Drawtober 2023: Moonlit Conservatory
My feet fly over the floor of the House, the wood creaking in protest as I pursue the darkened figure. Doorways flash past, wallpapers streaming together in a swirl of jewel tones. The figure always stays just ahead of me, always just out of sight. But they’ll have to stop sometime—the House is labyrinthine, but it is not eternal, and they will eventually come to a room from which they can’t run.
Ahead, they turns a corner, vanishing through a door. I pursue them, breath coming in sawing pants as I push through after them—
—and find myself in the conservatory.
I pause on the threshold. Moonlight fills the room through the huge glass windows, edging the plants in silver. A fountain, water trickling out of the mouth of a stone sea serpent, sits in one corner of the room, ringed with wrought-iron furniture that glows black in the dim light. The air in here is thick with moisture and heavy with floral scents. There is only one other door from this room, leading out into the cemetery, and it is padlocked. The Keeper has the only key.
I take a few steps forward, feet echoing on the tile. “Show yourself,” I demand loudly. “I know you came in here.”
Nothing but the sound of trickling water greets me. I shut the door behind me, flicking the lock, and peer around the room. There are no electric lights in here, and I didn’t bring a flashlight, so all I have to go by is the dim illumination coming through the windows. But as I look around, peering past plants and circling the fountain, I find no one lurking in the corners.
The figure, whoever they are, is gone.
Irritated, I sink into a rattan chair beside one of the windows and catch my chin in my hands. How had they gotten past me? It seems impossible that I could have chased them all this way, only for them to escape. They could be a spirit, I suppose, and simply drift through the walls. Or perhaps a vampire like Mircalla, riding moonbeams through glass. But neither of those strikes me as particularly likely.
Something tickles my arm, and I turn. One of the moonflower vines has overgrown its pot, twining around the chair and gently brushing my skin. I run a finger over the petals, leaning in to take a deep breath of the moonflower’s citrusy scent.
Nothing meets my nose.
I lean back, frowning. It looks fine—the petals are a healthy white, the vines an emerald green. But the flower itself smells like nothing at all, even as I take in another breath. Perhaps I haven’t been watering them enough? Or they need fertilizer?
The rattan chair creaks as I sit back with a long sigh. This is too much to think of now. The events of the night press down on me, as heavy as the humid air, and I feel sleep weighing on my eyelids. I should get up. I should do another pass around the conservatory. I should make sure that the intruder truly isn’t in here.
But instead, I let my eyes fall shut. Just for a few minutes, I tell myself. Just to rest my eyes. Just a few…minutes…
#
There is a funeral in the cemetery.
Above the House, gray clouds swirl, forbidding and heavy with rain. At the far end of the cemetery, a crowd of mourners gather around a recently dug grave, some of them holding umbrellas in defense against the ominous sky.
I step out of the House’s back door with a sense of confusion, unable to look away from the crowd. Surely, I would have remembered if there was a funeral today. Even though the House has a cemetery, proper funerals are surprisingly uncommon. Most of the time, graves just…pop up. I never got a straight explanation for it from Jack when he was Keeper. It has something to do with people having a certain affinity with the crossroads, or something like that.
I step down from the porch, my feet sinking into the muddy path that leads through the center of the graveyard. No one looks up as I approach, intent on the coffin being lowered into the earth. The faces in the crowd are abstracted, their individual expressions impossible for me to make out, like a smeared oil painting. All but one.
A red-haired man—only a few years into his twenties, I think—stands near the head of the grave. He wears a heavy black coat and a bright red scarf the same color as his hair. Unlike the rest of the mourners, his eyes are not on the coffin.
He is looking at me.
My heart lurches at the sight of him. There is something so familiar about him, something that teases the edges of my memory. I know him. But I don’t know how I know him, nor from where. It makes me ache with an emotion I can barely put a name to, something too sharp to be sadness and too distant to be anger.
He takes a step toward me, and reflexively, I step back. Fear suddenly spikes as I look at the scene, at the young man now pacing toward me. He was standing in the Keeper’s place, I realize. He was standing in my place at the head of the grave.
Turning, I try to flee back into the House. But the path is muddy, and my feet slip out from under me, and I am falling, falling—
#
I wake with a start. The late October sun is shining through the glass of the conservatory, illuminating the fountain and the flowers. It is morning. I fell asleep.
My bones ache as I begin to sit up, then pause. A familiar tartan blanket, red and orange and dusty brown, slides off my shoulders to pool in my lap. Someone placed it over me last night while I slept here.
A chill creeps through me as I peer over the conservatory, my eyes finally landing on the back door. I hadn’t bothered to check it last night. I have the only key, after all, and the padlock is heavy and old.
But now, in the bright light of the October morning, I’m able to see everything more clearly. The back door stands slightly ajar, lock hanging from one side as a chill breeze pushes into the room from the cemetery beyond. The intruder, whoever they are, must have gone out that way last night.
They must have come back in that way too, I realize. It was the only way the could have gotten back in to put my own comforter over me while I slept, blithely unaware that they were even in the room.
