Pasquinelli/Rise 465

The next day Jon and Ray were together again for breakfast, both agreeing to stay at the house for the next day, when Jon remembered he hadn’t thanked Ray for possibly saving his life, or at least his sanity.

“There’s gotta be some place we can get a TV,” said Ray in the computer tower. She was searching, trying to find a Circuit City or BestBuy.

“Yeah,” said Jon not really knowing what he was agreeing with. “Hey, listen, I just wanted to say thanks about yesterday.”

Ray didn’t look up from the screen. “No worries.”

“Seriously,” Jon pressed. “I don’t know what would have happened to me if you weren’t there.”

“I’m sure you would have been fine. That old lady looked like she was about to keel over anyway, I doubt she could have kept going much longer.”

“What do you mean, kept going?”

Now Ray looked at Jon from her seat. “I’m not really sure. She was pointing at you and wiggling her fingers and saying something I couldn’t hear. It looked like she was putting a curse on your or something.”

“A curse?” said Jon, perplexed. This was more disturbing than he thought.

Ray went back to her monitor. “Like I said, she was doing it for a few minutes while I called 9-1-1 and was waiting for them to come. But she looked like she was gonna faint too.”

“Wonderful....” Jon trailed off. Until now, he hadn’t thought the woman could have affected him like that. He thought it might have been some outside hallucinogen that she put in his food or drink.

“Would you stop worrying about that and help me figure out where we can get a TV?” said Ray, still searching intently.

But she didn’t need his input any more. A moment later, Ray found electronics’ store in Eureka. Jon said no when she asked if he wanted to go with her. He’d rather stay at the manor.

Less than an hour later, Ray returned to find Jon in the backyard, lying on the stonewall in the exact same spot where they’d first met. She actually sat down next to him. It was at that moment that Jon felt like he’d made his first real friend in northern California. They’d done things together, been company to one another, and most importantly, Jon knew Ray was concerned for his well being when she called the ambulance the day before. Jon looked up at Ray. “Sup.”

“Well, I got a thirty-six inch flat screen. Hoisted it up the stairs by myself. Then he old bat” (Ray had begun calling Mrs. Jouler that routinely now) “told me you were out here. Thanks a million.”

“Oh, sorry about that,” said Jon with his head still pointed at the clouds.

“Yeah, fell twice on the way up.”

“Oh, sorry about that,” Jon repeated.

Ray exhaled loudly. “I was joking. Hey, space cadet. Wake up.” She shook his arm.

Jon sat up. “I know, I’m sorry. I’ve just been...thinking about yesterday.”

“Well, stop it. Thinking too much will make your brain hurt.”

“Can’t hurt what you don’t have,” said Jon with a grin.

Ray laughed her booming laugh. “That’s better. So what are we gonna do today? Another day trip?”

Jon turned his head at her very fast. “Just kidding,” she said.

As they sat there on the stonewall, it became apparent that they’d run out of things to do.

“Go for a drive?” Jon suggested.

“Nah. Riding in the car for too long makes me feel fat. Besides, I like having some sort of destination in mind.”

“Okay...how about....” but Jon never finished the train of thought.

“What is that?” Ray asked, staring straight ahead, back toward the manor.

“What’s what?” Jon said absently, running over various activities in his mind that might suit them.

“That,” said Ray, looking intently and pointing at the second floor of the house.

There was a large glass cylindrical-shaped room sitting on the roof of the first floor, nestled in between the adjoining walls on the second floor. It was shorter than the second story roofline, but looked very out of place on the old Manor. The styles didn’t fit. Jon had remembered seeing it several days prior but didn’t give it any thought until Ray pointed it out just now.

“What is that?” Ray asked again.

“I haven’t got a clue,” responded Jon, now also staring wondrously at it. “I remember seeing it the other day.”

“Yeah me too...I saw it when I walked back inside after you hilariously fell off the wall the other day. I just didn’t think about it --”

“Until now,” Jon interrupted.

Ray looked directly into Jon’s eyes for a solid ten seconds before looking back at the room. Apparently, she wasn’t used to odd things happening to her, either.

“Maybe it’s another dorm room?” suggested Jon, but even as he did, he realized how preposterous it sounded.

“Can’t be,” said Ray.

“Perfect,” said Jon eyeing the back door. “Why don’t we just ask?” suggested Jon as the back screen door opened and Mrs. Jouler came out wearing an apron, a sun hat, and brown leather gloves.

The two of them rushed over to her (as much as Ray could “rush” in any case). She sized the two of them up and looked back at them suspiciously.

“Uh, Mrs. Jouler? Could you come over here for a minute?” asked Jon. In a smart move, Ray stayed quiet because the two of them were still not on cordial speaking terms.

Mrs. Jouler complied without objection. She followed them out to the middle of the lawn.

“What’s that?” asked Jon, pointing at the out-of-place cylindrical room.

“That’s a house, dear,” she replied and started swaying back and forth on her heels in a fit of giggles.

“No really, what is that?” Jon asked without any note of joking or sarcasm as he pointed right at the room.

Realizing that they were quite serious, Mrs. Jouler turned back to the house, and stared at the spot Jon pointed to.

