"I'm telling you Molly, there's something freaky and paranomral going on around here." Angel said over the phone to his sister that evening. "First, I get knocked out by a mugger but nobody steals my wallet or takes advantage of me. Second, before I went down I saw a guy get brutally attacked in an alley and the next day he's walking around perfectly fine without so much as a scratch. Third, Vaggie apparently sleep walked outside last night but anyone who's known Vaggie for as long as I have, knows that when she's asleep she's dead to the world. She doesn't move, she's as still as a rock. And fourth, this town has creepy legends surrounding it."
"Angel is this like the time you thought Mr. Stamos was a mummy?" Molly asked.
"No. Because this time I'm not going to come up with any theories based on instinct. I'm going to wait and see what I find out. But can you really blame me for that incident? The man was literally skin and bones and he wore toilet paper."
"He was in a chemical explosion, and those were bandages you idoit."
"Oh right, I forgot."
"So what do the girls think about this?"
"I haven't told them because I know what they're going to say. Charlie is going to gently tell me I'm wrong and Vaggie is just going to call me a moron and try to get me into therapy again. She suspects something is not right but in the logical sense."
"She's probably right but just in case, you still have the rosary Mom gave you?"
"I never leave home without it."
"Then you should be fine if something demonic shows up. Talk to you later little brother."
"Molly how many times must we go over this? I am not you're little brother! We're twins!"
"I was born first, that makes me the oldest."
"By five minutes."
"Five minutes, five years, I'm still older than you."
"Whatever. Give my love to Mom."
The phone call was then ended and he started to comb his hair for dinner. When he was finished, he decided that he was too hungry to wait for supper time so he made plans to sneak into the kitchen and grab a snack to tie him over. Probably was though, he still had yet to figure out where everything in the house was.
"Now where is the kitchen exactly?" He thought going downstairs.
Angel looked for a staff member who could give him directions but none of them could be found at the moment. Too busy with work.
"Well kitchens are usually not too far from the dinning room and I think I can remember where that is."
He turned right and kept his eyes peeled for anything familiar looking. Nothing was ringing any bells and the hall seemed almost endless. It almost felt like the entire corridor was just going on and on forever.
"Okay it's clear that the dinning room is not this way." He thought.
But when he turned around to go back, he tripped over the carpet and fell down, hitting a small trigger in the floor which caused a pannel on the left side of the wall slid open to reveal a secret passageway.
"So old houses really do have secret entrances. My brother so owes me twenty bucks."
He stood up from the floor and stepped into the passageway.
"I wonder where this goes?"
The panel slid closed and everything went black.
"Hey!" Angel started beating on the the back of the hard wooden panel. "Hello? Anyone out there? I'm kind of trapped in a wall here!"
Nothing.
"Now I know why people stopped putting these in houses."
Angel searched through the darkenss with his hands, hoping to find a lever or perhaps a seam between the panel and the wall the could use to pry open the secret doorway.
"Just great, I'm trapped." He complained when he did not find anything. He pulled his cellphone out from his pocket and used the light of the screen to navigate his way through the passageway. The only thing in sight was an ancient stone staircase leading upward.
"I guess the only way to go is up."
He carefully walked up the stairs and at the top there was an eerie hallway with one door at the end, and all along the walls there hung countless oil paintings. He slowly went down the corridor of protraits while absent mindly taking a look at some of the artwork. At first they just looked like average, expensive paintings of people who lived long before Angel's time. Nothing that really captured his attention. That is until he noticed the last three paintings. He stopped to look at them because they were of people he recognized.
The first painting was of Husk sitting under a tree with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. The second was of Niffty wearing a pretty dress and holding a parasol as she stood in the sunshine. And the third was of Mr. Pentious holding a document which he was looking over. All three of them were dressed in clothes of a different century, they were out during the day, and they all appeared to be very happy and at ease.
But then the paitings started to slowly change. The daytime atmosphere turned to night, the happy faces of the three staff members turned to either rage or sorrow, and they no longer appeared human. They somehow morphed into these sub-creatures, these monstrous beings surrounded by misery and agony.
"What is this? Some kind of funhouse?"
He backed up against something on the other wall. It was a hanging mirror.
"Where did that come from?" Angel wondered.
But he didn't wonder long. Almost instantly, he began to admire his reflection.
"You'd think it was a sin for a man to be this gorgeous." He boasted.
But his admiration was quicky haulted when his reflection went through a very slow and graphic transformation. First his face warts and pimples started to appear on his face. Next he to look like he was having an allergic reaction to something, the skin had become swollen and rashy.
