Quinsey Wolfe's Glass Vault

by Candace Robinson

  Maybe this is a forest? When or if I get back home, I need to research the difference between woods and forest. I can’t believe I have no idea what the difference is between them.

  The cottage is only several feet away, and I say a silent wish to myself hoping to find August inside.

  I stare at the house, thanking every tree around here that it isn’t covered in sugary treats and frosting. I really don’t want to have to deal with a witch today. Unless there is a witch inside that doesn’t have her house decorated like a gingerbread house? That would make it easier to trick someone like me.

  When Maisie and I were younger, Hansel and Gretel was one of our favorite fairytales. I was never afraid of it back then, even though the story itself could be disturbing for children. When I look back, I was always so intrigued about a house made of desserts and sweets.

  We would always play in Maisie’s backyard. She would grab a loaf of bread and tear up bread crumbs and pretend that our stepmother had abandoned us in the woods. Back then, I didn’t think that it would be my real mother that would eventually abandon me.

  There were never birds around to eat the bread for us to lose our way, so we had to use Maisie’s dog, Roosevelt. He isn’t alive now, but he would gobble the pieces up in one second.

  Maisie and I would argue who would be Gretel and who would be Hansel. I would usually give in and be Hansel most of the time.

  In Maisie’s backyard under the trees, Uncle Jaron had built a small cottage for us to play in. It was so much better than those cheap plastic ones, and there was a lot of room in there to play.

  On this particular day when we were pretending to be Hansel and Gretel, we decided to decorate the small house. We snuck inside and grabbed anything we could to make it look like a house of candy.

  There were condiments that we squirted all over it. We drew designs with mainly the ketchup and mustard, since the red and yellow were colorful. The house was light beige and white to begin with. We just wanted to make it vibrant and look like a real candy house.

  We glued and colored all over it with anything else we could find. When we were done, it looked amazing, to two young children it did anyway.

  I had found a small twig to hold and pretended to be in my small cage that the witch put me inside of. We didn’t have a third person to play with us, so Maisie took on the role as the witch along with her Gretel.

  My hand kept showing her the bony twig. Maisie would be over the top with her acting when she would go to feel the twig to see if I was meaty enough to eat. We would let out a pile of giggles and have to start the scene all over again.

  When Aunt Krista came outside to bring us in for dinner, she was so mad when she saw what we had done to the house. Uncle Jaron couldn’t stop laughing and told us both how creative we were. It was mainly Maisie’s idea, and even back then she was always the more creative one out of us.

  We didn’t go unpunished. My Aunt made us clean the house up as best we could and help Uncle Jaron repaint it. I wouldn’t really call it a punishment because it was fun getting to help redecorate it again. That time we chose the colors, and we made the colors bright.

  The little hammer inside my head knocks the memory away. God, I miss Maisie.

  I walk cautiously to the house. The roof isn’t covered in normal shingles—they are layered and made of a different type of material that is a dark grayish brown. The walls of the house on the outside are painted a light green, and the trim on the edges where each wall meets is a light brown that matches the color of the front door.

  I crouch near the side of the house and try to look inside the windows. I slowly raise my head up to see if I can see inside. The window glass is covered in too much grime to see anything except a light coming from within the house.

  When I duck back down and step away from the house, I crush a few blue and yellow flowers in the process. There is a whole row of flowers along the house with all sorts of colors radiating. I don’t have time for flower gazing. I build up the small amount of courage I have and walk up to the front door of the house.

  I bring my hand up and knock three times on the wood, and it radiates throughout the cottage. I step back a few steps in case someone or something strange answers the door. The distance also gives me a chance to take off running before being taken or attacked.

  No one answers the door. I try again and do the same thing, except this time I give it an extra knock and step back. My eyes dart around the house and hover at the door, and then I realize no one is going to answer.

  “All right,” I say to myself.

  I pace in front of the door, shake my head, and head straight for it. I grab the doorknob and turn it. It’s unlocked, so I slowly open the door and step inside.

  Chapter 22

  When my feet hit the ground inside of the cottage, the flooring is hardwood that looks remarkably clean and shiny. The house, on the other hand, smells of death. I follow the narrow hallway and turn around the corner where there is a large living area, and I stop dead in my tracks.

  There is a girl sitting in front of the fireplace sewing or knitting something.

  I’m prepared to run. “Excuse me.”

  The girl doesn’t turn around. Instead, she continues to rock back and forth in her wooden, rocking chair. Each squeak reverberates.

  “Hello,” I say even louder.

  Nothing. She doesn’t flinch or anything. I walk to get closer to the girl. When I’m standing right beside her, I pull back, reaching my hand up to my mouth, and gasp. “Maisie!”

  The rocking stills for a moment, but she doesn’t look up. She begins rocking again. After taking a breath to get over my original shock, I realize Maisie looks fine other than she’s here in this dreadful place. Her normally straight, black hair sits just below her chin in loose ringlets that make her look a lot younger than she is. She has on a blue cap sleeved dress with a brown lace up vest, and her feet are completely bare. My attention is drawn to her hand where she continues stitching something. It looks like it’s animal skin. Possibly deer skin.