“Well, that is where the north wing connects with the main part of the house. My bedroom is right there,” she said and pointed to a window at the northern end of the wing. “Miss Cavitt’s room is there, and your room, Mr. Kenneth, is there.”

“And?” pressed Ray, becoming visibly irritated.

“And what, exactly?” said Mrs. Jouler, matching Ray’s annoyance. The computer tower is off to the south, and the bathroom is right next to Miss Cavitt’s room.”

“You don’t see that big, circular glass -- ” began Jon again.

“What on Earth are you two talking about?” said Mrs. Jouler, surpassing Ray’s annoyance factor by several notches. “Now is not the time to start teasing me. Those big, beautiful bloomed roses don’t just grow on their own in the wild you know. Don’t get bad habits from her, Johnny dear. I’ll see you both later. Good day,” she said and left to her gardens.

“Something’s not right,” said Jon, frowning. He had not known Mrs. Jouler to blatantly ignore an elephant in the room. Especially a large glass one. He also hated being called ‘Johnny’ by anyone other than his mother.

“She’s hiding something,” Ray deduced.

But Jon shook his head. “No. She’s never just lied to me like that. It’s almost as if....”

“What?”

“As if...she couldn’t see it, you know? I know it sounds weird, but when I pointed to it, she didn’t even look twice.”

“Maybe she’s losing it,” said Ray.

“No, I don’t think so,” Jon said more firmly. Ray didn’t suggest anything else in regards to Mrs. Jouler’s sanity or truthfulness thereafter.

“All right, fine. I don’t believe her, but I believe you. So what is going on?”

“I don’t know. Something doesn’t fit.”

“Want to go see it?” said Ray suddenly, a wild look in her eye.

“Hell yeah,” said Jon. He put his arm on Ray’s shoulder and turned both of them so they were facing the forest. “But we can’t get into any of those rooms,” Jon said in a whisper, indicating the other dorm rooms. “They’re all locked.”

Ray cleared her throat and casually ran her left hand through her hair. She then brought her fist between the two of them. As she opened her hand, a single bobby pin was revealed. Grinning widely she said, “Locks? What locks?”

“Isn’t that a little old-fashioned?” said Jon, eyeing the pin dubiously.

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.”

“All right, I’m leaving it to you then. Let’s go.”

They casually strolled to the back door of the manor. Mrs. Jouler stopped what she was doing to glare at the pair of them for a moment. Ray smiled widely at her as Jon held the back door open. When they were out of Mrs. Jouler’s sight, they hastened their stride until the approached the staircase, and Jon bounded up ahead of Ray who had on her clunky heels and could go no faster.

At the top landing, they both looked left and right. A door directly ahead of them was their first and closest option.

“Good a place as any,” said Jon.

It took only a matter of seconds for the bobby pin to do its thing, because Jon had only glanced down the stairs to make sure the coast was clear when he heard a click of a lock, and when he turned around, the dorm room door was wide open and Ray was already inside.

“That was quick,” Jon said, examining the walls, looking for a door or something that might lead to a strange room.

“What can I say? I’m good,” said Ray simply, looking under the twin bed.

“Or you’ve just had a lot of practice.”

“Shut up.”

A few fruitless minutes later, they pushed the lock on the handle and left the first dorm room.

“That didn’t help,” said Ray, playing with the bobby pin in her hand.

“There’s still five more rooms to check, minus yours and mine.”

They proceeded to break into the other four dorm rooms. Much to their chagrin, they found nothing in any of the four rooms. The absence of the large cylindrical room just seemed to fuel their quest. After making a full round of the second floor, the last locked door they approached was the north wing room; the one most likely connected to the glass room, and also happened to be Mrs. Jouler’s room -- clearly evident by the ornate double doors.

“Should we?” asked Jon, feeling worried now.

“We’ve come this far....” said Ray as she worked furiously at the doorknob. Just like all the others, it opened with a minor click after a few seconds.

Because Mrs. Jouler was head of the household, and an older woman, it made sense that her room would be the largest and most extravagantly decorated. It felt to Jon that the entire room was gilded with glints of gold in the walls and crown molding. There were real Victorian era mirrors, Louis XIV style furniture in rich woods and upholstery, and to top it off was an enormous canopy bed that could have passed for a small barge. A granite and marble fireplace finished off the room as a glass domed clock ticked steadily on top of the mantle, and there was even a painting of a young man in an ornate frame above the fireplace. The ensemble reminded Jon of the Getty Center’s furniture gallery. The room was a bit musky but still looked lived-in.

“This is...wow,” was all Jon could say.

“It’s cluttered and tacky,” said Ray with her lip curled.

“At least it looks like the rest of the house, not like our four-walled rooms.”

“That’s true. It matches. Now where is that room?”

Jon was already poking around in the bathroom when Ray began intermittently knocking gently on the north wing wall that joined with the rest of the house.

“No secret anything in here,” Jon said as he emerged from the marble bathroom. “But it does look like the bedroom,” he added, wanting to report something.

“No door...no moving candle holder... I don’t get it,” said Ray in an exasperated voice as she slumped down on the fluffy bed. She sank several feet into the down.

