The Roads That We Explore - 4. A Peek into a Hidden World

Staring at the camera that he had found in a tote, Rose frowned as he flipped it around in his hands. “This come from the last house that you owned?” he asked. His lover looked over his pile of boxes and grunted.

“Yeah. It was a big ass house that was in the middle of nowhere. Nearly a mansion but it was short a few feet,” Lex replied as he continued to dig through his boxes, separating things out. “Each time that I buy a house as is, there tends to be a lot of shit to go through. I usually pack up the small things, check out the furniture, and if it happens to be good enough or salvaged, I’ll sell it off. Or keep it for the house depending on what I’m doing with it. One place is now a museum. Pulls in good money to,” he said. He repacked several things into a new tote.

Rose made a thoughtful sound. “I found an old camera. I think that I can probably get the film processed,” he said finally. Looking into the box, he found a camera case, finding a recorder in it, the tapes still in it, along with four extras. “I think that I have an old video player at home,” he said. He looked over them. “I’m actually kind of curious about this stuff,” he admitted.

Lex looked over his boxes again and shrugged. “Go ahead and do that. I know that you tend to be curious about the history of the town. Are you working on another book?” he asked.

Rose nodded. “Yeah, the publishers want to see something new from me. I’m working on a haunted history book this time instead of a flower book.” He looked up and smiled. “Starting with the history of us and our sister city.”

He dug around in the tote some more, finding a matching camping bag and some other things, dragging them out to lay on the floor. He tossed the bag of chips and cereal bars after he checked the ‘sale-by’ date. He packed the rest into another tote with a ‘take home’ sticker on it. “Since you flipped that one house that has that history, I’m hoping that I’ll find something of the families left over and not in the museum for the book.”

Lex grunted. He walked around with a dolly and two other totes on it. “You’ll have access to everything in here since I’ve never really had any chance on getting through most of it. My writing and flipping really took a lot of my time,” he admitted.

Rose chuckled and closed the top once he had made sure that he had gone through the boxes that were in his pile and he had what he wanted. “Yeah, I wouldn’t doubt it,” he said, putting the tote’s top on it. “Okay, let’s get going.”

Once at home, the tote was put into Rose’s office and forgotten about for close to a month. Rose lost himself in researching other parts of his book with an uptick in the gardening as his business flourished, while Lex got lost in editing his next book. One day while he was cleaning the house and ending in his office one day while it poured rain outside, Rose found the tote and made a thoughtful sound.

“Oh! I forgot about this,” Rose mused, standing up with the tote, carrying it over to where he had two long folding tables set up. Placing the box down, he pulled on gloves and laid out a plastic sheet, opening the box top. He started to lay out the tapes, the camera bag and the backpack onto the sheets. “I should record this.”

Muttering lowly, he loaded a new memory card into his recorder, hooked up the headset to it, and pressed record.

“It is March fourth, twenty-nineteen,” he started, checking the time on his phone. “It is two PM. A month ago, I had gone to the barn that was turned into a storage area that Lex’s parents let him use to go through things. We have since gotten through about half of the items there, but there were some items from what I have learned was the Karagraham house. He had brought the house and flipped it into a museum, keeping some of the items within. The Karagraham House museum is in the next city to us, so it’s not really something that I really thought about researching but it is connected to us,” he said, looking at the items.

Once they were laid out, he started to list off the items, starting with the tapes.

“Eight small recorder tapes. There is a larger loading tape deck to play the recorder tapes on a VHS. They look to be in good shape. The camera bag is in good enough shape for being stuffed in a box for close to a year. It holds a camera with four more tapes, including one in the camera. There are four batteries and a charger with four more tapes in a side pocket. There’s also a charger that would work with a charging port in a car. The backpack holds nothing amazing,” he said. “I tossed the food that I found in the storage unit. It has a journal that looks to be an urban explorers journal with details on places they’ve been. I’ve also found a wallet. I’ll need to look up who this person is and see if I can’t find them so I can maybe return this stuff.”

