(Skeleton Key) Into Elurien Read Free

the best way to escape my semi-rational fears is to let myself get scared by something I know to be harmless, something I can let go of more easily than my anxieties. Like the spirits or monsters roaming these halls. Just a legend. A game.
    And that little fairy girl… My stomach tightened. A coincidence that it happened here. She was obviously off her rocker to begin with, poor thing.
    I tried a few of the numbered doors, interested to see what the older and more expensive rooms looked like inside, but all were locked tight. The only knob that turned belonged to a door with no number on it. The door swung toward me on silent hinges, revealing a dark staircase heading up.
    The attic. There had to be something interesting up there. My grandmother’s attic had been full of weird old shit like mink shoulder wraps (complete with paws and faces) and rusted strap-on roller skates. The inn was bound to have even older stuff.
    I hurried back to my room to grab the flashlight from my bag, then headed up the stairs. They creaked horribly under my feet. The musty air turned colder as I climbed, and I pulled my sweatshirt tighter.
    My tiny light picked out dark shapes when I reached the top, none of them welcoming. A hulking, monstrous form to my left nearly made me retreat down the stairs, but it was only a mannequin with blankets tossed over it.
    “Hush now, girl,” I whispered, a soothing phrase my grandmother had used when I was a nervous child. She’d been more of a comfort to me than my own overbearing parents ever had, and was probably the only reason I was a remotely normal and functioning person. God rest her soul.
    I moved around the perimeter of the massive attic, stepping from beam to beam in case the floor—or rather, the ceiling—wouldn’t hold my weight. My physique rested somewhere in the middle of what my friend Lisa Flanker had once called the Waif-Whale Spectrum. Healthy and normal, unless you were in movie-and-magazine world. Athletic enough to climb the ropes in gym class, but not nimble or dainty enough to take anything but the utmost care as I sneaked around a dark attic.
    I found a string hanging down from the centre of the roof and gave it a tug. The light startled me. I hadn’t expected it to work. Now the attic became something more interesting and less frightening, and my heartbeat slowed to normal as the light chased away the darkness.
    A door to a partitioned-off area caught my eye, only because it looked so out of place. Everything else in the attic was covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs, but this door—dark polished wood carved with gorgeous floral patterns—was clean. I leaned closer and set my hand on the cut-glass knob, which didn’t match the brass fittings on every other door in the inn. It seemed to vibrate briefly under my fingers, then stilled.
    My mental exhaustion was obviously catching up with me. I turned the knob, but the door wouldn’t open.
    Go back to bed, I advised myself. But I still didn’t feel sleepy. Just drained, bored, and not ready for a tomorrow full of disappointed glances from my mother—not to mention the “I told you so” looks from classmates who had never left the island.
    I turned to the chests and boxes that lined the walls, searching their contents to distract myself. A tiny part of me feared finding the skeleton of a young child who had become trapped during a game of hide and seek decades before. Grandma always warned me and my cousins about that danger when we played at her house. The skeleton would still be wearing clothes, tattered with age and moth-eaten. Her eyes would stare up at me, empty sockets filled with—
    I opened a chest, screamed, and let the lid slam shut as I stumbled back and fell onto my arse. Shit, shit, shit. Oh God. Grandma was right. Fuck.
    I forced my breathing to be calm, and my mind soon followed. That was not a dead child. Take another look.
    “I don’t want to,” I answered out loud, but crawled back to the