“And the closet is on the other side of the room, so there couldn’t be a door or anything through there,” said Jon, finishing Ray’s thought fragment. “Well, we tried our best. I mean, we did break into half a dozen locked rooms in the course of an hour.”

“I’m not giving up,” Ray said with a new twinge of determination. Jon wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Ray like that. He couldn’t tell if she really wanted to know what the room was, or that she wasn’t getting something she wanted, and it grated on her.

“That’s all well and good, but can we please get out of here before Mrs. Jouler comes back,” said Jon, glancing out a window that was facing south. “Hey, I can see that weird room from here!” He saw part of Mrs. Jouler, still working in the gardens, and if he really strained, he could see the very end of the cylindrical room. It looked so strangely out of place, yet perfectly meshed with the age of the rest of the house. The grey clouds reflected in the smooth glass, along with the shingled roof.

“Let me see,” said Ray as she sprung out of the bed and started poking Jon hard in the ribs.

“Ow! Okay, okay,” said Jon as he sidestepped out of her way.

After Ray finished peering through window, she turned back to join with resolve in her eyes. “There’s got to be way to get in there. There wouldn’t be some room stuck onto a house with no way to get to it, even if Jouler doesn’t care enough to check it out.”

“But that still doesn’t answer the question of why she can’t see it.”

“It’s not like she doesn’t see it. It’s right there.”

“I already told you -- ”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard you the first time,” said Ray waving him off and starting to pace. “We’re missing something. We’re missing...something....”

“I agree. But let’s get out of here and we can try and find out what we’re missing, huh?” Jon said, pulling on Ray’s arm to lead her out of the room.

Over the course of the next day, Ray and Jon were poking around everywhere looking for a door or passage that might lead them to the glass room. Jon didn’t know what it was, but something about that room intrigued him so much that he simply had to figure it out. When they were out of the grounds, all he could think about was that room. He tried to engage with Ray in normal conversation, but it was half-hearted, even on Ray’s part. She seemed to have the same problem. They purposely made arrangements to be outside in the backyard just to look at it. Jon thought Mrs. Jouler must have considered them crazy. Jon would have used the word ‘obsessed’. Finally, one morning in the breakfast nook with no one to bother them, Ray came up with the most logical plan either of them could muster.

“We’re going to climb up,” she said intently, looking into Jon’s eyes without blinking.

Jon considered this. “I don’t know. Mrs. Jouler --”

“Mrs. Jouler is going grocery shopping tomorrow. It’ll take her an hour at least, and we can’t try anything like this when she’s here. It’s the only way.”

Jon tried to think of some way to protest this, but after he realized he wanted to get into that room just as much, if not more so, than Ray, he said, “Okay, but first, I think I have an idea that’ll help us.”

“Spill,” said Ray.

“Let’s go to the Hall of Records today -- maybe we can find a blueprint of the house as it originally was built.”

“Nice thinking.”

“I’m good for it once in a while.”

They actually needed to ask Mrs. Jouler where the city hall was. Jon made up a story about wanting to know the town better. He doubted Mrs. Jouler believed any of it by the look she gave him, but she told him where the Hall of Records was in any case.

This time, Jon drove them there -- it was hardly two miles away. The Hall of Records itself was more cramped than Jon might have thought such a place should be. Once inside, the space was old and dank with nothing on the steel grey walls. There was an older, balding gentleman with glasses at the desk. He appeared to be reading a magazine of some sort.

“Yes?” he said in a monotone.

“Um, we’re here to look at the blueprints for a private residence,” said Jon.

“Resident blueprints cannot be viewed -- ” he began slowly.

“Ugh!” said Ray, but Jon nudged her to keep quiet.

“-- Unless the parties have identification as collateral.”

“Oh, great. Sure. Ray, give him your I.D.”

“Mine? Why?”

“Because I need mine to drive us back anywhere just in case.”

“Just in case what exactly?”

“Just give it to him,” Jon hissed.

“Fine,” Ray said as she jostled through her purse, unfolded a pretty white wallet and extracted her driver’s license. She slapped it on the table and the clerk took it and replaced it with a sheet of paper and a pen.

“Fill this out entirely and return it to me.” The clerk’s tone could have made Jon appreciate the intricacies of water pressure to divert his attention. “I shall fetch the blueprints when you return.”

Jon thanked the man and took the articles to a nearby table and pulled up a second metal chair so Ray could sit with him. He scanned the form up and down.

“Uh oh,” Jon muttered.

“What? What is it now?” Ray said, more snappish than usual.

“Look at some of these questions... ‘State your intention for these documents; Have you ever been convicted of a crime? - If so, please list; State your address; State your occupation; State you mother’s maiden name’. It just goes on and on like this.”

“Relax. Give me that.” Ray tore the sheet from Jon and began scribbling down the page like it was her job. Jon was reading over her shoulder and the further down he followed her flying hand, the wider his eyes became.

“Your mother’s maiden name is Maleficent?”

“It is now,” Ray said, flipping the paper over.

Jon looked away after Ray answered Zimbabwe to the question ‘List your previous residences if any’.” This was too much.

Jon hummed, “we’re going to jail...”

“Shush!”

