Excerpt from Book 5 (untitled)

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Jonquil set out to solve the mystery of the house room by room. Unlocking the secrets each room contained became an adventure. With a set of master keys obtained from Mrs. Lamb, Jonquil spent the morning and afternoon exploring. She found many of the rooms untouched; dust covers draped the furniture, cobwebs clung to shadowy cornices and corners; a scent of musk clung to the heavy drapes that darkened the rooms. The rooms with sheer curtains seemed almost suspended in both time and space.

She felt like a wandering intruder and silently retreated, closing and locking the doors. Jonquil realized the impracticality of reopening the entire house and the size of a staff required for caring for such an immense manor. Being only one person, her needs were few, but in time she hoped to change the emptiness of the house and fill its musky, haunted spaces with people, gaiety, laughter, and music.

The house felt imposing and yet for all the proclaimed grandeur of its past, it remained an empty, lonely house. The days and the years passed by the manor on the ceaseless activity of the winery and vineyards and the lives of those who came and went with the seasons, leaving the house silently watchful. Now, people stirred once again within its walls and beneath its roof. Doors and windows opened and closed. Light seeped into the darkness of forgetfulness and the house slowly awakened, remembering.

A forgotten trill of laughter drifted through the hallways; voices stirred the dusty silences. Especially at night after the servants retired and the winery workers returned to their own hearth fires and families.

Jonquil could hear the faint trickle of noises, escaping through some rent in the fabric of time captured within the house. She slept in her mother’s oak, canopied bed and wondered if she dreamed her mother’s dreams.

With each step further from the center into El Nath’s unknown, the mystery deepened. Jonquil thought, “This is a dream. I am asleep, dreaming I am awake within this odd, distorted world.”

The velvet comfort of mystery was a timed destruction set off by the opening of a door to a room of darkness terrified of the light. Jonquil saw her hand upon a brass doorknob, slowly turning and the light seeping in through an ever widening crack. She wondered what she would find.