Sabrina nervously closed the Portrait gallery door behind her, hand trembling slightly as she did so. I don't understand it. I was fine before! But…those faces…
She nearly gagged as the death-portraits of the Gracey family resurfaced in her mind. Were they doomed to this? Had their family been cursed from the beginning? How else could suffering follow one family so closely? Everyone was caught in the snare of misery in this house; not even the innocent Gracey children had been spared.
There are so many questions, and no answers in sight…
Salem and Leota were unusually quiet, as if sensing her distress. The psychic softly directed her to return to the landing from which they had entered the Upstairs Hallway.
The blonde turned around, and began carefully weaving her way through the hallways; quickly, in case any more Netherworld demons decided to come looking for her. Her eyes flitted from side to side, watching for anything to leap out of doorways, or materialize through the walls.
That's odd, Sabrina noted mentally. Before, there were monsters leaping at us from all angles. And now…there are none to be found. Bizarre.
Her eyes widened as she passed by a demon trap. Nothing's trying to get out.
"Something's wrong," Sabrina whispered.
"I'll say," Salem grumbled. "This entire house."
"No." Sabrina shook her head. "Haven't you noticed? I only did a little ago." She paused. "How strange…" she mused on her last statement.
"Noticed what?" Salem demanded. "The fact that we've almost figured out the secret behind this entire place? The fact that we're in over our heads? The fact that we could very well die here?"
"No. The monsters are gone."
"Oh." Salem blinked.
"She's right," Leota called, distressed. "I can't sense their energy."
"Neither can I." Sabrina 'pushed' with her mind, searching for any of the familiar monstrous auras that they'd encountered before. Nothing.
"That's rather unlike Thorne," Leota mused. "He's the type to throw everything he's got at an opponent. Having his Netherworld servants roaming around was his advantage and our handicap."
"Now, the situation's reversed," Sabrina murmured.
"But why?" Salem demanded. "Is he that bad a tactical leader? Even when I was attempting to conquer the Mortal Realm, I knew how to direct my troops to the best advantage."
Sabrina paused, watching him for a moment. "I think that's a question we'd all like answered, Salem."
Leota snorted, in a most un-lady-like manner. "Whatever the answer is, we won't find it here. We have to keep going."
Sabrina nodded, and began her return to the landing that connected the floors of the mansion. She stood on the threshold of the staircase. Below her were stairs leading down to the Downstairs Hallway. Another set of stairs, on her left, led upwards…presumably to the third floor.
"All right, then," she murmured under he breath. "We're reaching the endgame, Thorne. Beware."
And she began to climb.
The flight was short enough, leading to a narrow, unbelievably short hallway. At both ends of the hallway was a round window, and there was one door on each side. The lushness that trademarked Gracey Manor was very nearly gone here.
Above her head, the boards sloped. A thin, worn carpet meagerly covered the floor, patches of wooden boards plainly showing through where the threads had worn away. No paintings adorned the wall, and there was not a stick of furniture throughout the hall. The grandeur and magic was gone from this paltry garret-like hallway.
"Which door?" Sabrina asked, to no one in particular.
Leota shrugged. "On your left is the Attic, and on your right is the Observatory. Take your pick."
Sabrina hated stupid decisions like this. Either one she picked; it didn't matter. Pointless—entirely so. Yet, the decision-making process hindered her momentarily. For some reason, she felt compelled to make a 'rational' choice in deciding which door to open. And so, Sabrina Spellman turned to the oldest decision-making tactic in the history of creation.
"Eeenie, meenie, mynie, moe; catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go; eenie, meenie, mynie…MOE!" she finished triumphantly. Her finger pointed at the Observatory door.
Salem felt like falling over in surprise. The quality of Other Realm employees sure has declined in the past century…
Smiling, victorious, Sabrina hastily deconstructed the barrier, and yanked open the door, hopping inside. Salem barely had enough time to leap in, luckily managing to avoid getting his tail caught in the door.
The room was dark. But she'd expected that.
Sabrina stood, blinking, trying to adjust her eyes to the dramatically dimmed light of the Observatory. The room was absolutely bare of any type of furniture; it was constructed of cold stone, and reminded Sabrina of a castle tower. "It's almost straight out of Harry Potter," she grinned.
There were, of course, differences between the Gracey Manor Observatory, and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry's Astronomy Tower. For one, planetary charts and star maps covered the walls. Some, of course, were outdated; she found one that didn't even list Pluto in the sky.
