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arvensimp · 1 year

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The Scarlet Wallpaper

a Lakehouseshipping parody of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Turo takes Sada off to the stay in a lighthouse when she seems unwell after Arven is born

CW: postpartum illnesses including depression, anxiety, and psychosis

Please note that this is a (not particularly humorous) parody of a work that is in the public domain. I am not claiming any of Perkins Gilman's phenomenal wordsmithing as my own, and I highly recommend reading the original work (it is hyperlinked above)! I am not writing this for any sort of profit. this is just parody inspired by a really good work that hits close to home.

It is very seldom that mere researchers like Turo and I secure enough additional funding to cover housing for the summers, much less on the coast.

A historical lighthouse, still in use! I could say a calm reprieve or hope in a storm, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so easily? And why have it stand so long untenanted? And to be given to scientists, no less?

Turo laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

Turo is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with fantasy, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. I could guess he doesn’t even like the term “ghost pokemon,” believing that science could better explain the phenomena. This is not to say that I am not also a woman with a firm root in science, but I am not so blinded by electricity and time's unending march forward that I cannot hope to learn from stories of the past. Things unexplained then may have solutions now. Some do not. Many do not.

Turo and I are professors both, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see, he does not believe I am sick!

And what can one do?

If a professor of high standing, and one’s own husband and research partner, assures friends and colleagues that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency towards the fantastical perhaps—what is one to do?

My close friend Jacq is also a professor, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

So I take vitamins and minerals or pokeblocks and poffins—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden by him to “work” until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with the idea.

Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. Proper research is a thrill in and of itself which would rouse me back to my senses and life.

But what is one to do?

I did read and work, writing for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

I sometimes imagine that in my condition if I had less opposition and more interaction and stimulus (at the very least interaction!)—but Turo says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let it alone and talk about the lighthouse.

The most singular and spectacular location! Apart from the labs in the crater, of course. It is quite alone, standing well high on the road, quite a ways from Los Platos but still nicely on Poco Path. In some ways it makes me think of Hoenn, for there are hedges and fences and a gate that locks, and then so much water, sprawling and sparkling and clear, far as the eye can see!

There is a delicious bit of greenery nearby too! While it cannot compare with other areas in our dear Paldea, it is still rather quaint. It is large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.

There was once a dock down below towards the shore, too, on the sandy beach, though it has more or less crumbled into the sea. In a few years the water will have eroded the last traces of its existence.

There was some economic trouble with shipping, I believe, something about the cost of having to heave freight up the hill; anyhow, the dock has been empty for years. Hence the lighthouse has been left empty, only turned on and off by a timer.

That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid; but I don’t care—there is something about the lighthouse—I can feel it.

I even said so to Turo one moonlit evening, but he said what I felt was just the humidity, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with Turo sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so...sensitive. I think it is due to this "nervous condition."

But Turo says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself,—before him, at least,—and that makes me very tired. He makes me tired.

I don’t like our room a single iota. I wanted one downstairs that opened onto the fence overlooking the water and had sprawling ivy all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but Turo would not hear of it.

He said there was only one window and not room for our Nidoking sized bed.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction or instruction of some sort.

I have a scheduled prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

He said we came here solely on my account and on behalf of the generosity of our funding sources, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. “Your exercise depends on your strength, my treasure,” said he, “and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time.” So we took the room at the top of the lighthouse.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was likely a landing first, then perhaps a pokemon nursery, and then maybe a pokemon gym. I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children and creatures, and there are rings and things in the walls.

The paint and paper look as if a childrens’ school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. I did not pay much attention in my art classes, but I know this much.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.

The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, rusting scarlet, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a grimy muddy tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes Turo, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.

We have been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious bedroom, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

Turo is away all day, and even some nights when his research calls him.

I wish I could answer my own research! Our research!

But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

Turo does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!

I meant to be a partner to Turo, a rival, a rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able—to dress and brush my teeth, and eat food.

It is fortunate Clavell is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!

And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.

I suppose Turo never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wallpaper!

At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.

He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

“You know the place is doing you good,” he said, “and really, querida, I don’t care to renovate the house just for a three months’ rental.”

