Chapter 75: Day 74,

Day 74,

The air was actually cool when we woke this morning.  Looks like we’ve been slowly but steadily climbing in altitude since undocking from that island the other day.  We’re still moving generally north but starting to veer back toward the east.  I think we might be heading for Cloud Tower.  Is this how people get in there?

Cass and Lin seem a bit put off by the altitude-induced chill, but Maiko seems surprisingly at ease with it, energized even.  She said something about this being the most comfortable she’s felt in a long time.

 

We found the key to those locked second floor rooms.  It was in the room the tree was growing through.  Turns out that room wasn’t actually locked, it just had a branch pushing the door shut.  Hard to tell what that room was originally used for, overgrown and exposed to the elements as it was.  The key was on the floor near a small table that had been knocked over.  Why lock all the doors but then just leave the key sitting out like that?  Was there something in this room that Priscilla had wanted whoever came here to see before going into the other rooms?  Or would it have been her friends that came up after her disappearance that left it out?  Either way, if there was anything else in that room, it’s gone now.

As for those other second floor rooms, they appeared to be additional bedrooms, although one had been converted to a storage closet for stacks of paintings.  Dozens of canvases piled one on top of the other as they were set to lean against the walls or lay on top of the bed.  Most looked to be landscapes and still lifes, but there were some portraits mixed in.  Some of them didn’t look like anything I’d expect to find in the Village or its surrounding islands yet felt achingly familiar.  Deserts, mountains, snowy fields, pine forests, buildings of glass and metal.  Were these drawn from Priscila’s outsider memories?  Stories?  Pure flights of fancy?  If they were outsider recollections, did Priscilla paint them, or just describe them to her husband?

The other bedroom looked to be the one the house’s departed owners actually used.  There were still clothes in the wardrobe and knickknacks and mementos scattered atop the dressers.  Hanging on the wall directly across from the bed where it might be one of the first things seen upon waking was a painting of a beach.  I think I might actually recognize the spot from my walk with Pat a few weeks ago.  It’s not where I woke up, but it’s not far from it either.

Among the mementos was a finely crafted doll, albeit one that had seen better days, with its faded red clothing ragged at the edges.  Nibbled at by insects over the years perhaps?  It seemed out of place in a house that had never known children.  Did Priscila wash up young and keep a comforting plaything with her out of sentimentality?  Or was it intended for the child she was never able to have?  Whatever its origin, Cass seemed intent on bringing it back with us.  Said it might be nice for the kids that show up at the archive during the rainy season for their lessons.  I suspect she just likes it but wants to act like she’s too old for dolls herself.

We also tried going up into the attic today since the trapdoor to that was in the painting storage room.  Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much of anything salvageable up there.  What isn’t rotten and water damaged is covered in plants and I honestly don’t trust the floor up there to not give way under us if we were to do more extensive investigation to find something otherwise.  As it was, only Cass actually walked out any distance from the ladder and neither Lin nor I were thrilled about her doing that.

The rest of the day we’re spending cleaning out the ground floor.  If we’re ever going to come back here, we need to make this place a proper shelter and home to be safe from any shade that might show up.  Maiko’s been going back and forth between helping us and island watching.

I’m taking a break from that myself at the moment.  Going to go back to it soon.  Hard sweeping and scrubbing chicken dropping when all your brushes and brooms have their bristles disintegrate if you push too hard.

 

While we gathered for dinner this evening I addressed something that had been on my mind for a while and asked the others if they’d heard the story about the girl from the forest who wanted to see the sea.  Lin and Cass had.  Maiko hadn’t.  Cass said that pretty much everyone hears that story as a kid, although it seems that every family has their own versions of it.  When I asked if they thought it was odd that it wasn’t written down in the archive anywhere, they asked why write down something everyone already knows, especially when changing parts of the story is part of the fun.

While the beginnings and endings are always the same, the worlds the girl visits in between change from teller to teller, to the point where it’s something of a tradition for people to make up their own when telling it.  Lin admitted that she herself used to daydream about the girl making her way through other stories she’d read or heard and meeting the other characters there.  Two points always seem to persist though.  One, that at some point the girl loses her mother’s sword and then (usually) goes on an adventure to get it back, often enlisting the help of others she meets along the way.  And two, at some point she encounters a deep, dark wood, the nightmare to the dream she was born in.

We wound up spending the night taking turns telling the story to Maiko.  Afterwards I asked them what they all made of the ending, with the girl climbing the tallest highest tree.  Maiko was frustrated that it just ended there without resolution.  Cass said that she liked to think the girl wound up in yet another world and kept on having adventures until one day her parents finally caught up with her and joined her on travels like they said they would “One Day.”  Lin said that she used to think something similar.  Then as she got older she started to think it was more likely that the girl would have failed to climb that impossible tree, but that was no fun as a story.  These days she figures that the point of the ending, the story’s final lesson, is that there simply aren’t answers to some things, and that’s okay.

When they turned the question around and asked me what I thought of the ending, I had to say I honestly wasn’t sure yet.  That was part of the reason I asked them.  Still, while I didn’t say it, what Lin said about some things simply being without answers didn’t sit right with me.  Then again, just because something has an answer that doesn’t mean we always have a way of learning it, and is it worth the frustration of constantly hurling yourself against a mystery like that instead of just making peace with it?

That said, there was one final question of the night, if Maiko had any stories like that to tell.  She said her mother had told her a few, but it had been a long time so her memory of them was a bit fuzzy.  Not to mention that she was uncomfortable with telling a story to a crowd, even if it was just the three of us.  We didn’t push her for it.

Still, I am curious.

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