She stared at the central telescope: an enormous metal monstrosity reaching to the ceiling. It seemed that, among the jumble of metal that served as the base, a ramp or walkway of some sort curved along the structure, upwards. I guess that's how you get to the top.
"So…how does this thing work?" the Spirit Detective pondered.
"There are three generators along the ramp," Leota quickly explained. "You need to turn on the first two to warm it up and open the current, but the third has the main power switch."
"Seems easy enough," Salem grunted, jumping onto a piece of metal from where he could leap to the backpack.
Sabrina tipped her head back, staring. How big is this thing? Twenty feet? Thirty? I just hope it's stable…
Carefully, the group began to climb the telescope's base. Every now and then, Sabrina would nervously look downward, as if to reassure herself that nothing was on the ground floor, waiting for them. Nothing was.
The room was eerily quiet.
The generators, she found, bore a strange resemblance to large hourglasses. It seemed too simple: flip the switch, and the glass began to glow a soft white. The gentle, low hum of the generators charging up was relaxing. She was almost lulled into a state of composure…almost. No matter how soothing the white noise from the generators was, it simply could not erase the deathly aura of Gracey Manor.
It seemed almost a lifetime ago, that these strange, burgeoning powers had awakened. A sixth sense was definitely unusual…although, secretly, kind of cool. She had, of course, earlier swallowed the urge to blurt, "I can see dead people, too!" when Salem had made reference to her new abilities.
Trace-energy perception…the ability to learn about objects and their surroundings by tapping into trace amounts of residual energy left upon said object.
This sixth sense, however, apparently could extend into many fields. Leota had, so far, taught her to use it to sense auras. But there were other gifts it could be used towards—psychokinesis, telepathy, astral projection—that she would have to try and see if she could accomplish. From what she'd heard, it was worth trying.
She paused a moment, her fingers brushing against cool metal. I wonder if the lights will come on when I throw the main power switch? Well, there's only one way to find out…
The Spirit Detective walked forward, quicker this time, searching for the final generator. It was firmly built into the side of the main telescope, the switch left in the "off" position. With a grin, Sabrina firmly grabbed the switch, and pulled it upwards.
The generator lights flickered on, pulsing a bright white, as a soft hum was emitted. Sabrina would have turned away, if the hum hadn't slowly increased to a piercing whine, and the lights begun to flash menacingly. The whine increased in frequency and pitch, until her head was throbbing, and her ears close to bleeding. The telescope's structure began trembling, the walkway buckling beneath her feet. With a shriek, Sabrina fell backwards, sliding back a few painful feet before she rolled sideways and grabbed on to a piece of railing.
Salem wailed and dug his claws into her dress; Leota was shouting something that Sabrina couldn't hear. She closed her eyes and clung to the railing tightly as the telescope began to squeak and sway dangerously.
The explosion was the last thing she heard.
Cold pricked at her spine. Shivering, Sabrina began to return to consciousness slowly and piecemeal.
Where am I?
Her eyes slowly opened, narrowed at first. Black. Black everywhere.
I can't be dead…can I?
She pushed her eyes open fully, and blinked. The vast, glittering brightness of space surrounded her. Rather like the ceiling of a planetarium, but closer. Milky whorls and clusters of stars were dotted throughout the entire view. She nearly stretched her head to look for the Milky Way, before she mentally smacked herself.
I'm in OUTER SPACE!
She felt like screaming for a moment, as panic swam through her veins. She gave a shuddering breath, and stopped, as she was not instantly frozen or vaporized.
"I'm guessing you forgot that witches can breathe in space?" Salem drawled unexpectedly from her left.
Sabrina's face flushed. "Shut up," she mumbled.
Leota's ball slowly rolled out of the backpack, coming to a rest by Sabrina's hand. She looked at the two, bewildered. "You're not dead," she gasped. "We-we're in outer space…and you…you haven't…"
"I'm not sure how much you know about witches, seeing as you used to be a human," Salem stated, eying her. "But one of the basic differences is internal body composition. Our lungs are structured to work in almost any kind of atmosphere. Our blood is chemically different. We use a different and larger section of our brain."
"That's why we can still breathe," Sabrina explained. "I'm just…not used to being knocked out, and waking up near the Cat's Eye Nebula."
