Imagined Away

  Qatarina & Ora Wanders

  Wandering Words Media

  Copyright © 2023 by Qatarina & Ora Wanders, Wandering Words Media

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Contents

  1. Hoggwaller Manor

  2. Haunted House

  3. The Basement

  4. Mean Girls

  5. All Manners & Politeness

  6. The Star

  7. Adding Stars

  8. Fine

  9. Missing Backpack

  10. As is Written

  11. Not Real

  12. What's Out the Window

  13. Fishing Line and Moon Cycles

  14. Dream Hero

  15. Water into Wine

  16. Clown's Circus

  17. Long Stairs

  18. Dream Trevor

  19. Back to Reality

  20. Aunt Molly

  About the Authors

  Hoggwaller Manor

  My parents never liked this place. We never visited. My mom was superstitious, and my dad said he had too many memories of his late sister to ever step foot inside again. But here I was—now with two dead parents and nowhere else to go but my grandparents’ rotten old haunted house.

  The taxi cab—yeah, those were still a thing in this weird ancient town—pulled up to the start of the long driveway. The man behind the wheel was squat and portly, with a bushy mustache that took up the better part of his face. His nose wrinkled at the sight of the house.

  “This it?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately,” I answered, with a long sigh. I flung open the car door and shimmied out of the backseat, pulling my overly stuffed suitcase out after. It thumped onto the ground, the collection of key chains hooked to the zippers clattering noisily.

  “Unfortunately,” echoed the man. He wrinkled his nose again, then shifted around in his seat to watch me. “If this is the last stop, you gotta pay up.”

  “I know. Hang on. It’s—it’s in here.” I abandoned my suitcase briefly, pulling my backpack out instead. I dropped the bright pink canvas down on the top of the suitcase. It was just as covered in key chains. They bumped against my knuckles as I pulled open the front pouch and tugged the rumpled envelope out of it.

  I paid the driver with the money from my social worker. I’m almost out of cash; my travel voucher gave me just enough to get from Maryland to the middle of East-Jesus-Nowhere, Texas, AKA Hollow Brook.

  The driver counted the cash, then jammed it into the dash. He wrinkled his nose again, nodded up at the looming, Victorian-style manor house. “You, uh, have fun with that.”

  As soon as the door was closed, the bright yellow vehicle was backing out of the driveway and zipping off down the road. Not that I could blame him. If I had literally any choice in the matter, I would have zipped off down the road, too.

  But I didn’t.

  This creepy mansion was the last stop for me.

  Flinging the backpack up over one shoulder, I turned and started up the long driveway. The extendable handle on the suitcase wiggled as it was pulled to max. The path was cobbled, so the poor piece of luggage rattled as we went.

  I caught a glimpse of movement in the upstairs window—a pale face, then a closing curtain. Great. My grandparents.

  I didn’t know them very well. My grandmother would call on the holidays, and Gramps would send out postcards once in a blue moon, but that was it. I walked even slower, dragging my feet. Thump-thump, thump-thump. The suitcase rattled along behind me.

  There was a small porch attached to the front of the building. It had three steps leading up onto it, half rotted and creaking. I stepped onto the top deck of the porch in one go, then turned around and heaved my luggage up after me.

  It wasn’t really a great sign of things to come but—whatever, right? Yeah, whatever. That was my current motto: Whatever, forever.

  I mouthed the words to myself, took a deep breath, and then turned and marched over to the front door. It was painted an ugly shade of purple. Lifting up my hand, I was about to knock when the door swung open, revealing my grandparents.

  Man, they moved fast.

  Gramps was short, like all the men on that side of the family, and more bald than not. He gave me a watery smile. Grandma stood next to him, two heads taller and looking about as far from happy as an old woman could get.

  “Quinn?” Grandma said it like a question.

  I held one arm out to the side. “In the flesh?”

  My pink curls already felt like they were going flat. The Texas heat was way heavier than even the hottest summer in Maryland. My decision to wear a black tank top and jeans? Seriously not a great one. It hadn’t been that bad with the AC blasting in the taxi, but now that I was just out here standing in the sweltering heat, it felt like my clothes had been turned into a microwave.

  “You’re so big,” said Gramps, sounding awed. He leaned forward a little, squinting at me. His eyebrows were bushy and white, two caterpillars perched above little eyes. “She got so big, Annie.”

  “I see that,” said Grandma, still not sounding overly happy about it all.

  That made two of us.

  But I had promised my social worker I would put my best foot forward, so I tried to make my smile a little brighter. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said Gramps. He stepped aside, and after a moment, Grandma did too, the both of them letting me into the house.

  It honestly wasn’t much cooler inside. The foyer was dark, the wallpapers yellowed with age and grayed with dust. Two seriously creepy paintings of cats hung just opposite the door, on either side of a hall-table with a big, yellow pitcher and bowl set on it.

  “You must be tired,” said Gramps. “And hungry!”

  As though summoned by the words, my stomach growled loudly. “I could eat.”

