5. Damian

Chapter five

Damian

I followed Owen up the stairs, and we explored the rooms. They were all decorated in what he called Victorian style. It wasn't ugly, but it was too fussy for me. I was a simple guy who liked simple things, and this was just too much.

Finally, after touring the second floor and seeing Owen, grinning from ear to ear, I realized it really should've been someone like him who inherited the place. We were just about to walk downstairs when a door creaked open on the next landing. "Okay," Owen said, "now, that was creepy."

I nodded. "Shall we go up?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Your house, so you go first!" he said, and I laughed since that's what I'd said to him when we first arrived.

I walked up the narrow stairs, definitely not as ornate as the staircase that led here. When we got to the top, Owen gasped. "My God, this is… It's like a novel."

He wasn't wrong. Each corner of the roof had huge windows. Stained glass surrounded ovals, which let in natural light. I walked to one of the windows and looked out over the Puget Sound. Mt. Rainier stood off to the side. It was as beautiful as that sight ever was. When I looked closer, I noticed the stained glass depicted the scene through the oval window.

I glanced around the room and saw that each window had similar stained-glass scenes, and I assumed each of them depicted the sight through the clear glass. Lake Washington, the Cascade Mountains, and the Olympic Mountain Range. "Wow, this is truly amazing." I said and scanned the room for Owen.

He was staring at the books on a shelf, his hands tucked behind his back, a look of amazement on his face. When I walked toward him, he sighed. "These…these look like they're centuries old. I don't even dare touch them," he said as he gestured toward the ancient-looking books. There were no titles on the spines, and I had to agree they looked pretty old. "It looks like this was originally a ballroom, as I said earlier, but someone turned it into…into this wonderland."

"It's pretty amazing. Hey, I want to take some pictures to send to my friend. Hold on," I said. I pulled my phone out and tried to get a selfie in front of the massive window with Mt. Rainier in it. When I backed up, I accidentally knocked over a vase, which fell to the ground and shattered. I quickly knelt to pick up the shards and cut myself. "Oh, crap, damn."

"Come over here, and let's get it under the water," Owen said, pulling me into the ancient bathroom. The plumbing worked though, and the cool water washed away the blood. Owen pulled off some toilet paper and wrapped my finger while trying to find a bandage. "Come on, let's go downstairs and see if there are any down there."

He turned off the faucet and was pulling me toward the stairs, when I suddenly froze. "What?" Owen asked, and I pointed at where the vase had fallen.

Somehow, the shards had been swept up. Nothing was out of place. I looked at my finger just to be sure it was still cut, and sure enough, it was still bleeding.

"Um, I-I think I might be ready to go," I said.

"Yeah, yeah, me too," Owen replied, and we both rushed down the stairs and out the front door.