Introductions were passed around, and Elizabeth showed Christina the title and what few legal obligations came with it (primarily: must apply for permission to develop), but Christina deferred signing immediately.
Instead, she asked questions.
"What did your contract look like?"
"Why me? Why not give it to the Church?"
"Have you heard anything about the place being haunted?"
Basic Outline of Events
1. Questions were asked and answered. Elizabeth is skeptical of the haunting, but is willing to meet later tonight about it. She does not have the contract on hand, but will bring it by at tonight's meeting. She does not like the Church, in a kind of passionate, this-is-a-clue kind of way.
2. Christina asked for a brief tour, and received it. The same path as the dream tour was taken, and some of the info (what can be remembered) seems to match. Christina is a bit weirded out, but is not ready to look like a total freak yet, so doesn't say much about it.
3. Christina and Thomas meet with Elizabeth that evening, precisely at 9:00 pm... except they arrive 15 minutes early, and find that Elizabeth beat them there anyway, and has a friend (who was not in the dream). Mr. White is a soft-spoken Chinese man in a white dress suit, who is here for Elizabeth's "peace of mind". Christina and Mr. White have a brief conversation in Chinese, which no one else can follow.
4. They wander the premises, but find nothing, even when Elizabeth pulls out an antique, sterling silver, clamshell mirror just like the one from the dream. Disappointed, everyone heads back to the cars.
5. Christina looks over the contracts, and finally signs on the title to accept Elizabeth's potentially multimillion dollar gift. While Christina and Thomas discuss what to do next, Elizabeth sits in the taxi with her lawyers, and seems to be arguing about something. Then she rolls down the window, and hands the clamshell mirror to Christina, "I almost forgot; this is one of the artifacts from this place, and you own it now as well. I will bring the others by tomorrow morning." When Christina asks why she forgot, Elizabeth just laughs and says, "I was rather fond of it, while I had it."
6. Christina and Thomas decide to call Father MacHaggerty, and ask him to accompany them. They will search for the haunting one more time before leaving tonight...
"...as large as life, and twice as natural!"
-- The Unicorn, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass
So I met with the mysterious Ms. Adelaide. She was almost exactly as I envisioned her--or, rather, as I dreamt her to be--but she was definitely every bit as intimidating. She carried herself with the self-assured, expectant air of someone who's always a few steps ahead of you, and is waiting to see if you're about ready to catch up. And all her words and actions exuded a perfunctory kind of civility that implied generations of cold British breeding. (But she is herself an American, as far as I know.)
I let her talk for most of the meeting, since, as I said, her politeness seemed borne more out of a sense of habitual propriety rather than friendliness. Also, I decided to use her speech to follow along with the events in my dream, in the hopes that I might find discrepancies for later analysis.
Several changes worth noting:
- she didn't offer a tour. In fact, she spoke little of the land and its history until I asked for it. She did give a tour, but it seems that she only gave it because she picked up on my hint that perhaps she should. The "tour stops" still matched up exactly with Father MacHaggerty's path, and with Dream-elizabeth's path.
- she concentrated much more on documentation that would deed the property to me, but perhaps that focus was aided by the presence of the lawyers (who followed us around everywhere and listened to every word we spoke). Her original contract she didn't have on her person, but she said she'd have it the next time we meet.
- there were some other things, but I've since forgotten...
...at the time of this writing, my poor brains have been so strained, and my patience so tried, that I barely know what's what. (and that certainly can't be right, because if a "what" was a "what," then I'd certainly know what it was. But I don't, and so it can't be. And yet it is, because it agrees with the premise. Does that make sense? Oh, I'm afraid I've lost you, dear reader. Do be a kind-ling and fetch me--I'm about three miles back, and two yards over)
Anyway, that's why I've started keeping this sort of travelogue, you see, that I won't forget details.
I asked Elizabeth about hauntings, and it went very much in the same vein as in the dream (at least, I think it did). I told her that I would meet her later, and that I would have a friend with me. She agreed to the later meeting, and said that she would have someone with her as well. (Oh! This is another something different from the dream! But, as I've already filled up the top portion of my page with words and I've not skipped any lines, it's too late for me to go back and add that detail--what an illegible mess that would be, and I wouldn't be so cruel to you, dear reader! .. who are you, anyway?)
We met later that night at nine, just as we did in the dream version of events. Ms. Adelaide met us there, even though we arrived a bit early. As usual, she got there by cab, but this time, she was accompanied by one Mr. White, who, she later claimed, tagged along because of his interest in history. She didn't introduce us (which was rather rude), so I introduced myself to him after I introduced Thomas to both of them. (Incidentally, to my words of "Thomas, this is Ms. Elizabeth Catherine Adelaide," she merely nodded. So much for closing any gaps...)
I looked at Mr. White slightly askance, mentally noting that "White" isn't a common name for a Chinese person not of mixed blood. The oddness of the name was reinforced by Mr. White's strange pronunciation of English...all my life I've listened to accented English spoken by people of all Chinese dialects, but I have never heard an accent like this one. After learning that he was, indeed, more comfortable with using Chinese than English, I switched languages. I got to know a little about his history, how he came to know Ms. Adelaide, and that she speaks Chinese, but her grasp of the language is rather poor. (I caught her grinning at that, though, so she can't be that terrible...)
Then, for what felt like the millionth time, we moved rather aimlessly around the property, looking for anything unusual. We found nothing.