  “We were just about to eat,” said Gramps. “Right, Annie?”

  Grandma had been very quiet through it all. She closed the door, hand lingering on the brass knob. Her white mop of curls was unkempt. Brushes were clearly not her friend. But then she gave a slow nod and she said, “I had just taken supper out of the oven. Put your bags down here. We’ll eat, and then Eddie will take you upstairs.”

  Grandma turned and vanished through a door on the left. Gramps shuffled after her. He walked with a heavy limp.

  I didn’t have any problems leaving the suitcase in the foyer, but I was mega reluctant to leave my backpack. It had my art books in them.

  I knew that it was super unlikely for anything to happen to them but… I just couldn’t take the chance.

  My backpack came with me.

  The thing was, this move? It had been a disaster. And short notice. Everything I owned had been crammed into one suitcase and my backpack; and the tang of smoke still clung to some of my clothes. Everything else had been lost in the same fire that had killed my dad.

  Boom.

  The house had gone up in flames, just like that.

  At least, that’s what the neighbors said. I hadn’t been home for it. I had insisted on going out to the movies that night, and had walked back to the house only to find the firefighters and the police had filled up the street. The thick plume of hazy black smoke had stained the sky above us.

  I would never forget it. Especially because everything was reminding me of that night; point in case, the big black stain on the ceiling just in the little stretch of hallway between the foyer and the dining room. They must have had a water leak at some point.

  Hopefully, that was already cleared up.

  The dining room was big, and old, and dusty. Several shelves had been fixed to the walls, each one lined with a variety of dolls. The dresses they wore were served as the only bright patches of color in the room, not counting the ancient, dust-covered chandelier that hung from the ceiling. The table at the center of the room looked like it could have sat ten people, which made it even weirder that all of the food was congregated at the one end. Grandma had already sat down.

  Gramps eagerly stood behind one of the chairs, his hands curled over the top of the back. He pulled it out. “For the princess.”

  I gave him a little smile and sat down, thumping my backpack onto the floor at my feet. “Thanks.”

  Gramps shuffled over to sit down too, in the chair across from me. The meal had already been put out on the table. Canned green beans that had been dumped into a casserole dish, still in their juices, sat closest to me.

  They were spooned onto my plate with a slop. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the wet plop that the glue-like unseasoned mashed potatoes made though, or even worse, the sound of gray beef getting dropped onto the plate beside the heap of clumpy white.

  I swallowed, hard. My stomach might have been growling a minute ago, but my appetite had just gotten up and left the building.

  “Bottoms up,” said Gramps, cheerfully. He added the same assortment of bland food to his plate, and then to Grandma’s. I looked over the table searching for something to toss on the meal but there wasn’t so much as a salt shaker in sight.

  “Thanks,” I answered dryly.

  Picking up my spoon, I used the back of it to flatten the mound of mashed potatoes.

  Grandma asked me, “How was t
he drive?”

  “It was fine,” I told her. “Long. And kind of hot.”

  “It’s been a scorcher out there this week,” said Gramps, with a bobble of his head. “Won’t be like this forever. The rains will come about soon enough.”

  “It’s not going to rain,” said Grandma with a sigh. “Hasn’t rained all month, just about.”

  I let them have their conversation about the weather—boring—and tried to focus on getting down the food in front of me. The green beans were mostly okay, even if they were sort of wet and tasted like they had probably been in the can a few years longer than the expiration date would have preferred.

  The beef?

  Way harder.

  It was stringy and tough and wet all at the same time. The flavor was a bit like wet cardboard. The thick, gloopy gravy that had been dumped on it was a bit like watered-down glue. I hurried through choking it down, turned toward the last obstacle on my plate… and froze.

  My dad loved to cook. And mashed potatoes, they were what he called a rainy-day staple. We didn’t just eat them when the weather was bad. We ate them whenever someone was in a funky, down, or otherwise kind of bummed out mood. He would fix them up with thick chunks of blackened garlic and load them down with sharp cheddar and bacon bits.

  Then I would flatten it with the back of my spoon, and he would draw funny faces in it.

  I had flattened it. But there was no one left to draw the faces. I let out a heavy exhale, lower lip trembling. Somehow, the thought made me want to smile and cry all at once. Should I draw the face myself? I could have, I supposed, but it wouldn’t have felt the same.

  I had to flatten it. Someone else had to draw the face.

  Gramps looked concerned. “You alright, champ?”

  Champ? The weird nickname was enough to draw me out of my reverie. What was this, Little League practice?

  I sniffed. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just super tired.”

  “Considering the trip you made, that’s understandable,” said Gramps. “Right, Annie?”

  Grandma hummed at me but didn’t look up from where she was trying to saw through her gray beef and glue gravy with a butter knife. Silence fell over the table once more. I was quick to choke down the unseasoned mashed potatoes and then get up, offering them both a yawn that was way too huge to be believable.

  “Is it okay if I go unpack?”

  Gramps and Grandma looked at each other, then down at their still mostly full plates.

  “You can just tell me where it’s at,” I said. “I can get there myself.”

