The Calder Estate (1/1 Bee and Avery)

The wrong Edwards. Sometimes Harvey wondered. Klaus' sister certainly seemed more conversant with the supernatural, but it was hard to tell if anything beyond appearances substantiated that assumption. Klaus was certainly more reserved on the topic than his sister had been, and what ‘skills’ he’d demonstrated left much to be desired. Though, regardless of fact or skewed perceptions, Harvey knew it was moot to dwell on. Klaus was the one he’d got, and Klaus would be the one to rouse Calder Estate.

Charms could be a good topic to bring up over breakfast though. Harvey filed that thought to the back of his mind.

“Right then.” He clapped the door frame as one might a comrade’s back. “Good night… Klaus.” Awkward with a stilted delivery, Harvey wished he had chosen more casual words. ‘See you in the morning’ or ‘don’t stay up too late’. Good night sounded too formal and oddly…

It left a bad din in his ears, a mocking echo that followed him back through the great room and up to the second floor. His luggage was still by the door to the master bedroom. The gloom within persisted, a dormant predator peering out with tired eyes. It gave Harvey pause. Memory of Cat’s voice, shrill and sobbing through radio static, came over him like tide. Then memory of that night.

“Just lay the fuck down, I’ll do this myself.”

He suddenly didn’t feel much like sleeping. Or being alone with his thoughts. But what choice was there? Go back to Klaus, ask if he wanted to swap ghost stories? Harvey didn’t have any. In fact, he didn’t have much of any stories at all, supernaturally related or otherwise. He grabbed the radio and turned it on. The potential for communication over it would suffice, had to.

Nothing ventured.

Suitcase in hand, Harvey crossed the threshold into the master bedroom. The overhead light fixtures flared to life with the clack of a switch. From it, the foreboding darkness shrunk, retreating under furniture and into distant corners. And diagonal from the door, perched like a vulture awaiting carrion, was a camera. Its unblinking, red eye scrutinized him.

“At least it’s spacious.” Harvey whispered to himself positively, tossing his suitcase on the bed. For better or worse, he was in for the night.
 
"Night." Klaus replied, forcing himself to cease rocking and stand still. Though it was a common enough exchange in dialogue Klaus still found it strange to be saying 'goodnight' while the sun still lit the sky, faint as it was now having almost sunk completely below the horizon. He stayed like that until Harvey's footsteps retreated far enough up their stairs that he could no longer hear them even with the preternatural silence of the rest of the mansion. Making his way out of the kitchen Klaus walked into the great room, glancing towards the stairs as though to make sure that Harvey had actually gone up them. He'd wait five minutes then head upstairs. He did actually mean to call his sister as he had told Harvey, but that wouldn't be possible with his phone dead and while the charger was still tucked away in his duffel.

With a sigh he slumped down onto one of the couches, letting his head rest against the back of it. Without any other options to pass the time he might as well try and contact Clara the old fashioned way, er, new fashioned way? Were familial telepathic connections old world or would they be considered wireless? With a scoff he set the thoughts aside, it probably wasn't even going to work so overthinking would be even more useless.

"Okay. O.K." Klaus sat up straighter, taking in a deep breath through his nose and letting his eyes shut as he exhaled. "You can laugh about this later." He told himself, "Clara will get a kick out of it." The thought of his sister and how she would react had his shoulders drop slightly as he relaxed. He searched for the part of himself he had felt go quiet and pictured it reconnecting, like plugging in a lamp that had been turned on and watching it light up immediately - likely not the most elegant way of doing it but it made sense to him and with these sorts of things that had seemed to be what mattered. She'd find it funny that after this long he was only just attempting to actually take advantage of his 'gifts', would probably laugh at him and tease that they would really be able to be business partners. He could almost hear her now-

Wait... No that wasn't right. He could hear her.

The voice was static and warped as though he were listening to it from underwater but it was decidedly his sister. Eyebrows furrowing he concentrated harder, only able to make out a few muffled words at first then a full sentence. ...don't think so-... I...- ...nah, it's not ...- out... Strawberry is my favourite though I guess I could take chocolate if you can't get it. A laugh, We could share...

When the speaking faded back to mumbling Klaus attempted to talk only to find that he wasn't able to make a sound. Though there was nothing obstructing his mouth physically the more he tried to communicate mentally the more he felt as though his lungs were filling with liquid, a substance thicker than water that prevented any sound from escaping. After a few more tries it had started to become almost painful, manifesting as a pulsing ache in his temples and Klaus let the connection he had attempted to create drop. With a deep breath his eyes fluttered open and he swayed slightly, suddenly very glad that he had taken a seat before. Realization swept over him as he sat there, he had actually gotten Clara, he'd heard her talking. It was both exhilarating and absolutely terrifying at the same time.
 
