Fantastic, you’ve enchanted the bones to life. Dare I ask what’s next?

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Unspoken Promises
Current Date: May 31, 2023

Character: Chloe Jordan
Race: Human
Age: 36
Current residence: Spirit Falls, Wisconsin
 

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It has been two years, give or take, and I still have no idea how the strange woman made it into the house. Both the officers came back later in the day to check everywhere, even though I had told them I already had done this, and they had no need to waste their time on this. Both assured me that it was all right and that I deserved to feel safe in my own home.

We truly never found where she might have come in from. I know that Officer Zorić checked her pockets and found nothing—I suppose it could have been possible that there would have been a key. From the attic to the basement, every nook, cranny, and everywhere between the non-existent dust bunnies. Nothing.

For a handful of weeks after her removal from the house—she had done no real harm, other than trespassing, of course—I had trouble falling asleep. Every creak of the house as it settled unsettled me and I found myself roaming the halls, just trying to find out the source of the noise and, of course, I never found a thing.

The officers checked up on me every week, just to ascertain that I was all right and by the month marker when it was possibly clear that I was not getting the rest I should have, Officer Richards showed up with a few teas that were meant to help me find calmness once more and they helped. I had never thought that teas could do this for a person and yet, I now find myself seeking them out when I am running low. It has been an interesting learning experience.

During those weeks, I found myself wondering if the house did not have hidden passages. It is certainly big enough and it possibly could have been one of those things my grandparents had not thought to tell me; what good would it have done? At that point, it was also highly possible that they had forgotten about these things as well.

In a way, I feel as though even though there possibly could be secret pathways and passages around the house, if the woman had been, say, living in the walls for possibly years, I would have heard her. The house is old, it creaks, and it took me a long time to learn which floorboards to avoid and I am conscientious about being quiet, even if I know I am now alone in my own home. They are little more than remainders of my life in the whore house as a child. I would have heard others if they had roamed.

As I was trying to find ways to understand just what it was that could have led the woman into my home, I found my way to the library. A comfortably sized building—though I believe there were bigger ones out there in the world, but we are a small community, a smaller one yet now—it had a good collection of books but for a short moment, I thought that perhaps there would be nothing on what I was looking for.

As it turns out, I did find two books on architecture that spoke of older castles and manors. One of them only had vague mentions of things but the other spoke of the history of secret passages and I found myself taking the book with me. Possibly not quite where it should have been, I believe, I found a novel right next to the second book, something that spoke of witches, magic, and a little bit of mystery. No romance in there, thank goodness, I would have left it there, I believe. Not that I have anything against anyone that might wish to believe in romance, it simply is not my cup of tea.

It was slow, as I devoured my way through the main book, but I am fairly certain that I missed not a single word and I re-read the whole thing twice. This little novel, I found that I had an easier time reading a chapter or two, as they were fairly short, while I was settled near one of the windows at the back, just overlooking the flowering garden.

I had no true expectations but, as it turns out, I found myself engrossed in this story, possibly more for the mention of the hidden passages than anything else and the eventual confusion down the way from the main character that seemed perhaps more irritation than confusion as the witch—their mother—had somehow brought bones to life. The bones ended up serving quite a bit later in the book but in a fairly subtle way.

As someone who had never been truly one for reason—not much of that possible during my childhood—I never developed a desire to read more, but after that book, which I delayed in bringing back and borrowed again not long after once more, I found myself reading now and again. I am, by no means, a fast reader but that hardly matters, does it? If others wish to have the book I borrow for some time, they will have to wait. They should have come for it before I did.

I am allowed these things just as everyone else is.

Final Word Count: 884

Does anyone else have a house with a magical door? Am I the only one who doesn’t?

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Unspoken Promises
Characters: Chloe Jordan
Race: Human
Age: 34
Current residence: Spirit Falls, Wisconsin
Final Word Count: 773 words
 

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I don’t know the stranger in my house, and I don’t know what to do about them. I also say ‘them’ because I’m not sure whether they are male or female.

I woke up this morning and they were there. I am more than aware that I am not prone to delusions; I didn’t even have the kind of imagination necessary to ‘will’ myself away when I was with customers. I think that this is one of those things that never was awakened in me due to the way I spent my early years. So, I know that this stranger, they’re quite real.

I don’t recall seeing them around the little community but from the moment the lawyer dropped me off at the bed and breakfast to the moment I finally called my grandparents, I never roamed much. During the fog, I did head in to the heart of the community, I would go to get food like everyone else, I would bring dried goods that my grandparents had kept more than enough of that I knew I would never eat so that others could have a chance at them, but I did not socialize much.