  “Maisie? What are you doing?” I ask.

  She finally stops and looks up at me in the face. One of her eyes is still covered by a patch. It’s a solid blue and matches her dress. There is nothing vibrant about it like her usual patches. “Who is Maisie?”

  Shock hits me hard, and I reach over to grab her arm. She moves it gently away from me. “You’re Maisie.”

  Maisie begins to giggle. “Aren’t you just the silliest? My name is Snow.”

  My eyebrows shoot straight up and almost off my forehead. “Uh, as in Snow White?”

  “Yes, how did you know that?” she giggles again.

  My face cringes. “Lucky guess.”

  Something is wrong with her, and I have to figure out how to undo this. I finally take a look around the room now that my focus is off of Maisie. I turn my head to the left, and there are animals all over the ground, piled up in the corner. Blood spills from them into puddles on the flooring.

  There are seven little beds in a row with seven small men. They are lying in them with the sheet covered to their chin. One might think them asleep with their eyes gently shut, but the blood on their faces proves otherwise. The white sheets on their beds are drenched in blood. How did I not notice this? The shock of seeing Maisie must have overwhelmed everything else.

  I look over to Maisie horrified. “What. Is. That?”

  She shakes her finger in the air. “Those little men weren’t very kind to me. Now they will remember to treat me nice,” she laughs hysterically. This giggling thing is really starting to creep me out.

  Maisie lifts the animal fur to flip it over. Her dress has dark, red blood all over it from where the underside of the fur was lying. “Um, Maisie?”

  She looks at me and tilts her head to the side grinning wide. “You mean Snow.”

  I press my lips and nod my head. “Right, I mean Snow. You do realize you are getting your dress a little messy. Maybe we should set w
hat you are working on down and find you something else to wear. Do you have another dress?”

  I reach for the fur, but she moves it away from my hands.

  Her eyebrows draw together in a hard line, and a crease forms between them. “Yes. I believe that I do.” She sets the fur down on the ground softly, as if it may break like a glass vase.

  I move my hand gently to her arm. “Look at me. Do you remember me?”

  She stares hard at me, and I think there may be recognition starting to form. Then whatever may have been there is gone, and she shakes her head.

  “Do you remember the name Perrie? That is me. Or how about August and Neven?” August isn’t in here, and I hope more than anything that he is okay. I’m going to assume Neven is here in one of these displays because I don’t know where else he would be. Unless he did run away and just happened to return home while we are all stuck in this crap hole.

  “Perrie,” she sounds out my name like it’s a new word that she is learning for the first time. Then she suddenly jumps to her feet, and I jump back away from her not knowing exactly what she’s going to do. “Let’s clean,” she says excitedly.

  “Let’s not.”

  Her face draws up into a pouty expression. She looks over at the beds, which I have been avoiding looking at since I spotted the massacre. Her hands go to her cheeks, and then she palms her ears. “They did an awful thing to me, but I taught them.”

  Do I even want to know? Yes, I have to know. “What did they do to you?”

  “When I first arrived, I didn’t know there were people that lived here. I fell asleep in one of the beds in the middle. I woke up when I heard whispering, and my wrists were tied together.”

  I’m scared to hear where this is going. I think I know where it’s leading, and I’m beginning to fume.

  Maisie reaches up to the blue eye patch and lifts it back. I don’t have any time to prepare myself, and I let out a small yelp. “They took out a knife and removed it.”

  Oh, I was beyond wrong.

  Her eye is gone. Maisie’s beautiful whole freaking eye is missing. I’m overwhelmed with emotions, consumed with anger, rage, despair, and fear. If those little men weren’t lying there already dead, I might have had to do something myself.

  She giggles and pulls her eye patch back down. “Don’t worry, after that they fell asleep. I was able to get free and got them all back. You see that bucket over there?” She points at a large, brown, wooden pail sitting next to the pile of animal carcasses.

  The pail has some blood on it, and I’m not sure where it came from. “Yes, I see the bucket.”

  “Go look inside the bucket,” she says anxiously.

  “I think I’m going to have to pass on that.”

  She doesn’t hear my response. Maisie lifts her hands to cover her one remaining eye and eye patch, “Now they see no evil.” Then she moves her hands and covers her ears tightly when she presses against them. “They can hear no evil.” Finally, she moves her hands in front of her mouth, and her eye is open wide. “And now they will forever speak no evil.”

  “Uh-huh.” I’m in shock with this whole situation. How do I even respond to what she is saying?

  “Come here and look.” She waves me over excitedly and yanks me to the bucket before I have time to protest.

  The bucket is in front of me, and I’m going to retch. I dry heave and back away. The bucket is filled with eyeballs and tongues that have been plucked out, and ears that had to have been cut off. This is crazy. Maisie is insane, and this place has made her this way.

  “Before I could help them, I had to stab each one right here so that they would sit still and not move a single little muscle.” She points directly at her heart, as if she has helped the dead dwarves.

  After seeing Maisie’s eye, I know she had to defend herself. But the way she is acting, and the way she went about it is not like her at all.

