The Gathering

Notebook In The Attic

XIX. The Three Doors

The corridor stretched impossibly long. Sarah had counted the doors on arrival. Now there were more spaces between them. As if the house was breathing, expanding to accommodate her presence.

The air grew cooler as she walked. Stone cold radiated from the walls. It smelled of new construction materials and something older underneath.

The three generic studios clustered at the corridor's far end. Unlike the personalized spaces—Mia and Lora's Nashville memorial, Alice's holographic wonder, Kash's intimate booth, Kamadan's silence chamber, Emma's neural cathedral—these doors bore no marks of occupation. No nameplates. No worn patches on the handles from repeated entry.

Sarah tried the first door. The handle was cold under her palm.

The door opened onto a medium-sized space. Not as vast as the Wilds' studio. Not as compact as Kash's booth. The equipment configuration offered possibility rather than purpose. A mixing board. Monitors. A microphone suspended in a small isolation booth. Everything neutral. Everything waiting.

She stood in the doorway. The room was silent. No hum of equipment. The room offered no answers.

She photographed the space with her phone—Emma would want documentation—and moved to the second door.

This studio was different. Same approximate size, but the equipment emphasized live performance over recording. A small raised platform. Proper monitors for a performer to hear themselves. Cable runs for instruments that weren't present. The floor showed no scuff marks. The cables lay coiled and unused.

The third studio made Sarah stop.

It was configured for a pianist. A grand piano—not a digital keyboard, an actual acoustic grand—occupied the center of the space. The wood gleamed dark in the overhead light. The bench was adjusted for someone of medium height. Sheet music rested on the stand. Paper crisp and new. But when Sarah approached to read it, the pages were blank.

Empty staff lines. Waiting.

Her hand hovered over the keys. The ivory was smooth, cool to the touch. She did not press down.

The composition degree she'd never finished. The songs she'd stopped writing when her mother got sick and someone had to run the café while Dad dealt with insurance paperwork. Five years ago. A different person.

The house provides what people need, Emma had said.

Sarah backed out of the room and closed the door carefully. Her footsteps echoed in the corridor's silence.

XX. Above

The attic access point revealed itself in a manner consistent with the house's personality. It wasn't there until Sarah looked for it. Then it had always been there. Tucked into a corner of the second-floor landing she'd passed six times without noticing.

The pull-down stairs descended smoothly. Without the creaking protest such mechanisms typically offered. Warm light spilled from above. Someone had left a lamp burning, though Sarah knew no one had climbed to the attic since their arrival.

She ascended carefully. The air warmed as she climbed. The wooden rungs were worn smooth under her fingers.

The attic space contradicted physics with the same casual disregard the basement showed. It extended well beyond the house's footprint. The ceiling was high enough to stand comfortably. The air was dry. It carried the smell of old paper and cedar and something like beeswax. Light came from multiple sources. Oil lamps converted to some sort of indefinitely-burning technology.

Storage dominated the space. Crates, trunks, wardrobes, bookshelves. All organized with particular logic. Someone knew exactly where everything was. Would be annoyed if items moved. Labels on the crates bore dates stretching back decades, centuries, some in scripts Sarah didn't recognize.

The house was an archive. Someone had been collecting for centuries.

She photographed methodically. Close-ups of labels. Wide shots of the arrangement patterns. The librarian instincts she'd inherited from her mother—the same mother who'd sobbed at a jazz song in 1987—guided her documentation.

A trunk near the window caught her attention. Unlike the others, it bore no label. Its surface was clean, as if recently placed rather than long-stored. The wood was warm from the light through the window.

Sarah knelt beside it and lifted the lid. Hinges creaked softly.

Inside, wrapped in cloth that felt like silk but shimmered like water, rested a notebook. Not old. Modern binding, acid-free paper, the kind serious composers used. The cover bore no title, but the first page held an inscription in handwriting Sarah didn't recognize:

For when you're ready.

— A friend

Below the inscription, in different ink, someone had added:

She doesn't know she's ready yet. Give it time.

Sarah closed the notebook. Her hands trembled.

She replaced it in the trunk. Lowered the lid. Photographed the trunk's position in relation to the window. Evidence that she'd found it. Documentation of its existence. Record that she'd chosen not to read more.

Letters are for the people they were written to, Mia had said.

This wasn't a letter. But it was close enough.

Sarah descended from the attic slowly. The stairs retracted behind her with the same impossible smoothness. She'd report what she found. The generic studios, waiting. The pianist's space with blank sheet music. The archive above. The notebook addressed to no one.

The trembling in her hands would not be mentioned. The inscription that named her without naming her would not be discussed.

Some discoveries needed time.

XXI. Kitchen Reconvening (Evening)

The kitchen had become the natural gathering point. Large enough to hold all seven of them. Domestic enough to encourage conversation. Equipped with the kind of coffee-making apparatus that kept Emma satisfied and functional. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee filled the room.

