Ethan swiftly moved out in front of her and pulled out his gun. She felt a reassurance she didn’t know she needed then and was glad to have him there beside her and to be there with him herself.
The house was vast, at least the size of the Carltons, but it couldn’t look more different. It was dark and dreary, and the fog seemed to cling to it even up close. Tessa felt herself shiver unconsciously and wrapped her arms around herself to keep it from happening again.
She had expected to see construction tools all over the long yard, but there weren’t any to be found. Just overgrown grass jutting up against the sand that lined the edges of the cliff.
“Last chance to turn back,” Ethan said as they approached the front door, looking back at her with a very serious expression.
“Not a chance,” she said, shooting him a shaky half-grin.
“Alright, then,” he sighed, clearly thinking better than to try arguing with her again, and he left her a few steps behind him as he stepped onto the rocky front porch made of the same blackened wood material as the house itself and grasped the charcoal door knocker, letting it fall against the door three times in short succession.
The knocks rang out, echoing over the roar of the waves below. But not a sound came in response.
Ethan waited for several moments and then knocked again.
“Military police, open up!” he called alongside his knocks.
When those attempts, too, went unanswered, he shook his head and took several steps back until he was even with Tessa again.
“They can’t be serious,” he muttered under his breath. “Well, I’m coming in anyway.”
He rushed at the door and kicked it in. It didn’t take much, which honestly didn’t surprise Tessa. For a house that had supposedly been under construction for some time now, the place looked a little too bare-bones for her comfort levels.
The door fell in with a clang and broke in two, revealing rotted wood that splintered out in several directions.
His gun held out in front of him, Ethan crept forward into the house, stepping tentatively over the fallen door and into the dark house. Tessa followed close behind him.
There was almost no light coming into the house, except for what shone through where the door had been, and the sun was beginning to set, anyway. Pair that with all the fog, and Tessa had to blink several times to allow her eyes to adjust to the lower lighting, and even then, she could barely see anything.
“Do you have your phone?” Ethan whispered back at her.
“Yeah, but I still don’t have a signal,” she hissed back, not sure what he was getting at with this.
“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked, and Tessa could’ve hit herself for not thinking of this before.
She quickly scrambled for her phone and turned on its flashlight, illuminating the room in front of them.
There wasn’t much of an entryway by the door, just a small pocket to their right that was home to an empty umbrella stand. They were left staring at a vast living room area not unlike the one they had sat in at the Carltons in size and design, but completely different from it in appearance and aesthetic.
There was no furniture to be seen but for an old rickety wooden table to Ethan’s left that was covered in spray paint and other graffiti, no doubt from the house’s decades serving as a spot for high school kids to scare themselves.
Stacked on the table were all kinds of papers. They mostly looked old, frayed pieces of parchment with a yellow tinge to them that indicated their age. There were a few pages that looked newer, too, however, and Tessa stepped up to the table and shone her flashlight beam over them.
“Wait, what’s that?” Ethan asked before she had a chance to get a closer look at the papers, pointing to a place ahead of them that the flashlight beam had barely touched.
Tessa squinted to try to make out what he was pointing at, but she didn’t see anything yet. Just the thin outline of what looked like something large.
She reluctantly moved her flashlight beam from the papers resting on the old table to whatever Ethan was trying to get a glance at. As soon as she did, she nearly dropped her phone in shock.
Tessa wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find, but it wasn’t this. It was the hollowed-out carcass of a giant ship. Well, part of what looked like a giant ship. Tessa wasn’t exactly the expert on these things that Ethan was.
“What the…” Ethan started to say, his mouth hanging open as he stared at it.
Tools and other construction items rested all around the ship’s carcass. That must’ve been what the Carltons had been hearing for all this time, not work on the house itself.
“Is… is that…?” Tessa asked, not sure how to finish her sentence as she gestured at the strange ship. She didn’t dare breathe the words the Dragon’s Rogue, all of a sudden afraid of jinxing it much like Ethan had been this whole trip.
“No, no, it can’t be,” Ethan said, certainty in his voice as he stepped up to the ship and ran his hands along a smooth piece of wood that Tessa imagined was meant to be a part of its main deck. “This wood is too new. This isn’t an old ship. It’s not even a whole ship, yet. But someone definitely wanted it to look like one.”
“Huh?” Tessa asked, shaking her head in confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“See this here?” Ethan asked, walking over to the other end of the ship and pointing to a darker area of wood there.
Tessa tentatively took a few steps forward to stand right behind him and shine the light where he pointed. Sure enough, a part of the ship looked darker and older than the
