“What did the instructions say again?” Honey wondered, as she drove along an unfamiliar country road in a forgotten corner of New England.

Trixie, who was navigating, frowned at the hand-written sheet. “There’s almost nothing after ‘Turn left at the sign with the duck on it,’ and we already did that. It just says to ‘Turn right at the big tree,’ but I don’t know which big tree it might mean. They all look pretty big, except for the small ones. And most of them don’t have anywhere you could possibly turn.”

“Maybe it was the wrong sign with a duck. Maybe we should–” She pulled over with a spray of gravel “That was it! And I missed it.”

“That looks like somewhere to turn around,” Trixie pointed out.

A minute later, they turned into a rutted gravel drive next to the weathered trunk of what must once have been an enormous tree, but now looked many years dead. Honey rolled the car to a stop.

“Turn right at the big tree trunk would have been more accurate. If this is the right place,” she commented.

Trixie pointed out the opposite window. “I think it must be. That’s the name of the house, right?”

Scraggly bushes almost covered the wall, but here and there a letter could be seen in the sign upon it. With a little imagination, ‘Leamington Manor’ could be read. Named after a place called Royal Leamington Spa in England, the estate had been in a distant branch of Honey’s mother’s family for many generations.

Honey accelerated again, though not too fast, following an overgrown avenue of trees which soon blocked the view in every direction.

She shivered. “This is kind of creepy. I wonder when we’ll see…”

They rounded a corner and the house came into view, an untidy conglomeration of multiple extensions, topped with a tangle of chimneys, gables and dormer windows.

“Wow!” Trixie stared open-mouthed at the enormous, dilapidated mansion before her. “You never told me to expect something like this.”

Honey shrugged a little helplessly. “How could I, when I didn’t know?”

Pulling up as close to the front entrance as she could get, she opened her door and got out, taking a few tentative steps towards the grand front staircase. Trixie had no such hesitation, but soon bounded up to the imposing front door.

As her best friend shifted her weight from one foot to the other, Honey took the stairs at a measured pace. Her heart began to beat faster as she weighed the set of keys in her hand. She faltered to a stop on the second-top step. Above her, she saw Trixie’s eyes narrow.

“Tell me again why we’re here,” Trixie demanded, “and this time, tell me the whole story.”

“The whole story?” Honey asked, with a nervous giggle. “Do you mean the whole story with the I forget how many greats grandparents who came out from England, and the branch of the family that built this house and how I descend from their younger child, while the house passed down through the older child’s line, only now they’ve all died out? Because I’m pretty sure I told you that whole story already, including exactly how many greats there were supposed to be.”

Trixie just shook her head.

“Then, maybe, the whole story of how the will of the last survivor of that line – who, presumably, is probably the person who wrote those dreadful directions of how to get here – made sure that the house could only pass to a direct descendant of the original owners of the house?”

“Honey,” her best friend warned.

She closed her eyes and drew a calming breath. “There’s something horrible about this house and I don’t know what it is. Under the terms of the will, I’m actually fourth in line to inherit, but the three people ahead of me have all refused to do whatever it is that has to be done in order to get it. And now that I’m here, I don’t think I want it anyway.”

Trixie still had a look of suspicion on her face. “What do you have to do?”

“That’s it. I won’t know until I go inside.” She drew another deep breath. “Mother’s cousin Prudence is the mother of the person who’s third in line – I think her daughter’s name is Chastity and did I mention that the will specified that unmarried daughters were at the top of the list? Well, anyway, cousin Prudence didn’t even let her daughter come here at all, but Mother says that Prudence is very superstitious and I didn’t need to pay any attention to her and that anyway, Chastity is bottle-blonde and only likes ultra-modern furnishings and architecture.”

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Trixie asked, ignoring the whole issue of cousin Prudence and her daughter. “You’re not going to get any answers standing out here.”

Straightening her shoulders, Honey took those last two steps onto the wide platform and walked over to the door. She sorted through the keys until she found the right one, unlocked the door and pushed it open to the accompaniment of groaning hinges.

“What on earth is that?” demanded Trixie, pointing at a shape dimly discernible inside.