He went through the rest of the bag, laying out a heavy-duty flashlight, a dozen batteries for said flashlight, and flashlight bulbs. Old tissues, toilet paper, and three rolls of film were found and laid out. With the backpack done, he turned back to the camera case to make sure that he had dug through every pocket.

“I have found a rather nice film camera and four rolls of used film. I’ll have to get them processed,” he noted. He laid them out after checking to see if each film had been used. “I’ll do that once I’m done checking the rest of the pockets. There seem to be a few hidden ones.” He found two more of the film containers, laying them out to the side. Fully done with everything, he made a few more notes and turned off his recorder, putting it to the side and stripping off his gloves.

Wiping the film rolls and tapes with a dry rag, he called out to Lex that he was going to get some film processed and the video tapes put onto disc. It took him four hours to get into town to get to his friend who processed film and video for a living, and then get back home after some food shopping. Each picture envelope was thick and took up a bit of room in his smaller backpack along with the five different discs for the video.

Lex texted him, telling him that he had found two more tapes in another box he had brought home and about what was on the videos. He had found out that they had been taken of the house before he had bought the house. So far, there wasn’t a lot that he could tell from the videos, mostly b-roll that he had watched. He figured that it was someone connected to a documentary that hadn’t gone through.

Rose got home with Chinese and a fresh six pack of cold beer bottles for them, putting the rest of the stuff that he had bought away. He took the food, the pictures, and two bottles of beer out into the living room, finding Lex waiting with plates and silverware. He sat down, and while Lex dished up food, he laid out the pictures on the large coffee table. “There’s something really weird with some of these,” he said, taking the plate and shoving a bite of cashew chicken into his mouth.

Lex made a curious sound, muffled around his mouthful of eggroll as he looked at the pictures that Rose had chosen from the ones that had been laid out. He chewed as he studied them, swallowing before he talked. “It’s the fogginess to them, right?” he asked. Rose nodded. Looking at them, he pointed out that in a few there was an almost solid fog streak.

Rose frowned. “Did you have any trouble ever photographing that place?” he asked. Lex shook his head. “Odd.”

They continued to work their way through the pictures, taking their time between bites or talking about this photo or that photo before Rose came across one last picture. This one was different though to their eyes. Where the others had strange streaks of fog, the occasional curl of smoke like substance, this one had a face. It was from the film in the camera, the pictures of that of the house.

Staring at it, Rose’s eyebrows shot upwards as he put his place of mostly eaten food to the side and stood. He jogged into his office, finding his magnifying glass that he used when he was inspecting flowers and old pictures of gardens of old estates around the city. He jogged back in, Lex frowning at the picture with the face. Sitting down, he picked up the picture and carefully used the magnifying glass.

“That...yeah, that is a face,” Rose said, frowning over at his lover. “They look like Marianne but softer,” he mused as he went back to looking at the picture.

Lex took the picture and magnifying glass, also studying the face with a frown on his face. “Didn’t Marianne tell you that her family was a bastard line of the Karagrahams in your interview?” he asked.

“Yeah. On her father’s side if I remember correctly. The youngest sister had a lover who ditched her the moment that she became pregnant. Gave her kid up after she left to have it. The kid was given over to their grandparents on their father’s side. They lied that their son got married on his way to the War and she died giving birth. Luckily for them, they did live in another state and city, so their lies weren’t ever discovered outside of immediate family.”

Lex grunted. He sat up. “I think I’ve seen her face. She looks like the mother of the bastard child. At least the one who is thought to be their mother,” he said finally. “Maybe you can dig in a little more and do a full history on that whole thing? Marianne did say she wouldn’t mind working with you if you wanted to write about her family and their ties. This would be an interesting bit of information if we could figure out who took that picture and why they left it in the house.”

Rose nodded, gathered the pictures, putting the ones with odd things into another envelope before dropping them to the table. He smirked at his lover. “Let’s leave that for later though. And just enjoy the rest of our night. Forget about creepy pictures and needing to find people.” Lex laughed and hauled Rose into his lap, kissing him, forgetting about the pictures for the time being.

At least until Rose’s research found out that the explorer who had left their bag behind had disappeared while on the property a year before Lex had bought the house.