Night of Thade: Part Two

     “W-ell…” Donna started, making mental notes of everything happening. “Sometimes, the spirit of a dead Neopian can enter a living Neopian’s body. It’s kind of like a past life. But,” she paused here, which frustrated me, “if you need to know something about the past life, that spirit can utterly…take over…” Donna was trembling with excitement. Sharon was trembling too, but with something else—fear. At that moment a blinding white light surrounded me and I felt…different somehow.

     It’s hard to explain exactly what happened, yet I remember it so vividly. I felt… knowledge entering my brain, so much I felt as if my head was going to burst. My fur changed to a darker shade of green as a strange breeze blew it back. I felt a tickle in the back of my throat. What I remember most, though, was the eye.

     It was an itching, burning sensation in my left eye. It hurt, oh, it hurt so much that I let out a yell as I covered my eye with my paws.

     Then…it was over. The light faded away and I slowly floated back to the ground, my back towards my friends. Sharon walked up to me, cautiously, as I trembled. “…G-g-garrett?”

     I turned around to look at my long-time friend and she let out a long scream. She took two steps backward and tripped over her feet. “Please…please! Don’t hurt me…!”

     “What in the world are you talking about, Sharon?” I shouted, then covered my mouth. Sharon was still trembling. I knew why. The voice that had come out was not my voice. It was the voice from those memories; the voice of Thade! I knelt beside my long-time friend and spoke softly. “Sharon…it’s me. I still…I can still remember.” Donna flicked a lock of her long hair aside and smiled.

     “Well, obviously my book was wrong!” Donna said with a grin. “Maybe the ‘utterly taking over’ part doesn’t happen so quickly.”

     “Huh?” I said, still not quite understanding what she was saying. Then it dawned on me. “You mean I’m…” Donna giggled like a child and pulled out a Meepit Mirror. I looked at my reflection, knowing what I would see.

     “Aaaahhh! I look just like him!”

     I wasn’t entirely right. My fur color had changed, true, and my eye was…well, it definitely matched the puzzle-solver’s. My head was also flooded with an incredible amount of knowledge and the urge to solve puzzles. But my feet were still unbandaged, and there were no stitches on my face. Once again, Donna giggled like a child and started galloping about the room.

     “This is so SWEETNESS! Sweeeeetness! Woooohhhoooo!” Sharon was still in the corner of the room, trembling. I looked directly into her eyes and said, with a commanding, yet gentle, tone. “Don’t be afraid.”

     Upon hearing this, Sharon blinked slowly, and when her eyes re-opened, they had changed color from sky-blue to chocolate brown. Her hands flew to her mouth once more and said, in a tone I had never heard her use before, “Mr. Thade! I-I can explain, sir! I….oh dear, oh dear!” She looked at her bathrobe and did a quick curtsy. “I’m sorry, I will only be a moment!” She dashed into her room across the hall and locked the door. Donna and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. In under 30 seconds, Sharon came out in…the outfit of a maid. She performed a deep curtsy. I bowed back, in some sort of instinctual motion. Sharon opened her eyes, and I saw that they were blue once again. She looked at her outfit and gasped.

     “What…what am I doing? What’s happening to me???” Tears gushed out of Sharon’s eyes and my mind slipped into another of Thade’s memories.

     My yellow Shoyru maid was crying, and she blubbered, “You can fire me, sir. I…I was not a very good maid, sleeping when I should have been preparing your tea…”

     I held up a paw to tell her to stop crying. “It’s alright, it’s alright. I can forgive you. I know you did not mean to do this. Just don’t ever do it …”

     I snapped out of my memory and slapped a hand to my forehead. “Oh, the maid!”

     “What?” Donna asked. I described the last memory to Donna and Sharon, explaining that there was a Shoyru maid in Eliv’s castle. Donna nodded, understanding everything clearly. Sharon, however, was too nervous to understand anything.

     “What…what does it all mean?” Sharon’s eyes were still cloudy, although she was now calming down. “A maid…in your memories? But…that can’t be me … can it?”

     “I’m afraid so,” I nodded as I spoke, solemnly. Before I could continue, Donna asked a question that even the spirit of Thade could not answer.

     “What I want to know is, why does Eliv want to contact you?”

     “That’s right,” Sharon stepped in. “Mr. Thade…I mean, Eliv, is controlling your thoughts for part of the time; surely you must know why…or have some kind of clue!” I pondered this for a moment, then realized that there was only one way that I could think clearly.

     “Bring me a puzzle book!”

     Sharon, operating with her newfound maid’s instincts, grabbed the largest puzzle book in the library. She set the book down on a table, and I proceeded towards the chair. After picking up a pencil, however, something still didn’t seem right.

     “Sharon! I need a quill…and some ink…quickly!”

     “Yes, sir…I mean, Garrett!” Sharon quickly plucked a feather from Donna’s wings, which Donna didn’t mind, seeing as it was part of an “amazing otherworldly phenomenon,” and grabbed a bottle of black paint to compromise for not having ink. I commenced doing the puzzles, solving each one of them.

     Bandages entwined themselves around my feet as I worked long into the night. It wasn’t until a full moon had risen when the answer to Thade’s newest riddle was so obvious it smacked me in the face.

     “We have to get to Thade’s castle.”

     Donna pushed a lock of her pale, white hair out of her face with a hoof as the strange mind of Eliv Thade took control once again, but only to robe myself in Sharon’s purple fuzzy bathrobe. Like Thade’s, it was old and worn, and had a few holes missing from the faux fur around the collar. I felt great comfort wearing it. It felt so…familiar.

      I grinned what must have been the horrible grin of Thade, for Sharon and Donna both took a step back. I quickly closed my mouth. “Erm, what I meant to say was…on to my…I mean, Eliv’s castle.”

     It would have been a difficult journey to the Haunted woods had Donna not been there. She graciously gave Sharon and I a ride on her back. Halfway there I allowed myself to slip into the mind of Thade for a while and discover more about “my” past and “my” personality. It was a strangely enjoyable experience. While I was Thade, I discovered that he and I were more alike then I had realized. We were both leaders, and loners in society. Thade also complained about his fireplace and often moaned about “not having some sort of…heating in the center of the house.” Donna jostled my memory.

     “We’re he-ere!” she sang. I shook myself, and looked at Sharon. I smiled sadistically. She, too, had slipped into her ancestor’s memories, but her situation was different—she was having difficulty leaving.

     “Mr. Garrett Thade, allow me to show you to the front door where we will discover the truth about you…oh dear! I am in a muddle again…” Donna hit herself on the head, and her eyes reverted back to sky blue. “I mean, in we go!”

     Eliv Thade’s castle was not really a castle, just a large mansion. For a moment, I could see it in all of its former splendor and its glory. Then I saw the flaws. It was old, a bit lopsided with age, the paint was peeling and the windows closed up. The door was locked shut, as I found out when I tried to open it. In fact, I was walking away when I heard a large clock strike twelve. The doors flew open and a wind, not unlike the transformation wind I had felt earlier. However, instead of blowing, this wind was sucking!

     The door shut and locked behind us before we knew what had happened. “S-spooky” Donna shuddered, then brightened. “We’re in Thade’s castle!” Instinct told me to walk to the bedroom. I instructed my Uni friend and my Shoyru friend-turned-maid to proceed to the bedroom. As we walked, taking in every detail, I passed a mirror. Wondering how far into my transformation I was, I looked into the mirror. The sullen face of Eliv Thade looked into mine. I grinned.

     The face in the mirror did not grin back. Instead, he raised a paw and pointed towards me.

     “Yyyoou….”

To be continued...