It so happens to be one of these things, I know.

Mind you, I very much so lock my doors at night. If I’m being honest, I rarely unlock the doors at all unless I have any need to step outside and even then, I unlock the one door I will be using and that tends to be a door at the back.

This stranger, I don’t know where they came from.

They were standing near one of the empty bedroom doors, just mumbling away about magical doors. When I saw them, I admit that I stopped moving, waited to see whether or not they would notice I was there, and they had not. So, I silently made my way back upstairs and I checked every single window and door. None of them were open. I slowly, silently so, made my way back downstairs and still, they were there. Still mumbling about a house with a magical door, wondering if they were the only one who didn’t have one.

I didn’t approach them. I admit rather willingly that I do not handle things like these well and would rather let someone else handle it. Still, keeping as quiet on my feet as I could—I’ve learned to tell which floor board groans and which doesn’t—and even downstairs, I checked everywhere, and everything was locked. I still don’t know how they came inside.

Still wanting to avoid confrontation, I moved to the far side of the house, where the kitchen sits, and I quietly placed a call at the police station. I’ve never seen the officers at my house other than when they were doing their rounds during the fog. Both of them were quite nice people. I told them to preferably come to the back to knock as I had no idea how the stranger would react to sudden knocking from a door just some feet away from them.

It took a few hours; I think mostly because I told them that so far there had been no signs of aggression and I believe that they were busy handling something else on the other side of the community and I’m quite a ways away on the edge, so it was all right.

It was officer Zorić who came. I let him inside and showed him to the stranger and he looked about as confused as I was about them. He stated that he had never seen that person before. I stayed some distance away while he approached the stranger and without much of a fuss, the stranger—a woman, it turns out—was quietly escorted out of the house.

That was about an hour ago. I still have gone through every single room in the house, I have looked at every nook and cranny—and it is a fairly big house—and I have found nothing. I even went up to the attic to see if perhaps there had been an opening there but even the little window out there is secure.

I can’t even begin to put into words just how disquieting it is to know that this stranger—a stranger not only to myself but to one of the two men who checked in on every single person during the fog—has somehow managed to make their way into my home and I cannot find out where their entry point was.

I want for nothing more than to feel safe in my own home.

Regret? I knew you would and finally, after all that time, you’re here to grovel at my feet.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Unspoken Promises
Characters: Chloe Jordan
Race: Human
Age: 33
Final Word Count: 681 words
 

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My grandparents did not live to see the fog lift. On the first day, when it was just the sight of the lifted fog, I cursed whatever god would listen to me because I would have wanted them to see this but, as more days passed on by, I think I then thanked that god because I didn’t want them to live in this strange, abandoned world.

The one good thing, I guess, that I can say about their passing away, is that they both slipped away in their sleep, just a few hours apart, most likely. It’s hard to tell but the medical doctor who still was left in the city said that it did look like they’d both likely just slipped away one after the other. It was pain-free and it was beautiful. Or well, as beautiful as death can be.

They’ve lived a long life; I want to believe that they deserved to slip away peacefully. I didn’t know them much; eighteen months, give or take. They took care of this community while it was not lost under the fog. They kept the economy going. It was through their means that all the solar installations were done. In a way, I guess they saved this town from darkness.

Now, while the fog was a thing and even now, clearly, money no longer has any use. As far as I’ve heard and I admit I haven’t really gone to ask, but Sarah-Lee rarely stops gossiping, she seems to thrive on it, there is nothing left out there. The closest cities are abandoned and everything looks as though it has been left for nature to reclaim for a hundred years, give or take. I don’t mind, it just means that if somehow they hadn’t managed to fake my death, my chances of ever being dragged to the whore house have diminished to near nothing.

I admit and it isn’t all that easy, but on the night of their passing, I had a dream that woke me in the middle of the night and terrified me. I couldn’t go back to sleep, though; strange as it sounds, I swear I felt a soothing presence at one point; it helped me calm down. I don’t know if I believe in all things non-humans, but I suppose I could. I saw things prowling through the fog on the edges, I heard about the man that was torn apart but no one knows what, I want to believe that it was my grandparents, as they left, that came to me one last time to tell me that I was going to be all right.

