Spending the Night

Spending the Night

A Chapter by Selena Griffin
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Shelly and Jessica spend the night at their secret place.

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It was after we had gotten back to the dining room that I noticed that Jessica had that old, worn pack slung over her shoulder. I hadn’t noticed her get it out of the truck, but then again, my mind had been rather occupied at the moment, and I might not have noticed a herd of elephants walking by. My father had always said I didn’t pay enough attention to my surroundings. She walked up to the table, and plopped it down upon the hard wood. From the bag she pulled out two, cloth place mats and put them in front of two chairs right next to each other on the side of the table closest to us. I figured this wasn’t a bad idea, considering how dusty the table was. The place mats might help a bit when it came to keeping our food clean and devoid of dirt. She then got out a couple of brown, paper bags, and set these on the place mats, one to a mat. Turning to me, she said with a cheerful smile, “Ready to eat?”

I walked over to the table, my stomach grumbling in anticipation of having something to munch on. It had been lunch since I had least eaten, and judging from the dimming light flowing into the room from the bank of windows, it was now very, very close to dinner time. Actually, at my house we would have already eaten by now. “What have we got?” I asked, wondering what could be in the bags.

She sat at her place, and pulled out a hamburger wrapped in a McDonald’s wrapper. It looked like a double cheeseburger. “I thought we could use a few things to eat, so I sort of got us a few burgers before you came over. Hope you like them.”

I sat down to my place, and stuck my hand in the bag. I could tell that there were probably a good four or five burgers in the bag, and sort of wondered how well they would keep. There was no way I’d be able to eat all of them in one setting, and I was sort of figuring that the extras were supposed to be for breakfast the next day. I doubted there was a working fridge in the place, so I just hoped I didn’t get sick off the things the next morning. Granted, I was pretty sure a McDonald’s burger didn’t hold one gram of real meat, but could tofu go bad over night? I unwrapped one of the cheese burgers, and took a bite. It tasted okay, for now, and I quickly finished off two of them before finally turning to Jessica. “So, where exactly are we going to stay for the night here. I didn’t see any furniture down here I would call all that great for sleeping on, and I bet these stone floors get cold at night, not to mention how hard they’d be on one’s back. I‘d like to be able to sit up in the morning.” Yeah, I knew I was whining, but as much as I like this place, I also liked a full night’s sleep.

Jessica waved my comments away in her typical fashion. “Don’t worry about that. I’ve got everything covered. Did you think I was spending the whole day sitting around at home?”

She lead me out of the dining room after she packed up the rest of the food, and dragged me over to the stairs that we had noticed earlier when we had first come in. I would have been a little worried about going up a flight of stairs in such an old structure, but these were made of stone, and looked more sturdy than staircases I had seen in modern structures. A few of the steps were crumbling slightly near the edges, but if you paid close enough attention to where you were going, you wouldn’t have to worry about slipping on a loose bit of stone. There was no railing on either side of the staircase, but I wasn’t too awfully worried about that. The steps were wide enough that one felt pretty secure with walking up them. The staircase was narrow, not even wide enough for us to even think about walking side by side, so I let Jessica take the lead, and I followed closely behind her. There was light coming from the bottom of the stairs where it was coming in through the windows in the front room, and a bit coming in from the top of the stairs, allowing us to see the entire staircase, but I couldn’t really see where this was coming from. There was probably a few windows up there, and the light would be coming in through them. Another hour or two, and I doubted that there would be any light on the stairs at all. Nightfall would make this a very precarious part of the castle to be traveling in. I thought to ask Jessica if she had brought a flashlight, but if she had had enough sense to bring food, then surely she would have thought of that, too. Besides, I doubted that either one of us would be taking these stairs at night. It just didn’t seem like that grand of an idea to me.

Once we reached the top of the stairs I could see that there was a long hall with a number of windows on the wall opposite the stairs, letting the last of the day’s light fall upon the floor, and a bit drifted down the stairway. On the side of the hall we were on, there were a good number of doors, all of them closed, so that I couldn’t see into any of them. At both ends of the corridors were passages leading off in the direction of the windows. One might have thought this was strange, until one saw what lay beyond the windows.

Jessica dragged me over to the bank of windows, and I found myself looking down into a sort of courtyard. There were stone fountains, statues and a number of urns that had once held plants, maybe even small trees, they were that large. These were now devoid of anything but the most tenacious of weeds, and I could only guess that the plants that had lived within them at one point in time had been very high maintenance. With no one to take proper care of them, they had simply died off, leaving the urns to what could live there on its own. Paving stones wound their ways around these items, making the place look like a magical, fairy tale land. The statues were of a variety of different things, from Greek looking women to mythical beasts to imps and fairy looking folk. I don’t think I had ever seen anything so wonderful in my life, and doubted that I ever would again, no matter how long I live. I was in the middle of the most wonderful adventure I could ever hope for, and it was all thanks to the girl standing next to me, pressing her forehead against the window pane to get a better view of outside. Not being able to actually see myself, I wasn’t sure which one of us looked more like a child, me or her.

