Spliced

“So which door?” Zephyr asked once those three had left. Three doors were situated behind them, toward the south-west. The other two were on the wall opposite the front door, to the north-west, the right-hand one being the one the others had gone through. That left only...

“That one,” Cat said pointing to the only other door that anyone could have argued was to the north-east, the ceiling door.

Zephyr groaned. “That’s the wrong direction.”

“It probably doesn’t go anywhere,” Cat replied. “Which is why we should check it out first.”

“It probably doesn’t have anything useful in it either,” Zephyr argued. The ceiling hatch creeped him out. He had visions of eyes peering down from it.

Next to him, Indi was unusually silent and he got the feeling she had the same opinion about it. Furthermore, Zephyr would have put money on it that Cat only wanted to look in that door because she knew it creeped them both out.

To her credit though, Cat was more than happy to check the thing out herself. While the others watched from the ground she scaled the steep staircase, which was really more like a ladder, and pushed open the hatch.

He half expected something to jump out but nothing did and the hatch swung up with ease.

Cat took a few steps up until her whole upper body was in the ceiling hatch.

Beside him, Zephyr could practically hear Indi holding her breath.

A creak behind them made them jump and they turned to find Wolf had opened one of the doors along the south-west wall.

“Sorry,” he replied as he glanced back to see both of them glaring at him.

Zephyr and Indi turned their attention back to Cat.

“There’s something up here,” Cat remarked as she turned on her torch to get a better look.

“You see anything?” Zephyr asked impatiently, his nerves getting the better of him. He wrinkled his nose as a sudden and horrific small hit him in the face.

“Something dead?” Wolf remarked beside him.

Zephyr gave another start, having not realised how close Wolf had been nor how silently he’d moved from over by that other door to right beside Zephyr.

Indi giggled nervously. “What?”

Before Wolf could answer, Cat called back down. “There’s a dead cat up here.”

Wolf nodded as if he’d been expecting it.

“Is that what that smell is?” Indi asked.

Wolf nodded again.

“Come back down, Cat, we should explore the actual rooms,” Indi pleaded.

Cat did as asked, closing the hatch on the way down. The dead animal smell lingered a little longer.

“What’s in that one?” Indi asked turning to Wolf and the door he’d been peaking into before.

Wolf pulled it open further to show her. “Dumbwaiter, well dumbwaiter shaft.”

They crowded around the dark shaft. “That’s a big dumbwaiter,” Zephyr remarked. “Are you sure it’s not intended as an elevator?”

Wolf shrugged.

“It’s too small to be an elevator,” Cat countered.

“It goes down,” Indi observed.

Wolf nodded. “Probably to the basement.”

“Yeah well they’re unlikely to store a will in the basement,” Zephyr remarked, hoping Cat didn’t get any sudden inclinations for exploring the lower bounds of the house.

Indi turned and started opening the other two south-west doors to see where they went. One revealed a small office, the other a narrow hallway. Cat opened the last door, the one along the north-western wall, which disappointingly turned out to be just a small closet.

“Hallway then?” Indi suggested.

“Office first,” Zephyr countered. “We are looking for a will.”

“Oh right,” Indi replied staring longingly at the hallway, evidently more eager to explore the house on a larger scale rather than rifle through piles of papers. “There is that missing guy too though.”

“Who the police said isn’t here,” Zephyr reminded her.

“Not that you could trust them to find a donut in a donut store,” Cat quipped as she followed Zephyr into the office.

Zephyr started opening drawers in the desk, and skimming through the documents contained in the leaning towers of information piled upon multiple surfaces.

Indi made her way in slowly, taking time to see and get a feel for everything that was in the room before she started touching anything.

Cat breezed across the tiny space, on a mission to explore the roof high wooden cabinets at the far right of the room.

The room was not very big but the owner had certainly managed to make use of as much space as possible. So much so that the window behind Zephyr was almost completely hidden by stacks of books and paper. Indi was starting to get the feeling that maybe exploring a creepy old house for a will was not going to be as fun as she’d hoped. Of course she did want to help Kass but if the will happened to be in the first room they looked she was going to be very disappointed. Although maybe they could keep exploring the house after they found it.

Indi’s eye was caught by something shiny on the desk, a group of metal rods with several silver balls that moved around in a dependent fashion. It sort of looked like one of those desk puzzles people always got. Indi reached for it but just as she was about to grasp it Cat gave a loud exasperated cry behind her.

Indi drew her hand back and spun to see what was wrong.

Cat was standing in front of the cabinet with the doors thrown wide open. The contents inside the cabinet added significantly to contents in the room. Indi didn’t think she’d used this much paper in total during her entire time alive.