Honey stepped over the threshold onto the dusty black and white chequered floor. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she began to make out the shapes around her. She stood in a large room, twin staircases sweeping upwards on either side in wide arcs. Hallways led off to the left and right. Overhead, a vast chandelier loomed.

But the item which had caught Trixie’s attention was not any of these. Straight ahead, mounted on a massive plinth more than waist-high, stood a taxidermied polar bear, its massive front paws upraised and its face frozen in an open-mouthed snarl.

“Ugh! That is horrible,” Trixie commented, wandering up to it. “Who keeps that kind of thing in their house?”

Then before Honey had a chance to answer, her best friend’s attention was drawn elsewhere.

“Hey, isn’t this the same handwriting?” She picked up a piece of paper from the edge of the plinth. “It’s hard to read in this light.”

“It’s hard to read anyway,” Honey answered, taking it over to the doorway. “It’s some directions to go somewhere in the house.”

“What’s that on your hand?” Trixie asked, grabbing it.

Honey shook her head and pulled away. “It’s only a scratch.”

“But you’re hot!”

Again, Honey shook her head. “I’m fine.”

Trixie cast her a sceptical look, but let the matter drop.

“Okay, we need to take the left-hand set of stairs and follow the corridor at the top to the other end of the house,” Honey continued, “and we’ll find some more instructions there.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she closed and locked the front door before turning to the stairs. At the foot, she stopped short.

“There’s someone else here!” she whispered to Trixie. “Over there!”

Trixie tensed, but after a moment relaxed again. “It’s just a huge mirror. I thought it was a doorway, too.”

Honey shook her head slowly. “I don’t think it was our reflections that I saw. I thought the woman was wearing a long dress.”

“It’s just your mind playing tricks on you,” Trixie answered, a little uneasily. “Let’s go and find out what you have to do.”

They climbed the grand staircase, pausing at the top to look down at where they had been. Honey shivered.

“It looks even more horrible from up here.” She pointed down at the polar bear. “If I do end up inheriting this house, that’s the first thing that has to go.”

Her best friend nodded agreement, then turned away to find where to go next. “It must be this way. Is the electricity on, do you know? It’s even darker than out here.”

She found a switch and flicked it, but nothing happened.

“I guess not.” Honey glanced back in the direction of the car, wondering if she’d remembered to put in the flashlight she’d intended to bring and coming to the conclusion that she’d forgotten it. “But I can see a light at the other end, so we should be okay when we get down there.”

They entered the dim corridor together, finding that their eyes adjusted to the light. Doors, both open and closed, lined both sides and they stopped often to peek into the various rooms. When they reached the lighted area, they found another set of stairs leading down. Towards the back of the house, large windows allowed them to see the overgrown grounds.

“Here it is!” Trixie cried, racing over to a side table on which stood a dusty dried-flower arrangement.

Honey followed her, but all of a sudden felt faint.

“You are sick!” Trixie pushed her into one of the intricately carved wooden chairs which stood nearby. “Why didn’t you say so?”

Honey began to shake her head, but stopped as it made the room spin. “I’m fine. Really. Where’s the piece of paper?”

Her best friend handed it to her, but at the same time grabbed hold of Honey’s hand and pushed back her sleeve. Trixie’s eyes widened.

“I knew it! It’s not just a scratch.” She searched for and confiscated the car keys. “We’re leaving right now.”

Honey stared down at the place on her arm. She had stuck a couple of band-aids over the worst of the cut, but the finer end of it which Trixie had seen earlier still showed. What she hadn’t seen earlier was the angry redness which had begun to creep out from the sides of the dressing – a dressing which she just remembered she had forgotten to change that day.

“I think I’m going to faint.”

She leaned forward and Trixie grabbed her, helping her down onto the floor before she fell. Trixie said something, but she couldn’t understand what it was. After a moment, however, her head cleared.

“I think I’m okay, now,” she decided, pushing first to her knees and then clambering to her feet. “Trixie? Where did you go?”

She turned in a full circle, but could see no sign of her friend. She called again, but got no answer. Then, she saw the piece of paper still at her feet. She stooped to pick it up, smoothing out the creases she had made when she slumped on top of it.

“You must take this journey alone,” she read aloud. “No one can help you. You must discover the terrible secret, or die trying.”

