The Mansion Incident

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lisa did not remember feeling so happy in her entire life. Even when she escaped the rooms underground, she felt happy with the thrill of discovery, but this was a different kind of happy. This was the happiness of having a real friend. Out of all the other friends she ever met, none of them ever gave her a present. But her new friend gave her one! She accepted the flowers and gave Lisa a shiny metal toy!

Lisa stood out among the trees and moved the metal toy back and forth, watching the moonlight twist and reflect off the surface. She could not remember clearly, but she knew that her mother gave her presents sometimes. If her new friend gave her presents as well, did that mean her new friend was her new mother? Lisa hoped so. She wanted the woman to be her new mother very much.

She didn’t know how long she spent outside playing with her new toy, but she eventually realized that her new friend might still be waiting for her. Lisa tucked the metal toy in her pocket and ran back to the little house.

Her friend was no longer there. That didn’t bother Lisa. Maybe her friend needed to go somewhere else. Forcing her new friend to stay with her all the time would be selfish, and Lisa desperately wanted to be a good friend. In fact, she wondered about all her other friends, the friends whose faces she took. Was she a good friend to them?

Maybe she was a bad friend. Maybe that was why they did not give her presents like her new friend did. She decided that when she found the woman again, she would not take the woman’s face, just to be sure. She did not want to be a bad friend.

Lisa went through the door to the stairs and walked down into the small underground room. There was a large metal door there, left slightly open, and Lisa knew that her friend went this way because the door had been closed before.

The door led to more underground rooms like the ones that Lisa escaped from. She didn’t know if she wanted to go back down there. She spent a very long time underground and just rediscovered the surface. She didn’t want to go back. But her new friend went down there, and Lisa wanted to follow her very badly.

She sat in the doorway, trying to decide what to do. Deep down, she didn’t want her new friend to go to the rooms underground. She was afraid, and didn’t know why. Once more, blurry memories seemed to drift up from the back of her mind. Very long ago, so long ago that Lisa didn’t even know if she had been alive then, her mother went to the rooms underground and never came back. And the man with her mother, the man Lisa thought might have been her father, went there as well and never returned. And then Lisa went there too.

What happened to her mother and father? Lisa didn’t know, but she believed that the rooms underground had something to do with it. For the first time, she began to wonder exactly when she first went to the rooms underground. Her mother and father did not put her there, the caretakers did. Lisa was sure of that.

The rooms underground were a bad place. Her mother and father were gone now, and Lisa suddenly felt very angry about it. She was mad at the caretakers for making her parents go away, and mad at them for keeping her there for so long.

And then she was scared again. If her new friend went to the rooms underground, maybe they would take her away too! Lisa did not know if the woman was her new mother or not, but she did know that the woman was her best friend. And Lisa wanted to protect her. She wanted to help her.

And so Lisa made up her mind. She went through the door and back to the rooms underground.

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