“What do you think all these papers are about?” Indi asked out loud, but no one answered.

“Looks like it might take awhile.” Zephyr lifted yet another rather large stack of papers out from beneath the desk and dropped them on the only clear space on top with a loud thud.

While he was under the desk Indi found herself reaching for the silver puzzle again. As she grabbed it, it shrunk into a small silver cube. She frowned at it. She felt compelled to put it into her pocket before anyone saw it. She did so, and the room felt strangely out of sync for a moment, before the feeling went away.

“Isn’t there a spell we could use?” Cat asked exasperated, evidently about as keen as Indi was on this kind of searching.

“If we knew what we were looking for,” Wolf remarked. He hadn’t entered the room as far as the others had. In fact he didn’t even look at them now. He was balanced in a squat peering closely at something on the door. “That’s the problem, we don’t know what exactly we are looking for, what it looks like, what it’s made of, if it’s even written on paper.”

“Well I assume it’s written on paper.” Cat replied. “Anyway, it needn’t be a finder’s spell or a summon.” A mischievous glint entered her eyes. “We could always just resurrect the old lady, just for a short period. I managed to dreamwalk a zombie just a few weeks ago. She wouldn’t even need to be awake. We do have access to a necromancer.”

“After our last mission I’m surprised you’d even think of suggesting the idea.” Wolf stood and looked at Cat with a stern expression on his face.

“That seems excessive just to find a piece of paper,” Zephyr agreed still looking through papers on the desk.

“We do?” Indi asked, wondering at Cat’s reference to a necromancer.

Wolf nodded. “You’ve met Tash right?”

“Oh right. Um, how come we don’t use her to help with Lily?”

“Because she’s Coal’s bitch,” Wolf replied bluntly. “That said, if it turns out she can help, then we’ll ask. On the other point, no self-respecting necro is going to bring someone back from the dead just so you can get the location of a will.” He gave Cat a pointed look. Even though he figured she was just being flippant as usual, he considered it a topic that shouldn’t be joked about. “Think of the pain it would cause the person being brought back.”

“Hence the asleep part,” Cat explained.

“Uh huh and how were you going to implement that?” Wolf said with a tone that suggested he had her.

Cat narrowed her eyes. “Dreamwalker remember.”

Wolf just chuckled at that, causing Cat’s eyes to twitch in poorly-concealed anger. He wasn’t even looking at her anymore though, he’d gone back to studying the door.

He wasn’t wrong. While Cat could put someone to sleep it didn’t work every time and she’d never done it on the recently revived. Besides any necromancy of someone who had been dead that long, even a short revival, was going to require at least a few dead sheep or something. Cat had known it was out of the question before she’d even brought it up. She hadn’t expected quite the slap down from Wolf though. She had no good comeback so she shook herself off and changed the subject to the next obvious question.

“What are you looking at?”

Wolf pointed to a spot on the door. Both Cat and Indi got closer to have a look. There in the corner of each of the panels were some scratches that Indi had originally assumed to be decorative. They were carved into the wood and appeared to be painted on the inside with a light blue colour.

“See those markings?” Wolf asked.

The girls nodded. Zephyr stopped shifting through papers and watched them from where he was.

“I’ve seen them before,” Wolf continued. “Years ago there was a couple, an infuser and a teleporter, who designed and built a line of well-known doors. They were very expensive so you don’t find many of them. People would hire them to put these doors in their houses. When closed and then reopened they could take you from one part of the house to a completely different part of the house almost instantly.”

“Teleportation doors?” Cat asked.

Wolf nodded. “This was their mark.”

“How do you know?” Cat asked.

“Saw it in a book on architecture that I was reading a few years ago.”

“The mark is magic?” Indi asked.

Wolf shook his head “No, no, it’s just their symbol, to show it was theirs, like a brand.”

“So how does it work?” Indi asked.

Wolf stood up and stepped back. He reached for the door.

“Aren’t we supposed to be looking for a will?” Zephyr asked. He had moved a little closer but was still very near the desk.

Cat turned briefly to roll her eyes at him. Indi remained with her own eyes fixed on Wolf as he gently swung the door shut.

Indi jumped slightly as the door clicked. She’d half expected something to happen. She glanced over at the window behind the desk but it was too covered with stuff to tell if the room had gone anywhere. For all she knew the room was still in the same place and only what crossed the threshold of the door would be teleported. Or perhaps the magic happened when you opened the door. Less patient than Wolf was she reached for the door handle and pulled it open. Wolf did not stop her.

Through the doorway crickets chirped, ferns waved, thunder rolled, and the sun shone down through panes of broken glass, two stories above them. They were now looking into a large greenhouse.