At some point, Elizabeth took out the same antique silver mirror, and looked around in it. We still got nothing. When Elizabeth decided to go, I didn't try to persuade her to stay longer. She moved back to the cab (which just sat there, all this time) and showed me the original contract from the auction. After I looked at it, she presented me with the contract she prepared for me and asked, "Well, will this haunting aspect prevent you from signing for the property now?"
I sighed, signed my name, and couldn't help but feel with the last stroke of the pen that I had doomed myself to something horrible. The trouble was, there wasn't anything horrible that I'd doomed myself to--haunted or not, I'm still just gonna sell it, and at the very least, I'd be getting two very sweet million bucks for doing nothing.
She got in the cab along with Mr. White, and, after a bit, she passed the mirror over to me and told me that it now belonged to me, since it came with the land. Then they left.
Thomas and I should have left too, but I never was one to let well enough alone. I was angry that we got no supernatural activity that night, and I was furious that such inactivity occurred while Elizabeth was there, watching and waiting, always expectantly.
Thomas and I decided (well, I decided, but what was he gonna do?) to give Father MacHaggerty a call to search again before we called it a night. After all the weird dreaming, and my subsequent hazy time perception, I wanted to make sure that I had actually experienced what I thought I experienced, but I sure as hell wasn't gonna do that by myself.
Father MacHaggerty arrived a little while later after being dropped off by a red corvette. (!! I thought priests are supposed to take vows of poverty, or something?! To be fair, it belonged to some guy named Tony, but still...) Then we got started.
"He was part of my dream, of course--but then I was part of his dream, too."
-- Alice, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass
Remembering my dream, I immediately took the silver mirror and began to fiddle with it. And then, we all saw it. There the orphanage stood in life as it did in the dream--solid. This time, though, it wasn't solid only in the mirror, but solid on the goddamned hill.
During the time between my first meeting with Elizabeth that morning and my second meeting with her later that evening, I told Thomas about my dream, and so we both recognized the signs now. Softly, I murmured to myself, "Holy crap, we really got sucked in." The three of us (me, Thomas, and Father MacHaggerty) followed the driveway that led away from the property, and just as in the dream, we found that it was overgrown with wilderness.
The priest's first instinct was the same as mine: the cellular call for help. Only I knew it wasn't going to work, and, indeed, it didn't. I mentioned again that we were sucked in, and the priest's response was, "Let us pray." And that's just what he did. He just sat himself down in the snow, and started praying.
I've long since given up on organized religion, but I sat near him anyway, because if anything was gonna go down that night, I wanted to be by the person who could perform exorcisms, dammit. It seems like a stupid thing to think now (especially now that I remember that in order to consecrate the ground, the Church has to own it first), but it seemed rather reasonable then. But then again, things are always obvious in hindsight.
Because it looked like Father MacHaggerty was gonna be there for a while, I moved over to chat with Thomas, who stayed clear of the "praying zone." We talked for a while, and the next time we looked back, Father MacHaggerty was gone. Simply gone. No sign of struggle, no cry of alarm, nothing.
Thomas and I immediately checked the area over with flashlights. (I had one for him and one for me, and I also had matches, and a GPS--I picked all this up during my happy electronic shopping spree earlier in the morning. Get me paranoid enough for something, even if it's trivial, and I'll be prepared for the Apocalypse.)
We stood away enough from the forest to be safe, but close enough to hopefully make out whatever was making itself a threat. We caught glimpses of a rather long arm coming down from above, but every time we tried to get a better look, it wouldn't be in the same place, but we couldn't tell where it was coming from or going to, because the thing was silent.
Eventually, because Thomas and I both have photon light things on our key chains, we had the bright idea to use the flashlights in one direction, and shine the photon lights in some other direction to try to catch it in motion. Unfortunately, our lights only worsened our fears, because they weren't anywhere near bright enough, and seemed to make the shadows grow in shape and expanse. Refusing to be beaten this way, I got my digital camera out, zoomed in as far as I could, set my flash for as high as it would go, turned off the red eye reduction feature, and took a picture.
I was hoping that since it (whatever it was) was now used to dodging beams of light that readily announce their presence and direction, it wouldn't be ready for a flash of light that covered an entire area. I wasn't exactly prepared for the image I got.
To be sure, there wasn't much in the shot, since the foliage obscured things pretty well. But what I did catch was a pair of gleaming red eyes (red, presumably from the lack of red eye reduction) set really friggin' far apart. A tree trunk blocked its face, but there was one shining focus of red light on either side of the trunk.
I won't lie; I was worried. Father MacHaggerty was snagged somehow, and there was a one-of-those-things hiding in the trees, eyeing me and Thomas. I picked up a good sized rock and heaved it hard into the area just past where Father MacHaggerty was sitting. (And I don't really throw like a girl, either--my uncle saw to it that by the time I was 9, I could throw a football in a near perfect spiral. That, and I've always been rather fond of chucking heavy objects at people.) I don't know what I was expecting (perhaps a heavy thud as it hit the priest's corpse), but it didn't make a sound.
Puzzled, I picked up another rock and threw it again. It clattered to a stop somewhere in the dense wood, and then the first rock I threw came at me and slid to a stop at my feet. I was thoroughly perturbed at this point.
Thomas then picked up a rock of his own, chucked it, and followed its path with his flashlight. A second later, that rock came flying back at him from a WAY different angle and conked him on the head. Luckily, it didn't break skin, and it didn't knock him out. We stopped our admittedly dangerous rock throwing "game" and trudged back toward the hill to wait for dawn. After all, we got out that way last time.
We sat side by side, facing opposite directions to keep watch. Eventually dawn broke, and as the sun rose, the outward appearance of the orphanage shifted.
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