I’m sure some of you are concerned for my safety after my last post. I think that now is the time to update everyone on what has happened since. Many of you in the comments suggested that the footsteps that I heard might be coming from Anya, so I set out looking for her not long after.
It’s strange, seeking out something in this maze. I’d step through a door into the kitchen, hearing footsteps upstairs, then I’d walk through the door into the upstairs bathroom, seemingly hearing footsteps from the next room, only to end up in the attic and hear footsteps below me.
As I made my way around the house, I began to notice some things. The house wasn’t an exact replica of my own. The paint was fresher on the walls. The mirrors were cleaner. The carpets were different colors. Most noticeable of all, though, was that the radio and phone looked like they were from the thirties. I even saw a typewriter.
Eventually, a little under two hours later, I stepped into the kitchen and at last I was faced with Anya.
“Eric! How are you here?” she asked.
“The same way that you got here. How are you alive?” I responded.
“As soon as you leave a room, it returns to its original state, as it was before you set foot in it. That’s why the fridge always restocks itself.” she explained. “No offence, Eric, but you look like you haven’t slept in a while. Or shaved.”
“Kind as ever.” I replied, both of us laughing halfheartedly, still tense from the very nature of our current situation.
“At least you put on some muscle. You used to be like a stick figure.” she laughed again.
“You look a bit different yourself. You’re sense of fashion has changed a bit.” She had changed a lot. Her hair, which I remembered as being shoulder-length, was much longer now. She also appeared thinner and paler, probably from being inside this house for the last five years. More noticeably, however, was the fact that her outfit looked to be from the 1930s.
“These are the best clothes I found in the wardrobe upstairs. They suit me, no?” she smiled sadly. “Eric, why are you here?”
“I.. I guess I though I’d save you, or at least end up being with you.” I frowned.
“Perhaps there is some way that you can save me.” she said after a brief hesitation.
She gestured to the window. Gazing at the trees, I noticed something strange. The branches seemed to be shifting every couple of seconds, appearing on different parts of the trees, then, seconds later, the leaves would be orange, then green, then the tree would be bare of leaves.
Then I saw saw something horrifying. It seemingly regular deer walked by the house, but after a couple of seconds, its antlers and legs were in the wrong place, then its eyes, then its entire head, all appearing on different parts of the body every few seconds, as the poor animal cried out in agony. I heard the same sound from deeper in the woods. Eventually, the deer returned to its regular state, and ran deeper into the woods, before its cries resumed.
“What’s happening to them?” I asked Anya.
“The further they stray from the house, the more distorted they become.” she said solemnly.
“You said I could save you. How?”
“Eric, when I arrived here, I met someone about a month later. There was a woman, Delilah, she claimed to be a witch.”
I was skeptical, obviously, but seconds prior I had seen a deer with its hind legs protruding from its neck, so I figured I’d let her finish speaking.
“Were you close with Caroline, your grandmother, on your father’s side?” she asked me.
“She vanished when I was five. Her mind had been… going… for some time at that point, but my parents always said I was her favorite. Why?”
“Delilah told me that when your grandmother’s mind was going, she visited her, requesting her services. Caroline wanted to go back to her childhood.”
Anya proceeded to recite the story to me. The spell was to feed off of my grandmother’s memories and send her to a pocket dimension mimicking her childhood so that she wouldn’t have to deal with the pains of her old age and failing mind. The plan was that she’d seal herself in her old room that night, disappear from this world and wake up as a child in her 1930s pocket dimension.
Delilah went to checkup on her about ten years after casting the spell, apparently she does the same for all clients. But, when she visited the pocket dimension, she found Anya trapped inside. The pocket dimension had tried to draw on Caroline’s fractured memories, and ended up creating this distortion of her childhood home, constantly trying to replicate it.
“Why didn’t stop it?” I asked Anya.
“Delilah went to confront Caroline, she told me I’d be out in ten minutes. She never came back.” she responded.
“Wait, my grandmother is here? In the house?”
“That’s why I think you can save me. Perhaps she’ll recognize you and end this somehow. It’s our best bet.”
She led me through the house, and after about three hours, we ended up in the upstairs hallway. I looked at the end, the entrance to my grandmother’s old room. Anya and I braced ourselves and walked through the door.
Sitting on the bed was my grandmother, as I remembered her, but a few seconds later it was a young girl, then a middle-aged woman, then a teenage girl, then my elderly grandmother once again.
“Grandma! It’s me, Eric!”
She stopped staring blankly ahead, then blinked a few times, she looked old and confused, but when she met my eyes a look of realization dawned on her face.
“Oh, Eric! You’ve gotten so big!”
“Grandma! You need to stop this! Please!”
She looked much more awake than before.
“I can’t want to go back. I’m close! If I can just get this right, I can go back to when it was easier…”
“I know, grandma. But you’ve been sitting here, trying to recreate this for eighteen years in the real world.”
“Eighteen… Eighteen…”
“Please, grandma. Just let it go. Let us go. You can rest.”
There were tears in her eyes. Then she slammed them shut and I was faced with a skeleton lying down on the bed. Anya and I looked around to see that we were back in the real house, the real world. We hugged each other excitedly. She was crying.
I buried grandma Caroline in the backyard, outside the house. I think she would’ve liked that. The house isn’t cursed anymore, thankfully. Anya is understandably baffled at how much things have changed in the last five years, and she developed has an interest in some real old-timey fashion. I think it might take her a while to adjust.
I’m glad I was given an opportunity to save Anya and give my grandmother some peace.. Even still, though, I hope I wasn’t left anything else cursed in my inheritance.