Honey frowned down at the paper for a moment, then crumpled it into a ball and tossed it back on the table.

“No, thank you,” she told it. “Whoever’s next on the list can have the place. I don’t want it.”

“Don’t you?” asked a voice.

Honey spun on the spot. A few steps away stood the same woman she thought she had seen earlier – or, at least, someone very like her. The long, pale dress she wore brushed the floor, but did nothing to hide a slim figure rather like Honey’s own. The woman took another step or two forward into the light and Honey gasped. For a fraction of a moment, she thought she was looking at herself. Then subtle differences began to appear: a slightly broader forehead and narrower chin, a thinner nose, a different shape to the lips.

“No, I’m pretty sure that I don’t,” Honey answered, a little belatedly. “And I’m leaving right now.”

Slowly, the woman shook her head. “You can’t leave. You’ve accepted the task and you will complete it. Or die trying.”

“But I didn’t accept,” Honey pointed out, waving wildly at the table. “I most deliberately did not accept.”

Then she actually looked at the table. The paper lay smoothly in the place it had first been, without the slightest sign of a wrinkle.

Honey stared at it for a moment, then turned in the direction from which she had arrived. “No. Just no. I’m leaving right now and you’re not going to stop me.”

No footsteps followed her as she raced along the corridor and down the stairs, barely giving the polar bear a glance as she did. But she stopped short in the entranceway. The front door had disappeared, leaving only a blank wall in its place.

Honey turned a full circle. The polar bear, the twin stairways, the corridors and the mirror were all just where they had been before. The woman glided down the stairs with a serene expression and one hand skimming the handrail.

“You see? You cannot leave without discovering the secret.”

“Let me out!” Honey demanded. “Let me out right now!”

“Or what?” asked the woman.

Not being able to think of a suitable threat, Honey instead asked, “Who are you?”

The woman shook her head. “That is part of the secret which you need to discover.”

Honey frowned. “Fine. I’ll discover the secret. That shouldn’t take too long – though it would have been quicker if Trixie was still here, but surely I can solve one little mystery on my own.”

She looked around and chose the corridor on the same side of the house she had been down. Her footsteps echoed on the hard floor as she strode into it. She stopped short after a few steps to open the first door. The room, whatever it was, faced the back of the house and had no windows. Honey guessed it must be a cloakroom. She closed the door and moved on.

The next room, facing the front of the house and located just before the corridor turned in the opposite direction, contained comfortable chairs but little else of interest. Honey flicked back one of the drapes, but there was no window behind them.

“You see? You cannot leave,” the strange woman informed her from the doorway.

“You’ve said,” Honey answered, putting her back to the not-window and finding it unyielding.

“I don’t believe you’ll find the answers here, either,” she continued, strolling inside.

Honey edged around to another door. “Well, maybe I’ll try somewhere else.” She opened the door and stepped through it, trying to look at where she was going and the unknown woman at the same time. “Maybe in here.”

The doorway led into a grand ballroom, almost empty, its few chairs draped in dust-cloths. Here and there, more doors led off it. Honey chose one and crossed to it. Outside, the corridor continued – presumably the same one she’d been in before. In the choice between the direction she had been walking in and the one she’d come from, she chose to keep going.

She passed by further doors on both sides, the ones to her left leading back into the ballroom and the opposite ones into smaller rooms, none of which caught her attention. At last, she came to a staircase and followed it upstairs.

She emerged in the same place where she had read the second note. It still lay on the table with the dusty dried flowers. Honey walked over to it and took another look.

“It’s changed!” She reached out to pick it up, but drew back her hand at the last moment. Instead, she leaned over it and read aloud: “In my private chamber a secret lies. No living soul has seen it and no living tongue speaks of it.”

The woman was standing behind her again, though Honey had not heard her approach. Wordlessly, she indicated a door that Honey had not previously noticed, directly opposite the corridor through which she had arrived the first time she came here with Trixie.

She eyed the woman for a moment, then walked over to the door.

“It’s locked.” She shook her head at her own lack of logic and pulled out the set of house keys. “But maybe one of these opens it.”

