NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 34, Home
What a nice girl, going so far as to show him where the police station was. It was a bit of a detour, but since he got home in the end, he couldn’t complain.
...That is, if this actually was home. The building was large, having several floors and many balconies. It was right beside a park, too, so he knew this was it. But once he went inside, he couldn’t help but find himself a fair bit confused. Ah, though, now that he took a look around, besides the potted cactus in the corner, there was actually a wall of named slits, likely for letters. And one of these was titled ‘Samantha and George Wiedemann, 621’. Mysterious numbers that likely indicated in which part of the house they lived in.
He was in the right house, but he didn’t know which apartment they lived in specifically. Likely the 621’th one, whatever that meant.
There was only one way to find out. Kreig started climbing stairs.
By the first floor, when he took a peek at the apartments there, he found that they were all titled ‘1XX’. They had to be on the sixth floor. No worries, he’d be there momentarily.
And he was.
The climb took a mere two minutes, ending with him standing outside the door of the Wiedemann’s, number 621. Kreig’s own body easily dwarfed it. The upper frame was at the level of his chin if he stood with a straight back. He had to hunch down just to get his eyes in the frame. Even then, he didn’t dare knock. What if his knuckles rapping against the door broke it? What if he made a real loud sound and ruined something? What if he-,
Oh. There was a doorbell.
Kreig swallowed deeply, tried not to think about breaking it, and carefully pressed the small button. A lovely chime resounded from inside the apartment, followed by hurried footsteps and the door slamming open on his chest. Since Kreig was standing quite close to the door, whoever was trying to open it couldn’t get it open at all. The person in question peeked out from the small gap possible. It was Sam. “-Kreig? Kreig! You’re here! Okay, um, hold on, step back a little.”
Kreig took a step back, giving Sam enough space to swing open the door fully. A small smile shyly pulled at her lips. She was wearing an apron too, and a sort of cloth tied around her head. A chemical kind of smell seemed to linger around not only her but the apartment as a whole. “Come in! We’ve-, uh, we were told you’d come, so!” a proud grin spread across her face, “-we’ve been fixing up the place!”
Sam stepped to the side, allowing Kreig to hesitantly enter.
The first thing that hit him was how terribly everything smelled, every spotless surface covered in an approximate imitation of actual nice smells like citrus or rose. It made him want to wrinkle his nose and leave. He couldn’t even appreciate how there wasn’t any garbage anywhere or how he couldn’t see any cobwebs around the lamps and how the floor was swept. None of that stuck with him in the least.
Bad smell. He wanted to leave. But he remained.
“So? How is it? We didn’t have time to clean up a lot of parts, but… I mean, can you tell? You can’t, right?...” Sam asked, stepping up to stand beside him.
He could tell a lot of things. For one, he could tell that the bread on the table was collecting a nice assortment of different moulds, and that their ceiling fan hadn’t been cleaned on the other side. But he was a guest, and they were his hosts. Never show unkind behaviour to your host or lord. “No, I cannot.”
Sam breathed a sigh. “Phew. Thank fuck. You’re a regular mystery, you know that?” He did not, in fact, know that. But it wasn’t his place to point out. “You’ll be sleeping in the-, George!” George peeked his head out of a door down the hall. He seemed tired. “There, that room. You’ll be sleeping in the guest room. Calling it a guest room is… Well, what it used to be isn’t important. Right now, it’s got a bed and a nightstand and a desk. Therefore, it’s a guest-room. Not a… yeah.”
George’s eyes fell on Kreig. “Uh. Hi. I’m not… Sam, I’m not done yet, will you please take the time to present some other part of the apartment while I finish up?”
Sam, who had seemed fully intent on bringing Kreig to the guest room, now stalled in her tracks. “You’re not-, wow. Shit, okay, uhhh, this is the living room! We’ve got a couch, and a tv, and a PS4 and that’s about it. Um. And also this lamp? Yeah. Neat lamp, huh?” It… It was. It really was. If Kreig’s eyes weren’t going bad, it seemed like the lamp was not, in fact, connected to anything. He’d learnt to accept electricity by now. But cordless electricity… “You have seen lamps before, right? Cuz if you haven’t, I can… No, actually, I can’t explain batteries to you. Don’t throw them into nature. That’s about all I know.”
Sam seemed silently upset at being unable to explain things properly. Kreig didn’t mind. While Sam cursed herself, he had in equal silence strode up to the lamp to absolutely make sure that it didn’t have a cord. It did not.
Magic. Must’ve been an artefact. Or something of that ilk, he didn’t really know all that well.
“-Okay, so, this here is the kitchen. Right beside the living room. Very useful to go get snacks quickly. Mhm mhm,” she pulled open the fridge, “do you, uh, what do you eat? Krupke never told me what you ate, so we sort of just bought a bunch of things in a haste… Like meat and potatoes. And a chocolate cake. Y’know, to… to celebrate. If you’d like that?” As Kreig leaned over her to peer inside the fridge (a fantastic thing), he found that it did indeed contain a chocolate cake. It had a 7 on it, alongside the words ‘Happy Birthday Champ’ spelt out in frosting. “Yeah, heh, that’s… Ignore that, it was all they had-,”
“Thank you,” Kreig said, his eyes transfixed on the cake. “Tonight will be glorious, indeed.”
“Oh? That so?” Sam replied, a smile finding its way back onto her face. Unlike when they’d been down there, she seemed quicker to smile now, though Kreig wasn’t sure what had changed.
Though, as he noticed one thing, he realized there was one thing he had to say in regards to things he ate. “No mushrooms.”
“Huh? Uh, okay. Sure. No mushrooms… I’ll be sure to tell George, he’s the cooker of us,” Sam said, nodding deeply before standing back up fully. She clapped her hands. “Okay! We’ve done the kitchen and the living room, that leaves us with the bathroom and the two bedrooms… Uh, you know how to use a toilet, right? Don’t you?”
“I don’t need to.”
“You don’t-, dude, that’s damn ominous. Okay, um… We’ll skip the bathroom. Just keep your hands washed so you don’t spread any germs around.” Kreig decided not to mention the fact that his race didn’t allow for such dirty creatures to live on or inside his body. “That leaves our bedrooms… Uh. Do you need to see them? I mean, I don’t mind showing mine, but George might be a bit more… Well, whatever. Let’s go!”
Sam proceeded to lead Kreig through the apartment, past the guest-room and into a room to the left of one that Kreig rightfully assumed to be the restroom. Sam’s room was rather large, had a nice bed, and was designed in a very similar way to how a baboon would design their cave, had they had one. The most aesthetically pleasing thing to be found was a string of ball lights handing over a window. The rest was mostly themed with dragons. A shelf of dragon figurines, a dragon-themed bed-covering, dragon plushies.
She clearly had a style, but to Kreig, who had lived most of his life in a world where dragons were decidedly not mythical, seeing so many of them was like a Swede coming to Germany to find a man obsessed with mooses as if they didn’t exist. It was jarring in an odd way he couldn’t explain.
“Heh, yeah, um. This is… I can explain? Actually, I can’t. Dragons are just straight awesome. What more do I need to say?” Sam said. Going by her lazy smirk and crossed arms, Kreig could somehow tell that she, in secret, enjoyed his reaction.
She wouldn’t for long. “I’ve killed four dragons.” It was true.
Watching her entire body language drain away into horror and shock told him everything about her mental state. “You-, you-, you-?! No. Wait. Hold on.” She slapped her cheeks with both hands. “Get it together, Sam! Priorities! Does that-, if you’ve. Um. Are there dragons in the otherworld?”
...Did they not know that?