Though they had viewed every nook of the house, the entirety of the master bedroom included, Harvey was compelled to review it once more. To familiarize himself and check for any curiosities or disturbances, he supposed. That was the euphemistic and less pathetic way of describing his search for boogeymen. Because the room felt artificially empty. Too empty, a void, an absence. As though something that should have been there had tucked itself away in hiding.

It left him uneasy. As both means of escape and tacit invitation, he left the bedroom door open.

Harvey crossed the room to the deck and stepped out. Like much of the rest of the house’s exterior, the deck too was choked with verdure and crumbling to rot. There was nowhere to stand but beside the door. Outside, the thrum of insects was swelling to a cacophony as the night descended. And through the loose knit of trees, Harvey could see a sliver of the lake. Its surface glared under crepuscular light, piercing and inquisitive. Between the teeming mosquitoes and humidity that left his skin balmy, Harvey preferred not to linger. He returned to the bedroom and latched the deck door.

View from the window seat was little better. It offered nothing but crisscrossing branches and the roof of the porch below. Harvey optimistically considered it an exit should the door ever be unavailable. But that also implied it could be an entrance to those not granted it in the hall. He tested the lock until convinced it would hold and moved on.

With the flick of a switch, the bathroom illuminated with soft florescence. It was massive, arguably the same size as the bedroom. Too commodious for a commode. And the tub, something about it being front and center, directly across from the door felt… lascivious. Like rose petals or stripped clothing should have been leading up to it. Anniversary special, infidelity invitation, or the set-up to some ritzy porno. It really didn’t exude sanitary to Harvey.

He peeked into the walk-in closet, momentarily marveled at its vast emptiness and the luxury it would be to fill it, and then closed it. The master suite was large, but otherwise eerily barren. It left Harvey feeling open, exposed. For once he missed the cramped comfort of his apartment. Though that was the only thing missed about it.

On his way back to the bathroom’s double doors, Harvey noticed something in the sink closest to the closet. It was a tangle of hair in the drain, tendrils of which still clung wetly to the basin as though someone had recently tried to rinse it down. Black that tapered to a tawny root. Dyed hair. Maybe the estate’s owner had left it behind. Such reasoning wasn’t ostensible, but Harvey held to it regardless. He impulsively turned on the sink to wash it down, but the drain was clogged. The hair waved languidly, animated by the purling and pooling water.

“Fuck.” Harvey hissed, trying to shut off the water, but the knob spun uselessly. No grip, no catch. The sink began to mist, steam rising from the water’s surface. He stepped away and frantically scanned the bathroom for pliers or a wretch, as though anything of recourse would be in the vicinity. There wasn’t. And when he looked back the mirror had begun to fog, revealing letters. All lowercase in a left-handed upwards slant and misspelt.

fagget
​
The violence with which the memory struck him left Harvey nonplussed. He just stared. A dissonance of locker-room conversation filled his head.

“Did you hear what happened to Cat?”​
“He made her cry. Talked shit like taking it in the ass made him better than everyone else.”
“I always knew that fucker sucked cock.”
​
They keyed the pejorative into his gym locker and pissed on his clothes. He had to walk home in shorts after throwing the others away. Cat had slandered him, spread lies thicker than tar, and he was too ashamed of the truth to even try exonerating himself. No one would ever question it. And no one would ever defend him. Because Cat was all he ever really had.

“Maybe Klaus wrote it.” Harvey softly thought allowed, though knew it wasn’t true. A half-hearted attempt to convince himself otherwise.

The radio on his belt began to cough and hiss static, startling him. Then a wet, swallowing gurgle came from the sink as it slurped down the clot of hair. The drain hiccuped. Bubbles popped on the water’s agitated surface. And then the bedroom door slammed shut.

Harvey’s heart skipped a beat in consternation. There weren’t any cameras in the bathrooms. Klaus wouldn’t see or hear him, viscerally Harvey knew that. He was afraid to move, catatonic, waiting.

And the radio answered.

Through the static, Cat’s voice taunted. “Don’t you want to redeem yourself, JaCkie?”
 
Another minute passed without any further happenings before Klaus felt steady enough to get up from the couch. The dizziness he'd experienced immediately after breaking whatever connection he had made had been nothing compared to what had followed a half minute later. Whether it was from lack of practice or from having been in such a charged atmosphere all day he couldn't say, but that didn't change the fact that it had nearly made him sick.

In standing he swayed slightly, though it quickly passed. He couldn't have been sitting for more than a minute or two but his knees and lower back ached as though he had been there for much longer. Stretching as he walked Klaus made his way around the maze of furniture in the great room, the path made slightly less difficult by the fact that they had shoved the majority of it out of the center and toward the walls. Out of habit he looked around for the light switches but quickly thought better of it, it certainly couldn't hurt anything to leave the lights on overnight. Well, it wouldn't hurt anything aside from the electricity bill but he wasn't overly concerned about that. Leaving the lights on for one night wasn't the end of the world. Not to mention that it kept the crawling feeling of things lurking in the shadowed corners at bay, a feeling he hadn't had this strongly since he was a child.

