Author's Note: Thanks for sticking with the story. And now here we go!
Chapter Six: A Storm and a Catalyst
That night, Flynn was sound asleep and did not notice when Rapunzel silently slipped out of bed, pulled on one of her older gowns and a pair of heavy boots, and quietly left the room. She felt bad about sneaking around like this. She was fundamentally an honest person, and operating—as she had been—in such secrecy around Flynn was not in her nature. She truly did like him, and she had to have a powerful reason to keep secrets from someone she liked, but there was a powerful reason. Rapunzel had managed to subdue her terrible grief over the loss of the only person she had known for so many years, because her work and her growing attachment to Flynn kept her thoughts occupied, but the grief remained just below the surface, and it was intensified by a feeling of guilt and self-blame.
As she walked softly downstairs, she heard a pattering behind her. "Pascal!" she hissed. The chameleon stopped and looked reproachfully up at her. "Oh, all right," she whispered, bending over and holding out her hands. Pascal climbed into them and scurried onto her shoulder. She supposed that it would be better for her to have his guidance. She tiptoed into the kitchen, picked up the nearest threatening-looking object—a heavy frying pan—and finally slipped out the back door, grabbing the lantern off the floor as she left.
Pascal might not approve of what she was doing, but he didn't want her lost in the woods if she was nevertheless determined to do it. With her little chameleon pointing the way, she found the tower without any trouble.
"Look to the symbols," she murmured softly to herself as she stepped inside the ground-level entrance. She finally lit the lantern, which she had managed to avoid doing until now, and immediately gasped in astonishment. There at her feet was a stone with a symbol carved upon it. It was a little more than three feet in diameter. She backed out of the stone entrance, set the lantern down on the ground, and got on her hands and knees to examine the stone. The stone floor did not seem to be mortared, and the gaps between the paving stones were just large enough for feminine fingers to slip through. Rapunzel bit her lip in contemplation as she gripped the sides of the central stone, with its carved design.
Pascal gave a loud cheep of protest as she began to lift it up. "Pascal!" she complained. "I have to."
She pulled the stone up from the ground and set it down on top of the others. Her eyes grew wide. "Oh my goodness," she exclaimed in an awed voice.
The sun was just starting to rise when Rapunzel finally made it back to the house. Pascal abandoned her at the foyer, unwilling to follow her to her favorite room in the house. She darted upstairs, pattered softly down the hallway past their bedroom, and slipped into her laboratory, where she promptly deposited a heavy book, shoving it into a stack of papers to conceal it as best she could. She took off her boots and dress in the lab and slipped back into the bedroom almost naked. When she saw that Flynn still slept soundly, she breathed a sigh of relief as she slipped back under the covers and fell asleep.
She awoke again a few hours later to a gentle nudge from him. "Wake up, sleepyhead," he said in an amused tone.
Sleepyhead, indeed, she thought as her eyelids fluttered open. She was pretty sure she felt more tired now than she had when she came back from the tower just before dawn. She couldn't have had more than two or three hours of sleep, and she knew she was going to pay for it today, but she didn't think she had any other choice. Yawning, she felt as if she literally could not get out of bed and would fall asleep again any moment.
Flynn looked vaguely disappointed at how tired she was, but he decided it would be ungentlemanly to pursue his object when she was so clearly exhausted. He didn't know why she would be—she had spent the whole previous day inside—but there it was nonetheless. He leaned over and gave her a light kiss on the forehead. "All right, go back to sleep if you need to," he said indulgently. "But I'm going to get up."
She slept until noon.
Flynn did not know about the book or the nighttime trip to the tower, and if he had known about the latter, he would have insisted on seeing the former to know exactly what book had been so important that it warranted such a jaunt. What he did notice was that for the next few days, Rapunzel did not express any interest in going to town to acquire more books. He wondered at that, and that same letter that had inspired such outrage from him a few days ago came back to his mind. He distinctly recalled the phrase "look to the symbols and you will find the book," and he couldn't help but wonder if the old manuscript that he had found in the tower many weeks ago contained some kind of cipher-clue about the elusive book's location.
Yet he knew she did not leave the grounds of the house—at least, during the waking hours. The implications of that idea weighed on him, albeit too late, and he began locking the bedroom door at night and keeping the key under his pillow. Rapunzel noticed this and began to fear that he suspected she had sneaked out that night, but she could not work up the courage to ask him why he was suddenly doing this. Instead she devoted herself during the daylight hours to intensive study of the book but made sure to spend at least the last two hours before bedtime with him. If he didn't suspect that she had left the house during the night, she was sure that he was locking the bedroom door out of a sense that they didn't have enough time together. She supposed that over the past two or three weeks, she had become obsessed with her project at the expense of spending time with him. She began making profile drawings of him when they sat in the study together, something that she actually enjoyed very much. It was easy to forget the powders and sinister old books upstairs when she was immersed in drawing his handsome features...