“Then do let us go downstairs,” I said, “there are nicer rooms there. Plus the water is so close.”

Then he took me in his arms and called me a sweet little fuecoco, and said he would go down to the cellar if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.

But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.

It is as airy and comfortable a room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so unreasonable as to make him go so far just for a whim.

I’m really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.

Out of one window I can see the path to Los Platos, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.

Out of another I get a lovely view of the ocean and the cliff side that dips down almost dangerously steeply. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always think I see people and pokemon walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but Turo has cautioned me not to give way to imagination in the least. He says that with my prowess and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I grit my teeth and try.

I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to go to the lab for a little while it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.

But I find I get pretty tired when I think too hard on it.

It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my research. When I get really well Turo says we will ask Professors Kukui and Burnett over for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put a Electrode in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.

I wish I could get well faster.

But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down. Like a red Mimikyu with its head nearly torn asunder.

I get positively furious with the impropriety of it and the unendingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. Skittering and jittering about, like googly eyes in a blender.

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, at least. An inanimate thing that is truly inanimate and not a Pokemon in disguise. And we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a pokemart filled with dolls and toys.

I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old vargueño used to have, and there was one accompanying chair that always seemed like a strong friend.

I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.

The furniture and trappings of this room are no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from the winding downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a gymnasium area they had to take the Pokemon nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages as the pokemon have made here.

The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticks closer than a Zweilous—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.

Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the wooden plank itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed, which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the Kalosian war.

But I don’t mind any of that a bit—only the paper.

There comes Clavell. Such a dear man as he is, and so careful of me! I must not let him find me writing.

He is a perfect, and enthusiastic caregiver and hopes only for the best for me. I verily believe he thinks it is the writing which made me sick!

But I can write when he is out, and see him a long way off from these windows.

There is one that commands the road, a lovely, sunny, winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great green velvet with dipping grassy knolls and even a strange looking lock off in the distance...

This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade of scarlet, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly even then.

But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

There’s Clavell on the stairs!

Well, All Legends' Day has come and gone! The guests have left and I am tired out. Turo thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had Geeta, Hassel, and a few others from the board down for a week.

Of course I didn’t do a thing. Turo sees to everything now.

But it tired me all the same.

Turo says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Professor Birch in the New Year; he says the air in Verdanturf might do me well.

But I don’t want to go to Hoenn at all. I secretly imagine perhaps my Turo only wants to see what kind of electrical phenomena might be happening down the road in Mauville! What kind of futuristic gadgets he might ogle after!

Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.

I don’t feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything, and I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous, not to mention agitated.

Perhaps worst of all, I am loath to admit, I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

Of course I don’t when Turo is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.

And I am alone a good deal just now. Turo is kept in lab very often by serious cases, and Clavell is good and lets me alone when I want him to.

So I walk a little along Poco Path or down that lovely hill to the water, sit on the sand under the cliff, and lie down up here a good deal.

I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.

It lingers in my mind so!

I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as acrobatics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.

I know little of the principles of design, but I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of repetition, or alternation, or evolution, or mega evolution, or terastalizing anything else that I ever heard of.

It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.

Looked at in one way, each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of “debauched Kalosienne”—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing dragalge in full chase.

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.

There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the cross-lights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy evolution after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction, growing, becoming bigger, better, stronger, more powerful.

It exhausts me to follow it. I will take a nap, I guess.

I don’t know why I should write this.

I don’t want to.

I don’t feel able.

And I know Turo would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!

But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and spend more and more of each day hibernating or horizontal.

Turo says I musn’t lose my strength, and has me take feebas-liver oil and lots of potions and things, to say nothing of breads and wine and rare meat.

Dear Turo! He loves me so much, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real, earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Kukui and Burnett.

But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think rationally. Just this nervous weakness, I suppose.

And dearest Turo gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read his research notes to me till it tired my head.

It was the most infuriating thing! I want nothing more than to be back in lab! To think! To work! To feel well enough to think and work and be in lab and research! To have his research, our research, read to me and exhaust me to the point that I couldn't concentrate? It brought me to tears. I tried my best to hide them, but nothing gets past Turo.

