“This has always been here?”
“I wasn’t supposed to show you this, the general’s orders. But I think you’ll find this much more rewarding than a seven percent solution. Let me go first and light lamps.”
Sigmund disappeared down the stairs using an instrument she’d never seen before to light the sconces and suspended lamps as he went. Helena couldn’t help herself she followed right behind him.
“If you’re going to ignore my suggestion and follow me, close the door behind you. Few people know of this room, I think you should keep it that way.”
Helena did as she was told, climbed the few steps to shut the door then reattached herself to his coattails, “Is this...” Helena didn’t finish her sentence most afraid of the answer.
“Yes, this was your father’s study and your mother’s workshop. I tried to keep it exactly as I found it after your mother’s disappearance.”
They descended below the main floor level and kept going underground, Helena guessed at least twenty feet below the landing. If she was that concerned about it, she could go back and count the steps, but she really wasn’t. The shelves filled with books and jars caught her attention first. However, as more lights came up, she found many more things to be excited about.
The last light lit Sigmund tried to explain, “Your parents had eclectic tastes when it came to research. Nothing was off-limits. I often wonder if that was why they were so secretive, I never knew what they worked on.”
“Father was a scientist, my mother a witch, did they always work separately?”
“On the contrary. They worked more together down here than apart. They presented the perfect blending of magic and science. Had you not been born, I’m sure your mother would’ve been by your father’s side when he went missing. They made a decision that one should remain behind in case the unthinkable happened.”
Helena took what Sigmund said at face value, but she couldn’t help but wonder if she caused her parents’ mishaps. If she hadn’t been born, and her mother had been by her father side, perhaps he would’ve never gone missing, and she would’ve never gone to such great links to find him. An unspoken nagging feeling struck at the core of her soul that she was ultimately responsible for losing her parents.
“Is all of their research here?”
“As far as I know, after your father disappeared we tried to keep everything exactly where we found it. Not as some memorial, but we thought maybe the arrangement of his ongoing research might help us discover where he went. Your mother was particular about what I could and couldn’t help with while we searched. Even after his disappearance, she was utterly secretive about what exactly they researched.”
“The answers to what happened to them might be down here still.”
“They might be, but your mother and I sifted through all this information with a fine-tooth comb.”
Helena walked to one of the bookcases wordlessly reading the titles, all she had never read before, many written in Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian. She could speak those languages, but there sat mounds other books she couldn’t fathom what language they had been written in, to her eye they look more like squiggly lines than a decipherable language.
“Sigmund, if you don’t mind I think I’d like to be alone down here. This is the closest I’ve ever been to my parents,” she kept her back to him, so he couldn’t see the tears dropping from her eyes. Her hand rested on a copy of ‘The Ascent of Legendary Creatures and their Zoology,’ by Charles Darwin, she had read two of his other books this might be a decent place to start.
“Of course, Mistress. Remember I told you there comes a time when we must do our own research. I will leave your mother’s key here on her desk,” Sigmund set the red tasseled key down on the small secretary desk covered with papers then slowly ascended the stairs leaving Helena to her thoughts.
Helena didn’t know what to think, her stepfather the General had kept all this hidden from her, her whole life. Could she have possibly discovered some secret to locating her mother and father, might she have awakened some secret power sooner to save them? Why did everybody know so much about her past, or at least her parents past and nobody would tell her anything?
Then she remembered something Sigmund had said about her parents’ fanatical need for secrecy. Perhaps nobody told her about her parents because they had no earthly idea what they were doing. As far as she could tell they might’ve been down here summoning the devil and plotting the end of the world. There probably was some of the social elite in San Francisco that thought the couple was doing precisely that.
If mother was a witch and father was a scientist with evil diabolical plans what could they have been scheming? Maybe that’s the warning, death on white wings, has something to do with what her parents had researched. She walked around the room lightheaded peacefully touching items that she knew her parents had once touched, it made her feel closer to them even though she really never knew them. She plopped down in what must’ve been her father’s chair, a high black leather wingback office chair. The kind that she envisioned her father sitting in smoke from his pipe creating a halo over his head, his red hair and beard looking aflame in the gas line.
She cracked open her newly discovered Darwin book and started reading about the zoology of Legendary Creatures. She began skimming books, there was so much information that she never knew of contained in this one room. She wanted to read and memorize everything. She discovered book after book tugging at her attention, but