Sarah was first to return. Emma was already present. Hunched over her modified phone-scanner-device. Muttering at data only she could interpret.

"Preliminary results won't crystallize for another thirty-six hours," Emma announced without looking up. "The DNA traces are complicated. Multiple markers that don't correspond to any population database I can access remotely. I'll need Kamadan's Miskatonic contacts for proper analysis."

"What does complicated mean?" Sarah asked.

Emma raised her head. Her jaw was set. A crease had formed between her eyebrows.

"It means whoever prepared this house is either not human in any standard sense, or is human in a way that hasn't existed for millennia. Neither option simplifies our situation."

Alice drifted in from the dining room. Her eyes slightly unfocused. Consulting her other phases.

"The house has layers," she reported. "Temporal sediment. Some rooms exist in multiple whens simultaneously. I can see the basement studios flickering between configurations. What they are now. What they were prepared as. What they might become."

"Can you see who built them?"

"No."

Alice sat on the counter. An oddly casual gesture for someone dressed like a Victorian illustration.

"I see effects, not causes. The hand that arranged, not the mind that planned."

Footsteps on the basement stairs announced the Wilds' emergence. Lora came first. Her face still. Her shoulders straight. Mia followed. Eyes rimmed with red. Carrying a cardboard box filled with papers. The cardboard was worn soft at the corners.

"David's last year of compositions," Mia said. She placed the box on the kitchen table. "Everything he was working on before the fire. Recreated exactly. Including the coffee stains."

She laughed. The sound caught.

"He always spilled on his work. I used to yell at him for it."

"And Thomas's letters," Lora added quietly. "From when he was traveling and I wasn't. Years of them. I burned my copies in grief. Now they're here."

Emma set down her scanner. "The house provides what people need."

"The house remembers what people lost," Mia corrected. "There's a difference."

Sarah hesitated, then spoke. "I found something too. In the attic."

Six faces turned toward her.

"An archive. Crates going back centuries. And—"

She paused, choosing her words.

"A notebook. Newer. Addressed to no one I could identify. From a friend."

"Show us," Emma said.

"I can't. I mean—I didn't bring it. It was something I shouldn't move. Like letters."

She looked at Mia.

"Something meant for specific hands."

Mia studied her for a long moment. Then she smiled. A genuine smile. The trickster edges smoothed away.

"You're learning," she said. "What else?"

Sarah described the three studios. The neutral spaces. The pianist's room. She did not mention the trembling. Or the inscription that said she doesn't know she's ready yet.

"Waiting rooms," Alice observed. "Spaces prepared for arrivals that haven't occurred. The house anticipates."

"Or hopes," Lora suggested.

"Houses don't hope."

"This one might."

The back door opened. Kash and Kamadan entered from their expedition to Fischer's studio. Both moved slowly. But their eyes were alert. Tired from work, not from failure.

"Encrypted files are beyond my capability to access remotely," Kamadan reported. "But I photographed everything visible on Fischer's displays while he was explaining. Background windows. File structures. Enough for pattern analysis if Emma is willing."

"Willing and capable," Emma confirmed. "Transfer the images."

"Fischer himself—"

Kash hesitated, glancing at Kamadan.

"Terrified but truthful," Kamadan completed. "His emotional signature during the visit was consistent with genuine confusion. He truly doesn't know who or what gave him the information he used to create us. He believes he invented us. He also believes, now, that he was wrong."

"Does he know who a friend is?" Mia asked.

"No. But—"

Kash pulled a polaroid from her jacket pocket.

"He had this in a drawer. Said it arrived with no explanation three years ago."

The photograph showed a man's hand resting on a desk. Just the hand. No face, no body. No identifying features except for the unusual quality of the skin. Iridescent in the polaroid's chemistry.

"Male, forty to forty-five," Emma said. She took the image. Held it at arm's length. Tilted it toward the kitchen light. "Consistent with my doorknob analysis. And that skin texture—"

She trailed off.

"I need better equipment. This is not normal human epidermis."

"So we have a benefactor who isn't human. Who built us studios. Who possibly implanted Fischer with ideas he thought were his own. Who's been watching us for years."

Mia counted the points on her fingers.

"And we don't know what he wants."

"Yet," Alice said. The word hung in the kitchen air.

"Yet," the others agreed.

Sarah found herself included in that agreement. No one questioned her presence. She'd been absorbed into the collective. Not as audience, but as participant. The girl who existed because two women sang a jazz standard in 1987. Now standing in a kitchen that defied physics. Listening to people who defied explanation discuss their situation.

Inheritance. Connection. Family that chose rather than birthed.

The coffee Emma had made was excellent. Sarah wrapped her hands around her cup. Let the warmth spread through her fingers. She drank slowly. Listening. Documenting in her mind. Preparing to be useful.

She didn't mention the notebook waiting in the attic.

Some discoveries needed time.