"Isn't it beautiful?" Salem sighed. "We must be at the center of the universe…cats always are at the center of something important."
Resisting the urge to smack him, Sabrina pulled herself to a sitting position to view their surroundings.
Obviously, the generators had blown, and taken the telescope with it. Everything below them was shrouded in infinite, inky blackness, but shattered pieces of the telescope hovered all around them. Carefully, she psychically searched the area for…well…anything.
Hmm? It's there…somewhere southeast and up.
Sabrina pushed herself off the ground. "Come on."
"Huh?" The psychic and the cat both turned to stare at her.
"There's something—an energy trace—over in that direction," she explained, pointing for good measure.
"Do you think it's the switch?" Salem ventured.
Sabrina shrugged. "At this point, I think I'm willing to settle for anything." She began walking towards the end of the dented sheet of steel she had previously been unconscious on. "I just wonder how we can get there."
Salem growled, and began tugging the backpack towards Leota's ball. She obligingly rolled inside, as he followed suit. "I'll retreat to relative safety while you figure this one out."
Sabrina made a face as she slipped the backpack on. "Thanks." Cautiously, she stood at the edge of the battered metal sheet. While the darkness of outer space stretched in all directions, the cloud of defeated machinery was spread over a one-hundred-yard area. The nearest piece was about three feet away.
Pfft. An easy jump.
Pulling her backpack on tighter, she backed up a few feet, then executed a running jump onto the nearest piece.
What she certainly hadn't counted on was gravity.
She sailed through the air, much like jumping on the moon. This is so weird. It almost felt like time had slowed down, and she was soaring through the air in slow motion.
And then she realized that she was going to overshoot her goal. As she began to descend, Sabrina twisted around, frantically grabbing at the sheet of metal behind her. She ended up pressing her torso against a piece that had been bent upwards, and wrapping her arms around it.
Once she'd prevented herself from falling into the void of space, the Spirit Detective clambered onto the smoother, flatter surface. Sitting on her haunches, she began to massage her forehead.
"Okay…so gravity works differently here. I guess that means I have to shorten my jumps," she mused.
Taking her own advice, she found that carefully shortening or lengthening her jumps almost always landed her exactly in the center of the piece of debris. This is like the book puzzle in the Conservatory—except the stakes are much higher this time. It was mindless—jumping from hunk of debris to hunk of debris. The only difficulty lay in the timing of pieces that were rotating.
I feel like I'm stuck in a platformer game. And it's uninspiring.
"I feel nauseous from all this jumping," Salem volunteered.
"Please don't puke on Leota," Sabrina sighed.
"Because then, you'll owe her a new backpack," the psychic chimed in. "Not to mention having to clean my ball off."
Salem rolled his eyes. "Which, of course, I can easily accomplish, given my lack of opposable thumbs."
Sabrina nearly skidded off the edge of a battered generator. "Everybody, shut up and let me concentrate."
Salem growled, and retreated back into the backpack, wherein he proceeded to curl into a ball and whimper.
Rolling her eyes, Sabrina proceeded to continue jumping across the debris, towards the strange energy. She nearly fell off a rotating cylindrical barrel, feeling much like a lumberjack rolling a log along.
The pieces of metal became smaller, more of them rotating swiftly. It became, at least to the teenage witch, an absolute chore to jump from each to each. She nearly tripped twice, and banged her shin on a rotating steel beam.
It was a noticeably grumpier Sabrina who half-limped, half-jumped onto the platform where the energy trace had been coming from.
"Well, whaddya know. A light switch," Salem remarked sarcastically.
Sabrina mumbled something unintelligible under her breath, and yanked at the switch. The platform instantly began to shake again, as it had before the main generator exploded (and landed them in this whole mess to begin with!).
"Not again!" Leota groaned.
"This is getting really old," Sabrina snarled, as she searched for something to hang on to.
"Mommy!" Salem wailed.
And then everything was falling.
Both dark clouds and bright points of light flashed by her eyes as she was falling, head first. She couldn't open her mouth to scream, she was falling too fast.
Am I going to die? …Well, if everything so far hasn't, then maybe…
With a brilliant flash of light, she smacked onto something hard and cold. "Oww," she mumbled, rubbing her rear. At least I'm not dead…I think. You can never tell around here…
"We're alive!" Salem cried, clawing his way out of the bag. "Rejoice!" Leota shot him an annoyed look. "Whoops…" the cat chuckled nervously. Shoot. Forgot she's dead.