  Gramps looked a little put out. Oops. Was he looking forward to showing me the room? Well, there was plenty of time for him to show me the rest of the house, since I was stuck here now.

  A few instructions later and I was upstairs, standing in the middle of my brand-new, creepy bedroom.

  “Gross.” I frowned. The luggage was dropped down at the foot of my bed, and I dropped down on top of that, too. “And weird.”

  That was an understatement. The room was absolutely filled up with dolls. Some of them were on shelves, and they looked pretty fragile. Porcelain faces with dainty curls of blonde and black and red, in little satin dresses. But there were some of them that were just in the room. An array of ballerina figurines that were taking up space on the top of the dresser. A big raggedy yarn doll sitting up by the pillows.

  There was a big bay window in the room, which was cool, but the cushioned window seat had even more dolls on it. The big centerpiece there was a large porcelain thing with brown curls and a feathered pink hat. Her silky pink skirt had a single golden button at the front, just beneath the collar.

  I had never liked dolls. I was a crayon kid when I was younger, not a Barbie girl. Art had always been my calling, just not in a fashion sense. So having this place filled up with dolls… It wasn’t the most welcoming scene for me to walk into.

  Add in the fact that the room just didn’t look like it belonged to someone my age, and you had the recipe for a miserable space. Like, this room had clearly been my grandparents' guestroom. They might have washed the sheets to get the dust cleaned off, but everything else practically reeked of a room that had only been put to use recently.

  But hey! Whatever, forever, right?

  I only let myself have a little sulk, and then I hauled myself up and started to try and do damage control. The first thing that had to go were the plush dolls on the bed, with their weird mitten hands and creepy button eyes.

  I gathered them all up into my arms and carried them into the room across the hall, which must have been some sort of tea-room back in the day. Then it was back to my room to try and get some pictures put up.

  Art was pretty much the biggest thing in my world. I loved it; drawing, painting, coloring. One day, I was going to take a trip to Paris and visit the Louvre. At least… That had been my plan before.

  It had always been me and my dad. My mom, she died when I was super little. And the thought of going to the Louvre on my own…

  “Come on, Quinn. You can’t spend your whole night crying,” I told myself, scrubbing at my face with one hand. “You’ve got to get some color into this dreary place!”

  So the pictures went up, using sticky putty so I didn’t muck up the walls of the old house, and the curtains were pulled open as soon as the dolls were cleared off of the window seat. It was kind of a terrible view; a side lawn with scraggly, sun-yellowed grass, and the tip of the neighbor’s house poking up from above a few ugly oak trees.

  Definitely not the kind of imagery that was going to inspire me into painting the next Ivan Shishkin. That was fine. There were plenty of other things to inspire me here. Like the cobwebs. And the dolls. And the dust. And the dolls.

  Did I mention the dolls?

  Groaning, I abandoned my inspiration hunt and dropped down onto the mattress. The quilt was handmade with blocky yellow and red patches of fabric. It smelled like moth balls.

  I didn’t know how long I laid there having my second sulk of the night before the knock sounded on the door. I rolled off the bed and tried to make myself look a bit less like a wet noodle on the way to the door.

  Something moved behind me. Creak. A squeaky floorboard was pressed down.

  Wide eyed, I spun around—but there was nothing. The knock on the door sounded again. Must have just been a mouse, I told myself, before turning and pulling the door open.

  Unsurprisingly, it was just my grandparents.

  “We know you’re tired,” said Gramps. “We just wanted to come up and say goodnight.”

  Grandma said, very softly, “Your father was a good person.” Her eyes glistened with moisture, but she blinked it away fast. “And I know we haven’t seen much of you, but I can tell that you’re just like him.” She cleared her throat. “That’s how I know you’ll follow the rules.”

  “And that we’ll get along,” added Gramps, with a friendly bob of the head.

  Grandma ignored him. “We don’t have many of them, Quinn. In fact, there’s just one that I can think of right now that you must always listen to.”

  I hoped it wasn’t don’t move the dolls. I was kind of out of luck if it was.

  Grandma leaned close to me, bending at the hip so that we were eye level. She placed a hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I need you to promise me that you will never go into the basement.”

  “That’s one of our only rules,” Gramps said.

  “Okay,” I told them. “I think I can manage that one.”

  Grandma patted my shoulder and straightened up. “Good.”

  Gramps gestured down the hall, toward one of the rooms farthest from mine. “We’re just in there if you need anything, Quinn.”

  “Thanks.” We stood there for a few moments longer just sort of awkwardly staring at each other, and then they turned and shuffled down the hallway toward their room. I closed the door again, retreating over to the bed.

  I was fine for all of five minutes. Then the mothball scent started to burn my eyes. I shoved my face harder into the pillow. The room was pitch black and eerie without the overhead light on. I felt like the dolls were staring at me.

  The first tear rolled down my cheek, staining the fabric of the pillow dark. After that, it was impossible to stop the rest of them.

  I cried myself to sleep. The dolls watched from their perches all night long.