Terror in the Attic
Benny expected the rest of the house to be secured in only a couple minutes . . . that is, if they didn't run into Ethan's "something a lot worse." But after locking the doors to a couple of second-storey balconies, the three were at a loss. They couldn't find the stairs to the top floor, which if it was anything like Benny's or Ethan's houses, would be one open attic. Or maybe several distinct rooms, given how big the place was.
Ethan was impatient looking through the second floor. Again, most of it looked as if it had been frozen in time nearly a hundred-years ago. Since vampires barely slept, the rooms hadn't taken as much damage on the part of Harlow and Gus. Well, Harlow obviously had taken over Colby's father's room. This large room with heavy furniture definitely hadn't featured a stack of linen paper and quill pens back in the twenties. Or those weird vampire council uniforms set out in the closet.
As for Gus, his room had a good deal of suitcases. Opening one, Benny found several stainless steel kitchen utensils. Benny threw them out the nearest window.
"You're not going to Benny a la Orange me" he said.
The three vainly looked through the closets for a trapdoor to the attic, like Rory had in his home. Colby's sister's room, which was spotless; Colby's mother's, which was connected to Colby's father by an interior door; and a few guestrooms which looked as if they had come from a particularly tony hotel.
Colby's room looked out of the twenties, with gramma-phone and a pinup of a starlet whom Ethan identified (with his seer power) as that of Greta Garbo.
The three returned to the hallway to decide what to do next.
"Why don't we just have Benny float us up?" asked Rory as he leant against the wall, when the three had returned to the hallway. "Someone can go to the door to that walkway upstairs and lock it up there."
"I can only do one of us" said Benny.
"And you're not very good at that!" thought Ethan, but kept quiet as Benny's floating spell had just saved the three of them a couple hours before. But he couldn't just keep quiet?
"I'll go" Rory volunteered.
"No, you can't, Rory" said Ethan, as Benny gave him a death stare. "Look, Benny, you can beat gravity and save us all from being splatted. "But what about your aim? The last thing we need is any of floating into space . . . again. Plus we should probably keep together . . . especially up there."
And a fit of shivering came over Ethan.
"Okay, Ethan" said Rory reluctantly, who although disappointed decided to trust his smarter and more cautious friend. Especially after the trouble he had gotten into on other occasions! "But how do we get up!"
"By the stairs" said Ethan, excitedly. "How stupid can we be? Of course there are stairs. They've just been boarded up . . . not even that, they've been wallpapered over. Colby's been getting up there through that door on the roof all this time."
"So we have to go room to room, calculating where the hidden stairs are?" grumbled Benny
"No, they're right behind Rory" said Ethan.
Rory jumped and turned to look at a wooden cabinet and a patch of wall. But Ethan was right. This patch of bare wall was right above the main staircase heading downstairs, and the ceiling of the main staircase downstairs was sloped. That was the location of the attic stairs in Ethan's house; although Ethan's house was much smaller, it was still the likeliest place for the stairs here.
Benny did use his floating spell, but to move a heavy wooden cabinet out of the way. Given it landed upside-down by the window, Ethan and even Rory were relieved not to have trusted Benny to float them up instead of "only" magically breaking their fall and saving them from the big SPLAT.
Light sabres weren't useful against wallpaper, but Benny remembered Gus' suitcases and snapped his fingers with an accidental spark of magic. Benny ran off, but soon arrived back in the hallway with a knife (the three of them looked at that knife loathingly, and sincerely hoped Gus only used his fangs against people!) and stuck it in looking for the cleft between the old door and the wall. Sure enough, it worked, and soon enough there was a door before them sans doorknob.
"If Colby wanted everything kept perfectly, why did he board up the attic stairs?" said Ethan, saying the question on all three of there minds.
"In the old days, that's where the servants lived" said Rory, sagely. "Up on the third floor."
"It would be like the guy not to care about the help" Benny said. "But how did you know that?"
"How did you not know?" Rory retorted. "The last two years they've had us reading nineteenth century English-novels in English class.
"It's too boring to actually read" Benny admitted, as he tried to open the door without the doorknob.
"It might be easier with the doorknob" said Ethan.
"Dude, where was it?" asked Benny. "Use your seer power?"
"It fell out of that wooden cabinet" said Ethan, with a grin. "I saw it alright . . . but with my eyes."
Ethan inserted the doorknob, and let Rory to use the key (the one that looked like it opened a rusty padlock). Ahead of them was a flight of very steep and extremely dusty steps.
Rory figured that bad omens were true; just like many things he didn't know existed two-years before. And Rory had the worst omen, the one-and-only thing about his restored humanity he didn't like . . . and had hated since the time he was four. The third-storey was so dusty that halfway up the stairs, he took a breath and didn't get any air. Too dusty for Rory's trusty garlic to ward off his asthma, whatever it might do to fight vampires. At the top of the stairs, Rory couldn't help but start coughing . . . but his reliable asthma inhaler put a stop to it. And once it was over, Rory brightened up. A little coughing once in a while, or cursed into a creature so evil anything holy was deadly to him? Who'd never grow up and have a life like his friends? No contest, no contest at all.
Ethan and Benny had asked the typical questions; "Are you okay?", "Hold on, dude!", "Take a deep breath, Rory". Ethan was naturally concerned, but almost in a good way, as it had been a long time since he had said this (back in the summer before they had started high school).
Once, it was over, the three were able to turn on the nearest round light switch and look about.