Sabrina turned around. Behind her, the telescope was re-assembling itself, the generators whirring and humming, gentle white light beaming and lighting the room. "Well, at least that's fixed."
She pried herself off the floor to incredulously watch the telescope put itself back in pieces. Meanwhile, Salem had found something of interest.
A piece of paper had fluttered down from the ceiling, landing on his nose. The parchment caused his little kitty nose to twitch, ending up in a massive sneeze that sent the paper flying. After he pounced upon it, Salem caught the paper in his teeth, and carried it back to the backpack. It took some nosing, but he was able to find the other pieces.
Jigsaw puzzles are hard to arrange when you have to pick the pieces up with your mouth.
This statement was entirely true; the fragments of the Death Certificate were torn very much like a jigsaw puzzle, and arranging them was difficult for the hand-impaired cat.
But, at last, it was assembled in a fashion that made sense, more or less, and he proudly sat to await Sabrina's return.
"Good work, Salem!" she crowed, Beacon in hand.
Salem shot Leota a smug look. "See. I am useful."
"Sometimes."
"WHAT?"
As they began to bicker over who was the more useful of the two, Sabrina studied the picture.
A portly man, dressed in the stereotypical clothes of a pirate captain, was poised nervously at the edge of a wooden plank. Behind him, on the ship, stood a crowd of pirates, angrily waving cutlasses and pistols. One man held something looking like a treasure map, his mouth open in an angry scream.
"They made him walk the plank? Their own captain?" Sabrina stared incredulously at the picture.
"Red Roger," Leota began to explain, abruptly breaking off from her argument with Salem, "was one of the jolliest buccaneers to sail the seas three hundred years ago. He was, in fact, a good friend of Ambrose Gracey's."
Sabrina's jaw dropped. "Ambrose Gracey was a pirate?"
"No, no, he was a friend of a pirate," Leota explained wearily, as if used to the question. "Roger had been a friend of his in the shipping industry who found that being a pirate was…well…more profitable."
"So…why did his crew mutiny?"
Leota grinned. "He buried the treasure."
Sabrina blinked. "But I thought all pirates did that."
"It's a really amusing story, but you should probably hear it from Roger…"
Sabrina pushed herself off the floor. "That's what you say every time."
The psychic blinked. "Do I?"
The black-robed girl rubbed the back of her neck. "Never mind."
By now, the telescope had fully re-assembled itself, standing as tall and sturdy looking as it had before the explosion. The ghostly forms of a man and a woman stood at the base, clad in long, billowing dark robes, with golden circlets around their heads.
Sabrina walked closer, trying to identify their outfits. It looks like something out of a history book on the ancient Celts.
She stopped before she could invade what she dubbed their 'personal space,' and studied them. The woman raised her head, and began murmuring in a throaty drawl, "I am Morgan, queen of the realm. It is right for all to submit to my power and beauty."
Sabrina nervously stepped back before she realized that Queen Morgan, like most of the souls in the mansion, was trapped in the reverie of her past. She could neither hear nor see the Spirit Detective.
"It is that power," Morgan continued, "which enabled me to slay that monstrous dragon."
"Yikes!" Salem yelped, backing away.
"But all thy power be for naught, Morgan," the man next to her sighed. "For we canno' even find our child. The princess," he murmured, "resides in another castle…far away…"
The king and queen returned to staring into the night sky, melancholy despair settling over them once more.
I wonder how their souls came to be trapped here. It's obvious that they belong to medieval Scotland…
"I wish I could help the ghosts here," Sabrina whispered quietly. "They all seem to be searching for something. Like them," she gestured to Morgan and her husband. "They're searching for their child. But it seems that they'll never find her. I wish I could help," she added, as they turned to leave the room.
"You can," Leota stated quietly. "Rid us of this curse. Then…and only then…will we ever be free…"
I know this chapter may have seemed a bit implausible, but I felt it was necessary as the last "normal" room in the game/story.
The Cat's Eye Nebula really does exist, although I don't know its placement in the galaxy. Sabrina and Salem actually get to visit said nebula in the Sabrina science handbook Sabrina's Guide to the Universe. Salem's of the firm belief that it must be at the center of the universe…for reasons he stated above.
Next chapter: The final revelation of Gracey Manor's bloody past awaits in the Attic, along with other shocking secrets…and Sabrina must prepare for the fight of her life…