In the dream, I was back at the whore house, the matron just there, in front of me. I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t move away from my position on the floor on my knees. She was just giving me this sad look as she shook her head. She told me that she knew I would regret running away. She knew I would eventually come back to her and grovel at her feet because being a whore is all I was good at. She had groomed me from childhood, selling me to my first proper patron when I was just ten; it was all I was meant to be.

Just the thought of going back to the whore house made bile rise in my throat and that was when I woke. It may not seem like something very big, but it was terrifying to me. She could be a sweet woman if he behaved but if you so much as crossed the line, you were in trouble and that trouble was nothing pleasant. The matron ran an ordered house and she had punishments that made it very difficult to want to ‘do the crime’ because none of us wanted to do the time.

I haven’t had the nightmare since and I’m grateful. I don’t think I could have handled it. I miss my grandparents, however, and this house is just so big. So empty.

As if I would want anyone to suffer this curse, too.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Unspoken Promises
Characters: Chloe Jordan
Race: Human
Age: 31
Final Word Count: 797 words
 

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In the middle of August last year, a patron offered my boss to buy me for a week. It was a first. At least, it was a first since that one time when I’d been ten and that had been my first everything but no one ever bought their whores for more than just an hour or two, now and again an evening but rarely anything more than that, let alone a week.

She bartered and she bartered hard. My patron paid the high price and I was given strict rules to follow. I had to call in every eight hours at set times, no matter what, I had to have a small tracker on me at all times and my patron had laid out the plan of where he intended to take me, where we’d be staying and when we’d be on the road.

All in all, it was an overly complicated thing but it changed my life forever.

The man had looked just barely familiar to me, I might have seen him within the walls of my workplace before but that was about it, I couldn’t put my finger on it and once we were in his car, he didn’t really talk much beyond the basics of this and that. The weather, the landscape, everything.

He took us to a little town called Spirit Falls.

It was only once we were in the bed and breakfast—not the one he had told my boss about—that he laid everything bare to me. He was a lawyer, hired by grandparents I had never known. They were my maternal grandparents and had tried, for years after their daughter had run away, to find her. They knew where she was only after a whole lot of digging and at that point, she’d had me. The child without paperwork. From what the man told me, there had been a huge legal battle following this but since I had no papers and there was no proof as to who I was—my boss had starkly refused any blood work to be done—it didn’t really lead much of anywhere.

At least, until now.

All of this, as it turned out, was a ploy to set me free.

He didn’t tell me why it took so long to get there, I didn’t ask. He just told me that once the week was over, he would ‘drive’ me back home, that being, he would drive with the tracker I had been given and the car would end up either in a lake, a ditch or down a cliff side. I didn’t ask to know about that either. He told me that my grandparents were essentially the benefactors of Spirit Falls. They were the reason people still worked, they were the reason the town wasn’t completely abandoned. My mother had run away to get out of the ‘small town’ mind and to experience something new and exhilarating. She’d wanted adventure.

The lawyer told me that he didn’t wish my childhood on anyone else. It wasn’t right that I’d had to endure what I did and I kept my mouth shut about that other whore house where all of the whores working inside were born there and ‘bred’ especially for that. He gave me paperwork, all that had never been mine up until that point, everything. He told me that my grandparents would come and meet me when I was ready; I only had to call the number on the back of a little card. Their home, a mansion on sprawling grounds, was just on the edge of the town.

I think all of this would have been an interesting change in life if I hadn’t been so afraid of my old boss sending security to find me, I was terrified. Even once the week was over, I was afraid and I waited. I even gave it another week and there just was nothing. I was confused.

In the first week of September, I did call the number. I met a pair of elderly folks who were kind and warm and accepting of me. They took me in with wide open arms. It was strange but I went with it.

Barely a few days later, the fog settled in.

I thought my life had changed in a drastic way when I was taken away from all I’d known before and there still had been some fear of what could happen if they found me but the fog changed it all again. No one seems to be able to leave the one and we haven’t seen anyone new. I just don’t really know what’s going on, no one seems to know.

Still, I’m free from my previous life, so that has to be something, right?

I’m not risking myself for something so petty.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – Unspoken Promises
Characters: Chloe Jordan
Race: Human
Age: 31
Final Word Count: 532 words

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I have spent my whole life, all of it, in a whore house. How, some would ask? I was born there. The only one to ever have that sort of ‘luck’ and I wasn’t as lucky as some of the others I’ve heard of out there. I’ve heard about that one whore house where the female workers were encouraged to have unprotected sex with one of their favoured patrons so they would get pregnant. They’d be moved to another floor when it was time and their children would be raised on those upper floors until they were ten or twelve, from there, they started doing simple chores, washing laundry, dishes, helping with the cleaning of everything, meal preparations. They’re not offered to the clients until they’re sixteen, at least.

