Chapter 3 - Old Boxes

“The mansion,” Mrs. Park said, “was built around 1885. We know that much because someone found the plans for it.”

I put down the box I was holding while shifting my fingers so they wouldn’t get pinched between the bottom of the box and the floor. I was a slow learner, but getting knocked around by a bunch of wooden boxes for three hours will teach anyone.

During a break, I’d used my phone to look up when cardboard boxes were invented. China had them as far back as the 1600s, but, apparently, Big Jacky or the original owner of the house had decided that cardboard boxes weren’t good enough for long-term storage.

I decided that whoever had made that choice should be required, by law, to move them around for cleaning.

There was a quiet thunk-thunk when the box landed. I stood up and turned to Mrs. Park. She had paused to look at me. Sunlight was streaming in from the window behind her, and the bare, ancient light bulb suspended above us gave off a dull orange glow. With the light and the dust in the air, it looked like she was standing in a golden halo.

“Everything else,” she said, “is a mystery.”

“But if they found the plans for the mansion,” I said, “wouldn’t they know who the owner was?”

Mrs. Park shook her head. “The plans were kept by the architect who’d designed the home, and they were passed down through his family. Mr. Noctis didn’t even know about them until I told him. He seemed rather excited about it, actually.”

“Oh?”

“He paid to have a copy made. I found them on his desk once.”

I jabbed an accusing finger in her direction. “You were snooping.”

She clicked her tongue and made an agh noise. “Hardly. I was cleaning his study. If you leave something laying out, you take your chances. I can’t clean blindfolded.”

I lowered my hand. “Okay, but how did you learn about the plans?”

“Oh, you know…” She smiled at me. “I was snooping.”

I grinned.

She turned and picked up the vacuum so she could move it out of the way.

“An ad had appeared in the paper,” she said. “‘Looking for a housekeeper, large job, flexible hours, good pay’—and it gave the address to the Noctis mansion. I went looking for any information I could find about the place.”

Mrs. Park put the vacuum down and picked up her cleaning carrier. It had a pile of unused microfiber cloths, several squirt bottles, and various other tools. We had finished vacuuming the dust off the boxes and were about to start dry dusting the few pieces of furniture that were too big to store in a box.

“Of course I’d heard of the mansion before,” she said. “Everyone who lives in Quicholt has heard of the mansion.”

“Really?”

She picked up a cloth and pulled out the first piece of furniture. It was a dining chair.

“This is a small town, Emerra. You don’t think they’d talk about the mysterious old house hidden up in the mountains? We knew that people lived here, but we had no idea how many or who they were. Oh, the rumors.”

There was something delicious about my everyday life being someone else’s mystery.

I dropped to my butt beside Mrs. Park and crossed my legs. “Tell me about the rumors.”

“Well,” she said, “my favorite rumor was that there was a group of drugged-out artists up here having an orgy every night.”

I grinned at the former hippie. “Yeah, I’ll bet that rumor didn’t bother you much.”

“Those kinds of rumors are always exaggerated. A little something in the brownies, maybe a psychedelic or two that only a few people try. Then you go home and people are saying it was the most tripped-out party of the century. You had to check that there weren’t two parties that night. Anyway, I was more excited by the idea of being around artists.”

If I glowed any brighter, I would outshine the useless light bulb.

“What else did they say?” I prompted.

“That it was a drug den where the Colombians kept their stash before distributing it.” She paused long enough to raise a finger. “That rumor made me more nervous.” She went back to dusting. “Let’s see…a criminal hideout, a home for protected witnesses, a get-away for the rich and famous where they could avoid the paparazzi—a detox place for the rich and famous. But the rumor that came closest to the truth was that it was the home of a disfigured millionaire recluse.”

“Big Jacky?”

“Oh, I know he’s not disfigured, but he is a bit of a recluse.”

Personally, I would’ve granted him the “disfigured” descriptor a lot sooner than “recluse,” but Mrs. Park didn’t see a skeleton when she looked at him, and Big Jacky rarely went into town. Even if he was always disappearing to random parts of the globe, you had to be seen in town or it didn’t count.

Mrs. Park went on, “When the ad came out, the other housekeepers were too nervous to apply. I have to presume they didn’t want to deal with the drug lords.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I was so curious that it was eating me up. And I suspected that the rumor about the drug lords was wrong. I’d seen Darius in town once or twice. He seemed like a nice man. Tasteful, polite, and charming.”

