The Princess Summoner

Of Strange and Peculiar Things Part I

  She looked around her. She wondered where the noise the come from. Then she started to walk. She walked deep into the forest. She knew enough about wolves to know that they didn’t howl without reason. It was either because they were lonely or hungry. Fortunately, she did carry several apples in her backpack when she did venture out. And she had some now. The forest to her wasn’t as scary as was to some. She hadn’t heard the tales that come from them like her townsfolk. Mainly because her mother and father didn’t prescribe to superstitions and haunted tales. The dark woods were full of shadows and strange phantoms that looked menacing. Some of the townsfolk had said they heard ghosts out into the deep parts of the forest. As she walked, she heard the crinkle and crackle of the leaves that she stepped on. The wind started to whip and wail. She put her coat and scarf she had gotten the previous Christmas on and continued her way. The scene widened as she saw a house farther out in a clearing. The wolf was not howling. If she did hear a wolf it was somewhere else. The wind started to pick up. And she started to get an unnatural chill.

       The house appeared to be by itself in a little cottage. She trekked closer to the house. The clouds in the sky seem mired in a foggy soup. The girl became nervous. She had never been this far without her parents. But she felt a need to keep going despite what she felt. As she neared the house it was bigger than she thought. It was like a mansion. Suddenly the clouds misty and foggy as they were, crackled. She saw lightning in the clouds several times. Then, it started to rain. She thought she better get in this house before she catches a cold. She then knocked on the door with the antique door knocker three times. She waited. There was no answer. She knocked again three times. Still no answer. She called out in her shrill voice. Teresa “Hello...? Can anyone hear me?... I’m outside in the rain…Please, can someone let me in?”

    There was silence for a while. Then she sees the door open by itself. She sees that it is dark inside and cold. As she comes in from the rain, she gets a strange feeling inside her. A chill runs down her spine. Like someone is watching her. She sees stairs going up to the next floor. She starts to look for some light source. Light sources were few and far between out in the wilderness of the outskirts of the city. Not many ventured out here. At least not in the last decade. But as it so happened, she did find something as she ventured up the stairs, a lone candle with a matchbook to light it. As she does, she sees what a huge house this is. And that’s not all she discovered.

    The look of the upstairs was dark, dank, and moldy. Some of the furniture had dust balls in every nook of their comfort zones. She could see cobwebs travelling up to the ceiling and across the room. The windows had light blue drapery covering them along with ornate rugs covering the floor in a mish-mash pattern. She thought somebody grand must live here. She then saw a grand hallway leading into the back of the house. She couldn’t see beyond that because of the size of the place. She began to think why they would leave such a place. Such a place requires maintenance and care. She also began to see how beautiful it could be if given that same care. As she got to the end of the hallway, she saw a small room with lots of trinkets and doodads. And as she went into this room, she felt a strange feeling. It was one filled with things that she hadn’t felt before. She looked around and saw another bookcase. There seemed to be too many of these bookcases in this house, which was odd because no one had seemed to live here.

    The bookcases were filled with old books. Books with some letters in it. Some letters had ineligible writing on them.   Some of them had writings of long, gone banks numbering systems. Some of them had stories of ghosts and goblins. One had an adventure tale of swashbucklers and pirates. Another had things like aliens and futuristic cities in it. It all seemed pretty incredible to her. She had never seen a compilation of books out in the open like this. The books were stacked up almost to the top of the ceiling in rows very neatly. To her, those books were like discovering gold in the unknown spaces of men’s imaginations. But there was one book that looked especially appealing. It was high. 5 feet higher than she could reach without the proper stand. So, she looked for a ladder to reach it. It was barely lit in the room but on the far end of the bookcase was a movable ladder. It was nothing to move the ladder to where the book was. As she climbed, she realized she was in part venturing into the deep. Out into unknown. And part of that was scary. Yet so thrilling.