Inside the storage room of the Basement are boxes upon boxes, empty garment bags, and dirty dishes, a broken Casio keyboard surrounding an open trapdoor in the floor, from which fall a set of rickety wooden stairs down into blackness. With no easily found flashlight hidden in these junkpiles, you'd need to touch the concrete walls for guidance to the bottom of the stairs.
In the encircling darkness sits an imposing steel door. Its face is grimy as if forming moss at its edges. A control panel to the right is flashing red a scrolling message that reads DO NOT DISTURB: ELECTRIC SHOCK RISK. EVELYN, SERIOUSLY.
music playing in this room
Everything posted on the site is part of its own serial of posts that are novels taking form. The posts themselves and their orders and placements will change as the scenery shifts with the knowledge we get from interacting with each other. The building of our magical world and its documentation is all happening live. The Laboratory is where the seeds are sown of everything we live and create simultaneous, our bedrooms where it’s all fed and grows, and the Library is where the harvests begin.
The Laboratory is where villains lurk, each metal table and cabinet sterile and militant in the execution of its function, standing in neat and formal rows. The disorganization of the experimentation phase of all scientific progress is evident in the spillage of files from their drawers left open; papers, strewn over desktops and flat to the smooth floor. Lengths of wire cut undoubtedly too long or short are discarded on a work table, along the top of a roll of blueprints weighed down with heavy tomes to keep it from rolling up again.
SLAB NO. 1
The peaches have been cultivating a germ of unimaginable power under the light which has been filtered by a page from Evelyn’s diary. What?! On my honor, it was unlocked when I found it.
On a moveable chalkboard, a map has been drawn with yellow chalk and annotated with layer upon layer of newspaper clippings and sticky notes, identifying strange locations and vague distances.
SLAB NO. 2
The hand-written passages I believe to rotting the research materials in the Library to expiration, collected here, after having destroyed my last good Bible and Grady’s high school yearbook.
The steel trap of this room appears more lived-in than merely worked-in. Paintings done on sketchbook paper are taped to the clean wall next to the cot. On another wall is a sundress, pinned and stretched flat and papered with tabs and notes scrawled in Adam's hand, so illegible, the notes can't be made out but for the one word they all have in common: EVELYN. Hung near it, a refrigerated glass cabinet contains a perfect row of vials of blood. Each is labeled with the first names of every Gray Family member.
Brad and Rosie settle in for the night in their new house.