Page 74 of Black Curtain

“What do you think?” he asked finally.

Black had walked to the opposite side of the room to turn on a light switch as soon as the sitting room returned to how it had looked when we first walked in. I glanced around, realizing for the first time justhowdifferent it was, compared to the “older” version of the house and room. The version the apparitions had shared had been so much fuller, imbued with so much more warmth and life.

Now, the ceramic swans, eagles, deer and quail had vanished.

There had been a whole row of elaborately painted ceramic vases with flowers on the mantle of the fireplace, along with a gold-framed mirror. I had thought a lot of paintings lived on the walls when we first walked in, but back when Brick’s family lived here, paintings positivelycoveredthe walls, so many you could scarcely see the wallpaper. Thick curtains covered the windows on both sides, and brightly colored rugs covered the floors. There had been piles of cut wood, an iron tea pot. Embroidered pillows decorated the couch. There had been pipes and dogs and the smell of tobacco and sex and warm wine.

Now everything looked bare and dead.

“I don’t know,” I said, still staring around the room as I answered Black.

I was still thinking when a yell rose from another part of the house.

* * *

“Is he just fucking with us?” Jax muttered.

The seer with the purple irises stared at another, disturbingly real-looking apparition, this one in a downstairs room towards the back of the house, one that appeared to be a library or reading room. It might also have been used as a study, depending on the furniture, or even a game room.

It was difficult to tell for certain with most of the furniture gone, and all the tall windows covered with metal sheets. Thick, moth-eaten curtains covered the glass on the inside. From their faded colors now, I guessed they had once been red or purple. Black moved them aside to study the glass frames and their metal coverings and a mouse squeaked and ran into a hole in the wall.

Almost no furniture at all remained in this room, apart from a long, narrow table set against the wall, and a large number of nearly-empty bookshelves. A fireplace no one had bothered to light stood opposite the tall windows.

Like with the apparition Black and I had seen in the sitting room near the foyer, I could see more of how the room used to look when I stood nearer to the body. That’s probably why I came up with “library” as my final guess. When I looked directly at the dead body bleeding out on the floor, I saw flowers just above him, arranged in a French-looking vase on a round, new-looking table covered in lace. Bookshelves stood against three of the four walls, covered with leather-bound volumes, along with a busts and animals stuffed by a taxidermist.

I saw a desk with a stand covered in feathered quills, ink pots and stacks of paper, along with wax and what looked like a formal seal. Potted palms stood by windows that had no metal blocking the sunlight streaming through the glass. A massive globe stood in one corner of the room. The velvet curtains hung brand new and a purple-tinted red.

Velvet pillows filled a reading nook made of windows and a bench.

I saw a cat curled there, snoozing away in afternoon sun.

More palms stood in spots around the room.

More interesting still, under the dead body itself, I saw a new-looking carpet in a style I’d only ever seen in museums. A damask venetian, it contained a center motif of goldfleur-de-lisand red border lines. From there, it deviated. Instead of the normal types of patterns I’d seen in rugs from that time period, this one consisted of black silk decorated with white and red symbols that filled the border all the way around. The symbols themselves were completely new to me. I’d never seen anything like them before.

Something about those symmetrical lines struck me as occult in some way, but honestly, I was just guessing. Really, they could have meant anything.

Right now, those symbols were slowly being soaked with the man’s blood.

I saw a gold figurine near them on the carpet.

I didn’t recognize that either, but it appeared to be in the shape of a dog.

It hit me, staring at it, that it was a depiction of Anubis, the Egyptian god.

It looked authentic, like it had been stolen from a tomb at an Egyptian burial site.

The gold statue had blood on it.

An elaborately carved knife hilt stuck out of the man’s chest.

His eyes stared up, already gray in death.

“They were rich,” Dalejem said, speaking from closer to the fireplace. “Whoever they were, they had a lot of money. Shitloads of money. They traveled. They stole from other parts of the world. Or had others steal for them.”

“Pirates,” Dex muttered.

I nodded. Both things felt true to me.

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