10:54 PM
"I know I said this five minutes ago, but this time, if I'm still climbing these stairs in five minutes, I'm turning around and heading right back down."
"We've all been up these stairs before, though." Nini looked upwards at the stretch they still had yet to climb, the moon barely peeking over the top of the mountain. "I mean, I'm not going to completely discard the idea that there are more stairs now than there were last time I was here, but we should still be able to reach the top soon enough, right?"
Holland nodded, though they didn't look convinced. "Easy for you to say. Don't you and Lynn climb up here every week?"
"Yep!" Lynn grinned. "There's a haunted library there. A library that is haunted. No way am I gonna pass that up." Nini nodded in agreement.
"Right. So you two are used to it. The rest of us come here, what, once every few months?" Holland stopped walking and sat down on a step. "Just give me a minute to rest, okay?"
"'Average friend of Strix's is used to the stairs' factoid actually statistical error," Addie quipped. "Libraries Georgs, who choose to climb over a mile every week to look for ghosts, are outliers and should not have been counted."
"A mile?" Lissa looked down towards the shore they had left nearly half an hour before. "There's no way she lives that far up."
"She doesn't. This thing is like half that, tops. It's the stairs that are a mile tall. Not the mountain." Lissa nodded slowly, not understanding Lynn's explanation yet not knowing enough to argue against it. Aleshe Manor was called the 'most cursed building in the YWP' for a reason, after all.
"I guess I get why you all told me to come here at ten-thirty instead of eleven, then." Lissa turned back to face the top of the stairs. "I can't believe someone lives up here. How does she, I dunno, buy groceries?"
"Carrier pigeon." Everyone stared at Mari. "I'm serious. I asked her once. They deliver her mail, too. It's all pigeons."
"Don't carrier pigeons just fly back to their nests?" Abigail asked. "Wouldn't she have to send them all back once every few months?"
Mari shook her head. "They know how to fly back to the post office, and no, I don't know why. When I asked Strix she just said 'retractable leashes.' I'm pretty sure she was joking. Probably."
Daniel cleared his throat. "Hey, walk and talk, maybe? We're cutting it kind of close. She said eleven in her letter, right?" There was some grumbling among the gathered guests, but all eventually stood up and resumed their climb.
The manor rose above the cliff like land rising out of the water after a long voyage at sea. The full moon hung in the sky next to the taller of two towers, and as the group drew nearer, little green lights began to appear, drifting lazily through the air. Lissa reached out a hand to touch one, but Marissa stopped her. "Don't touch them. It's dangerous."
"What, are they going to steal my soul or something?" Lissa asked, drawing back her fingers from the light. It looked innocent enough, but then again, 'most cursed building' and all. Who knew, maybe they were secretly creatures from another realm where human spirits were currency.
"No, they'll just give you a shock. The ones out here aren't all that bad, really. They only really hurt if you grab them too forcefully." Marissa lowered her own hand. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have scared you. Just... do be mindful of them, especially if you go deeper into the forest."
Lissa shook her head. "It's okay. What are they?" she added as another pair of lights spun through the air over her head.
"I'm not sure. I asked Strix once, but all she said was they were 'not of this world.'" So maybe I wasn't too far off, Lissa thought, watching the lights float around the group. It's weird that they only show up here, though. Is it for the same reason that the stairs are taller than the mountain they were built into?
"We're here." Lissa snapped out of her thoughts to see Kaiya pushing open a pair of large wooden doors to reveal a golden light from within the manor. She fell into line with the other party guests as they stepped inside.
The entrance hall was mostly bare except for a soft red rug on the floor and a mat tucked into a corner. Above the mat hung a sign reading, 'Please leave shoes here- the furniture ghosts don't like muddy footprints.' A pair of sneakers lay beneath the sign, damp with what was most likely seawater. Lissa winced as she remembered that her own shoes were soaked from the water pooling at the gate. Why'd we have to go through that thing, anyway? It was half submerged! We could have gone around!
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"You're thinking about the gate, right?" Marissa asked. Lissa nearly jumped as she spun to face the other girl. "You can't go around it. Strix won't say why, but you can't. I don't think I particularly want to know, either." She gestured to their feet, where a small puddle of seawater had gathered. "This is unavoidable. Especially at high tide. Kind of sucks for me, since I can't wear shoes, but I'd rather not invoke the wrath of whatever force wants us to use the gate at the shoreline."
Lissa nodded. "Okay. But what's a furniture ghost? And why do they hate muddy footprints so much?"
