Like ice cold water, Edgar's screams brought me back to a reality...a reality for which I had always hoped, but how could it be? Lil'Bit, in this house? My skeptical body had yet to catch up to my racing mind, a mind seeing the three of us together, a family - a guy and his girl and their little dog too. Unable to move, struggling with all I have seen, yet praying for Edgar's words to be true, I relented, and in that moment, filled with such color. "I'm coming!" I screamed.Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness of Kristina's home, I realized her place was huge, and I'm not talking New York City huge; just enough room for a bed and a dresser, I'm talking Architectural Digest huge. I had passed by her building, an old bank built back in 1898, hundreds of times and had always assumed it had been renovated and split into many different apartments. As I searched around, trying in vain to pinpoint Edgar's still calling voice, I soon realized this building had no other apartments, no other residents. This building, this whole building was just one home...Kristina's home...a six story, 72 room, 35,000 sq foot mansion, and I thought either Diary Queen pays their shift managers very well or Kristina had even more secrets than this joint has rooms. Yes, more than 72 secrets.
"Edgar, where are you?" I needed a map. I needed one of those mall maps with that You Are Here label. It didn't help that each room looked the same as the one before, decorated in the same drab lifeless motif. Door after creaky door, half expecting to see Shaggy and Scooby and the rest of the gang running through the hallways, in and out and in and out of the rows of doors, chased by werewolves, angry ghouls and ghost pirates, all to a canned laughter soundtrack.
Third floor then the forth. Fifth and then finally on the sixth, at the end of the hall, a light. "Edgar," I whispered loudly, "are you there?" With a confused look on his face, Edgar appeared at the door and motioned for me to join him. "Is it him? Is it Lil'Bit?" I asked. Edgar sort of smiled and said, "Yeah?" Slowly I walk toward the room, frightened of what may or may not be inside. As I took my place beside Edgar, he said quietly, "What's that sound?" "What sound?" I asked, realizing quickly it was my heart, thumping loudly from the six flights of stairs I just climbed but more from the anticipation of what was in that room.
Kristina's room. Not what I had expected but compared to the rest of the house, a pleasant change. Sheer orange curtains fluttered lazily away from the barely opened four windows of the room. The closets and drawers empty, its contents laid about the floor and on the unmade canopy bed. Glasses of water half full or half empty lined the bedside table along with half eaten pizza and peanut butter sandwiches. Dusty antiques, covered paintings, old candle sticks and old clocks all giving different times, and covering the walls, every inch of every wall, more dense than any wall in Heather Mary's room were pictures of a single dog. I stood in amazement. "She wasn't lying," I thought, "she was telling me the truth. It's Lil'Bit." I then turned my head, and in a dark corner of the room, hiding between a cardboard box and an empty gold frame, staring back at me with sad, glassy but still earnest eyes was a small brown dog with a white little face..."Hush," I whispered to Edgar, "don't scare him. It's Lil'Bit."
No comments:
Post a Comment