Part 24

        Time-darkened ivory walls lay like aged drawing paper behind the dark ink line work of iron curlicues and leaves and vines. In the top right corner of the frame, where the leaves were most densely packed together, a golden bird peeked its head out from behind a particularly large leaf. Bright gemstone eyes (diamond?) glittered dully in the diffuse light, and its long, gracefully curling tail feathers slipped out from between other leaves farther down.
        Black silhouettes of unmoving leaflets ran up the right side of brightly colored flowers, cut from dusty glass. Light streamed between the dust left by long years of neglect, catching on small motes in the air, like sunlit pollen drifting slowly away from the open blooms.
        Odd, abstract blotches discoloring the wall and darkening a patch of the bright floorboards. The blackness dripped from the lower corner of a window, as if it had been left open at day's end, and the night had begun to seep in, darkening all that it touched.
        A music stand leaning into an empty corner, its fluid dark lines slicing the frame into small triangles.
        A perfectly-formed pale hand stretching gracefully toward some precious thing unseen, its shadow lost in the dark leaves scattered behind it.
..


        I reached the end of another roll of film, and sat down in a dim corner to change it. Pulling the mini-Sharpie out of the camera bag I was using for film, I marked the just-filled canister with an X, and pulled out a fresh roll. I realized I'd used up three rolls already - almost half what I had with me. Crap. Maybe I'd just stick with this room for today, and leave the rest for another time.
        ...but would I be able to get in later? Could I put an invisible key in my pocket? I could feel the thing, I just couldn't see it... I hadn't even thought about that, I'd have to try it.
        Still, in case, I decided to walk around the rest of the house - no way my curiosity would let me leave without taking a look around anyway. I took a final, longing look around the ballroom, still aching to know the room's secrets. I had no idea how I would ever uncover them, but... that was an issue for another day. Today was for exploring.

        I decided to go out the door at the back of the ballroom, by the fireplace, and then loop around back this way once I'd explored the back wing of the house. It led almost immediately into a large, very long dining room, whose centerpiece was an immense wooden table, surrounded by high-backed, intricately carved chairs. The backs looked awfully uncomfortable, but I decided whoever was rich enough to live here must have been high-society, and probably had had way better posture than I did. The seats were cushioned, though, with what looked like velvet, all in rich, dark colors. Actually the whole decor in this room was in rich, dark colors, all burgundy and purple and emerald and sapphire, dark browns and warm golds. I had taken my digital camera out a little bit ago, to get some color shots of the ballroom windows, and some zoomed-in shots of the frescoes on the ceiling (not that those were probably going to be very good, the light was pretty dim up there). I pulled it out again, and took general overview shots of each room I went in to, to look at later and decide where to go back to. (And to see if I could spot any more clues about who had lived there, and why they had left the place to be abandoned.)
        The walls were painted a warm reddish-burgundy, not quite so dark as some of the other decor in the room. The window was mostly hidden by heavy drapes, but a bit of light fell through between them, showing just how much dust had piled up on the table. There were a few paintings on the walls, all landscapes that I didn't recognize. An elaborate gold candelabra stood in the middle of the table, and there were cabinets full of what I presumed was expensive china and glassware, though I didn't actually know a thing about the stuff (except how easy it was to break - there was good reason Mom never let anybody besides herself wash dishes at home anymore). I peered in through the glass cabinet doors, and wasn't at all surprised to see how elaborate the crystal and glass all was, and what tiny details were painted on the china. Any one of these dish sets would sell for... God I didn't even know, I'd seen much cheaper looking ones at the antique store go for like two or three hundred dollars, and those were nothing compared to these.
        The thought slipped through my mind that if I took only a few things from the house, and ran them down to the antique store, I could be a good couple hundred dollars richer in the blink of an eye. But the thought left as soon as it had come - not only was I not in the habit of stealing, but... hell I couldn't even mention this place in conversation to sweet harmless old people, for fear of shattering whatever it was about the place that I was determined to keep intact. I couldn't even imagine taking something out of it! Which brought me back to the question of the key, but I pushed the thought aside to deal with later.
        There were three ways out of the room, the way I'd come in, an open archway into a hallway, and a closed wooden door. I went for the door, and found myself in - as I'd somewhat expected - a kitchen. Though the cabinets were made of the omni-present dark wood, this room looked a good deal brighter, since all the countertops were made of the ivory marble, as were the floors. The windows were large, and the curtains here were of a much lighter material than any I'd seen so far. Some kind of translucent material, a warm pale aqua color, which let the light in nicely - where it could get through the vines growing outside, anyway. There were sinks and stoves, wire baskets and weird looking gadgets here and there, the uses of which I could only guess. Now that I stopped to think about it, pretty much every gadget I was used to seeing in a kitchen was electrical, no wonder I didn't recognize anything here! Nothing that looked like a refrigerator, either... I figured there was probably a cold cellar somewhere, and they would have had ice brought over from the lake in the winter, to keep things cold all year. I took a few close-ups of some of the more interesting looking utensils, moving a few of them closer to the window to get better light on them. I realized that these were the first things in the house I'd really touched... my fingers tingled a little at the contact, but I was pretty sure that was only because I was focusing on it so much. Still, silly as it was, when I'd taken the pictures, I put each object back where I had first seen it.
        The only other exit went out into the hall, so that's the way I went. There was only one more room on this side of the hall, and both it and the one opposite it were pretty sparse. I wasn't sure if they were storage or what, but given the lack of decoration, I was pretty sure they were rooms for the servants to use. I decided to leave prying into the cupboards for later. There were two rooms on the other side of the hall, opposite the kitchen and dining rooms. Both were decorated in dark, warm colors, though the smaller of the two looked more like a private study or office. It had a large desk, with one of those old-fashioned rolltop covers, which was pulled down. A typewriter was perched on top of the desk, and I grinned brightly as I took my camera to it. I had this weird thing for typewriter keys, just the way the letters looked inside their small rings of metal, the yellowing of the protective layer over the bit of paper with the letter imprinted on it. I splurged and took a handful of shots of the typewriter, it was close enough to the window that the light wasn't too bad. I could really bring up the contrast in the dark room to good effect though, I knew.
        The room next to it, across from the dining room (and part of the kitchen, technically, since the study hadn't been very big), I guessed was a sitting room - a drawing room? One of those rooms that men had gone to smoke and drink after dinner, to get away from the women and discuss manlier things. Boys. The room smelled a little mustier than some of the others had, and I wondered if that had anything to do with cigar smoke or something. There were some bookshelves along one wall, and another fireplace. Plenty of deep sofas and chairs to sit in, some foot rests, lots of low tables. A tall, ornate cabinet stood in one corner, out of the direct line of light from either the windows or the fireplace, and on closer inspection I saw through the etched glass doors that it was, quite literally, a liquor cabinet. A huge variety of bottles, some with labels in languages I couldn't read, filled the shelves. Most were glass, a few of them colored, and the liquids in them ranged from deep red to gold to clear to... green?? Alcohol was used to disinfect so many things, I was pretty sure it didn't ever go bad, but... that still seemed like an odd color for it to be.