Turning to her, I asked, “Have you ever been down there?” I pointed to the magical land below us.

She sadly shook her head. “No. I haven’t found any door leading into the garden yet, but I still have some exploring to do. I’ve looked all over this side of the place, but I’ve done very little looking on that other side. I bet the door’s over there, somewhere, just waiting to be found.”

Looking off at the opposite side of the courtyard, I could see that the building encircled the entire area in roughly a large square, and I found it easy to believe that the other side of the structure was where one might hope to find a door out into that amazing sight below us.

“Well, it’s getting late, and we need to get moving,” Jessica stated, taking hold of my hand, and dragging me down the hallway. We were almost to the end of the hall before she opened one of the doors and pulled me inside.

We now found ourselves in a large, elegantly done bedroom. The canopy bed had seen much better days, and the curtains that had once hidden the actual bed from view were now worn and tattered so badly that they looked more like green spider webs than they did cloth of any sort. They fluttered lightly in a breeze I could barely feel. The mattress of the bed looked as if it had suffered a considerable amount of damage from mold, and smelled much like it as well. I could barely tell that the original color scheme of the room had been green with gold here and there, but now most of the things had faded to give it an old and unused look. There was a night stand near the bed where dust had collected in such a great amount that one couldn’t tell what color the top of the table was. There was a dresser off to one side, but I didn’t even think to look in it, even though one of the drawers had come loose from its place and was balanced in the piece of furniture at a rather lop sided angle. There was also a chest at the end of the bed, but it looked as if the lid would weigh so much that I feared it falling on our heads and killing us if we attempted to look inside it. There were strange carvings on the top of it, and I couldn’t quite be sure what was depicted on its surface.

“Well, what do you think?” Jessica asked, walking out to the middle of the floor and spinning about, her arms flung out to encompass the entire room.

“I’m not sleeping on that bed,” I informed her, pointing at the mess that sat at one end of the room.

Jessica looked to the bed, and laughed. “Of course we’re not sleeping on that bed. What do you think I am, crazy? We’re sleeping on these.”

She knelt on the floor, and pulled out two sleeping bags from where they had been stored out of the way on the other side of the bed. It looked like food had not been the only thing she had been setting up while I had been at school. She tossed both bags out on the floor, and plopped herself down on one of them. “Well, how’s this?”

Looking down at the black and green sleeping bag, I couldn’t help but smile and say, “It’s perfect.”

Jessica pulled her pack close, and proceeded to pull out a few, simple candle holders and a matching number of tapered, white candles. Apparently she had not thought to have these set up before coming here this afternoon, or if she had she hadn’t wanted to leave them laying about with the sleeping bags. She then set these up about the room, and lit them with a lighter she had in her pocket. I didn’t ask why she had a lighter in her back pocket. I didn’t think she smoked or anything like that. Maybe she just liked carrying it around just in case anyone asked her for a light. The candles cast the quickly darkening room in enough light that we would be able to see just fine. It sort of felt like we had gone back in time almost a hundred years. I was loving the entire experience.

She came back to her sleeping bag, and, to my amazement, pulled out her school books, and we went over the chapters she was supposed to have gone over at school. We didn’t share any of the same classes aside from homeroom, and there had been no homework there, but I was able to help her muddle through most of her work. She might not have been the academic type, but she still wanted to keep her grades up, which I found commendable. It was nearly eleven o’clock before we got done, and we both agreed that we were tired enough to try and get some sleep.

I don’t know how long I was out, and I have no idea what woke me up, but I awoke in the middle of the night. Before we had gone to bed, we had put out all but one candle, and this had burned down nearly to the candle holder, and the flame was flickering with only the smallest amount of enthusiasm. I was sure it would be completely out in only another thirty minutes or so. Still, that was alright. We weren’t leaving until morning anyway, so why would we need the light all night?

We had both gone to bed in our clothes, Jessica had not brought any night wear, and that was alright with me, so even though there was a bit of a chill in the air, it didn’t bother me too awfully much. I got up and padded over to the door. I don’t know what had possessed me to want to wonder around while it was still dark, but I didn’t want to wake Jessica from her sound sleep, and judging from the sounds her nose was making, it was a very sound sleep indeed. We had left the door open, so there was no worry about waking Jessica up when opening the ancient, creaky thing. I took a few steps into the corridor only to see that the silvery light of the moon was falling in through the windows. I walked over to them, and looked out on the most glorious land I had ever seen.