  I have got to figure a way to get her out of this trance that she is lost in and then try and find August.

  “Can you look at me for a moment?” She turns her head and looks directly into my face with a blank expression. I gently place my hands on the sides of her face. “Do you want me to tell you a story?”

  She clasps her hands together at her chest and makes it seem like I have just given her the best birthday present in the entire world. “I love stories!”

  I walk her gently back over to the rocking chair and help her sit down. I lightly kick the bloody fur out of the way that she was messing with earlier. I hurry and do it before she tries to grab it and set it on her lap again.

  “Do you remember that one time when we went to the carnival in ninth grade?” Of course she doesn’t.

  There was always this ride we would get on called, the Zipper. That year my dad drove and dropped Maisie, Neven, and I off. The first thing Maisie wanted to do was eat funnel cake. Neven and I shared our own since Maisie had to eat an entire one by herself. These funnel cakes were no small little pastry. They were enormous.

  Right afterward, Maisie wanted to ride the Zipper. We kept taking turns riding it with each other, but Maisie kept continuously riding it. Even when I would ride with Nev, she would just ask some random person to ride with her.

  It had to have been like the seventh time she had ridden it in a row, and she started saying that she wasn’t feeling good. Then she darted off for the bathrooms, but she didn’t make it. She threw up all over the grass.

  Neven and I tried to see if she wanted to go home after that, but she said she felt better and was ready to ride again. Neither one of us could change her mind.

  The first round back on the Zipper was fine. The second time the same thing happened, and she was done after that.

  We played some of the carnival games, and Nev happened to win a very small, stuffed dragon that he gave to me. I ended up giving it to Maisie. She was still feeling sick, and I wanted to help her feel better. She still has the stuffed dragon proudly displayed in her room.

  “Every now and then, Maisie, you talk about how that was one of the greatest days of your life,” I say.

  She takes her index finger and presses it to her cheek and smiles a huge closed-lip smile, tilting her head forward. “That wasn’t a story at all. There weren’t any animals or castles or anything.”

  I sigh and let my chin lower to my chest. “There was a stuffed dragon,” I say sarcastically.

  “Do you have another story?” she asks happily.

  “No.” I’m frustrated, but I try to come up with one more. I tell her the story of how we would play Hansel and Gretel that I had just thought about outside. And even years later in high school when we went to a Halloween party, we dressed up as Hansel and Gretel. That time Maisie was Hansel, and we made Neven dress up as the witch. He insisted on being a warlock, and Maisie and I agreed to his request. We had to be the ones in charge of designing his costume, though.

  “You have to remember that, Maisie. That was our sophomore year, and it was the best Halloween of all time. You even said so.”

  Her expression is possibly turning into recognition. She jumps out of her seat and clasps her hands together once again. “I love dessert!” she says maniacally and yells to no one.

  That’s it. That is the last straw. I can’t keep this charade up anymore, spending the rest of my life trying to bring Maisie back. My only choice is to grab her with force and drag her out of here.

  I stomp my foot so hard on the ground that Maisie turns to me and gives me a look of shock. “Damn it, Maisie. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but we are done with this crap. I can’t sit here anymore and pretend that we aren’t in some demonic house filled with dead bodies of tiny men and whatever kinds of animals are slaughtered over there in that pile.” I point at the animals in the corner. “Not to mention the stench in here that reeks of a thousand deaths. If I have to slap you repeatedly to get you to remember, I will.” I really don’t want to, but I raise my hand and get ready to aim it for her delicate ski
n.

  Her eye widens. “Perrie?”

  Chapter 23

  I did it. I don’t know how I did, but Maisie recognizes me.

  “Maisie!” I yell and rush forward and wrap my arms around her. I squeeze her tighter than I have ever hugged her in my life.

  “How did you get here?” she asks.

  I explain to her how August and I went to the Glass Vault to look for her and failed. Then we were magically sucked into this reality that is hell. Her eye stays focused when I tell her about the previous places that August and I had gone through; how there are missing people in here and that August is now gone.

  Between Maisie, Officer Rodriguez, and Josselyn, each of them didn’t seem to recognize themselves. I don’t know about Ben since I didn’t see him up close, but he didn’t seem like he was acting like a normal person. So, why are August and I not in a daze?

  “What about you? What happened? Do you remember everything?” I ask.

  Maisie pushes her hair behind her ears. “I remember most of it. I think? When I left your house and arrived at the Glass Museum, I came inside and there was no one there.”

  “So, did you meet Quinsey?” I interrupt before she can continue her story.

  She shakes her head. “No. I didn’t see anyone in the museum. It was like what you saw. I walked down a bunch of halls. When I came to the exhibit portion, I walked around and waited for a little bit figuring that he was either late or somewhere on the premises.”

  Maisie leans her back against the wall and slides to the ground. I sit down on the wood floor with my legs crossed facing her.

  “While I was waiting, I walked around and looked at the displays, and there was this Snow White one I stopped in front of. She was leaning over the seven dwarves that were lying in their beds with a knife that was dripping blood in her hand.