On the whole, though, Flynn could not help but feel that something very significant was about to happen. A sense of nervous anticipation hung over the manor house. One night, he was in the study, waiting for her to come back down, when dim flashes of light—blurs, really—began to illuminate the night sky. He gazed idly out one of the windows. Yes, there appeared to be a lightning storm, and judging from the dimness of the flashes, he figured it was mostly off in the distance. He turned back to the book he was currently reading.
The steady lightning continued, however, and got brighter. Flynn gave a sigh; apparently the storm was heading their way. He glanced up again. He couldn't see any bolts striking the ground; whatever was going on remained inside the clouds. Something was odd, though. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was, but something about this storm was not right.
After a particularly bright flash, he realized what it was. There was no thunder with this lightning. Come to think of it, he had not heard any all evening.
A chill quickly shot down his spine at this realization. All of a sudden, he wanted Rapunzel to be in the room with him. He didn't like the thought of her by herself in that isolated room at the end of the second-floor hallway. For that matter, he didn't even like the thought of little Pascal all alone in whatever room that the chameleon was currently in. He wanted them all together. He bookmarked and closed his book, setting it down on the table, when a rapid pattering of tiny feet caught his ear. He whipped his head around to find the source.
Pascal raced through the study door, squealing in his tiny lizard voice, and darted inside Flynn's doublet just as the bolt hit.
It was purplish-white, and in that terrifying moment—barely a millisecond—when it illuminated the whole room, Flynn was sure he saw things that just did not belong. Vaguely humanlike shapes and forms, though hideously distorted, were superimposed over the furniture and contours of the study. Everything was bathed in a ghastly, vividly bright ultraviolet-and-white, lending a stark, harsh unreality to the room.
Then the flash was gone as quickly as it had come. The room looked normal again, and the shadowy forms—if such things there had been—vanished so completely that Flynn instantly questioned his own perceptions from a moment before. That was when the massive central chimney collapsed. With a terrific crash, bricks tumbled down all the fireplaces connected to that massive stack, including the one in the study. Dust rose up from the hearth. Flynn's heart was racing, and the creature clinging in sheer terror to his shirt did not help matters, though he couldn't blame Pascal for being frightened.
Ignoring the chimney for now, he left the study and headed upstairs. "Rapunzel?" he called out in a shaky voice.
There was a pause, and then she responded. "Eugene?"
"Are you all right?" he asked as he reached the top of the stairs.
"Yes," she said. The door at the end of the hallway opened, and a frazzled—but curiously triumphant-looking—Rapunzel stepped out of the laboratory. She promptly closed the door behind her and headed down the hallway to meet him.
He swept her into his arms and squeezed her tightly. Pascal crept out of his vest and onto his shoulder. If he had bothered to look, he would have noticed the chameleon giving its owner—or, considering how it had chosen Flynn over her, perhaps former owner—an unmistakable glare of disapproval.
"We lost the chimney in that," he murmured into her hair.
"Oh no," she said quietly.
"It's all right, though," he said, stroking her back. "We're all safe." He said it more to convince himself than to soothe her. That ghastly whitish-purple flash and those shadows were still bothering him, though the brief moment was fading fast from his immediate memory.
"I'm sorry about the chimney," she said penitently.
He looked down at her in surprise. "It wasn't your fault," he said.
She glanced at him looking wide-eyed and guilty, almost as if she wanted to argue the point—but that didn't make sense, Flynn thought. And sure enough, in a moment, her expression softened, and she nodded silently. He squeezed her again. He did not really feel like going to the study. He wanted to get under the sheets with her—not for a sexual reason, but because after that, he needed to cuddle with her.
The next day, he headed out to the Snuggly Duckling shortly after lunch, leaving Rapunzel in her laboratory. Pascal scampered after him and leaped onto his leg, attaching himself to his pants and climbing up his body like a kitten might, much to his astonishment.
"Hey, little guy," he said as the chameleon found its place on his shoulder. "I'm going to the pub. You might not like it in there... and your owner is going to be annoyed with you, or jealous of me, or both, if you keep choosing me over her."
Pascal narrowed his eyes at Flynn and dug his scaly toes into the seam at Flynn's shoulders. Flynn sighed. "Fine, suit yourself," he said in resignation as he headed out the door.
