I let myself in the rickety fence in front of Anya Yuvinko’s house. It was nestled in a residential section of downtown on a pretty street. The black paint, crumbling stucco, and long-dead plants made it function more like a wart on an attractive girl’s nose.
I found Anya in her basement, like usual. She had several centrifuges spinning down vials of blood and she was hunched over a microscope.
Anya used to be a leading researcher relating to all things blood and hematology in Russia. Some sort of falling out had occurred, and she’d more or less fled to the states. Now her sole focus in life was finding out how to splice human blood with cat blood. She… really wanted cat ears. I wished that was a joke. Regardless of whether Anya had lost her mind, she had all the equipment I needed and none of the pretentiousness to stop me from doing my own work.
She was in her late forties with short blonde hair she cut choppily herself. She usually worked in bath robes, moo-moo’s, or whatever else she could find.
I set down a few cans of ravioli and instant noodles on the desk by the stairs when I came down. She never acknowledged the food I brought, but I also never got the impression she really left her house. Sometimes I wondered if she’d just starve to death if I didn’t bring her something to eat.
“You will extract plasma now,” Anya said in perfectly annunciated English. She had no hint of an accent, but she frequently struggled with grammar in ways that made her either difficult to understand or accidentally hilarious.
I got some of the menial tasks she needed help with while my mind picked over my own plans for the day.
If I had to describe my academic interests in layman's terms, I’d say I was basically obsessed with blood. Not in a creepy, I take baths in the stuff kind of way, either. My interest was because I felt like the healing potential of blood still hadn’t been unlocked. My dream was to find a way to make a sort of synthetic super-blood we could inject into ourselves to fight off infections and disease before they started. Anya was just one unconventional step I’d had to take in my pursuit of that goal. The other was the fact that I hadn’t so much as been on a date in at least five years.
But there’d be time for men later. Maybe when I was in my forties. I heard great things about the dating prospects for sexually inexperienced women in their forties, after all.
2
Cara
I stifled a yawn as the last of my tour group headed back home. I’d changed clothes after my internship into something that was more me. I liked wearing outfits that were a little out-there. Sneakers were usually a must. I might wear an old torn t-shirt from a show I’d been to years ago with a black plaid skirt one night and heels with a flirty dress the next. The point was having fun with it. My outfit was basically my version of those mood boards my elementary school teachers used to put up.
Tonight, I’d opted for black Converse, an “I came for the turkey” t-shirt with suggestive drops of white splattered around the letters. I was also wearing a neon blue and black plaid mini-skirt. The intended message? It has been a long ass day and I have no interest in making small talk, thanks but no thanks.
But I also tended to dress a little drearier for my late-night gig giving haunted tours of downtown Savannah, Georgia. I typically ended the tour at the old Mercer-Williams house.
I was just walking around making sure all the doors were locked when I decided I couldn’t wait until I got home to pee. I wasn’t supposed to use the bathrooms in the tour locations, but I’d been holding my pee so long I was either going to squat in an alley somewhere or desecrate the haunted mansion.
I stealthily pushed open the creaky front door and tripped on the loose floorboard. I wound up crashing face-first into an antique table, which knocked several picture frames over.
Whoops.
Thankfully, I was alone, unless the ghosts I told my tours about were real, at least.
I tried the bathroom on the first floor even though I knew the water hadn’t been turned on for decades. Sure enough, it hadn’t magically been activated so I could relieve myself.
I knew I usually heard pipes rattling from the basement, so I headed through the darkened manor down the stairs.
Distantly, I thought how most sane people would probably be scared out of their minds right about now. I’d just spent the last two hours explaining to wide-eyed tourists how dastardly and haunted this house was. In truth, the place did creep me out. I always had the sense that I wasn’t alone here, but I hadn’t had any of the ghostly encounters other tour guides claimed to experience.
There were stories of former tour guides killing themselves here. People getting pushed down stairs. Phantom hands grabbing ankles and leaving marks.
But my personal stance on the paranormal was “maybe, but probably not.” I thought it was fun to talk about. Unless a ghost decided to formally introduce itself, I was going to remain a skeptic. So the only fear I really had going into the darkened basement was of giant rats.
I had to cross the large basement area to a door I’d never bothered to open. I was crossing my fingers there was a toilet behind it. I tried the handle and found it locked.
“Shit!” I hissed. That was it. If I didn’t find a way to a toilet in the next five minutes, I was going to pee myself. It was that simple.
I went to a precarious, tall standing shelf lined with endless buckets of paint and heavy tools, hoping to find some kind of key. I stood on my tiptoes and saw something metallic hanging just over the edge of one of the top shelves.
“Don’t do it, Cara. You’re not coordinated. You will die.”
I ignored my own advice and planted one foot on the first shelf and tried to reach for the key. It wasn’t enough, so my full bladder compelled me to climb up one more shelf like it was a giant ladder.
I barely got the key between my fingertips by stretching as far as my short frame would allow. I was on one tip-toe with my fingers fully extended like Harry Potter about to grab the snitch.
That was the moment I felt the shelf lurch.
I was falling forward toward a brick wall.
Oh hell no.
I closed my eyes and held on for dear life.
There was a huge collision and clatter of thousands of things falling from the shelf—thankfully not including the stupid thirty-year-old thing clinging to it. My forehead banged against a paint bucket and something bounced up then pounded painfully against my back.
“Ugh,” I murmured. I slid my hand between my legs to make sure I hadn’t peed myself. “Hah,” I said, finding I was dry. “I still got it.”
With some premature old woman grunts, I pulled myself out of the spilled carnage of tools, cans, and now-broken shelves. When I got a few steps back, I saw the shelf and its contents had broken a door-sized hole in the brick wall.
Shit. I was going to get fired.
I wasn’t sure what I expected on the other side, but I did not expect to see a perfectly preserved room.
I stood there staring at the opening as dust filtered down from the disturbed rafters overhead.
Why was there a room in the haunted mansion behind a bricked-up wall?
I took a half-step backwards, then looked at my hand. I was holding the key.
Some things in life were more important than the loss of your job, damaging historic locations, or potentially disturbed ghosts. One of those things was a full bladder, so I quickly rushed to what I prayed was a bathroom.