“Whoa,” Indi remarked. The others just stared in dumbfounded silence.

Indi was the first to move. She sidestepped Wolf and stepped over the threshold just as Wolf came to his senses. He cried, “Wait,” as he made a grab for her arm. He missed her by a fingernail.

“What?” Indi, now through the door, spun to look back at them.

“You can still see us?” Wolf asked.

She nodded, Then crossed back into the room. “Let’s see where else it goes.”

Wolf stepped back and let her close the door again. He seemed to happy to observe.

The next room was empty except for an old metal-based double bed. It must have been near the front of the house as very little light was coming in through the window.

“Hmm, not much privacy,” Indi remarked as she pulled it closed again. “Imagine if someone walked in on you while you were you know.”

“Having sex?” Cat completed for her, eyebrow raised, arms crossed.

Indi blushed and grinned. “Yeah,” she replied.

She glanced at the other two briefly and caught a rare smile on Wolf’s face.

She ducked her head and turned back to the door.

It opened into a large pink tiled bathroom. This time the room was filled with sun, and through the giant windows that surrounded three of six sides of the large tub they could see the tops of the trees in the back garden.

“Wow, they really weren’t concerned with privacy,” Indi remarked. “What if you opened it while someone was in it.”

“I thought they’d be tied to specific doors,” Wolf mused. “I guess they had a healthy agreement on boundaries.”

“Or they were perverts who got off on watching the guests bathe,” Cat replied.

“What happens if you take the door out of the house?” Indi asked as she crossed the tiled floor to lean over the tub and peer out the windows.

“I believe they were constructed so they only work on the house they were built into, although there were rumours that some could reach secret rooms after houses had been destroyed. Probably just external cellars that were connected up during original construction.” He stepped through the door, took a few paces forward and turned to look back.

Cat also followed though, stopping in the middle of the bathroom to look around. Zephyr sighed, and hating to be left alone, he too followed into the room.

“Crap!” Wolf remarked as Zephyr stepped from the door.

Zephyr turned to see not a door but a pink tiled wall where he’d just come from.

“It’s gone!” Indi remarked with surprise.

“Yeah, I thought that was what would happen when you first stepped through it,” Wolf explained. “It must have a capacity memory though. It won’t close off unless everyone has left the room.”

“Why would it do that?” Cat asked. “Why not just stay open until some one closes the door?”

“It takes energy to keep the connection open,” Wolf replied.

“Where’s it getting the energy from?” Cat asked.

Wolf shrugged “It might be built into it. Or it could be powered from somewhere else. I don’t know.”

“For a guy who reads as much as you do, you sure don’t know a lot,” Cat jabbed.

“The more you know the more you know you don’t know,” Wolf replied as if that was an answer.

Cat just frowned.

Indi smiled. She liked that answer.

“Well shit, I guess we’re done looking in that room,” Zephyr commented.

Cat and Indi shared a grin.

“I would have liked to study that door a bit more,” Wolf agreed still looking at the wall where the door had been. “You know, I thought it would connect to another door. The fact that it just appears in the wall, opens up a lot more possibilities.”

“Where in the house are we?” Zephyr asked as he moved to the window.

Indi leaned over the tub and peered out again too. “We’re down the end we’re supposed to be looking, I think. The south-west wing.”

Zephyr nodded in agreement as he got his bearings.

“If we’d managed to get the door out maybe I could figure out a way to get it working out of the house,” Wolf continued, talking more to himself.

“I thought you said it only worked in the house,” Indi replied.

“Yes, well there’s a lot I thought and a lot that’s unknown.”

“You’d probably need an infuser,” Cat told him. “Know any?” She said it in a tone that suggested she didn’t think he did.

“Katrina is one. You know, Amanda’s middle child,” Wolf reminded her.

“Right, no sixteen year old is going to be able to pull off that sort of magic.” Cat shook her head.

“And yet Amanda at sixteen had better control and power of her firestarting than you do with your dreamwalking now,” Wolf jabbed.

“I’m feeling some tension in the room,” Zephyr interrupted with a playful tone and with a gentle nod toward the door that suggested they keep exploring the house.

Wolf rolled his eyes, he had little appreciation of silliness. But he was keen to keep moving and took the opportunity to reach for the door handle of the regular door. Although he did give this door more of a study than one would normally give a door.

Zephyr’s comment got an amused half-smirk from Cat however. Wolf had been one-upping her all evening. She welcomed the interruption, and she too, was keen to keep moving.

Indi reluctantly pulled herself away from the window. The view and the sun had been nice and she felt like she hadn’t fully finished admiring the garden from up here yet. There was so much view to see.