Yeah, the lights could stay on.

Klaus had made it halfway up the stairs when he heard the door slam. It was sudden enough so that it caused him to jump, the sound amplified by the still silence that filled the rest of the house. Normally a thing like a slammed door could be passed off as a result of an open window, the wind creating abnormal currents in the room as it bounced off walls and furniture alike to create a vacuum but he highly doubted that was the case this time. Realistically it had probably just been Harvey, there really was no need to slam doors but it wasn't unlikely that with a house this old the door frames had bloated and swollen with the combination of humidity and summer heat, making slamming them the only way to close them fully.

He reached the landing at the top of the stairs quickly, a distinctly not cheery hop in his step as he took the stairs two at a time. Directly to his right was the master bedroom, and to his left a ways down the long hallway the other two bedrooms and the one of the estate's many cluttered storage rooms. Full of various furnishings and decor pieces that were draped with sheets that had probably once been white but were now yellowed with age and the odd inexplicable stain. While Harvey had been checking the connectivity of the cameras he had spent a good long time in there readjusting, there had been no plugs in the room so Harvey hadn't been in there himself. To make the process take even longer his radio had stubbornly refused to relay more than a few scattered words and copious amounts of static while he was in the storage room itself. It worked perfectly the moment he stepped out of the doorway though, which made the whole process even more annoying.

Instead of heading straight to 'his' room Klaus walked the few steps toward the closed door to the master bedroom. It made sense for this to have been the door that had slammed though there was really no way to prove it. He raised a hand to knock then let it fall again. If Harvey didn't answer then he'd knock.

"Harvey? I heard a door slam, was that you?" He called.
 
The radio thrummed and popped. Electric laughter in the wake of Cat’s goading. Or something’s goading. Harvey’s nerves may have been alive with panic, muscles inert with consternation, but he knew that wasn’t truly Cat speaking over the radio. Not the real her anyways. Perhaps it was a memory, an echo of one with uncanny verisimilitude.

And maybe that was worse. Because the actual Catharine Keyes had long since moved on and changed. Unlike Harvey who was haunted by his failings, now more than metaphorically. That night could play over and over again here. All the ignominy and humiliation. A record on repeat. And he was left waiting for the needle to drop.

Memory was beginning to bleed into reality. The scent of smoke and incense wended from the bedroom to the bath. Harvey could smell it. Ylang ylang, attar of rose, and the black effusions of burning stationary. He remembered Cat adding the ashes to the cup and drinking half before forcing him to finish it. The dregs, the bitter sediment of feigned ritual and teenage witchcraft lay at the bottom for him to swallow. It had coated his tongue, leeched into every cell and held fast. More bitter than unrequited love. More biting than any blade’s cut.

Harvey needed a drink, needed to leave, but was afraid of what may have been waiting in the bedroom. Memory flickered through any attempt to maintain a clear mind. Diaphanous fabric trimmed with lace. Razor bumps and bruised knees. Eye shadow heavy enough to cake. And the curtain of Cat’s bangs, preventing Harvey from seeing the timidity and hurt in her eyes.

He thought he was going to vomit. Then the sink shut off. A shiver ran across the water, fleeting, fleeing. Harvey hadn’t heard Klaus at the door, but something else did. And in its absence was quiescence. Eerie and still. Harvey stood catatonic in expectance of something, thinking it the eye of the storm, eddy in the current. But it wasn’t. And nothing further came.

The sink continued to drain, the radio silenced, and the cloying scent of staged romance began to fade. Slowly, on soundless footsteps, Harvey crossed back into the bedroom. By the thin gap beneath the door, he saw something was outside it, blocking the hall light. Finding safety in the room’s camera, Harvey called out.

“Klaus?” Please be only Klaus.
 
For a while there was nothing, the silence stretching on long past the couple of seconds that it was socially acceptable to wait before responding. Feeling restless Klaus shifted his weight from foot to foot, glancing over his shoulder and down the length of the hall that lead to the other bedrooms. It was entirely possible that Harvey had actually decided to room up in the one opposite to the blue room, though when they had been setting up cameras Klaus recalled that his bag had been in front of the door to the master.

After another few seconds of waiting he opened his mouth to call out again but quickly quieted at the sound of his name. It was muffled through the door and sounded like it had come from further than just the other side, the speaker standing a few steps back.

"Yeah, it's me." Klaus paused, raising his voice slightly. "Didn't mean to bother you, sorry. I thought I heard a door slam, just figured I should check if everything was alright?" Sure, it was a bit awkward to talk to someone through a closed door but he wasn't about to open it unannounced.
 
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