On the fourth try, the lock disengaged and the door swung open silently. Beyond, the corridor was painted a delicate pink. Ornate white side tables held dainty pink and white ceramic vases. Everything that could have a frill or a lacy ornament had one. Honey was forcibly reminded of Miss Lefferts. She shuddered.

“Come, now,” the woman chided. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in there.”

She strolled inside, as if to demonstrate the complete harmlessness of the situation. Honey resisted the urge to slam the door and lock it, if only because she dimly suspected that would make no difference to the woman and she did not want the suspicion proved correct. Instead, she entered the corridor.

The suite, once she explored it, consisted of four rooms, all decorated in the same pink and white frilliness: a sitting room with pink upholstered chairs, each with a white ruffled cushion; a bathroom; a dressing room and a bedroom. Honey discounted all but the last.

“This must be the place,” she mused, staring up at the explosion of frills which erupted from the four-poster bed. “But where would someone hide something here?”

She began to circle the room, starting by lifting the frilly skirt of the table to the left of the door and working her way around in a clockwise direction until she reached the door once more. Then, none the wiser, she sat down on the edge of the bed to think.

“Ouch!” she cried, standing back up at once.

She lifted the covers and bent to look underneath, struggling to separate the inevitable layers of ruffles. Once she found the right place to pull, she found another paper, secured with a pin. This time, she remembered not to touch it.

“Why did she think I’d find that there?” she wondered aloud.

“You must search until you find,” the woman told her.

Honey jolted, not having noticed her presence in the room. “It says, ‘Secret within a secret place. Unseen but seen by the unseeing.’ What does that mean?”

A rather cruel smile twisted the woman’s lips. “That you will have to discover for yourself.”

Honey stared around the room once more, raking her eyes over ceiling, walls, furnishings and floor. This time, she noticed that as well as a fitted carpet, the room also contained a circular rug. The two tones of pink were near-identical, making Honey wonder why anyone had bothered. But she knelt beside it and began to roll it back.

“You see? You can discover things if you try,” the woman told her.

Underneath the rug, the carpet had been slit. Honey pulled that piece back as well and gasped. The floor beneath the carpet held an intricate, bold design, totally at odds with the overt femininity of the visible décor. Stark shapes in black, yellow and red stood out against the white background. Honey touched them and found them to be mosaic tiles, cold and hard against her fingertips. She could not make out the whole pattern from this one section, but as she revealed more and more found herself feeling strangely uncomfortable.

With both the rug and the damaged piece of carpet it concealed completely removed, Honey could see some tiles in vivid blues and greens. She tugged at one edge of the carpet to see more underneath.

“Eyes! They’re eyes!” she realised. “But they can’t be hiding anything. They’re stuck down.”

She felt around carefully, not finding any way they could be removed. Then she thought again about the words. Seen by the unseeing? These eyes could not see anything. She looked up at the place those unseeing eyes stared.

And there, above her, was the clue she needed. The ceiling of this room was covered in ornate panels and the one right above her had a small eyelet on it, painted white to match.

“There must be something to pull on that,” she deduced, looking around wildly for where such a thing could be concealed.

She pounced on the bed, as the most obvious hiding place, and in minutes located a pole with a hook on the end resting on a little ledge under the lowest layer of frills. It took a bit more effort and concentration to catch the eyelet with the hook. Once in place, the panel did not seem to want to move, but in frustration Honey twisted it and it swung down with a clunk. A rope ladder fell to suspend from it.

“Oh, no. No way,” she muttered. “I am not climbing that thing. It looks about a hundred years old.”

The strange woman cast her a scornful look. “You exaggerate.”

Honey ignored her and thought about the problem. The ceilings of the rooms in the suite were much lower than those in the rest of the house, but still too high to want to fall from. After a moment, she remembered seeing a ladder in the dressing room. She carried it back and set it up.

“So, once I find out what’s in here, I can leave, right?” she asked, with one foot on the first step.

The woman yawned behind her hand, stretched and lay down upon the bed. “I am weary. Do not disturb me.”

Honey watched her settle to sleep for several moments, then climbed up to the top of the ladder. She peeked into an attic room, lit from the light of one of the dormer windows that peppered the roof. From what she could see, it was only about ten feet square, with no other way in or out.