Whether you called it an attic or the third-floor was a matter of preference. Although the ceiling plainly sloped at the side of the building, it wasn't an open space, like in Ethan's house, but divided into several rooms and at least one narrow hallway. Although vampires might not reflect, and it was an open question if they left fingerprints, they apparently left shoe-prints as Colby's were here and there showing up deep in the dust. They led to the opposite side of the house, where in the gloom Ethan could see a short, spindly spiral-staircase leading to a door out to the roof. Or, rather, the cupola with a roof peaked like a witch's hat and a french door out to the widow's walk alongside the rooftop of the old mansion.
But the three geeks stalled, as they were amazed. Among the dust, the dim light, the wooden floorboards and faded wallpaper the place was filled with about the largest collection of miscellanea they had ever seen. A king's ransom in stuff. And why was it all there? Record players, bicycles, mugs, neckties, music boxes, women's hats, woman's purses, jewellery, laptops, cell phones and boxes upon boxes of watches.
"What the heck is all this?" asked Rory.
"Vampires have to find a place to put their junk" said Benny. "Grandma Evelyn usually puts it in the garage. Or the basement."
"We use the attic" Ethan said.
"I wish my house had an attic like this" said Rory idly. "All our attic has is pipes, insulation and trusses. You can't walk up there . . . well you can, but you'd go through the ceiling if you didn't keep on the beams. And my mom would really ground me then."
But there was something about Colby's strange stockpile that put Ethan's nerves on end. So much so that he really didn't want to take the seemingly simple walk to that spiral staircase down the hall. But, a geek's gotta do, what a geek's gotta do . . . .
Benny soon picked up on the fraught mood, and . . . as he very rarely did . . . looked quietly and cautiously around. Benny felt like he was in for some sort of shock, like the time he had seen Sarah bite that rat in Downtown Whitechapel thereby proving everything Ethan had been telling him about Sarah having been a vampire (at the time). And the fact the supernatural actually existed.
As for Rory, who had at first curiously looked back and forth at the stuff, he soon had an unexpected bout of shivering.
The steady beat of raindrops on the roof, and the slow return of the thunder as another storm cell approached, didn't lighten the mood. A strange roar, as if from a stray gust of wind, likewise added to the gloom.
The rooms at the sides had once been, as Rory guessed, servant rooms. But they too were filled, almost to overflowing, with the items. And then, near one room, Ethan stopped so abruptly that Rory and Benny stumbled into him. Ethan looked in.
"Dude, the stairs are that way" commented Benny.
"A heart-shaped locket" Ethan said, as he grabbed something off a cluttered and dusty night-table to show Benny.
"So . . . a heart-shaped locket?" said Benny. "You want to give it to Sarah, don't you?"
Ethan opened it, and showed Benny a photo of a woman and her blonde daughter. The teenage girl was very good looking, but the clothes she wore reminded Benny of those in his Grandma Evelyn's old yearbook.
"She must be really old by now" said Rory innocently, also looking at the photo. "She's probably a grandmother."
"I wish she was a grandmother" said Ethan morosely. "Colby kept a list of victims in notebooks. One of them said "Grand opening of Toronto subway, March 30, 1954. Picked up blonde U of T coed for ice cream. Nineteen years old. Heart-shaped locket, but only 10 karat gold."
Sure enough, the back of the locket said 10K.
"Dude, he kept a . . . collection" said Benny.
And it was clear was all this was. Souvenirs of Colby's victims. Thousands upon thousands of them.
"When he was alive, he collected coins" said Ethan.
"And then, when the guy became a bloodsucker he kept on collecting" Benny observed. "Like Erica did, this past year, only way worse."
"Sort of how we'd be collecting" said Ethan hollowly. "Everything itemized."
"You keep your stuff way more organized" said Rory. "My mom and dad make me keep my models and things neat. They get angry if I don't keep my room clean."
"Rory, buddy" said Benny impatiently "Focus! Evil vampire taking souvenirs from victims. You keeping your room clean so you won't be grounded. Two entirely different things!"
"Uh . . . yeah" said Rory, whose mind turned back to the horror about him.
"Where were the cops?" wondered Ethan. "This, at least, is evidence."
"It's not as if vampires leave much in the way of clues" Benny reminded him. "And they're not really easily caught! And even if the police had an idea . . . . not only are they good at covering their tracks, it's really hard to believe there's such a thing as vampires doing the killing."
"It's too bad we weren't able to catch them at the bank" Ethan said. "Nobody believes this stuff until they see it."
The three fell silent, and listened to the beating of the rain on the roof.
It was true. As much as Ethan scoffed at people like Principal Hick's eyes being closed to the supernatural, it had been the same with everybody he knew . . . himself included.
Nobody had believed Jane when she told Benny and the Morgans about the terrifying murder of the kid taking slap-shots off the Morgan garage. Benny didn't believe Ethan when he warned his best friend of Sarah's wonky reflection. And Rory wouldn't listen to Benny nor Ethan's warnings about the danger he was in at the vampire's party.
The three were able to make it to the short, spiral staircase without too much trouble. And, after climbing the rickety stairs, Ethan opened and then slammed closed the door and locked it.
"We can finally go home" said Ethan. "I mean, home to your mom and grandma's, Benny."
"Last one out of this place is a Cylon" claimed Rory.
That, of course, was a challenge that couldn't go unanswered!
"You're not going to beat me" said Benny, who was starting down the hall, accidentally jostling some of the collection.
"Wait 'til I get down from these stairs if we're going to race" said Ethan.
Along the banister post at the bottom of that spiral staircase, Ethan noticed something he hadn't seen the first time. A long pearl necklace. Ethan whistled in surprise. It was the necklace that belonged to Colby's girlfriend, the one who had broken the ukelele over his head. Colby had taken his revenge and she must have been one of his first victims, if not the first.
Ethan immediately regretted that whistle, because that was the moment disaster struck.