The ground was dry as a bone on the way to the Duckling, something that struck Flynn as rather odd. He did not recall there being any rain with the storm at his house, but surely it had rained somewhere close by. Yet there was no sign of it. He didn't even see any evidence that the wind had gotten up. And with no rain, but lots of lightning, wouldn't there have been a very high risk of fires? That, too, hadn't happened. He was thoroughly confused by the time he reached the pub, but there was no mistaking the fact that a lightning bolt had hit his house. The bricks from the chimney lay scattered all over multiple rooms in the house, and from the outside, the shattered stack marred the outline of the house.
He walked into the pub and glanced around. The usual daytime crowd was there: Hookhand at the battered piano, Big Nose, Vladamir, Bruiser, Killer, Gunther, Ulf, Attila, Fang, Shorty, and Greno were the ruffians that Flynn immediately noticed. He went up to the bar and ordered a mug of beer, which the bartender shoved at him.
"What're you doing here, Rider?" Big Nose said.
Flynn took a sip. "I've actually got a job offer for somebody."
Several of the thugs looked up. "What kind?" Vladamir asked gruffly.
"Cleaning out a bunch of broken bricks from the house and repairing the main chimney stack."
Some of the thugs exchanged glances. "It fell down?" asked Vladamir.
"Yeah, a lightning bolt hit it last night."
Confused looks came over the face of everyone listening to him. "What're you talking about?" asked Hookhand. "Last night was clear as could be."
"Yeah," chimed in Big Nose, "I went outside and gazed up at the stars." A dreamy look came over his face, and the rest of the thugs glanced away, but no one would criticize or laugh at him. There seemed to be respect among the ruffians for each other's quirks and foibles. Flynn had once seen Bruiser knit and Killer sew, while Fang made hand puppets. No one in the daytime group ever made fun of them.
But what the ruffians were saying was seriously alarming to Flynn. "Look," he said, "I know a lightning strike when I see one. It hit the house... lit up the very room I was in." He pushed the memory of that brief moment out of his mind. "And for a while before that, there had been distant flashes."
The thugs looked really confused now. "I didn't see nothing," Big Nose said. "It must have been right over your house and went away quickly."
Flynn felt a chill creep up his spine once more, but he tried to ignore this. "Must have," he said, trying to sound nonchalant. "In any case, it hit the chimney. Can anyone come out to repair it? You know I'll pay generously."
The ruffians exchanged glances with each other, nonverbally deciding who should go out to do the job. Finally Vladamir, the largest ruffian, spoke. "I'll do it," he said.
"Great," Flynn said, though his words were not enthusiastic. "When can you do it?"
"In a couple of days."
Flynn drained his mug. "Appreciate it," he said, striding over to shake the ruffian's overly large hand. He needed to seal the deal, but he wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. It seriously disturbed him that none of them knew about the thunderstorm, and he wanted to leave behind this place and head back to the house at once.
When he got back, Rapunzel was in her laboratory with the door closed, but even through the heavy door, Flynn could hear her chanting rhythmically once again. Her voice was much louder and stronger in this chant, which seemed to Flynn to be a strange mix of Latin and Hebraic words. He listened outside the door for several minutes before realizing that she was repeating the same couple dozen words over and over. Flynn could not understand anything that she was saying, but there was a definably dark tone to the chant. Pascal could not stand to listen to it and immediately dashed down Flynn and across the hallway, leaping frantically down the stairs.
Flynn rather wanted to follow the chameleon, but he steeled himself and knocked on the door. At that very moment, she stopped her chant, and out of the keyhole there issued at once a flash of light and an incredibly foul chemical stench.
She must have just mixed something that ignited, Flynn thought shakily. That happens sometimes. Some things burn when they mix with other things. He told himself this as if he were trying to convince himself not of the truth of it, but of the falsehood of something else—though what else it was he feared, he could not or would not name.
"Rapunzel?" he said, but to his surprise, he could not manage a voice above a hoarse whisper.
Either she did not hear him or she ignored him, engrossed in whatever she was doing. A crackling rumble sounded from behind the door, followed by a smell slightly different from the one that had just issued forth. Flynn stood by the door, unable and unwilling to move.
She began to chant again, but this time it was different, and he did not recognize the language at all. The words, though, seemed imprinted in his brain, as if he would never forget them. Phonetically, they sounded to Flynn like this: "Yi nash yog sothoth he lgeb fie throdag"—followed at once by a shrieking "Yah!"
