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“She only implements dreams, nothing more. Is that so horrible?”
I don’t want to believe that there’s anything good about the woman, so I shrug her comment off.
“Let’s go inside,” she says suddenly, “there’s something I want to show you.”
I want to remain on the sand. I want to let the sun bake my body, but there’s something so good-natured in her invitation that I don my shift again and follow her inside the house.
If I were not in such a horrible gloom, this place would be glorious. The flowers, especially the roses, are blooming so beautifully along the garden pathway. The air with its salty tang seems to cleanse me inside out. And the mood about the B&B, despite my malaise, is lighthearted, even jovial, as the women enjoy the splendors of this picture perfect resort. I wonder if they know what nasty secrets are harbored here, or if they will also become victims to the wild Anastasia? Perhaps they’re even part of the malevolent force that fuels this place.
I wonder to myself if my suspicions are getting the better of me; but I wonder only until I remember Peach in the garden and the parlor nights before. That was reality, not some fiction concocted in my head.
Analise takes me on a journey though the house and up the back staircase. At the landing we continue on to the third floor. I haven’t been this far, but I see that there are a number of sleeping rooms, smaller than my own, but still delightful bedrooms for guests. One is already occupied by a guest who has just arrived. For a moment Analise steps outside her angelic role, and greets the newcomer with a smile and a hearty handshake—hardly like her greeting to me. Then dismissing herself with a polite apology, we withdraw from the room and continue down the third floor hallway.
“The place is filling up for this ceremony?” I ask.
“Of course,” Analise says. “But we still have lots of time.”
Time for what, I wonder silently.
At the end of the hallway, she opens a narrow door, and taking me by the hand, she pulls me up yet another flight of stairs to the attic. These steps have no railing and I find the climbing as treacherous as climbing up the ocean cliff from the beach. But on reaching the top, I’m surprised to discover, not the trunk filled dusty attic of storybook fame, but a clean swept room with a generous old couch, a single brass bed and an antique writing table sitting prettily in the dormer window. There are still old boxes, and trunks, and cast off things that belong in attics, but this place has a look of residency, not neglect.
“I stay here sometimes, in fact, Anastasia sends me up here when I’m bad.”
“Bad?” I question. “That’s sounds a little childish.”
“I am a little childish,” she says, laughing.
I laugh too, thinking how completely unaffected this woman is knowing herself as well as she does.
“So what does she do, feed you bread and water, and chain you to the bed?” I ask.
“No,” she laughs more. I’ve never seen her face quite so animated. “Almost… sometimes she spanks me with her hairbrush and sends me up here ‘to think about it’.” She imitates Tasia’s voice.
Immediately I think of Peach punishing me, blistering my ass with her leather belt: another coincidental similarity between the two of us. Perhaps we’re to be cast-offs in the cast-off attic together.
“But mostly,” Analise continues, “this is where I come to be alone, or like now, to be with you. No one will bother us here.” There’s an erotic twinkle in her eye and I almost expect her to descend on me and make love.
“Would you like to stay here?” she asks.
“Stay here? What, so you and your mistress can lock me up, so I won’t get away?” I blurt out awkwardly.
“Oh no!” she exclaims, surprised by my suspicions.
“I’m sorry, I was just kidding.”
She smiles again, “You can come here any time if you like, I won’t mind.”
With that, Analise scampers to the far side of the attic and pulls out a trunk. “Let me show you some things,” she says.
I come closer and sit on a low stool and watch as, with an almost religious reverence, she opens the creaking trunk. “For the ceremony,” she says, as she pulls out feather masks and odd looking bracelets, collars, cuffs, skirts and strange looking bodice pieces. I recall Peach’s flaming eyes as she spoke about the ceremony in that wild diatribe in our room days ago. I can almost hear drum beats in my mind and smell a bonfire in the air. The things in the trunk either reek the odors of the ceremony, incense and wood smoke, or they give off such an aura that it seems they still do.
Analise holds a mask to her face, smiling prettily for me, as if she’s modeling something from her mother’s closet.
“See they aren’t so strange, are they?” she says.
“I think of pagan rituals seeing them,” I tell her.
“Of course you do, but it’s all play, nothing more.” She fingers the items lovingly, going through each piece as if it brings back fond memories of when it was worn and by whom.