The courtyard, already a beautiful place, was bathed in an ethereal light that shone upon everything. Everything from the statues to the fountains to the pots that had once held plants was bathed in the silvery light of the moon, giving it all a supernatural look to it. The beings depicted in stone and marble looked more like ghosts in this lighting, and I could almost swear, from time to time, that I could almost see through them, as if they were as translucent as a spirit is supposed to be. There was a unicorn statue off to one side of the courtyard, and the moon gleamed off its horn in such a manner that it looked as if it were made of crystal. It shone and sparkled in an almost unreal way.

I have no idea how long I stayed there, but it must have been quite a while. The light of the moon shifted during the time I was standing there, first casting its full force on one side of the courtyard, and then moving to the other, illuminating the fairy creatures. Their wings sparkled like diamonds, and oh, how I wished I knew how to get down into that garden. I longed with all my heart to find the way in so that I could walk about that beautiful world. One could have forgotten all their troubles down there, if only they could spend a few minutes in that magical world, if only they could find a way to enter into its boundaries.

I longed to go looking for that doorway, but didn’t want to leave Jessica. I didn’t think anything bad would happen to either one of us here, this was our place now, our safe haven, but I also didn’t want her waking in the night not knowing where I could have gone, and I had no idea how long it might take to find that door. Jessica had had weeks to look the place over, and even she had not found the door leading into that mesmerizing courtyard. How could I possibly hope to find it in a few hours in the dark of night? With a heavy sigh, I went back into the bedroom and settled down in the sleeping bag to catch a few more winks.

I awoke the next morning to a rough shaking motion and a voice calling out, “Come on, sleepy head. Time to get up.”

I sat up, yawning and rubbing at my eyes. I was still feeling a bit tired, and if pressed, had to admit that my body felt a bit sore from sleeping on the stone floor, even if there had been a sleeping bag between me and the stones. I stretched myself as best I could to work some of the kinks out, but that didn’t help a whole lot. I was tempted to ask Jessica if she might not have packed a bottle of Tylenol, but decided that would make me seem whiny. “What time is it?” I uttered, hoping my words actually came out sounding like words. I shouldn’t have stayed up so late watching the courtyard, but even if I had the experience to live over again, I knew I wouldn’t have changed a thing about it, not even how long I had stood there.

“Oh, it’s about ten now.”

I looked at my wrist, and just then realized I had neglected to wear my watch the day before. It was still something I wasn’t all that grand about remembering yet. One of the flukes of youth, time only gains importance the older you get. Still, I never slept in, and defiantly not that late in the day. I could almost kick myself, and would have if I had been at home. Had I done this at home, I’m sure one of my parents would have had a speech on how important time is ready for me when I got down stairs, if they had decided to wait that long. Mom was especially fond of telling me the importance of living life to its fullest, just before planting herself before her soaps. “Oh my God, is it really that late?” I asked in a disbelieving tone.

Jessica happily nodded her head, and I had to wonder if sleeping in on the weekends might not be an uncommon thing for her to do. “Yeap. It’s that late. Having any sweet dreams I might be interested in?” She placed her chin on her hand as if she were settling down for a very long, very interesting story.

I narrowed my eyes and glared at her. “Nothing that involved you.”

“Well, I should hope not. Contrary to popular belief, I do not swing that way.” She rolled her eyes and flipped her hand in a very homosexual style.

I couldn’t help but laugh, and finally convinced my body to get on out of the sleeping bag. “I can’t believe I slept like that. I never sleep like that.”

“Maybe it’s the place. Maybe it’s good for you, or something like that.”

“I can’t believe sleeping like that is a sign that something is good for you.”

“I’ve heard it is when animals do it. They only like to sleep in places where they feel safe and comfortable. Maybe you feel safe here.”

She hadn’t meant it to really mean anything, but I couldn’t help but thinking over what she had said. Maybe I did feel safe here, but why wouldn’t I feel safe anywhere else? Why wouldn’t I feel safe at home? The answer wasn’t coming to me, and I really didn’t want to think about it too awfully much. Maybe I didn’t want the answer to that question.

Digging into her pack, she pulled out the hamburgers from the day before. “Hungry?” she asked, pulling out a wrapped burger.

“Starved,” I replied, taking it from her and eating it in just a few, oversized bites. It didn’t taste as good as it had the day before, but it didn’t taste terrible either, so I sort of figured it would be okay to eat. Hopefully I wouldn’t get sick off of it, and if I did, well, day off from school. Now, just as long as I didn’t get some serious form of food poisoning, I would be fine. I ate the second burger a bit more slowly, and looked to Jessica as she finished hers and placed all the trash back into the bag and then that went back into her pack. “What now?”

