“But Miss Riviere didn’t know, not then,” I intoned. “She didn’t know that the woman who had visited the house was in fact one of the strange happenings herself…”
“What are you talking about?”
Of course, stuff like that kept happening.
Like when I was working in the guest room.
Bam! Bam!
The bed suddenly started shaking! It was like someone I couldn’t see was jumping up and down on it.
“Eeyipes! Eeyiyiyiyipes!” I exclaimed, and I fled to the living room where Riviere was doing her job.
“Goodness. What’s come over you?” she asked.
“Oh, n-nothing. It’s nothing, really.”
“Really?” She smirked at me. “You came down here in an awful hurry for ‘nothing.’”
“Gee, what are you talking about? I just don’t know!”
“Oh?” Riviere gave me a triumphant little look. But this was not a battle I could afford to lose.
I went back to work—when only moments later, I heard a scream from somewhere in the house.
“Ahhhhhhh!”
“Miss Riviere?!”
When I poked my head into the living room, Riviere greeted me with a pouty look. “It’s nothing…”
Thump, thump, thump!
I’d only been back at work (again) a few more minutes when something near me moved.
“Yahhhhwawawawa!”
“Well, now? What’s all the fuss, MacMillia?”
“Uh, no fuss! No fuss at all.”
We had this sort of back-and-forth several more times, and the longer it went on, the more strongly we both began to feel that we wanted to solve this mystery and get home as soon as possible.
Why? Very simple.
We were scared out of our wits.
Incidentally, when humans are faced with profound danger, they sometimes discover abilities they never would have under normal circumstances. Riviere and I were no exceptions. That day, we both learned that we were stronger than we had ever thought.
“I’m all done!” Riviere announced. Several hours into our residence at the house, she had finished her exhaustive search of the first floor. I’d done at least a decent pass on the entire second floor, and when I went downstairs, I had found Riviere looking very pleased with herself.
“Did you find a sancta?” I asked.
“Nope, not a thing. I wasn’t able to disenchant anything I touched.”
“Huh, okay.”
“How about you? Anything jump out at you?”
Heh-heh! What a question.
“Prepare to be amazed,” I said. I puffed out my chest, and then, with a flourish, I placed something on the table in front of Riviere—a small box.
“Uh… What’s this?”
Allow me to explain!
“I found it when I searched Olivia’s husband’s office,” I said. Admittedly, almost completely by chance.
The office had been packed with difficult-looking paperwork. I had looked up to see a small door in the ceiling, and when I opened it—mostly out of a desire to snoop—I had found this box. Sitting there, covered in dust. Hidden away, as if someone didn’t want anyone to see it.
“What’s in it?”
“See for yourself!” I said, and I popped the box open.
Inside was a collection of small objects—some rope, a comb, a blade, a bottle, a mirror. Okay, so it wasn’t clear why all those things were in a box together, but still. If they had one thing in common, it was that they all seemed to come from an earlier age.
Riviere caught her breath. “Look at this…”
Olivia and her family had only started living in the house recently, but this box was dusty and full of old stuff—so it had almost certainly been here before they had moved in.
“Maybe something in this box is causing all the trouble,” I said with confidence.
“I see…” Riviere nodded quietly. But then she looked a little puzzled. “Why would somebody hide this?”
“That’s, uh, a good question.”
Very odd.
“If this is a sancta, we still don’t know who put it there and why they—”
Thud, thud, thud!
A crash came from the living room, almost as if to deliberately interrupt Riviere. We looked in to find a chair shaking all by itself.
She didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything.
Thud, thud, thud!
“Well! Who cares why they hid it, right?” Riviere said.
“Not me. Definitely not me!”
If one of the items in that box was a sancta, Riviere just had to disenchant it, and then boom! Case closed. And good-bye, house full of weird happenings!
Riviere and I, both bursting with the desire to solve this problem and get out of here, shared a quick look and a nod. Time for some disenchantment. If one of the objects was a sancta, it should emit a pale blue light. Riviere shoved her hands into the box so she was touching all the junk at once.
“Yah!” she said.
A light!
“Yes!” I exclaimed. Hooray! I jumped for joy and gave her a big hug.
So something in that box was a sancta. What was its effect? At this point, I didn’t give a fig. We’d succeeded in breaking the curse.
We’d cracked the case!
The front door opened. “Sounds awfully lively in here.” I guess Elaina was back from her research. “Good news?” she asked, walking over to where we were celebrating. She probably wouldn’t have dreamed that we’d already solved the case of the crazy hauntings.
“Hoo-hoo-hoo… Ahh, my dear Elaina, today all your work has been in vain,” I said.
“In vain? Why?” Whereas I was puffing my chest out proudly, she looked very suspicious. She hadn’t yet absorbed the reality of the situation. How should I break the news to her?
I grinned and thought about it.
Which was right when she said, “Oh, the box. You found it.” She was looking right at the box by Riviere. “I was just about to tell you about that. Phew!”
Hmm?
“What do you mean?” I asked, sharing a surprised look with Riviere.
She wanted to talk about the box? What was there to say?
Riviere and I stood there, the question marks practically visible over our heads. Elaina explained: “I’ve been out and about today. I asked the real estate agent to find any materials about the people who used to live in this house, and then I went and talked to Olivia and her family again. That box just happened to come up.”
“This box—,” I began…
“—‘came up’?” Riviere finished.
Elaina nodded in affirmation. “That box, I guess it’s full of sancta that Olivia’s husband collected as, like, his hobby or something.”
“Sancta he collected—”
“—as a hobby?”
Elaina blithely elucidated the situation. According to Olivia, her husband had collected sancta as a hobby since before they were married. Olivia found it unsettling, and when she was pregnant with their daughter, she took the opportunity to ask him to throw them away. Her husband had appeared to agree, but a hobby isn’t that easy to just cut out of your life. He’d continued collecting sancta in secret.
“So his collection was causing all the paranormal phenomena in this house?” I said, a little too eager to jump from this new information to a nice, upbeat conclusion.
Elaina shook her head firmly. “No, he never collected anything particularly dangerous. There’s no sign that his sancta are related to those phenomena in any way.”
“In any way?” Riviere and I chorused.
“No, and they respectfully ask that you not touch them under any circumstances. I mean, not that it should matter, as long as you don’t disenchant them.”
Very long pause.
Sadly, those sancta were no longer sancta, thanks to us and our hasty assumptions. In a word, they were already disenchanted.
“I see…”
Moreover, performing that disenchantment meant that Riviere’s body would return to a physically younger state tomorrow, and there was no almost no chance we would be able to disenchant the real problem sancta in the next couple of days even if we found it.
In our desire to get home as fast as possible, we’d only succeeded in trapping ourselves here longer.
Riviere gave a resigned look and sighed. “Maybe I can borrow their daughter’s clothes if I have to.”
The next morning.
“Gee, Elaina, you’re a really good cook!”
I sat at the table, stuffing my face. Elaina sat across from me while I showered her with praise. She looked very pleased with herself, her hair billowing dramatically.
“Do you know the secret? Why my cooking is so good?”
“No, I don’t!”
“It’s because I’m so beautiful!”
“Now it makes even less sense than it did before.”
I just didn’t understand what she was saying.