"They're exactly what they sound like. Ghosts that live in furniture. You can find them pretty much everywhere except the second floor and the library. And as for the footprints... you wouldn't like it either if you couldn't move and there was a big mud spot right next to you, would you?" Lissa had to admit that she would not.
"Hey!" Azrin pointed to the doors on the other side of the room. "Can we go in already? We're gonna be late!"
Mumbling an apology, Lissa pulled off her dripping tennis shoes and left them on the mat next to the eleven other pairs of damp shoes, then hurried over to the growing crowd at the doors.
Once everyone was gathered, Azrin pushed open the doors to reveal a much more well-furnished hallway. Couches and chairs lined the edges, three tables sat in clusters at the ends, and a piano stood in the middle of one wall. Lissa thought she saw a face peeking out behind the piano, but it vanished quickly enough that it might have been a trick of the light.
The most glaring feature of the hallway was a pair of double doors in line with the doorway the eleven guests were still standing in. A girl with curly hair mostly pulled back into a ponytail stood in the doorway and waved. "Hey! I was worried you guys weren't gonna make it."
Lynn waved back. "Sorry about that. The stairs, you know?" Strix nodded. "So, is the party in there?" she continued, gesturing to the doors.
"Yeah." Strix motioned for the guests to follow her through the doorway. "C'mon. Skit is already waiting."
The doors opened onto a dining hall, the bulk of the space taken up by a table and sixteen chairs. Each place at the table had a beverage labeled with a number from one to fifteen sitting at it except for one, which Lissa guessed was Strix's spot. Number ten was already taken by a girl with brown hair and a green-and-purple dragon mask, who was most likely the 'Skit' Strix had mentioned.
"All right. You guys know the drill, right?" Everyone nodded. "Everyone take your places, and we'll drink our tea together." Strix took her seat, and the others followed suit, each one looking for the number they had chosen earlier. Not every beverage could really be classified as 'tea,' but no one complained. As far as YWP tea parties went, this actually seemed pretty normal.
"Um, Strix? Three seats are empty." Sure enough, as Kaiya had said, the flowered teacup, Fiji water, and ocean-themed cup had no guests seated by them.
Strix fidgeted in her seat. "Well. I did send out fifteen invitations... I guess not everyone turned up. But it's fine! We don't need everyone anyway, not when the poisoned tea has already been cho- wait, forget I said that. Nobody's tea is poisoned. Especially not Skit's." The guests shared amused glances.
"Anyway. On the count of three, we drink up, okay?" Everyone nodded. "All right! One... Two..."
"Hey, any idea what's with the weird layout of this place?" Lissa whispered to Marissa, who was fortuitously seated on her right. "I mean, three giant sets of double doors going straight into the dining room? I swear those things take up half the wall."
"No idea," Marissa whispered back. "Come on, let's just drink." She turned back to her raspberry-patterned cup as Strix finished the count.
"...Three!" At that, Lissa brought her mug of chai to her lips, mirroring nearly everyone else in the room, and took a big sip.
That was the last thing she did before everything went black.
12:01 AM
"Lissa! Lissa, wake up!"
Lissa opened one eye to see Marissa and Addie leaning over her. Wait... leaning over her? Was she on the-
She pulled herself off the floor, accepting the girl's hands as they offered them to help her up. "What happened?"
"I don't know." Mari was standing at the table, reading something off its surface. "Everyone blacked out, and the next thing I knew, Strix was gone and this was on the table." She picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to Lissa, who read it out loud.
"Dear esteemed guests-
I am sorry, but it appears something has decided to interfere with my fun. A shame, really, as I was so excited to show you all what I'd found. I'm assuming that by the time you read this note, midnight has already passed. If that is the case, then I'm afraid there's nothing any of you can do about it.
Don't worry, though, because there might be a way for you to make things right. They cannot take a person without leaving one of their own behind. I suspect that this creature has disguised itself as one of you, and is now monitoring your actions. If you can figure out who it has replaced, you may be able to persuade it to divulge the necessary information to reopen the door and bring me back- provided you manage this within a four-day period. Otherwise, the door won't be able to unlock for years and years, and the changeling will have to be released upon the world.
If you're concerned about the creature hiding, don't worry. It has to take corporeal form, and I've made sure to lock the gate. Nothing is getting on or off this island until your time is up. The only choice it has is to hide away one of your party and take their place. Good luck. I trust all of you to do what is right.
Signing off for now (I hope),
Strix Cattus Aleshe"
The twelve guests merely shared glances with each other as they processed what they had heard. Strix had been... kidnapped? A creature was hiding among them? It almost seemed too strange to be true.
Eventually, Skit broke the silence, bringing voice to the thought in everyone's heads.
"...Shoot."