I saw my first client when I was ten.

By that age, I already knew what I was doing, how I was supposed to do it and just, the whole thing. I’m lucky they waited until I was ten but I guess that any younger would likely have left me a broken mess and a broken whore isn’t much use to anyone.

By the time I was twenty-one, I’d earned top spot amongst the rest of the workers and while it wasn’t a glamorous spot and didn’t really earn me the respect some of the others had, it still gave me a better room than I’d started with and my choice of patrons. Not that I ever really turned one away. Money was money, despite the fact that by then, if I’d been sold into the place, I would have paid back my dues and I could have left but my case is different and the boss has told me that he doubts he’ll ever let me go. When he dies, maybe.

You’d think that this sort of information would give me pause, would make me plot his demise but short of the fact that I’ve been whoring myself out for the past twenty-one years, my life hasn’t been terrible. Sure, I have to sleep with others for a living—both men and women—but I have a roof over my head, I have warm food in me three times a day, I have my own private bathroom, a bedroom with a lock on the door. I can roam wherever I want in the house and the neighbourhood so long as I’m back in time for my appointments and I’ve only ever been late once. Just once.

The sex isn’t so bad, most patrons aren’t rough and considering how long I’ve been here, word of mouth gets out and I get a lot of choice on who I spend my evening with most of the time. So sure, I think a life out there could be interesting but I have no formal schooling, no paperwork to my name, to the eyes of the world, I don’t actually exist, so no, I’m not going to plan my escape any more tonight than I have for the past decades, it would be stupid to want to go out there when I’m an invisible no one who would likely end up in the street.

My time is running out and soon yours will be too.

Timeline/World: Archived
Characters: Chloe Jordan
Race: Human
Age: 30
Final Word Count: 665 words

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I don’t believe in prophecies or in anything happening for a reason. That thing they call Fate? I guess I’d like to call it fake. I don’t know.

I have literally spent my whole life between these four walls. I was born from a whore and becoming one was all I could hope for my life. I was an accident, of course, but the matron saw potential. In a way, I don’t think I was an accident, now and again the matron would let the girls have unprotected sex and at any point in the year at least a quarter of her working girls would be pregnant. Didn’t stop them from working, no, some of the customers seem to love it. The matron, of course, had very strict rules for relations with the pregnant girls and those who failed to follow them were banned from the establishment. You’d have thought that Matron Brasier was a mafia boss. She ruled and still rules with an iron fist though her daughter has slowly begun to take over; it’s been a few years now.

I was too young when I was started in, moved away from the top floor with the other children where we learned the bare basics and otherwise had a caretaker to keep us occupied. Brasier seemed to have a set age for when she pulled us down from the top floor. The boys a little younger than the girls. I was eight when I moved to the working floor, to a special little area off to the side. Most of the time I was only helping with the cleaning and the chores but now and again some creep would come about who liked them ‘young’ and I was dumped into a room.

I was twelve the first time things really happened all the way. It was painful, I hated it and I cried a lot. I couldn’t really understand what was happening to me and it took another whore, a boy about two years older than me, to explain to me what had just happened. By then I’d been used to using my hands and my mouth at times but that had been it, so when that one client requested the whole deal, I was lost.

It didn’t happen again until I was fourteen. By then I understood a little better and I couldn’t really complain the girls at that point were also already being sold to clients. A lot of them took it with finesse, knowing little else than what their mothers or the older coworkers told them but us boys, we didn’t have quite so many others like us and none of them really took to our presence. I didn’t understand it then though I guess I do now.

Most of the women and some of the men tend to be on drugs, never anything very strong, but just enough to get them floating so they don’t have to really think about the job and just enjoy the physicality of the whole ordeal. I never could bring myself to that. It just didn’t seem right.

Instead, I spent my free time with Sapphire, just trying not to think about anything else for the time we had to one another. We didn’t really do anything, we just would talk.

Recently, he told me that his time was running out. That terrified me, he looked so exhausted. I think he meant as a worker here, in these walls. Brasier doesn’t keep any workers over the age of thirty-five but none of us really know what happens to these workers. Do get just get set loose? Most of us don’t even have paperwork, no schooling. It’s terrifying to think of being set loose out there in the world as someone who doesn’t even exist. I know that the vast majority of the workers between these four walls are of the generation born here, so what will happen to us when our time runs out?