He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well. He will not make the mistake again to read to me in such a manner.

He says only I can help myself out of my illness, that I must use my will, intelligence, and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.

There’s one comfort: Arven is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this room with the horrid wallpaper.

If we had not used it that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn’t have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that Turo kept me here after all. I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I never mention it to them any more,—I am too wise,—but I keep watch of it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.

It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

And it is like a pokemon. A dragon, a massive dragon stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish Turo would take me away from here!

It is so hard to talk with Turo about my case, because he is so smart, and because he loves me so.

But I tried it last night.

It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around, just as the sun does.

I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.

Turo was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy.

The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if it wanted to get out.

I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back Turo was awake.

“What is it, my treasure?” he said sleepily. “Don’t go walking about like that—you might hurt yourself.”

I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished we would leave already.

“Why, querida!” said he, “our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can’t see how to leave before.

“The repairs are not done at home, and we cannot possibly have you back in the lab now. Of course if you were in any danger I could and would, but you really are better, cariña, whether you can see it or not. I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better. I feel really much easier about you.”

“I don’t weigh a bit more,” said I, “nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening, when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away.”

“Bless her little heart!” said he with a big hug; “she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!”

“And you won’t go away?” I asked, admittedly petulantly.

“Why, how can I, my treasure? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Clavell helps with getting the house ready. Really, cariña, you are better!”

“Better in body perhaps”—I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.

“My treasure,” said he, “I beg of you, for my sake and for Arven’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me when I tell you so?”

So of course I said no more on that, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn’t,—I lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately.

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to an intelligent mind.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are. It double slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream sent by a Hypno.

The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding me of an ancient Pokemon from an old book...a brute bonnet. Like a fungus with shades of moss. If you can imagine that in joints, an interminable string of scarlet brute bonnets, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions,—why, that is something like it.

That is, sometimes! Other times maybe more like a paras. Or a parasect.

Sometimes.

There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

When the sun shoots in through the east window—I always watch for that first long, straight ray—it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.

That is why I watch it always.

By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn’t know it was the same paper.

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the pokemon behind it is as plain as can be.

I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind,—that dim sub-pattern,—but now I am quite sure it is a pokemon. Maybe two, for sometimes I see it moving as if bipedally, other times as if on all fours.

By daylight it is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps it so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour, too.

I lie down ever so much now. Turo says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.

Indeed, he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.

It is a very bad habit, I am convinced, for, you see, I don’t sleep.

And that cultivates deceit, for I don’t tell them I’m awake,—oh, no!

The fact is, I am getting a little upset with Turo.

He seems very queer sometimes, and even Clavell has an inexplicable look.

It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis, that perhaps it is the paper!

I have watched Turo when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I’ve caught him several times looking at the paper! And Clavell too. I caught Clavell with his hand on it once.

He didn’t know I was in the room, and when I asked him in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what he was doing with the paper, he turned around as if he had been caught stealing, and looked quite stern—asked me why I should surprise him so!

Then he said that the paper seemed to stain everything it touched, that he had found scarlet splotches on all my clothes and Turo’s, and he wished we would be more careful!

Did not that sound innocent? But I know he was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.

Turo is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper.

I brushed it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wallpaper—he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.

I don’t want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough.

I’m feeling ever so much better! I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.

In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.

There are always new shoots on the brute bonnets, and new shades of scarlet all over them. I cannot keep count of it, though I have tried conscientiously.

It is the strangest scarlet, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the scarlet things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like tulips, but rotting, foul, bad scarlet things.

But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, making the air stagnant and cloyingly humid, and since the windows must stay closed, the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house.

I find it hovering downstairs, skulking in the landing, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the doorways.

It gets into my hair. I've even painstakingly brushed and washed it to try and get it out, to no success.

If I turn my head suddenly, surprise! There is that smell!

Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.

It is not bad—at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.

In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.

It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell.

But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A scarlet smell.

There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even splotch, as if it had been rubbed over and over.

I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round—round and round and round—it makes me dizzy!

I really have discovered something at last.

Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.

The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The Pokemon behind shakes it!

