Chapter 12 : Bones
It was now Auntie Whispers' turn to invite the Woodsman and his family to her home.
"Why do I have to go too, again?" Beatrice asked the old man as they were getting ready to leave the cabin in the woods.
"She said 'you and your family'", he reminded her. "You're part of my family."
"…You really think so?"
The Woodsman nodded. The girl in blue couldn't help but smile.
As soon as Clover had finally found where she had left her boots, they were all ready to go.
Lorna offered to make the tea this time. However, once it was ready, the other two teenagers were nowhere to be seen. The Woodsman looked outside while his hosts checked if the girls hadn't wandered upstairs.
As it turned out, they hadn't. But then, Lorna thought, what if instead they went… oh no.
She immediately dashed downstairs and found the door to the basement wasn't locked. This was bad news. Very bad news. They saw. They saw all the bones. All the reminders of a period of her life she would rather forget.
She rushed into the basement ; when she found the other two girls standing in front of the neatly piled bones she was too short of breath to speak immediately.
"Oh, Lorna, here you are", Clover said when she noticed her host was there, turning around to face her. "Sorry, we just wanted to, hum… talk…alone and… we found this. Are you alright? You don't look alright."
"And why is this ossuary here of all places?" Beatrice enquired. "That's a pretty weird thing to have in a house, don't you think?"
"It wasn't me, I swear! It was the evil spirit!" the girl with the bonnet blurted out.
The others replied with a perfectly synchronised "what?"
The ossuary remained silent for maybe a minute, but it felt like hours.
Lorna had said way too much to be able to back down now : they would ask her questions. So she replied before they could ask.
"…And then he banished the evil spirit", she said after a lengthy explanation. "It's all over now. Now we can have visitors."
"That's… pretty heavy stuff", Clover commented, staring at the bones of the unfortunate visitors who came here before her friend was cured.
"First of, your Aunt should have asked the spirit to leave a long time ago, second of… you've met Wirt and Greg too? I travelled with them!"
"Am I the only one in the Unknown who never met these two?" the Woodsman's daughter asked. "Also, Beatrice is right ; your Aunt could have cured you a long time ago…"
"…She didn't think it was possible. Especially since the evil spirit had always been there."
"I didn't expect a soul like yours to have such dark secrets…" Clover said, her hand approaching the piles of bones but never actually touching it.
"Speaking of dark secrets…" Lorna started.
"Are you going to ask about Adelaide again?" Beatrice interrupted her.
"Whatever you did cannot be worse than what the spirit made me do", her host pointed out. "And you don't have anything to fear from Auntie Whispers : she never really got along with her sister. She only wants to know what happened."
"You know what?" the girl in blue said, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "Fine. She melted from exposure to night air. Because I left a window open. Happy?"
"…That's… that's it?" Lorna asked, surprised to have finally succeeded in getting information.
"Yes", Beatrice replied. "Can we leave this creepy room and put all of these deaths behind us now?"