~Steele~ The East Wing.

What a difference a few hours can make.

Before dinner that night, I was angry…But even that wasn’t really what it was. I was frightened. Not of Spence, not at its core. Of what I didn’t know. And that is always the worst fear to have, that sensation of worry, not for your present, but for the future, what could be, not what is.

As Spence dragged me through the door to the East Wing, it swinging shut behind my beaten form…I didn’t feel fear. I felt pain, but not fear…for in the place of the fear, I felt curiosity, the same curiosity I left the house for, except many times greater, an exalted crescendo of curiosity, like the rhythmic beating of a drum, slowly increasing in tempo and volume, as my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see the side of the house where Spence spends all his time.

Dust.

The rooms were covered in dust. Barely furnished, as if the house had been abandoned for years…and as we went slowly deeper into the wing, the dust got thicker, decades, centuries thick, as the house got colder and my curiosity boomed more intensely in my mind, a heartbeat growing rapidly in intensity, as the corridor kept going, and going…

Until suddenly, Spence stood at a door, the Door, at the end of the hallway, exactly the same as the rest, but different in a way my eyes could not perceive, but my body could, as the drums rolled like waves crashing into the shores of my mind, an invisible force assaulting, liberating, enlarging…

Then he opened it, and there was only White.







It’s cold.

My fear has not gone, though my curiosity has been satiated.

I no longer fear the unknown.

It is inevitability I fear.

When you are a child, you fear the dark room…not for any property of the dark itself, but because it can hide so many more fearsome things from your view: monsters, murderers, malign forces beyond your control.

In that sense, the dark itself becomes an object of fear. A fear by association. And the only way to lose that fear is by turning on the lights.

But what happens when you turn on the lights, and aren’t confronted with the calming, empty room you were hoping for, but instead, have your fears confirmed? You find that the lights were turned off specifically to conceal the monsters within?

I still don’t trust Spence…in fact, I have less of a reason to trust him now, than ever.

But I’ll stand by my family. And I’ll stand by him.



It’s all I can do, now that the lights are on and the forces of darkness are swarming in.

Stand with them, grit your teeth.



And close your eyes.