Ray finished filling out the form and without letting Jon look at it any further, brought it back to the front desk. The clerk took the sheet and glanced at it to see that all the lines were filled out. That seemed to satisfy him, because he jotted down Oak Tree Manor’s address on a slip of paper, and disappeared behind a doorway.

By this time Jon was perspiring with anxiety, and had begun wringing his hands together absent-mindedly until Ray jabbed him in the stomach.

“He’s finally coming back,” Ray said a little too loudly, fifteen minutes later.

Jon’s heart was pounding in his chest when he looked up to see the horribly bored clerk with several rolls of large paper tucked under his arms. He put them on the counter that separated him from the public, and without even looking at Jon or Ray, said, “Your time with the blue prints is limited to two hours, which begins now. Should you have any – ”

“We won’t need them for two hours, thanks,” Ray said and promptly scooped them up off the counter and brought them to the table they were sitting at prior.

Jon held one end of the pile of rolls, and Ray held the other. She glanced briefly at him, then together they unrolled the papers. After smoothing out the yellowing paper, Jon looked eagerly at the blueprints like they were a treasure trove. But the first sheet only showed the plans for what looked like a small guesthouse that was never built, or built then subsequently torn down.

“Next,” Jon said.

They rolled up the first sheet, and under it was a blueprint of the north wing of the house; it showed the master suite as it appeared in 1925 -- it was quite a bit smaller than it was when Jon saw it. There was no showing the strange structure in between Mrs. Jouler’s room and the rest of the house. Jon frowned and pulled that sheet off the pile -- it rolled itself up. Under that sheet was a blueprint of the south wing, then the east, then the west. There remained nothing out of the ordinary in any of the blueprints. There was even an entire structural and aerial side, front, and back view blueprint that showed no sign of any illicit room.

“What the hell,” said Ray in exasperation, taking a few steps away and tossing her head. “It should be right there,” she said, coming back to Jon’s side and pointing at the spot where the room should have been.

“We’re missing something. Again,” Jon said, ruffling through the sheets rapidly.

“Maybe it’s us,” said Ray, spacing herself from Jon again.

“Huh?” Jon was still rifling through the old sheets.

“Maybe we’re the crazy ones that see things that aren’t there.”

“Or maybe....” Jon said, bringing one of the blue prints to eye level,” we’re just not looking in the right spot.”

Ray whirled around and looked over his shoulder.

“Look at this.” In very untidy writing near the corner of the aerial house blueprint appeared the words ‘photographs recorded April 25th and 29th, 1926.’ “They’ve got pictures of this house! And I bet they weren’t for someone’s photo album either,” said Jon.

Ray shifted the huge sheets around. “But I don’t see any photographs here. Where are the pictures?”

“They wouldn’t be here.”

“Then where?”

Jon thought about it for a minute. Then the answer came fairly easily as he wracked his mind. “I bet they’re in a library as microfiche.”

“As...what?”

“Like microfilm -- sheets of the same stuff film is made of. It can record tiny writings of official government documents and city documents, or --”

“PICTURES,” said Ray. She laughed and slapped Jon’s shoulder. “So let’s go. How do you know all this anyway?”

“I volunteered at Mid Valley Library over the summer once,” said Jon as he collected the blueprints into a single roll again. “They had me filing congressional documents from decades ago. It took forever and was really boring.”

Rays eyes were gleaming again. “But you know where we could find these pictures.”

“Well, no. I know they could be at the library. We’d have to ask to get the actual files. And I’ve got no clue how to use the viewing machines.”

“Who cares? It’s the closest we’ve gotten to some answers other than scaling the roof and walking up to it which we were almost going to do a few hours ago.”

“All right, come on.”

After trading the blueprints in for Ray’s driver’s license, they were back on the road, headed for the library (the clerk told them where it was, though he could have been giving a eulogy; Jon couldn’t tell which), which turned out to be just down the street.

The library was a far prettier building than the Hall of Records. It was a much newer building with a distinctly modern flare -- it had curved walls and an asymmetrical roofline with huge glass windows. It wasn’t very large, but looked welcoming.

Once inside, a main Reference desk was right inside the door, and a plump woman with short curly blonde-grey hair greeted them, and reading glasses perched at the end of her nose.

“Hello,” she said with a smile.

“Hi there,” Jon said uncertainly. He wasn’t sure how direct he should be, so he decided to take the directly direct route. “We’re looking for any photographs on microfiche taken in late April of 1925. Would you have any?”

“Yes, I do believe we do,” she said with a giggle. “Follow me to the microfilm cabinets and we’ll see what we can find.” She grabbed a magnifying glass from a drawer and jerked her head sideways with a huge smile. “This way.”

The library was indeed a far warmer place than the hall of records. The sunlight streamed in through all the windows, the wooden floors were a warm holly color, and there were far more people in the library -- young, old, from every walk of life -- reading, browsing, or on the computers. The librarian led them to a set of wide, metallic file cabinets, unlocked them with a key and began flipping them incredibly fast.

“Let’s see...here we are. We’ve got a couple of fiches here from 1925, April through June.” She took out a slip of opaque celluloid and examined it closely through her reading glasses and magnifying glass. “These look like documents, so no photos there....” She flipped to the next one. “Ah, here we are. This one has several photographs... looks like mostly buildings, I think.”