Right after she finished this last bizarre syllable of the whole bizarre incantation, a scream in a female voice that did not sound quite like Rapunzel's began to sound, a scream that rapidly turned to maniacal, sardonic laughter. Flynn was transfixed with a horror that he could neither name nor even describe as the chortling echoed off the stone walls. Finally taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door, but to no avail. He drew back, breathed deeply once more, and closed his fingers around the doorknob, only to find that Rapunzel had locked it.
It was just as this realization passed through his mind that the sardonic laughter ceased and Rapunzel began to speak in her normal voice. Her tone was very low, and the words she was saying were indecipherable, but her muttering continued. Flynn listened closely, pressing his ear against the keyhole, but to no avail. All he could make out—though this was enough to frighten him—was that the muttering was taking on an overall tone of conversation or dialogue. As he listened closely, he realized that about half of the muttered phrases—an alternating half—seemed to be in that slightly different, slightly more sardonic and triumphant tone that he had never before heard Rapunzel use.
He steeled his nerves once more and knocked on the door once more, far more loudly this time, calling out her name sternly. At once the muttering ceased, and in the familiar, inquisitive, excited voice of Rapunzel's came the exhortation "Sssh!"
There was then some shuffling and heavy thumping behind the door, and in a moment, Flynn heard the lock click and saw the door swing partially open. Rapunzel edged out, dressed in one of her increasingly worn-out older dresses and smelling of chemicals. Her hair was frizzy and her eyes were wide with excitement and unmistakable joy. She slipped through the door and closed it behind her at once, before he could go in.
"Oh, Eugene," she exclaimed.
He glared at her. "What were you doing in there?" he said, his heart pounding. He spoke with more authority than he felt, but he wanted to calm himself and that seemed to help. "That chanting—the flash of light and the rumblings—and then the muttering—"
"I'm sorry, Eugene," she said, still sounding more excited than penitent. "I'll clean everything up as soon as I'm... calmed down... and the rest of it, well, it won't happen again. I promise you that—it definitely won't happen again."
She spoke firmly, and in spite of himself, he believed her about that. "It had better not," he said sternly, still trying to calm his own nerves. He steered her away from the door and down the hallway. "What was it? What were you trying to do in there? I want answers, Rapunzel," he said. It suddenly seemed as if all the uncertainties and questions he'd had over the past weeks were settling at the forefront of his mind. "You obviously have been doing a lot more in there than you've been telling me, and I think I deserve an explanation."
"You're right," she agreed at once. "I've just had the breakthrough I've been looking for all along... It won't happen again. It's your house, I know, and you've been so good to me, letting me stay here and offering me room and board—and being so, erm, affectionate with me"—here she blushed and paused awkwardly before continuing—"but what was going on in there was this... chemical reaction. That was the flash of light. The rumbling just came from... another reaction, an explosive one."
"An explosive one?" he exclaimed in alarm.
"Nothing caught fire," she said hurriedly. "Nothing of yours was damaged."
"What about the chanting?" he said, a chill curling up the back of his neck at the memory of that last round of muttering, those distinctly different voices or tones, and the suggestion of a conversation.
"It was part of the procedure," she explained. "I don't entirely understand it, but, well, it worked..." She cleared her throat. "But it won't happen again," she repeated.
"You're quite right it won't," he said firmly, steering her toward the staircase. She glanced back at the closed-off room for a moment before deciding to go with him.
It took them almost an hour to locate Pascal, who was found curled up in catatonic shock under one of the chairs in the study. Flynn brought him out, observing his staring, shocked, completely dilated eyes. He frowned at Rapunzel, hoping that she would feel properly contrite for scaring her chameleon so much.
"I'm sorry, Pascal," she said, stroking his tiny head. He moved a bit at her touch, and his pupils contracted to normal size. "It's all right."
The chameleon seemed to thaw. His movements were slow, but with a bit of coaxing—he was more responsive to Flynn than to Rapunzel—he was willing to crawl up Flynn's arm and rest on his shoulder. There he stayed for the rest of the day, even when they were eating.
Rapunzel wanted to go to back to the laboratory to supposedly clean up, but Flynn was reluctant to let her go in there again. Finally, though, when it was almost nighttime, he decided that she needed to bathe anyway—she still had a chemical scent in her hair—and she might as well do it after she had cleaned the place. She scampered happily down the hallway and slipped quickly through the door, closing it behind her. Flynn hung around the door, not sure what he was expecting—or fearing—to hear, but at once he started to hear the normal sound of sweeping and nothing more. He heaved a deep breath and headed off to the bath. He could use one himself, not because he was dirty, but because the warm bath would relax him.
