Authors: Nicole Lee
“
Well then, congratulations.” Rose said this hesitantly, hoping she would sound convincing. A part of her also thought, why would you even still try to make money at this point in your life? You’re the Bell family, the most privileged group of people probably in the history of this county. Half of the free world could retire on what you make in a day alone. She naturally refrained from sharing these thoughts, but the questions kept digging under her brain.
“
Thank you,” Simon said with a nod. “Now, the trick is not to grow complacent. It’s a good thing I have a lovely wife to keep me humble, and a son I’m very proud of to give me things to look forward to. Rose, hold onto this one, let me tell you that. He’s going to go far in the NFL.”
“
Assuming that’s what I chase after,” Grady said lightly, almost in fear of the thought that he could be heard and an argument or criticism would be let loose at this otherwise agreeable meeting.
“
What are your goals in life, Rose?” Julia asked, finishing off the rest of the libation in her glass.
“
Um, me?” Rose said, trying to think very hard beyond the truth.
“
Grady says you’re interested in cooking.”
“
Brewing,” Grady said quickly with a smirk. Rose kicked his leg under the counter.
“
You have an interest in making beer?” Simon quizzically said.
“
No,” she said. “Well…chemicals. Cleaning products. Maid service, maybe. If that doesn’t work out, I can always become a teacher. I like to -” she stared at Grady out of the corner of her eye, “-inform people of things.”
“
That’s a very noble and modest cause,” Simon said. “Our son’s also told us that you like to study unexplained phenomena as well. Is this true?”
Rose felt her heart sink, while the blood rushed from her head. Cold chills graced her spine for a quick second. Her legs felt like jelly.
“
There’s no shame in it,” Julia said as fast as she could.
“
Well, it’s always been interesting to me. I don’t know if I actually…ha…believe in any of it. But from an imaginative perspective, it’s always captivated me. Yet I can’t speak for others.”
“
We’ve had a few strange happenings in this house,” Simon said. “Odd noises in the middle of the night when there’s no one around but us. Last month Gerard was on vacation, and we heard the sounds of an angry woman above our sleeping quarters. I went up there with a gun, and guess what? No one was visible.”
“
Simon, let’s not let our guest think of us as eccentric millionaires, now.”
“
It’s fine,” Rose said. “I don’t mind. Has anything else happened?”
“
Every now and then, I swear that I see a silhouette in the shape of a woman drop from my ceiling. I have insomnia, you see, and so it happens quite frequently when no one else here is stirring.”
“
Forgive my husband,” Julia said in a shaking voice. “He hasn’t been getting a wink of shut eye at all in recent days. Who’s ready for some dessert?”
Rose found the mention funny, seeing as how they had not even been served their official dinner yet. Clearly Julia was someone who needed sweets in times of stress.
She peered to her right to find that Grady was giving her a strange look, one hinting at not disbelief towards his folks, but rather a sense of open-minded yet ominous conviction in the possible authenticity of the tale.
Soon platters and bowls full of ice cream and cherry cobbler were served. A part of her wondered if they had accommodated the menu to fit what she wanted, rather than what they ordinarily consumed on most off days, if there was such a thing in this family. She and Grady had been dating long enough for him to pick up on what she preferred to eat.
Rose finished off half the bowl of food, knowing that if she were toe at anymore it would surely result in an awful bellyache. She looked across the table to discover that the father was preparing to get up.
“
What are you leaving for?” Julia asked.
“
I need to tell Gerard to tell the cook that the turkey needs to be prepared with a certain garnish, otherwise the entire meal goes to hell. Excuse me.”
While only a few inches away from the table, his foot got caught on one of the legs holding the slab up. He almost fell flat on his stomach, but he regained his composure before losing balance completely. Rose watched in fascination as this otherwise sophisticated gentleman almost fell down, in part because of the drinks he had consumed, when she realized that the table was lifted a few square millimeters off the ground. Rose’s platter of ice cream fell off the table, crashing onto the ground.
Parts of it also landed on her dress.
“
I am so sorry,” Simon said repeatedly.
“
Will it come out?” Grady asked, referring to the blemish on her garment.
“
It will if I get it quickly enough,” Rose said, trying her best to hide the irritation in her voice directed at this strange turn of events.
“
Gerard will get the mess,” Julia said. “We do apologize. Would you like to use our restroom to remove the spot? We have plenty of towels.”
“
Sure,” Rose said, already beginning to feel weary and hopeless with the sudden calamity. Alexis would incontestably never forgive her, despite how it was not her mistake. “Where is it?”
“
Upstairs,” Grady said. “Down the hall to the left, the door at the far end.”
Rose tried to dismiss herself from the dining room politely, and then made her way out into the airy yet intimidating, cold and bare vestibule, climbing the snaking staircase to the second story. She walked down a hallway filled with pastel portraits of leaders, artists, and worlds long dead or forgotten. Rose would have sworn that the eyes of the people depicted within the frames were following her.
She stepped into the bathroom.
It was like a facility that had arrived out of a seventeenth century Royal family’s address. The shower’s frame was made of gold, the mirrors were large and immaculately clean, the floor tiles were coffee colored which provided a nice contrast with the bullion tinge of the rest of the quarters, and it was easily the size of her small cabin. The bath tub was well-nigh a spa, and the ceiling held a wide and meticulously built chandelier that had diamonds hanging from its tips.
Rose walked up to the nearest ample sink, and mulled over her encounter with Grady’s parents so far. They were wild and much less uptight than what she could have pictured beforehand, which was in some ways a relief and in others a sort of unexpected form of behavior. While amazed at their youthful vigor, she was still happy that they were courteous, albeit disappointed that Grady had told them she knew a lot about the paranormal.
