Page 38 of Changeling
“We have to go…right?” Sasha asked, turning back to the door with tears in his eyes.
Next to Nathan, Jim smiled, all reassuring with his ‘I’m here for you’ look that Nathan was so grateful for at moments like this. “Yeah, we really should,” Jim said. “None of us can move past this room anyway.”
Nathan wanted to grab Sasha by the back of the neck and kiss him until the incubus stopped looking so shattered. He couldn’t yet, though. They didn’t have time. And time seemed to be the key with this place.
Casting Sasha one long look of affection as the incubus moved toward them out of the room, Nathan received an answering smile but still wished he could do more. He couldn't help looking at Walter, still visible nearby in the hallway, as they began tomove for the next room, and again he thought that maybe he was beginning to understand what Walter must feel like, capable of watching and speaking and offering small bits of advice, but of so little else. It was a helpless feeling, not being able to do all that you wanted, or all that you thought the ones you loved needed.
But as Nathan met Walter's warm brown eyes, he didn't see sadness or regret. Instead there was something like relief. Walter looked ahead at Sasha and Jim, then back to Nathan, and he smiled as if to say 'they have you', before he faded away.
The next fifteen rooms went by quickly, leading all the way up to room #100 in jumps of five years. All of the rooms remained plain white with no change when they entered. After all, neither Nathan nor the others had existed 30 years ago
“Okay, so let me make sure I got this,” Nathan said after they had finished with the last room. “This place was originally a family house built way back when, which is why it was declared a historical building. The dead curator turned the place into a museum like sixty years ago when he was still a young guy. So...when did the incidents of people turning up like vegetables first start?”
“Right when it first started giving private tours,” Sasha said, leaning back against one of the plain white walls of the last room. “The curator, a guy named Hollander, never allowed the Historical Society to lay claim to the house. It was a private museum.”
“For what?”
Sasha gaped at Nathan. “For…the tours,” he said lamely. “I guess it’s never been stated to the public what the museum was for. People just assumed—”
“And that was their first mistake,” Nathan cut in. “Okay, so tours. They were pretty consistent over the years but only resulted in vegetables once in a while, meaning some people managed to get through this place fine. That we already know.But why didn’t the police ever tie the incidents to the Animus House in the first place?”
“That’s the best part,” Jim said. “When Hollander was still running the place, the people who came out changed were always found in their hotels or homes or somewhere else, not here. There was no way to trace what happened to them to this house. Not enough hard evidence anyway. The recent squatters were the first positive link."
“Okay,” Nathan nodded, “let’s assume everyone on the tour always makes it through these rooms, looking in on their pasts until they get to the point where they can’t go back any further. Last step’s the third floor.”
Nodding to each other, the three of them headed out of the last room, back onto the landing, and climbed the final set of stairs.
There was no accompanying message scrawled at the top of the stairs this time, but when they got to the third floor they came to a much smaller landing as if they had reached an attic. Before them were two close-set doors. Here there was a long message up high and then separate words directly above each door.
Jim used his flashlight again, since it was darker up here without any windows, and started reading. “Look to the past and you move forward. Stay in the past and you stand still. Seek the future…and you shall fall behind?”
“Great,” Nathan said. "Poetic and all, but what’s it mean?”
“Well,” Sasha supplied with a shrug, “I’d say it means…you should learn from your past without dwelling on it, and if you think too much about the future, you forget to live today. It’s actually a pretty good lesson.”
“With a nasty consequence,” Nathan grumbled.
Jim was still pouring over the Gaelic. “This one could mean 'the present' or 'now',” he said, reading the lone word above the door on the left, “and this one,” he said about the door on theright, “could mean 'future'. So it’s like a riddle. And the answer is either Present or Future. Right. At what point does David Bowie declare his love for us again?”
Nathan snorted. Jim wasn’t completely useless in the pop culture side of things. “At least the riddles inLabyrinthactually get ya thinking,” Nathan said. “This one’s easy. I’ll take door #1, Wink,” he said, smacking Jim on the back.
“Yeah…” Jim said, but he wasn’t looking at door #1.
“Hey,” Nathan insisted, pushing Jim a little harder this time, “eyes on the prize. I’m sure after seeing the past, a lot of people thought that glimpsing their future sounded like a fair deal. But we’re not stupid, remember? It’s pretty damn obvious that going through the Future door, whether you get to see what it suggests or not, dumps you out on the other side a vegetable. I don’t know what the Present door does, but if you ask me, I say we make things simple.”
Sasha and Jim turned to look at Nathan expectantly.
With a grin, Nathan took a small bottle of lighter fluid from his coat pocket. They wouldn’t need much to get a place like this going, old as it was and all wood. “We neutralize both doors and burn the place to the ground. That should nullify the spells and keep anyone new from wandering in. And I'd be willing to bet it'll bring out the dark fae behind this place, too.”
“But Nathan,” Jim objected, “we don’t even know what the spells are. The power of this place may rest in memories, but...” Jim paused a moment, his brow crinkling like he was the biggest idiot in the world. “AnimusHouse. Animus can mean 'memory'. That…really should have dawned on me before now.”
Nathan snorted again. “Who cares.MemoryHouse is going down. Neutralizing and burning the place should work.”
“But…” Jim looked at the future door again. “Think about this, Nathan. Think what we might see. If we could harness this power instead of just destroying it—”
“Hey,” Nathan said sharply, grabbing the collar of Jim’s coat. “You know better than to mess with this shit. It's a trap.”
“Maybe if we onlylookedinside,” Sasha suggested meekly.