“Yes! That’s what we’re looking for,” Ray blurted out.

“Wonderful!” she said, ushering them over to a large contraption that looked like it was a hospital-grade microscope and was almost as tall as Ray. With a few clanks and a bang, the cheery librarian announced that the fiche was ready to view. “Here are the knobs you’ll need to use to move the viewfinder up and down and side to side,” she explained while making the top part of the contraption move up and down and all over the place. “Just let me know when you’re done and I’ll come by and take it apart again. Ooh! I’ve got a line forming.”

She turned back to the Reference Desk and with a little bounce on her heels, she scurried back to the help the ever-growing queue.

Jon finagled the viewfinder to the beginning of the microfiche. The date was April 1st, 1925. It took a few tries for Jon to get it down (the first time he moved the knobs, he ended up in mid May in half a second), but they finally got to April 20th.

“Here goes...again.”

Jon scrolled over slowly, and he might have missed it because the trees were significantly smaller eighty years prior, but the roofline caught his eye. And there it was -- Jon didn’t even have to squint to see it -- a large curved structure just peaking out from behind the low part of the second story shingled roof. A glance at the picture and any onlooker wouldn’t even think twice about the subtle curve, but Jon and Ray who had looked for it all day certainly saw it.

“I see it,” breathed Ray.

“Me too.”

“So we’re not crazy.”

“I guess not,” Jon said, still staring at the image. Part of him was afraid that if he looked away he wouldn’t see it again if when he looked back.

“So everyone else is crazy.”

“Maybe.”

“Wait, didn’t the blueprint say there was another picture on April 29th?”

“That’s right,” Jon said. In his excitement, he totally forgot about the other picture. He then scrolled over a few more frames under the April 29th heading, and actually gasped out loud when the image of the back of the house came into view. The strange room was not in the picture. Where it should have been was instead only roof and wall, not even a hint of a depression where it might have been.

“How is this possible?” Jon asked himself as he scrolled back and forth between the images. The April 20th image clearly had the glass dome in the roofline. The April 25th image showed the back of the house with no strange room.

After flipping back and forth four or five times, Jon turned to Ray with his mouth open and he shrugged. “Do you see --?”

“Yeah I see it. Or, don’t see it, I guess,” she said. “What do we do now?”

Jon just shook his head with his mouth still open. He couldn’t formulate words because his mind seemed to have blown a fuse.

“I know what we do,” Ray said, answering her own question. “We climb up the house.”

“Oh yeah.” Jon had forgotten about that part of the plan until just now. By now, frustration was starting to seethe inside Jon like a pot of boiling water.

“She’s going shopping, right?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Then that’s the only way to figure it out. We’ll break in and see where it leads.” Jon felt his face flush at the words ‘break in,’ but his excitement outweighed his fear. He tried for a moment to think of a way to protest it, but it was in vain -- Jon wanted to get into that room just as much as, or perhaps more so, than Ray did.

Finally, he said, “Yeah. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

The next day dawned cool and breezy. After Mrs. Jouler drove away in her Cadillac with what Jon hoped would be at least an hour and a half of shopping ahead of her, Jon and Ray got to work. Out in the tool shed held their instruments of breaking and entering a room in a house to which they already had access. Jon found a long extending ladder to traverse the first floor of the building, and Jon hoped the roof wasn’t slanted so steeply that they’d need something to anchor themselves to the roof. If they started making holes in the roof....

Although neither of them had any roofing skills, Jon volunteered to go first. He would rather risk injury to his person or ego than have something happen to Ray instead. They did everything they could to soften a fall -- they lined the base of the ladder with pillows, blankets and even an old mattress they found in the attic when they were searching the house several days prior for a way inside the room.

Jon began the ascent up the ladder once they had everything in place. It wobbled slightly, but not so much as to be alarmed. He could hear Ray’s calls from the bottom. “Go on! You’re almost there. Don’t look down.” Jon wasn’t really nervous up until Ray said not to fall down. As he reached the seventh or eighth rung, he felt a breeze ruffle his hair, but the breeze was coming from above him on the roof. Odd, Jon thought, looking up at the wood shingles that he was only a few feet from being level with.

“What is it?” came Ray’s booming voice from the ground. She was holding the ladder steady at the base.

“I’m not sure. Give me a sec.”

Jon steadied himself on the ladder and decided to ignore the breeze -- which was all it was at the moment, a breeze. After taking another step up, the breeze wasn’t so placid. It became a torrent of wind. Jon could barely hold on to the sides of the ladder as he shut his eyes to keep them from watering. The force of the air bearing down on him finally became too much. He couldn’t take another step up, and he couldn’t even see anything even if he wanted to. He half climbed-half slid down the ladder onto the pile of cushy things.

“What was that? Why didn’t you keep moving?” said Ray, annoyed.

“I don’t know,” said Jon, panting. “I couldn’t go up any further; I would have been blown off the ladder. And it wasn’t just some random breeze that kicked up. It didn’t want us up there.” Jon concluded, realizing the situation was getting more and more strange and time went on. “What are you doing?” said Jon as Ray picked up a rock the size of a walnut.