She continued these thoughts while applying pressure with the pointed end of a dampened towel upon the discoloration, happy to see that it was beginning to evaporate with the clout of steam and moisture.
Looking into the glass, she figured it would not hurt to apply a bit more makeup, some of which had faded through out the course of the evening. She reached into her pocket and retrieved her kit, opening it up and then laying a few touch ups around her cheeks with the black brush. This was before she opened up the mirror to put a few more utensils on the inside shelf, with the faith that she would have more room to move her arms. Art required freedom, or so she had always been told.
A second within putting the mirror back in place, she learned that there was a woman standing behind her.
It was Karen.
“
Hi Mom.”
Hemera took a few steps back, a malicious grin forming. “You thought you were rid of me.”
“
I’m not that optimistic.”
“
It took a lot of energy to get back here.”
“
I’m sure it did.”
Karen was silent for a moment, and then leaned against the far wall, staring at Rose carefully in the mirror. It took a while before the daughter turned around to directly face her to notice how much she had changed. Her mother had seemed to age greatly within the past two days. The older witch’s hair was grayer, the crow’s feet beneath her eyes had become noticeably larger, and a noticeable quantity of weight had been lost.
“
You know what I’m going to do to you?”
“
Please,” Rose said. “I know you have no powers left. You might be able to pinch my arm without touching me, but that’s it. If you’re going to challenge me now, then it will be you who will lose. You’ll go right back to where you came from.”
Instead of saying anything, Hemera grunted instead.
“
Why have you always treated me badly, Mom?”
“
That’s not true,” she said. “Everything I did was for the best. You got everything you wanted and then some in life, so don’t start with me about your tortured past.”
“
Do you remember what happened when you sent me to the fireplace, Karen?”
She snorted. “I loved you before you grew up to be a disappointment.”
Rose laughed to agitate her even further. “Really? Then again, let me rekindle the hearth story.”
Long ago, on August twenty-fifth of nineteen ninety seven, Rose was trying to count how many boyfriends her mother had gone through. It made her eventually wonder if her Mom ever became as confused, if not more so, than she did in trying to remember them.
Most of them ended up being awkward encounters. The new lovers would come downstairs and eat a hearty breakfast in the morning, ninety five percent of them wearing a dopey grin on their faces, ones hinting at the thought, am I truly getting away with this?
Sadly, the answer was no. A lot of them began dying in gruesome and unexpected ways.
One was ran over by a Double Decker bus in a country where such public transportation was rare, if not entirely impossible to find.
Another existence was ended by sky diving, for both the first and the backup parachute failed to open. This depressed Rose, because she thought of him as a good man. A third, according the Oregon Times, had a tree crush him, in the middle of the Mojave desert no less, where such a natural growth was unexplainable.
Rose was too young to connect the pieces, not yet mature enough to conclude that her mother was placing curses on these ex-boyfriends and one night stands, leading to their inevitably strange demises. Later on in life, she would find herself unmercifully saddened by the ends of the guys for a very long time because of how the vast majority of them were, despite their promiscuity, decent human beings merely lead into the perilous web of a black widow, a bitter divorcee who was never going to give men the benefit of the doubt.
There was the twenty five percent of her mother’s love affairs who were not at all fun to be around. This smaller minority was genuinely mentally dysfunctional. They were sadistic to the very core, born of evil’s purest essence.
One put a shotgun in Rose’s face, laughing at her while she stared down the barrel. The gun was unloaded, granted, although that hardly made a difference. When that man was later kicked out of the house, which was not until four months after this fact, she had no idea what became of him. She knew that no curse in the world, no matter how black, was contentious enough for someone like him.
Rose was able to look past the domestically induced timidity within once and ask her mother why there were always so many ‘fathers’ entering and leaving every single week. Karen was washing dishes at the time, preparing to make her infamously terrible tuna and vinegar sandwiches. The weather channel was on mute in the corner.
“
Honey, life is too short to go through it without keeping your choices open. Trust me. You’ll know that one day.”
“
Why can’t you just go back and stay with Dad?”
Not within a single second after this phrase was spoken, her mother unleashed the kind of angry scream that not even someone who was being caustically murdered could create. She began throwing plates, silverware, and spatula’s at the adjoining wall. They broke into fragments on the already dirty floor, before she turned around and positioned herself on her knees, getting closer to her child.
“
Your father is scum.”
“
That’s not true,” Rose said. “Damian is sweet.”
“
No one can ever utter condescension to me in any form. Understand?”
“
Mommy, I wasn’t trying to-”
“
Shut up. Go outside.”
Rose walked into the backyard, already feeling the tears well up. Distant barks could be heard. She was handed a pail of water soon after that.
“
Go and hydrate Bill’s dogs.”
“
Who is he?”
“
Bill is a wonderful man who will be staying with us for the night. Now walk into their pen.”
She felt herself pushed so hard that the shove almost pummeled her to the ground. Regaining her balance, she walked to the white gates, staring at two of the ugliest pit bulls she had ever lain eyes on. The front was unlatched by Hemera, who readily kicked her into the small and foreboding arena.
The following ten minutes turned out to be a blurred repressed memory later on in her years, one swimming with pain and frustration at not being able to break out. It was far from being the animals fault that they were not properly trained to be civil towards kids, nor could the blame be put on them for digging their claws into her skin and tossing her around for being an intruder in their space. It was Karen’s doing.