After he was washed, somewhat relaxed, and stretched out under cool sheets with a book in hand, he waited for Rapunzel to finish cleaning and begin her own bath. He heard the door to the laboratory creak open slowly and footsteps patter softly down the hall toward the other end, where the bedroom and stairs were.
The room was lit only by the lamp on the nightstand and the hall only by a candle set in an inset in the middle of the hallway, so Flynn could not be sure of what he saw, but it seemed to him that when Rapunzel passed by the half-open bedroom door, she was trailed by something else hidden beneath a black sheet or cloak. It must be a sack filled with the dust and whatever else she cleaned up, he told himself firmly.
Flynn heard the front door to the house open, then a minute later, shut. Footsteps bounded up the stairs once more. "I'm going to get my bath now," Rapunzel called out as she passed by the bedroom again.
Something about her tone bothered him. Her voice was too bright and nonchalant. He didn't trust it; it sure seemed to him that this tone was meant to conceal something, but he could prove nothing. He decided that the events of the day—heck, the past two days—had simply set his nerves on edge so much that he was imagining things now. He tried to focus on his book, and when that didn't work, he tried to think about Rapunzel getting into the bathtub. That was a nice thought, and his imagination gladly latched onto that.
When she finally emerged, the chemical scents that had saturated her hair and clothes were mercifully gone. Flynn was relieved; he wanted as little as possible to remind him of that disturbing incident earlier in the day. Fortunately, Rapunzel's own presence evoked nothing of her activities in the laboratory. Dressed in a white nightgown, standing shyly in the doorway, Rapunzel looked more innocent—and, in Flynn's mind, desirable—than she had since the first night she came to the house.
"I see you're all clean," he remarked. "Why don't you come here?" He smiled encouragingly at her.
Hesitantly, blushingly, she came into the lamplight and sat down on the mattress. He reached out and pulled her into a kiss, which she happily returned.
"Now that you've had a breakthrough on your project, can I reward you for your cleverness?" he murmured against her skin, pulling her down.
She giggled. "If you want to."
"I think I do want to," he growled, reaching for her nightgown and pulling it off her as he positioned himself on top of her.
Eventually, they were ready to go to sleep.
The next morning, Flynn was the first to wake up. Rapunzel lay on her side, curled up against him. He smiled at her, but as he slowly became fully awake, all the thoughts that he had tried to ignore and push away rushed back to his mind. It suddenly occurred to him that now, while she was sleeping, was an excellent chance to go into her laboratory—when he had started to think of the room in his house as her sanctum, he was not sure—and see if he could find any clues about what she had apparently accomplished last night. Throwing on a robe, he shuffled down the hallway and opened the door.
Light flooded the room through the windows. Flynn gazed around the room and instantly got the impression that something was off, but he could not immediately figure out what it was. The flasks that had formerly rested on top of the table were piled up inside their old wooden box once again on the floor, completely empty of the powders and liquids that they had once held. The black-and-red urn stood next to the box, capped once more. Flynn went over to it, got on his knees, and opened it, turning it upside down gingerly—but nothing fell out. The books Rapunzel had purchased over the past several weeks were all neatly lined up on the bookshelves, though he thought he saw a black leatherbound volume that he had never noticed before. The old manuscript that he had found that one day in the tower was still nowhere in sight, and Rapunzel's own notebooks were piled up on another bookshelf.
As he got back on his feet, his gaze shifted toward the mantel, and that was when he realized what was different. The oval portrait of Rapunzel's mother, the painting that had so disturbed him with its creepily realistic eyes, was gone. An empty canvas, still stained with vague, formless blobs of paint that were absorbed into it, now hung over the mantelpiece. Whether it was from the lightning bolt of the day before yesterday or the flashing of Rapunzel's last round of experimentation, the sinisterly gazing portrait was no longer.
Flynn was staring in surprise—not sadness, exactly, for he wouldn't miss the woman's sinister stare—for so long that he didn't even notice that Rapunzel had come into the room. Suddenly, though, he realized that she was standing beside him.
"Your painting," he said, regretful for her sake—because after all, it had been her work, and her late mother.
Rapunzel, however, merely smiled in a wry, ironic way that Flynn found utterly unaccountable. "Oh, it's quite all right," she said through that smile.
He raised an eyebrow questioningly at her, but she would not say anything more. She just stood there smiling in that enigmatic way, as if something about the loss of the painting was actually amusing to her. Giving up, he took her by the arm and headed downstairs to eat.