Crazy House

Chapter 24: Tangled Web

Crazy House Chapter 24

"Well...I...I mean, I was," I stutter, completely caught off guard, "I was just...I mean."

Amy puts up a hand and I stop talking. I'm not entirely sure if it was a spell, or if she really just holds herself with that much authority, but I suspect it was the later. Either way, my guilt skyrockets. "Juliette, if there is any time to be honest, it's right now. I'm really not in the mood to be lied to again. And don't ask me how I know you were lying, because I've known since you came up with that bullshit reason for needing the visibility spell. You're not very good at making stuff up."

I sigh and nod my head, even though she is wrong about me being a bad liar. I'm way better than I would like to admit. "The truth is," I say, "that I have been sneaking in here for the past week, trying to figure out what's behind that door at the end of the hall. The problem was, I had to actually find the door, since it didn't exactly want to make things easy by being visible. I needed the spell to make it reveal itself, but here's the thing, it turns out, there is no door!" I wait for her to show some kind of excitement, or at the very least interest, but she just continues to stare coolly at me with her arms crossed over her chest, so I move on. "Okay, um well, yeah there is no door. Well, I guess really there is a door, but not really..."

"Juliette, what are you talking about?" Amy sighs. "Is there a door or isn't there?"

"What I mean is, the wall at the end of the hall is an illusion; it's just mist. There is another hallway beyond the fake wall that leads to the real door."

Now I've got Amy's attention, her eyebrows shoot up as soon as I mention the second hallway. "But that doesn't make sense, if you've checked that wall for a week, how would you only now discover that it was mist? I mean, I'm assuming you touched it at least once before tonight."

"I have, you're right, and it was completely solid," I reply, "but I think you need to know that it isn't real, or at the very least suspect, and it will revert to its true state. When I used the visibility spell, it didn't reveal something invisible, rather something that was visible when it shouldn't be. After that, I was able to walk right through it and found the real door."

"Did you go in?" she asks, suddenly much quieter. I nod. "What was in there?"

"It's really horrible Amy," I reply, suddenly seeing all those screaming people again, "it's just awful. There's this lab, like something out of Frankenstein, and parts of it look like they haven't been used in years while others look like they were just used yesterday. But that's not even the worst part, there's this tiny back room with an old examination table in it and...and I saw all of these people screaming and screaming and screaming. It was terrible."

We fall silent for a moment, too lost in the horror of it all to say anything. After a while, Amy breaks the quiet. "Did you recognize anyone? I mean, do we need to warn anyone?"

"It wasn't a premonition, just a vision of the past. That being said, I um, I saw Paige."

"Oh my god," Amy whispers.

"I didn't see Sarah, though I did find the rest of her...scalp. Whoever it was, they probably killed Sarah before they could get her to the chair."

"Do you think the torturer does that thing they did to us, you know when we were in the hallway doing the séance? That mind invasion thing where they told us all those horrible things, said all of our horrible thoughts, and knew every horrible thing we had done." Amy zones out for a moment, her eyebrows scrunched together. When she comes back, she shudders.