Ethan had dragged his feet long enough. It was time to clear out Grandma Gertrude’s mansion. Everyone told him she wasn’t coming back. That she was probably dead. Which was a hard pill to swallow, especially since her body had never been found.
But after a year of waiting, of Silver Alerts and subsequent investigations, he reasoned it was finally time. After all, it seemed an awful waste to let the property just sit there, unoccupied, gathering dust and cobwebs.
Ethan lived in a five hundred square foot apartment downtown. The complex had thin walls and noisy neighbors. Directly above him lived a retiree by the name of Roger. Roger liked to play bass at all hours of the night. Apparently, Roger didn’t have a family. No wife to nag him, no grandkids to babysit. No life to drag him out of his unit and give Ethan a little peace.
Ethan didn’t have much of a life either, admittedly, but his hobbies didn’t make such an ungodly racket that its reverberations shifted his neighbors’ furniture across the floor. Ethan liked to draw. When he clocked out of his remote finance job, he would retrieve his sketchpad from the desk drawer, throw himself onto his futon, pop on a fantasy show, and start doodling.
With his tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth, he would transpose his wildest imaginings to paper. Elaborate worlds filled with mythical beasts. Scifi futures populated by cyborgs and aliens. Alternate realities peopled with uncanny inhumanoids bent on conquering the multiverse.
There were always stories that paired with his drawings. He never wrote them down, but found he didn’t have to. That they would always return to him while reviewing his work. Into these fictions he would disappear for hours on end, sometimes sketching through the night until daybreak caught him off-guard.
Ethan used an expensive set of colored pencils his Grandma Gertrude bought for him a year before she disappeared. She caught him one afternoon drawing in his sketchpad between chores. Ethan always spent two Saturdays a month helping Grandma Gertrude maintain that old house of hers, mowing her lawn, weeding her garden, washing her dishes, dusting the mantel. Those Saturdays never felt like chores for Ethan, however, despite what the rest of Grandma Gertrude’s grandchildren thought of the old crone.
“Thought you might want an upgrade from them shitty Ticonderoga's,” she’d said when handing off the gift.
“Thanks, Grandma Gertrude!”
“Fuck you thanking me for? I never pay you for the yard work, do I?” But a soft smile — not really even much of a smile at all, something only Ethan could spot after twenty-four years of being her favorite — betrayed her sentimentalism, slight as it was.
Ethan loved Grandma Gertrude. He was probably the only person in the world that ever did. So it was especially hard for him to admit she wasn’t coming back.
He sat in his coupe parked on the opposite side of the street, staring over at the mansion. He managed to avoid it for so long by using his modest inheritance to pay landscapers. But that still left the inside untouched. Everything right where she’d left it. Memories waiting to be stirred.
“Alright,” Ethan said to himself, stepping out of his car.
On a held breath, he fed the key into its lock and turned it. With a gentle shove, the door creaked open. Inside, it was much as Ethan expected. Everything where it usually was, layered with dust. He stepped into the house and shut the door behind him.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Out of habit, he began by performing the usual set of chores he completed every Saturday. Only, it took him half as long without Grandma Gertrude’s interjections. “Ethan, what do you know about aliens?” “You ever summon a ghost, kid?” “Those dust bunnies ain’t going anywhere, come here and let me tell you about string theory.”
Grandma Gertrude was a font of fringe knowledge. If a subject could rightly be labeled “weird,” she knew a thing or two about it. Ethan never left her mansion without a new tidbit or factoid to chew over. He loved learning about the wild things that interested her. For a seventy-two year old, she had a remarkably youthful curiosity about her. He supposed her sharing it with him was her special way of telling Ethan she loved him.
He knew Grandpa Jack didn’t much care for the occult or the multiverse or cryptids. None of their progeny inherited Grandma Gertrude’s inquisitiveness. Perhaps least of all Ethan’s mother, Jane, who referred to her own mom as the Crazy Coot. Though, on occasion, she would substitute Crass or Crotchety for Crazy, depending on which attribute most recently irked her.
But none of these traits bothered Ethan. They were what made Gertrude special. Set her apart. Made her an outcast like himself.
Ethan stood over Grandma Gertrude’s recliner, stationed in its usual position right next to the fireplace. Have a seat, he thought to himself. It’s yours now. Grandma Gertrude wouldn’t want her favorite keister coaster going to waste.
Ethan lowered himself slowly into the ancient chair. With one inch left to go, he chickened out, bolted upright, and leapt away from the recliner. He couldn’t do it. It was Grandma Gertrude’s chair, the one she never let anyone else sit in. Sitting in it now felt like closing the casket.
“No,” he said to himself, instead going to the couch he always sprawled across. But the moment he flopped down, he felt something rigid jutting into his back. He shot up again, whirled and glared down at the couch.
Nothing looked askew, and yet something had jabbed him. He reached down and removed its worn cushions. Underneath, he found a curious scepter. “What the hell?”
With careful hands, he picked up the scepter. It had a long, wooden staff from which an ornately carved rod of amethyst extended. The gemstone looked like several violet diamond-shaped gems fused together to create the extension.
Ethan turned the object over in his hands to inspect it. It looked old. Beneath the golden cap that formed the base of the gemstone, the wood was discolored. He assumed this was from the hand that gripped it.
But Ethan had never seen Grandma Gertrude use a cane, much less a scepter. “Where did you come from?” he wondered aloud as he planted the end of its staff against the floorboards.
Suddenly, a light flashed within the gemstone. It traveled the length of it, brightened at the tip, then went out. For one exciting moment, Ethan was filled with wonder. But hopes of the sort of magic and wizardry that accompanied his illustrations extinguished as soon as rationality set in.
It couldn’t possibly be real magic. There had to be batteries in it somewhere, fueling a set of LED lights inside the gemstone.
As Ethan set about disassembling the scepter, trying vainly to twist the gemstone off the top, a scampering sound emanated from the kitchen.
He lowered the scepter and raised his eyes to the adjoining room. For a while, there was nothing. No movement at all. Ethan began to wonder if he’d actually even heard anything when the door to the cupboard beneath the sink shot open and a grotesque little creature spilled out.
It was green and vaguely humanish, but incredibly small. Perhaps only a foot tall. It had floppy, pointed ears with ringed horns and a shock of green hair between them. It looked up at Ethan with yellow eyes and bared two rows of sharp little teeth as it grinned.
The creature made a sound like a growl, but Ethan struggled to interpret the noise as a happy or aggressive vocalization. It rose in volume until something like a word formed on its thin lips. “Gobbo!” it shouted.
“Am I supposed to respond to that?” Ethan asked.
Before he could hazard a guess, the little critter came charging at him.
And it didn’t look like it wanted a hug.