What Lies Hidden in Your Closet: Part Three

      Ninth day in the Month of Relaxing,

      Today my owner and I walked to our land on Mystery Island to supervise the progress of the builders. There were about fifteen of them there, running around, when we arrived there. Most of them were just working on nailing the wooden frame of the house together. Piles of fresh timber were stacked into large piles on the ground, and some of the boards were so long and heavy that it took several of the builders to lift them. My owner was content to just stand on the edge of the property, near the dirt road, and watch, but I wandered away after perhaps ten minutes and went around the house to the back. More timber and several buckets of nails sat behind the soon-to-be building, but no one was working back there. There was a Green Techo, one of the workers, sitting on top of five stacked pieces of wood and taking his break. He held a navy ceramic mug in one hand that was filled with coffee, and he sipped it slowly while staring at one of the nearly completed walls. As I walked toward him, he looked up. "Hello there," he said, sounding very friendly.

      "Hi," I responded back, feeling slightly shy. There was a slight moment of silence. "How's the house coming along?" I asked, simply to fill some of the silence.

      "Good!" he responded happily, setting down his mug and gesturing to the frame of the house in front of him. "The entire frame of the house should be finished by tonight, and I've been working on nailing these boards to the frame to start making some walls." He picked up his hammer, which was laying on the ground, and looked at it for a moment before sitting it onto the timber. "You know," he said, looking back up, "your owner gave us a very interesting set of plans."

      "How so?" I asked, curious.

      "Well..." he started, then trailed off. He thought for a moment, then asked, "Has your owner told you about how she designed the house? Have you seen the plans?"

      "No," I admitted. I had asked my owner several times about what the house was going to look like, but she had refused to tell me. All she had told me was that I'd see once the house was built.

      "Well, I don't want to spoil the surprise for you if you don't already know how the house will be set up, but I will tell you that some of the ways she wants us to build things in this house are quite... different. I've never seen houses built in the way that she wants this one made." He glanced at a mechanical watch on his right wrist and appeared to be startled. "Wow, sorry! I really have to get back to work!" The Techo sprang up from where he was sitting and went back to work.

      It was just as well. As he continued his work, my owner came around the back of the building, looking for me.

      "The house was 'different'..." Kalina mumbled, wondering what exactly the Techo had meant by that. She hoped she'd find out in future entries. The next few pages, however, didn't hold any of the information that she wished to find, so she skimmed through them quickly and moved on. Finally, Sury wrote more about the house:

      Eleventh day in the Month of Swimming,

      It had been nearly a month since I had been at the house, so I went with my owner this morning when she went to check on the progress. I don't know why, but she didn't seem overly thrilled to find that I was coming with her. She didn't openly object to it, however. Once we arrived at the house, I was shocked to see how much progress had been made on the building of the house. "Wow!" I exclaimed, staring at awe in at the house, which had all of its walls up. Most of its exterior walls and windows had been installed. "How did they manage to get so much work done on it in only a month?"

      "Oh," she said, also looking at the house, "I paid them a little extra to get the work done faster. I'm going inside to see how they're doing on putting up the wallpaper and installing the floor. I'll be right back.... Stay here."

      Stay here?! I wondered. She had to have been crazy to think that I was just going to stand in the same place while she went inside! Curiosity about the appearance of the house's interior had been bothering me since we had arrived here. As soon as my owner was out of sight, I slipped around to the back of the building. I remembered seeing a rectangular gap in the wall while talking to the Techo the previous time I had been here. I was hoping that it, indeed, had been for a door.

      Once in the backyard of the house, I glanced into the house through one of the new windows to make sure my owner wasn't standing immediately on the other side of the wall, and I slipped through the white door which had been installed in the spot where I expected it. The door led into the kitchen, where wooden cabinets were just starting to be attached to the walls. Cabinets on the floor, along with the counter on top of them, had already been installed there, although they were dusty, presumably with sawdust.

      The room to my left was completely empty, and its walls had been painted dark green. The entire house reeked of the smells of sawdust and paint, but I didn't mind. Wandering into the room, I suddenly heard the nearby sound of my owner's voice, so I pressed myself against the wall and quietly walked towards the other doorway in the room. Once there, I carefully and quickly took a peek around the corner. My owner was standing there, conversing with one of the workers while two others worked on putting paneling on the walls.

      "This will be the living room," my owner said. "Or, at least, the visible living room. The other one... well... you know where it is, don't you?"

      Visible living room? What?! I wondered from my hiding spot. There's going to be more than one living room?

      "Yup," the worker, a Red Scorchio, agreed. "We should be done with both of them in another week or so."

      "Good. And how's the progress on the upstairs bedrooms?"

      "They're nearly done, and two of them have doors into the extra rooms in the house. The entire house should be done by no later than two weeks from now."

      Extra rooms? I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

      "Good! Thank you for building my house so quickly."

      "Heh, no problem..."

      At this point, I snuck back into the kitchen and back into the backyard. I walked through the gate of the short, white fence that had been built in the middle of the backyard, and I went down to the ocean, thinking about how nice it was to have the beach in the backyard. That's where my owner found me later, and, though she scolded me for not staying in the front yard, she never suspected that I had entered the house and overheard her conversation.

      Kalina wanted to keep reading, but the clock on her wall told her that it was getting late. She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and then she went to bed, telling herself that she'd read the rest of the diary tomorrow. Because she was so anxious to read the diary, sleep didn't come easily that night. For nearly an hour she lay in bed, tossing and turning. Just as she started to drift into a light sleep, she heard noises similar to those from the previous night coming from her closet. As she had done last night, she walked over to the closet to try to open the door... but, again, the knob wouldn't budge. She figured that if the door wouldn't open from the outside, it was possible that it wouldn't open from the inside either, so hoping that she was right she went and crawled back into bed. It was obvious to her that she wouldn't sleep with all the noise anyway, so she turned on the small lamp sitting next to her bed and flipped back to the spot that she had bookmarked in the old journal...

To be continued...