“I’m going to see what this does,” she said with a touch of sarcasm as she took aim. She hurled the walnut-sized rock at the room. Jon waited for a second.

Not only was there no break or reverberation of rock on glass, they didn’t even see the rock come tumbling down from the roof -- and Ray’s aim had been dead on. It arched toward the room, then disappeared. The pair of them exchanged dubious glances.

After replacing all of the things they’d put on the floor to soften a fall, they decided to give up their searching escapades. Jon was nearly hurt in the process, and although there was something about that room that was clearly out of the norm, they had had zero success. In fact, they ended up with more questions than explanations. Jon even privately thought (however ridiculous it seemed) that the room might not want to be entered.

But as the day dragged on, and the more he tried to ignore it, the more it crept into Jon’s mind. He thought Ray must have suffered a similar affliction, because the next day in the library, Ray was holding up a book but her eyes were glazed over the top of it, staring into space. The heavy rain outside forced them to stay inside. Fire was crackling pleasantly in the fireplace while pellets of water drummed methodically on the windows. Jon found it relaxing and almost hypnotizing. At the very least, it kept his mind off the room temporarily while he sat in a daze.

He’d even brought Roughing It to the library, but he wasn’t even attempting to read it. He got up out of his armchair and started pacing around and staring at the various volumes of old books, occasionally running his hands over the meticulously carved shelves. There were a myriad of flowers depicted on the carvings, and he recognized several to be American Bartlet flowers, Black-Eyed Susans, sunflowers, primrose -- all of which adorned the shelves. For every ten feet of bookshelves was four feet of the carved wall panels.

Walking around the library aimlessly, Jon picked up an interesting-looking book once in a while and flipped through the pages. Some sputtered out dust while others gave off the distinct old paper aroma. Another ten feet of books... another break. Again, carved flowers: daisies, Drummond Floxes, a huge rouse... A huge bloomed rose?

There it was, a full pouting rose in medium relief level with Jon’s breast. It was large -- about the size of a softball -- but with all the other carvings around it, the rose was lost and blended in almost perfectly. Jon vaguely remembered a statement from Mrs. Jouler about roses, and began to scan every section of the carved wall, going from random panels and back again to the one with the rose. He imagined he must have looked like an owl with his head cocked at strange angles, darting back and forth around the room, his eyes round as quarters.

“Dude, stop it. You’re making me dizzy,” said Ray who had given up trying to read and was following Jon’s wild darting pattern with her eyes.

“Just a second...” said Jon quietly, still darting around.

It turned out Jon’s intuition was correct. There were no other roses on any of the other panels.

“I think I’ve got something,” he said with his eyes blazing and his heart racing. He turned to Ray at last.

“What?” said a very disinterested Ray.

“Look here. A rose,” said Jon, pointing to the bloom.

Ray glanced at it from her seat. “A rose. Wonderful. Watch me do a dance.”

“No that’s not it. Remember what Mrs. Jouler said the other day about big blooming roses?”

“No...oh wait, yeah. She said she had to get back to them before blowing us off.”

“Exactly,” Jon said, grinning.

Ray just shook her head and shrugged, still blasé.

Jon was undaunted. “These walls -- they only depict wild flowers. This is a rose.”

“So what? You’ve told me roses grow in the wild.”

“Yes, but they’re smaller and not this...full. And there’s something else,” Jon was almost bursting with excitement now. “All the flowers on these panels repeat. Look. Sunflowers,” he said, pointing to a sunflower on the same panel as the rose. “Sunflowers,” he said, pointing to the next panel with sunflowers on it. “Sunflowers...sunflowers, sunflowers,” he continued, pointing to subsequent panels. “Primrose,” he pointed at the first panel again. “Primrose, primrose,” Jon said pointing to all the panels. “Rose...” he said and swung his arm around the room, not stopping on any other panel. He stopped, pointing at the original panel. ”One big bloomed rose.”

Ray looked at Jon with more scrutiny, then got up and examined the rose herself, then strode to every other panel.

“Okay, so there aren’t any other roses. Big deal.” She folded her arms.

“Yeah, but this is the only second out-of-the-ordinary thing we’ve seen since we saw that room. What if....” Jon reached out with his finger and touched the rose, then withdrew his hand quickly. Nothing. The carving was just as cold as wood should be on a cold, rainy day.

“Well that’s not going to be enough,” said Ray, and palm-first with all her long nails and rings, pushed forcibly on the rose. The metal on her hand clinked, and when she withdrew, the rose was slightly more depressed than it had been a second before. Jon gave a quick glance at Ray and instinctively thrust himself at the wall with both arms outstretched.

A two foot-wide section of the panel gave way and swung inward on hinges and creaked loudly. Jon and Ray stood there staring at the now pitch black passageway that lay before them. Ray took a few steps in, but came back when she could see no further.

“We need a flashlight or something,” she said.

“What if the batteries give out?”

“Well get candles then,” said Ray.

Their conversation was interrupted by footsteps on the hardwood floor.

“Quick!” said Jon, and he lunged forward and pulled on the side of the thick door with enough momentum to have it swing shut. The rose popped out to the way it was before Ray depressed it.

Jon had just taken his hand off the wall door when he saw Mrs. Jouler stride down the steps into the library.

