Chapter Fourteen Page Two, Dave, Eventide Manor

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Dave spent his day trying to live up to the promise he’d made Elys.

He knew it was only seven hours or so, and that he’d once spent a much longer amount of time doing nothing one fine summer day. (There’d been a power outage.)

            But it was hard, doing nothing, and Dave felt ill prepared to occupy himself. He didn’t even have any Sherlocks on hand. He could have burned through a couple. Instead, he attempted to imagine himself as a Sherlock, trying to solve mysteries in the house.

            Mysteries like, what happened to all the goddamn furniture. The living room was as bare as it’d been when he first arrived, of course. There were marks in the floor where furniture might have rested, but it was difficult to see exactly if it was furniture or just warps in the wooden paneling that could have appeared overtime. He eventually gave up trying to figure it out and decided that it was probably just that the previous owners had decided to move out at some point, and no one else had moved back in. That seemed alright. Mystery solved.

            He stared at the peeling white paint for a while before going upstairs to try getting into some of the locked rooms. His best guess was that the witch vampires used them for various storage purposes, and Dave couldn’t help being curious as to what would be behind the cracked wooden doors.

When the handles remained immobile, Dave got a few three step running start and threw himself against the aperture-blockers. Three or four good rammings got him nowhere near to getting through the first door, and only gave him a sore shoulder. The second door, painted black, burst open like rotten fruit on his first try. He tumbled through and found himself picking himself up from the ground.

            The room was completely empty except for a mannequin that stood by the window, shrouded in a semi transparent cloth. The mannequin wore a white dress and appeared to be peering out into the woods, with its arms folded. Dave noticed that it was feminine.

            Dave walked up to it and grabbed the shoulders to turn it around. When he felt how soft they were and saw the mannequin move, he jumped back, landing square on his rear. The mannequin turned.

            This shit wasn’t a fucking mannequin.

            It was a woman wearing a white dress.

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