It was probably a good thing the vampire was the ambassador to our home—though, that might have been where the rumor about the house full of protected witnesses came from.

Huh! Maybe that rumor was the closest to the truth.

Mrs. Park said, “I figured, why not apply? I didn’t have to take the job if I didn’t want to. During the interview, I’d see the mansion and find out who lived there, and if the recluse was too grumpy, I could quit!”

I was grinning again. Mrs. Park had that effect on me.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“What did you think when you got here?” I asked.

Mrs. Park cast a look my way. “Now, Emerra, you have to understand, when I arrived, Mr. Noctis and Darius were the ones who conducted the interview and showed me around the house.”

That made sense. They both looked human (to most people), and Big Jacky was supposed to be the boss.

But that didn’t explain Mrs. Park’s guarded tone.

“I thought they were lovers,” she said.

My laugh echoed over the whole third floor.

She continued in a more relaxed voice, “This was twenty years ago, mind you. It was a lot less acceptable back then. I thought that was why they avoided the town.”

I put my elbow on my knee so I could rest my cheek on my fist as I gazed up at her. “But you didn’t mind?”

Mrs. Park looked offended. “Of course not.”

I lifted my cheek from my fist so I could make a peace sign. “Free love.”

She set aside the dining chair. “Move this over by all those other boxes, would you, dear? We’ll want to do the floor before we put them back.”

I stood up and moved the chair while she hauled out a four-foot wide, two-and-a-half-foot tall, oval mirror that must have once looked smashing hanging over one of the fireplaces. All the filigrees and flourishes on the frame needed some serious detail dusting. She pulled out a toothbrush and fresh cloth.

I put the chair aside and came back to her. “What happened next?”

“Next they took me around the house, introduced me to Ingvar—”

“And how did that go?”

“Well, he was a bit moody that day”—she said as if he wasn’t “moody” every day of his life—“but I could respect how well he cared for the kitchen. Darius and Mr. Noctis talked to me about pay, benefits—all that. I liked the house, and the pay was generous, so I told them I’d take it. Darius said there was one more thing they had to discuss before I could be hired.”

I hooked my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and waited.

“They took me into Mr. Noctis’s study and told me that there were some things I couldn’t talk about—that there was an ‘expectation of secrecy that was supported by law.’ Darius assured me that I was welcome to quit at any time, but before they told me anymore and before I could be hired, I’d have to sign something saying that I wouldn’t talk about it to anyone, or I could be sued or some-such.”

I said, “I’ll bet by that time you were too curious to even read the document.”

Mrs. Park wagged the dusting toothbrush at me. “Always read your contracts, Emerra.”

“Okay. But how fast did you read it?”

“I might have been reading a little faster than normal. It said exactly what they told me it would. When I was done signing, they took me in to meet Iset.”

We both went quiet. Mrs. Park was remembering twenty years back while I was remembering six months back. The shock. The growing dread as the part of your brain left over from when humans evolved away from lizards screams about how the thing you’re looking at isn’t human. Then Iset’s soft voice, and the sense of awe.

Mrs. Park went on, “All those rumors, and the only thing they got right was that this was a bit of a strange place.”

My nose scrunched up, making tiny wrinkles over the bridge. That’s what happens when I find something funny, but I’m not about to laugh. “Only a bit?”

Mrs. Park dusted on, and she somehow managed to make her dusting look cheerful. “I don’t mind. It makes life interesting, and it gives me special status. Whenever I walk through town, everyone points and whispers, ‘There goes old Mrs. Park. She works at the mansion, you know.’ And whenever they ask me questions, I get to give them my best mysterious smile.” She looked at me. “That infuriates them.”

My smile was wide and almost as bright as the impish twinkle in Mrs. Park’s eyes. “I’m so glad they hired you.”

She let out a quiet tongue click and an equally quiet, “oh, you.” I couldn’t see a blush, but I figured that she was flustered. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that last line. But it was true! And if I was going to bother watching what I said, I’d rather save it for when I was about to say something stupid— not something sentimental.

Mrs. Park said, “I don’t suppose they had much choice. I was the only one who applied. Emma Johnson told me that she was thinking about it, but she must have decided that she’d rather drive two hours to get to work than risk working in ‘a place of evil.’”

I threw back my head and laughed. “A place of evil?”

“Oh, undoubtedly.”

I took a step closer and lowered my butt to my heels so our heads would be level. “Full of monsters and weirdos?”