She shrugged, looking about the room. “We’ve got the rest of the day, don’t we? Want to go exploring for a bit longer before we call it quits and head on home?”

Well, I hadn’t told my parents that I would be checking in with them at any time over the weekend, so I thought it would be okay if we spent a few more hours here. If this was going to be our secret place, it would be nice to know a little more about it. “Sure. Where do you want to start?”

“Well, I’ve looked all over the front part of the place, but you haven’t gotten to see it, so I thought we’d stick to the rooms on this hallway for today, and work our way back around the place later.”

It sounded good to me, and I was sort of curious as to what was behind the other doors I had seen last night, so we got all the things together, pushing the sleeping bags back into place, and headed off to the next room in line.

After awhile, I was sort of getting disappointed with what I was seeing. It seemed that the hallway we had spent the night in was one devoted to bedrooms. They all were similar in appearance, and so I thought they must have all been guest rooms for the past owner’s friends. He must have either had a lot of them, or wanted what few he had to have a choice on rooms during their stay. In general, they were very similar to the one we had spent the night in. Some were dirtier than others, some had windows that had been broken out at some point in time, and the storms over the years had sent debris into them to gather about the corners and the walls where they met the floor. We decided that these rooms would be useless to us, as neither one of us could figure out how to fix the windows, and cleaning them would be pointless since every time a hard wind would blow, it would just send more trash through the open holes that the windows now made, messing every thing up all over again. Jessica found a piece of clothe in one of the rooms, and, tearing it to tiny bits, used these to mark the unusable rooms by tying the dingy, yellowed clothe to the doorknobs. After we had walked the entire length of the hallway, we turned to see that there were a good number of yellow flags tied to the doorknobs of many a door. Over half the rooms were classified as useless, but that still left us a good number of bedrooms to use, and what did we need more than one or two for?

We decided at the end of our exploration of the front hall that when we spent our time here, we would use the room we had slept in to spend the nights, and a couple of the other bedrooms could be used to store stuff, so we wouldn’t have to bring everything along with us every time we wanted to stay here. It would make it much easier on Jessica if she didn’t have to skip school every time we wanted to spend the weekend at our secret place, and we both agreed that would be a good thing. We didn’t really want the school calling Jessica’s parents because of how much time she was missing at school, nor did we want anyone stumbling over our little find here. It was a sure thing that we would be banded from ever coming back if our parents found out about us coming here. They’d all freak, saying how unsafe it was, how the place could fall down on us at any moment and all that other crap a kid’s parent says just to make sure they can keep control of their children.

It was close to noon when we finally got done with everything, and both of us were starting to feel a bit hungry again. The burgers were gone, and if we really wanted anything else to eat for the day, we would finally have to leave our little secret place.

We were heading to the front door, when I pulled on Jessica’s sleeve to slow her up. “Just a minute. I want to take one, last look at something.”

I moved off to the laboratory, and took a last peek around. I’m not sure what lead me to do this, but I just wanted one last glance at the place before leaving for the week. Off to one side of the room was a door I hadn’t noticed before. It was almost completely hidden between two, dusty old shelves that held a number of preserved, small animals floating in some dingy colored liquid that I couldn‘t identify. The door was narrow, and made of wood with large metal hinges and what looked like an aged padlock. It seemed strange to me that one would go to such lengths to keep a door closed, especially in such a place. I wondered what was behind that door. It seemed to be calling to me, and I so longed to answer that call, but I was pretty sure neither one of us had anything to pry the lock off with. It looked pretty strong, even for its advanced age, and I just couldn’t believe that Jessica would have thought to store a crowbar in her pack.

Pointing to the door, I asked, “Have you been in that room?”

Jessica craned her neck to look around my shoulder, and then shook her head. “No. To be honest with you, I hadn’t noticed it before now. Odd, I thought I’d been all over this part of the place, but I don’t even remember having seen that door before,” she said with a puzzled tone to her voice.

Reluctantly, I turned from the room, and headed back for the front door. “Well, it’s late and we really need to see about getting back. We can check it out next week, if one of us remembers to bring a crowbar.”

Jessica chuckled behind me. “I wonder if I could get one to fit in this pack.”



© 2010 Selena Griffin


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Added on November 29, 2010
Last Updated on November 29, 2010


Author

Selena Griffin
Selena Griffin

Neosho, MO



About
Happily divorced, and living with my two, beautiful, autistic girls. more..

Writing
Prologue Prologue

A Chapter by Selena Griffin


Chapter 1 Chapter 1

A Chapter by Selena Griffin


Chapter 2 Chapter 2

A Chapter by Selena Griffin