Beneath The Yellow Village

Tolerate It ( Part - I )

ALARIC: "Hey Iris, open the door, or I'll smash it down with a hammer."

I've been trying to find the pendant which Iris inherited from her great grandmother. But it was definitely not my fault. She should have handed it over to me. I only wanted to take a closer look. I was intrigued. I wanted to find out why it keeps glowing.

"No, Alaric, you threw it in that lake because you are jealous." Iris shouts behind her apartment door.

"I didn't do it on purpose." I interrupt.

"Your father's books are out of your reach. Your mother never lets you touch your family heirloom while I walk wearing mine. If you can't find my pendant, we're no more friends." I can hear her sharply sobbing. She has locked herself in her apartment and she is not ready to see my face.

Ah, now what? I'll have to dive into the pond. Look for the necklace. Hand it back to Miss Willow.

It's mid October, the sky is golden yellow this afternoon after the fierce winds that blew away the trees and shrubs of Lake Wisteria last night. Iris is right. I shouldn't have snatched it from her. I couldn't help myself. She says I intentionally threw it in the lake. We both had lost our balance on the bridge. Her foot slipped and the next moment, the pendant was not in my hands. I was holding Iris. She claims she saw me tossing the necklace into the lake.

Does the pendant have any tiny switch? If that's the case, it should have been destroyed in the water by now. I do not believe even a single word written in that ancient looking leather-bound book in the library of The Willow House. It said that the stupid piece of ornament glows around a supernatural entity. If this is true, Iris must be in possession of some sort of abnormal power, because the necklace always glows on her. In either case, I will solve the mystery if I find the necklace anyhow.

IRIS: My parents agreed to give me that necklace on my fifteenth birthday. After months of pleading and requesting, they handed it over to me on a condition that if it ever starts glowing around someone, I would never try to seek any answers. I would treat the necklace only as a piece of jewelry. Alaric should have felt extraordinary because the necklace always let out a dim, rather incandescent, indigo colored glow whenever he approached me, though I never told him about this directly. But now, what does it matter? It is gone. I misplaced it. Alaric is stubborn. When he doesn't get the answers, he sets out on a quest to find them, no matter what the cost is. This adamant behavior, someday, would become the reason of his doom.

I've been his friend since he was ten. He was heartbroken; he is heartbroken. The death of his father on his birthday shattered his raw, innocent heart. His father's dead body was found in the woods of Old Velaris, with no other injuries except a few scratches on the collarbone, but the veins of his wrist were completely drained out of blood. He asks his mother what was his father doing in the woods alone in the middle of the night, with bows and arrows strangely engraved with some unreadable characters, some sort of ancient language which Mrs. Vincent refused to get deciphered. Whenever Alaric questions her, she scorns him off.

I'm afraid Alaric will set out to solve the mystery of Mr. Vincent's death and I hope it just turns out to be an animal attack. He will turn eighteen next year, in March. It is tough for him to survive that month. The way he talks about that incident almost every day, he will definitely chase the answers.

His obsession with my pendant grew when I had invited him to my home. We proudly call it The Willow House, our ancestral home, on my eighteenth birthday. My parents never allowed us to go through the books in the library. They kept the panes locked. They had gone out to bring handpicked blueberries for me from our farm. While Alaric was bouncing his rugby ball up and off the wall, it accidentally hit one of the panes. At least he says that this is how it happened. I came out panicking from the kitchen. I saw him going through a strange leather-bound book. He flipped the pages immediately and apologized for breaking the glass.

"What were you reading in that manuscript?" I enquired.

"Nothing. It tumbled down with the glass, it fell on the floor upside down. I was just checking if the pages were damaged. I'm sorry, Iris." He gave me a momentary, perplexed glance and shifted his eyes to the broken frame hastily.

"Mom and dad are going to eat me alive. I am not allowed to touch those books and neither should I let my friends hover upon them. The least I can do is clean all the glass. Maybe that would bring down their temper a little. I'll find the broom in the backyard, get the pale green towel and the mittens from the second shelf of the counter-top." I rolled my eyes and gestured towards the kitchen when Alaric kept his gaze fixed at me.

Letting out a deep sigh, he finally replied, "Okay, lady boss, you never miss an opportunity to bark orders at me, perks of being my only friend."

He was quick at finding all the stuff. I began removing the big shards of glass and then, out of nowhere, Ric haunted me with the white noise of the vacuum cleaner.

"Hey Iris, we can use this to clean up this mess."

"Smart boy."

"Well, one of us has to be." I shrugged while Alaric dragged me away and started evacuating all the broken pieces of the frame.

"What have you two been up to in our absence?" Mum showed up out of nowhere and that is when I recalled I never shut the door.

Awesome. How irresponsible of me.

I could feel the blood in my mom's veins boiling with fury, though she didn't let it overcome her facial muscles. They seemed absolutely stagnant. I don't understand what is such a big deal if we float around all these books and relics. If these are forbidden, they should just get rid of them, burn them, put them into the waters, deep down, where no one can find them.

"Mom, we are sorry. Trust me, none of us did it on purpose. The rugby ball got too high or something and the glass just-"

"Mrs. Willow, it is my fault. I shouldn't have brought the ball in the house in the first place and definitely shouldn't have been reckless with tossing it up that high." Alaric defended me.

"Alaric, I've told you so many times. Call me Margaret. No formalities. And, it's alright, relax. Iris, I presume we clear this up and never repeat the mistake again. I'll handle your dad. Enjoy your birthday, honey." I was so relieved, I had a leverage, it was my birthday after all. Mom went out to help dad to bring in the berries.

"Ric, never ever put me in this situation again. You know we are not at all allowed to overrule our parents on this. No questions asked." I warned him and he nodded like a good guy, which was abnormal. He would not let it go so smoothly.

My intuitions were so true. He did ask about the necklace on the Wisteria Bridge while we were hanging out there.