“Not a very good day to be outside is it?” she said with a smile. “But it doesn’t bother me; I like rain. It waters my gardens and lawns for me.” She strolled over to the plant life books shelf and after rummaging through the tomes, picked out a particularly large volume, smiled at them again, and plopped herself where Ray had been sitting. The whole time, Ray and Jon stared at her, becoming more and more horrified as they saw her begin to read the huge book from the beginning.

Jon and Ray traversed the entire first floor of the mansion to the dining room in the south end of the house. They got to the breakfast nook and sat down across from each other.

“What do we do now?” asked Jon.

“We wait for her,” replied Ray immediately.

“But what if she --?”

“We wait for her,” said Ray more slowly. “We finally found something that makes sense with that room. Don’t you think it’s odd that she shows up just as soon as find the door?”

“Ray -- ” Jon said, putting his head in his hands.

“Fine, fine, whatever. Let’s wait for her, yeah?” said Ray with more diplomacy. Jon could see she was determined, and to an extent, so was he.

He nodded in silence, and they returned to the library. Ray gave Mrs. Jouler a nasty smile that Mrs. Jouler fortunately mistook for a real one, and smiled back.

Hours later, the rain was still coming down as heavy as ever, and Jon, Ray and Mrs. Jouler were still in the library. Jon thought they would have had their chance when Mrs. Jouler left the room, but their spirits fell when she returned moments later with an arm full of firewood. Jon and Ray had another breakfast-nook conference. They surmised that Mrs. Jouler, without her gardens to keep her occupied, was going to be in the library all day and evening.

Sure enough, they were right. Jon even volunteered to help with dinner to pass the time in the hopes that after the meal, Mrs. Jouler would occupy another part of the house. Ray kept tugging on Jon’s arm when Mrs. Jouler was in the kitchen, cooking, but he shook his head. If she happened to go back into the library for any reason, she’d see them, or the door-panel. And sure enough, after the meal, both Jon and Ray groaned as they fell a few steps behind Mrs. Jouler who headed straight back to the library. The rain was lessening, but it was nearly dark, getting cold, and Mrs. Jouler didn’t look the type to sitting out in the rain.

She turned on several lamps and sat down in one of the armchairs. “Good reading weather,” she said and smiled at them.

“Can’t I just smack her upside the head with a book? It’d give us a few hours,” Ray whispered as they stepped down into the library yet again.

“No. Like you said, we’ll wait. It’s bad enough we keep staring at that part of the wall like it’s going to explode,” Jon whispered back and sat in his previous seat.

After almost two hours of hand-wringing anxiety, Jon got an idea. He stretched and yawned loudly and obviously. “Well I’m beat. I’m going to bed,” and with that, he put the books down he was supposedly reading and purposely slumped toward the foyer.

“That’s good, dear. Us gals will be here for a while,” said Mrs. Jouler.

“Actually,” said Ray without missing a beat. “I’m going to bed too. Night.” Ray, too, headed into the foyer.

With their backs turned to the library, they heard Mrs. Jouler a moment later. “Ah well, if you young spry things are going to bed I might as well. If it’s not raining I want to be up bright and early.”

The three of them started up the staircase with Jon and Ray exchanging devious looks as they reached the landing. Mrs. Jouler was right behind them.

“Sure wish I had some candles,” Jon said as he turned right down the hall.

“I think I can find some at eleven o’clock,” Ray called back from the opposite hall.

Jon heard Mrs. Jouler mutter something like, “never understand teenagers.” He closed his bedroom door and waited in his room for the next sixty minutes.

Jon was pacing the foot of the stairs at exactly eleven. He could hear the grandfather clock in the hall with its stringy chime broadcasting the hour. He’d already grabbed a small flashlight from his car. Ray came around the corner with a large, fat candle in her hands. It’s light made her features oddly shadowed.

As they stood in front of the panel once again, Jon felt the same anticipation he’d felt earlier that day. Ray pushed the Rose again, and the door swung open. Ray started to go first, but Jon held out an arm and went ahead of her. She didn’t protest.

The passage was only about four feet wide and eight feet tall, making the trip somewhat uncomfortable. Ray couldn’t have gone first even if she wanted to now; there was very little room to pass each other. The path continued almost due straight forward with only a slight veer to the left.

Ray voiced what Jon was thinking as the darkness enveloped them completely. “This has to be the way to that funky room.”

“Let’s just hope it’s not an elaborate passage to the wine cellar or that’ll just suck,” said Jon.

Ray gave one of her booming laughs and slapped Jon on the back.

“Look,” he said, indicating ahead. After a relatively straight passage for nearly fifty feet, their candlelight illuminated the start of a staircase that turned out of sight as it rose. “Up we go,” Jon said quietly.

They climbed twenty or so stairs that were of the same stone as the house facade and the backyard wall. Once on the landing, there was a dark wood paneled door in front of them. They looked at one another again, and after taking a deep, slow breath, Jon turned the iron handle, opened the door and stepped inside.