“Now, Emerra, what would Conrad think if he heard you say that?”

“It’s okay. He already knows I’m a weirdo.” I dropped back to sit on the floor. “I guess I’ll have to practice my evil laugh so I can fit in.”

I was working my way up to a good “bwahahahaha!” when Mrs. Park interrupted.

“You’re not evil.”

“No, no! Give me a minute. I have to warm up my throat first.”

Mrs. Park put down the toothbrush and reached for the dusting cloth. “You could have a laugh like the Wicked Witch, you still wouldn’t be evil.”

“Is that a challenge? I feel challenged.”

Mrs. Park didn’t seem to hear me. “Emma would probably call it heresy, but the older I get, the more I think there’s very little real evil in this world.”

My smile faded. Mrs. Park was being serious. More serious than I’d ever seen her before.

She went on, “I think that most of what people call evil is nothing but plain old garden-variety selfishness.”

She finished wiping down the front side of the mirror. Rather than move to the other side, she took advantage of all that open space we’d cleared to spin it around. The quiet noise of the frame shifting across the grain of the wooden floorboard sounded loud in the sudden silence.

“Is there a difference?” I asked.

Mrs. Park glanced at me. Then looked back down at her work. “I think so. In my book, for it to be real evil, a person has to want to hurt someone. With selfishness, all you have to do is not think about how what you’re doing might hurt others.”

“Or not care,” I said.

There was a tiny hitch in Mrs. Park’s dusting. “Yes, I suppose there is that.”

“And either way, someone gets hurt.”

Mrs. Park stopped and looked at me, but she didn’t say anything.

A part of my brain was ordering me to shut up, but a numb, buzzy feeling had filled my ears, making it easy to ignore.

“To the person who’s been hurt,” I said, “it doesn’t matter if they meant to do it or not. It still hurts.”

Mrs. Park reached out with her gloved hand, took my hand, and gave it a squeeze. “Oh, I know, dear. I know.”

Her sympathetic touch was enough to bring me back to my senses. My cheeks flushed. I looked down and swallowed.

Too much, Emerra. Tone it back.

Mrs. Park let go of my hand and picked up her rag again. “Maybe selfishness is evil—a sad thought—but I still think it makes a difference. At least to the person who did the hurting.”

I sighed through my nose and looked over the displaced storage room.

There was something sad about the idea that selfishness was evil. Maybe because everyone was selfish, and despite my evil laugh, I wanted to think of myself as a good person. That was important to me. I wasn’t like them.

But maybe they didn’t think of themselves as bad people either. Maybe that was the point. My mind shifted, and I found myself looking out from a perspective I’d never considered before.

To want to hurt someone took an anger hot enough to make my stomach clench around it. Not caring if what you did hurt others was something cold and hard, like a mind freezing from the outside in. But to not think of others…

I waited.

Nothing. Just a void where my reaction should’ve been. And that absence of hatred or detachment made a difference. Mrs. Park was right, and for some unfathomable reason, that irked me.

I let out a weird noise—something like hum-muh-mun-hun-ugh—while shuffling my hands over my scalp. Pre-chemotherapy, I would’ve been mussing up my own hair. These days, I was shining the cue ball. I looked up at Mrs. Park.

“Do you think philosophers get headaches when their thoughts get too big for their heads?”

Mrs. Park said, “I always assumed that to be a philosopher you had to have an unusually big head to start with.”

We looked at each other and smiled.

Mrs. Park tossed her dusting rag over to the dirty pile and stood up while spinning the mirror back around. “What do you say, Emerra? Can you handle this one? It’s rather heavy, and we can’t drag it around without scratching up the floor.”

I hopped up. “No problem.”

I walked over to the front of the mirror. Mrs. Park stepped to the side while still keeping one hand on the top of the frame so it wouldn’t fall over. I bent at the knees, put my hands under the mirror, and lifted.

As the mirror rose, I caught a glimpse of its reflective face.

I could see my arms, my shirt, and the top of my jeans—but behind and all around me were a hundred other figures—rows of them—crowds. Human shapes. Shades with unfinished faces. Some of them were looming over my shoulders, others were tiny figures almost lost in the background. All of them were white with a tinge of sickly blue-green wafting from their unstable edges, and all of their glowing white eyes were staring right at me.

I gasped and dropped the mirror. It shattered with a sound that made Mrs. Park yelp.

The light bulb above our heads went out.