure plate, a secret lever, something.”
The police exchanged a look. Pride was not an easy thing to swallow. Then, with a few scattered nods and sighs, they did as the girl said and set to work. Ace watched them for a moment to make sure they were getting on with it, then walked over to the bookcase.
“The thing with tropes,” said Ace’s English teacher, Mr. Nguyen, “is that they’re inexorably tied to our reality. This is why the content of our art informs our perception of the world, and of course the opposite is true as well.”
He cleared his throat, and started walking up and down rows of desks.
“Art is assuredly an output of culture, however it also serves as an input. Understanding this allows us to take control over our influences, and shape society in a way we’d like to see it in the future. Of course, an individual’s actions likely won’t be enough alone, but if enough artists…”
Ace was never much for academics. It was at this point she decided she’d heard enough, and promptly fell asleep at her desk.
Now, Mr. Nguyen’s words echoed in Ace’s head. If life imitates art… then she’d seen enough detective television to have an idea of where this was going. Ace reached the first bookcase, and took a deep breath.
She began pulling each and every book from its place on the shelf, tossing them onto the floor afterward. The books’ titles were exclusively in Latin, or at least that’s what Ace assumed. She got through the first shelf in its entirety, then paced over to the other.
“Ace, uh, what are you-”
“Not now, Mac. I’m working.”
She started on the second bookcase, tossing books just like before.
The thing with tropes…The second book on the third shelf wouldn’t budge. Ace gave it one more tug, and was rewarded by a deep, resonant click. She pulled back on the bookcase, and it swung open on its hinges.
Odds and Ends 
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