"What the hell?"
He moved his hand to his left cheek, one touch and it peeled up. All of it was peeling off. His entire face coming apart, leaving behind a bloody, grotesque skull. Angel started screaming and shaking, he closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he saw that his reflection was normal again.
He felt his face for extra measure and nothing changed. He darted away from the mirror and entered the door at the end of the hall.
"Okay this is the most F'ed up funhouse I've ever been in."
It took him almost ten minutes to catch his breath and slow down his heart rate.
"Serpents and spiders, tail of a rat. Call in the spirits wherever they're at."
The echo of a woman's voice along with a pale and gloomy light in the distance, led him further into the room. Angel heard ghostly moans and wails, and a firece wind blew past him towards the woman's voice.
He came upon a table in the middle of the room where there sat a crystal ball in an elaborate base. All around the room were unlit candles and tarot cards. The walls were heavily draped and he could now hear exotic music. Gypsy music.
"Rap on a table, it's time to respond." Came the woman's voice again. "Send us a message from somewhere beyond."
"Who said that?" Angel said looking around. "Hello? Is anyone up here?"
That's when the crystal ball began to glow and something appeared within. A head, the disembodied head of a dark skinned and golden eyed gypsy woman.
"Who or what are you?" She asked. "You're not one of the staff members."
"Whoa! Cool!" He said impressed with what he thought was a trick by special effects. He looked under the table cloth for a body and then checked the walls for a hologram projector. He found neither. "How are you pulling this off?"
"How am I pulling what off?" The head asked.
"You know the floating head bit. How do you do that trick?"
"It is no trick." She spoke. "I am Madame Velvette born into slavery, rescued and raised by gypsies, lived life as a simple fortune teller and medicine woman, but now cursed to be trapped in a crystal and serve as voice to the spirits."
"Nice backstory. Make it up yourself or is it a local legend?"
She glared at him.
"Whom do you seek?" She asked impatiently.
"What?"
Out of nowhere, a cushioned chair scooped up Angel and slid to a stop directly in front of the table.
"Hey! Let me outta here!"
"Silence!" Velvette commanded. "Why have you come here foolish mortal? Do you not know that a demon's curse plagues this house?"
"A what?"
"A demon's curse, one cast by tragedy and betrayal! A curse that seeks to claim a long-sufferig soul and destroy anyone like you!"
"Me? A curse wants to destroy me? Why does something want to destroy me? I haven't done anything!"
"Your friends are at stake! Your very life is at stake! Flee from this place!"
"Oh believe me, I'd love to flee from here!" He said getting freaked. "But I don't exactly know the way out of this joint."
"Dark spirits, from the grave come forth." She chanted. "Lift us from the black, and show us, show us the way back."
"Dark spirits?" Angel said. "Hey, no dark spirits! I promised my mother I'd never use a ouji board again!"
A violent wind suddenly burst into the room. The candles flickered low, and the room grew dark. An explosion of current started to spin Angel's chair all around the room.
"Evil and darkness have befallen this land for years." Velvette said. "To survive you must gain new sight."
"I must first gain new underwear!" Angel squeaked, sure that he had pissed himself. Now he loved a good haunting show as much as the next horror fan but this was going too far. "Alright lady I've had enough! Let me off this ride!"
"Fool! You think that this is a mere illusion?"
Angel was then flipped upside down. He screamed again and that action was followed by the chair dropping him to floor. He got up, and ran like mad, still screaming at the top of his lungs. He wasn't sure what he had just seen but he wasn't getting out of this secret passageway asap. But in his haste to escape, he accidentally went into the next flat instead out the door he came in.
This flat took him right into the one place he had been instructed to never enter. The attic. A low-ceilinged space full of crates and boxes and bins. Cobwebbs, dust, and even a few spiders were up in the corners. There was hardly any light and Angel had to be very careful about where he stepped.
He quickly adpated to the new surroundings and began to look around. He could see clothes, antiques, books, and more paintings. It was a room full of memories.
"I wonder if any of these paitings change."
He looked over them, expecting another fun-house like trick of the mind but no such thing occurred. But one in particular, he found to be very strange.
It was an oil painted portrait of a young woman sitting in a garden, wearing a 19th century dress. She was beautiful, with curled hair the brightest living gold and cloudless blue eyes. Her skin lily white and her cheeks like the roses surrounding her in the garden. But it was not her beauty that held Angel's attention for so long. It was the discovery that this woman's face, her body, her eyes, her smile, they were identical to someone he knew.
"Charlie?"
Yes, the woman in the oil painting looked exactly like Charlotte Morningstar.