An easel stood close to the window, a half-finished canvas upon it, palette and paints close by. Other canvasses lined the room. And all of them used the same kind of surreal imagery as the mosaic floor. The predominant theme of every canvas Honey could see was brilliant blue and green eyes.

Frowning in thought, she descended the ladder, glancing down at the floor as she did so. For a moment, she thought that the mosaic had changed and she almost missed a step in her surprise. She stumbled to the floor and stood staring at it.

“Why did I need to see that?” she asked the motionless figure on the bed. “Why is it important?”

The woman opened her eyes and Honey gasped to see that one was blue and the other green. Why didn’t I notice that before? she wondered.

“Look around you. What do you see?”

Honey glanced around the room. “Mostly, I see too many frills.”

“They cover up what is real, what is true,” the woman told her. “My whole life, I had to pretend. I never got to really live.”

“Then you painted them?” Honey asked. “I still don’t know your name.”

“It’s Madeleine,” the woman whispered, as she seemed to sink further into the bed. “But everyone calls me Honey.”

Gasping, Honey turned on her heels and ran out of the bedroom, along the corridor and across the open space at the top of the stairs. She stumbled to her knees beside the chair where she had collapsed earlier. And everything went black.

When she awoke, she felt something smooth against her cheek. She blinked once or twice, trying to make sense of where she was.

“Finally!” Trixie almost moaned beside her. “Oh, Hon, I thought you’d never wake up.”

The room came into focus. She was lying on a stretcher right where she’d passed out. And two ambulance officers were packing up their gear, preparing to move her.

“How long have I been out?” she asked, surprised to find her voice scratchy.

“I don’t know,” Trixie wailed. “You fainted and I didn’t catch you in time. You hit your head on the floor.”

Honey tried to shake her head, but it hurt too much. “Don’t be silly. You did catch me, but then I couldn’t work out where you went. And then that other woman – you remember, the one I said I saw, but you didn’t believe me – well, she’s been leading me all over the house in a wild goose chase. She’s in one of the rooms through that door.”

“What door?” Trixie asked.

Honey stared. The door that she had unlocked had completely disappeared.

“There was a door,” she insisted. “I thought it was over there, but it must be around here somewhere.”

“You’ve got a fever,” Trixie told her. “It’s probably blood poisoning, or something.”

“I didn’t imagine it, Trixie. I really didn’t.”

The paramedics started wheeling her away and she closed her eyes again, not wanting to watch while they took her down the stairs. They used the closest set. At the bottom, nothing seemed familiar, though that might have been because she was lying down and facing in the opposite direction.

“I’m sure I didn’t imagine it,” she muttered, as they passed numerous closed doors.

On the right, one stood open and Honey caught a glimpse through it of the grand ballroom and a single set of footsteps in the dust.

“There!” she called to Trixie. “Look, that’s where I went. You can see where I walked.”

Trixie paused to investigate, a puzzled frown on her face. She caught up just as they were loading her into the ambulance.

“I’ll follow you to the hospital in your car,” Trixie told her. “I’ve already got the keys. And if you give me the keys to the house, I’ll lock it up.”

“I really did walk through there, Trixie,” she repeated, as she handed them over. “How could I remember it and leave footsteps if I didn’t?”

“You didn’t leave those footsteps,” Trixie answered. “They looked weeks or months old. They’d already been covered in a new layer of dust.”

Honey frowned. “But I remember that room. We didn’t even look in there when we arrived.”

“You must have been her before, sometime. Or maybe you noticed something about it from the front of the house,” Trixie suggested. “Those windows do face this way.”

Trixie disappeared from view as the doors closed. Honey let her head rest, closing her eyes for a moment. It had all seemed so real. Could she possibly have imagined it all?

“Don’t go to sleep, now,” one of the paramedics warned, while the other started the engine.

Honey opened her eyes and tried to smile at the woman. “I was just thinking.” She sighed. “Do you think, is it really possible that I imagined that whole thing? Talking to the woman and searching the house and finding strange things?”

“Look into my eyes and tell me what you see,” she answered, in a whisper.

“Wh-what?”

“You heard me.”

Honey looked into a pair of eyes, one blue and one green. A scream rose in her throat, but before it could emerge, she fainted dead away.

The End

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