The interior of the glass room was breathtaking. It wasn’t so much grand as it was simplistically beautiful. The diameter of the room was about forty feet long and the walls were all sectioned opaque glass. The metal latticework that separated the various panes of glass was neither straight nor symmetrical. The metal, which looked to be copper, was intertwined, twisted and curved so the glass was separated like a large jigsaw puzzle that stretched into a domed ceiling that was dark grey against the stormy sky.

As Jon and Ray stepped further inside, the ground was covered in dust, but the candle and flashlights revealed a deep blue and black marble floor -- a color Jon had never seen in marble. Also in the room were two other features besides the bizarre floor and walls. In the dead center of the room was a cylindrical pedestal that came up to Jon’s bellybutton, and around it stood three chairs, all equidistant from one another. They looked extremely old, and the velvet cushions on them were deteriorating. In fact, one of the chairs looked like it might spontaneously splinter into tiny shards if it was looked at too hard.

“Wow,” Ray said, looking around the room with wide eyes and an open mouth. She pushed part of her hair behind her right ear and began walking the perimeter of the room. “So this is what’s in here. How cool is this?”

“Very,” said Jon, giving her a wide smile.

“No wonder the old bat didn’t want anyone to know about this place. I wouldn’t either,” said Ray, pressing her hands to the glass.

“I still don’t think she knows about this. I mean would she have these old chairs just sitting here? And she wouldn’t have left this much dust gather on the floor,” Jon said as he kicked his foot at the floor and a waft of dust rose into the air.

“Stop that; I have allergies. But look at this,” she said, noticing the pedestal.

They both converged on it. There was a small, circular object sitting atop the flat surface. It was larger than the diameter of a half dollar, but about a half an inch thick, and Jon saw it had an archaic-looking carving of a bird with a long, flowing tail. Jon reached out and touched it with his flashlight-free hand.

“I think it’s made of terra cotta --”

But a permeating, blinding light flashed in the room, and a loud crashing sound of breaking glass filled Jon and Ray’s ears. Ray gasped and put her hands over her face, dropping her candle. Jon shut his eyes tight.

When the brief pain in his eyes subsided, Jon squinted ever so slightly. The light wasn’t filling the room anymore.

“What the --?” Jon asked no one, as he was what the object was doing now. A concentrated beam of pure white light was shooting out of the object. The beam of light shone out of the room through a pane of broken glass.

“It’s okay, you can look,” Jon said quietly to Ray.

“OW!” said Ray as she took her hands from her face. She saw Jon staring at the light, and looked, too. Through the broken pane of glass, the light beam projected out to the forest. It ended a few miles away, deep in the trees. The beam was clearly visible through the rain.

Somewhat foolishly, Jon snatched up the Amulet. It stopped projecting the ray. “The beam must have broken the glass.”

“Oh yeah right, like a beam of light can really break --” but Rays sentence ended in a scream and she took several steps backward.

The place Ray had dropped her candle just happened to be the cushion of one of the old chairs. The old velvet and dry wood was on fire.

A new emotion crept up within Jon he hadn’t felt for a long time -- fear. Jon’s grip on the Amulet instinctively tightened, and he backed away from the chair. Ray looked around wildly, but there was nothing in that room to put out a fire.

Not really knowing why, Jon started muttering, “stop...stop” as if his words were enough to quench the flames creeping up the backside of the chair. But suddenly, as if a pail of water was thrown on them, the flames disappeared entirely. They didn’t die off, but they simply ceased to be.

Ray, with both hands over her mouth now, said, “How did you do that?”

“I -- I don’t know,” Jon said truthfully. He got over his shock enough that he eased his grip on the Amulet and brought it to eye level, and examined the carving more closely.

“This is a phoenix. I saw a drawing just like this in a bookstore the other day. It’s a mythic firebird, but I don’t know how it --”

Jon was again interrupted, this time by a loud voice coming from below. It was a sleepy voice, talking about a broken window.

“Mrs. Jouler!” they said together. Since the small fire was out, there was no pressing need to stay in the glass room in almost total darkness. They silently agreed to leave, and briskly walked out of the room, shut the door with a bang, and flew down the spiral staircase and out of the darkened passage in a quarter of the time it took them to first get across it. They got out of the passage and closed the Rose Door. The Rose once again popped back into place.

As they ascended the stairs out of the library, Jon felt that same sense of adventure creeping back to him. Something about that room, that Amulet (which Jon had taken with him), and that beam of light were connected – he could feel it. What’s more, they all seemed to beckon him. The whole thing was too strange for Jon to do anything about it that night, but as he and Ray were going up the stairs, Jon said, “Something feels weird about all this. Not wrong, just...weird.”

“Uh, I totally know what you mean. I feel like I’m gonna throw up or something.”

“Yeah...anyway, I’m going back into that room tomorrow when it’s daylight, then I’m going into the forest to find that spot it pointed to.”

“Come on, how do you know it was pointing us to a particular spot?”

“I just -- know,” Jon said. “Let’s go to bed so we don’t wake Mrs. Jouler up even more.”

“I’m going with you,” Ray said.

“Um, I like you, but I don’t think it’s a good idea if you start sleeping my room.”

“No you spaz, I’m going with you into the forest.”

“Oh,” Jon said, taken aback. “Thanks.”

“You are so not going to have all the fun, I swear.”

Jon smiled at Ray and the split up to their separate rooms.