Sometimes I think there are a great many Pokemon behind, and sometimes only one, and it crawls around fast, and its crawling shakes it all over.

Then in the very bright spots it keeps still, and in the very shady spots it just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.

And it is all the time trying to climb through or bend them apart. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.

They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside-down, and makes their eyes white!

If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

I think that pokemon gets out in the daytime!

And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen it!

I can see it out of every one of my windows!

It is the same pokemon, I know, for it is always creeping, and most Pokemon that big do not creep by daylight.

I see it on Poco Path, creeping up and down. I see it going up and down the cliff road leading to the sandy shore, creeping through the nearby cave network.

I see it on that long road with the grassy knolls, creeping along, and when an errant person comes it crawls vertically up the cliff face!

I don’t blame it a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can’t do it at night, for I know Turo would suspect something at once.

And Turo is so queer now, that I don’t want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don’t want anybody to get that pokemon out at night but myself. My sweet scarlet dragon.

I often wonder if I could see it out of all the windows at once.

But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.

And though I always see it, it may be able to creep faster than I can turn!

I have watched it sometimes away off in Los Platos, gliding as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.

I have found out another funny thing, but I shan’t tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much. Not even paper people.

There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe Turo is beginning to notice. I don’t like the look in his eyes.

And I heard him ask Clavell a lot of professional questions about me. He had a very good report to give.

He said I slept a good deal in the daytime.

Turo knows I don’t sleep very well at night, for all I’m so unusually still and quiet!

He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.

As if I couldn’t see through him!

Still, I don’t wonder why he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.

It only interests me, but I feel sure Turo and Clavell are secretly affected by it.

Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. Turo is to stay in the lab overnight, and won’t be out until this evening.

Clavell wanted to sleep in the room with me—the sly thing! but I told him I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.

That was clever, for really I wasn’t alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight, and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help it.

I pulled and it shook, I shook and it pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.

A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.

And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me I declared I would finish it to-day!

We go away to-morrow, and the pokemon movers are taking all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before.

Clavell looked at the wall in amazement, but I told him merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.

He laughed and said he wouldn’t mind doing it himself, but I must not get tired.

How he betrayed himself that time!

But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me—not alive!

He tried to get me out of the room—it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner—I would call when I woke.

So now he is gone, and the pokemon movers are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.

We shall sleep downstairs tonight, and take a cab home tomorrow.

I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.

How those Pokemon did tear about here back in the day!

This bedstead is fairly gnawed!

But I must get to work.

I have locked the door and thrown the key down toward the sandy shore.

I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anybody come in, till Turo comes.

I want to astonish him.

I’ve got a pokeball up here that even Clavell did not find. If that pokemon does get out, and tries to get away, I can catch it!

But I forgot I could not reach far to grab the paper without anything to stand on!

This bed will not move!

I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece of the frame at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.

Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling bonnet growths just shriek with derision!

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try, as is the glass.

Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is foolish and might be misconstrued.

I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping pokemon, and they creep so fast.

I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?

But I am safe and sound in my pokeball—you won’t get me out in the road there!

I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!

It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!

I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Clavell asks me to.

For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of scarlet.

But here I can creep along smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long splotch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

Why, there’s Turo at the door!

It is no use, Human, you can’t open it!

How he does call and pound!

Now he’s crying for an axe.

It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!

“Turo, cariño!” said I in the gentlest voice, “the key is down by the beach, near the cliff's edge!”

That silenced him for a few moments. Did he understand me? Can he speak in my tongue? Can I speak his?

Then he said—very quietly indeed, “Open the door, my treasure!”

“I can’t,” said I. “The key is down by the beach, near the cliff's edge."

And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see. Or maybe he just left.

Eventually, he found a way, of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.

“What is the matter?” he cried. “For god’s sake, what are you doing!”

I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

“I’ve got out at last,” roared I, “in spite of you! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

And clearly I'm the stronger one here because my opponent fainted!

But...were we in a battle? Why would he faint? I didn't use a single move.

But he did.

He fainted right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him along my splotched wall path.

#professor sada #lakehouseshipping #professor turo #professor turo x sada #turo #sada #turo x sada #pokemon scarvi

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