Stowing her luggage in the trunk, she got behind the wheel and looked at the directions she had written down and quickly started south, heading deeper into the overgrown wild. After about thirty minutes Aria checked the address twice before she pulled down a long dirt road. The cabin was not at all what she had expected. It was actually more of a proper family sized home than the modest dwelling she had been expecting. She noticed the road went off deeper into the woods past her property and she briefly wondered who lived up the hill.
Aria had to pinch herself to make sure she was not dreaming. She could have never afforded anything so nice on her bartender salary at home, and now she could live here in this big place – and all rent free. The estate even had the fees and taxes paid off for years to come. It had all been worked into the will. She didn’t have much in her pocket, but she knew that she would find something to do out there that would pay for food and her meager expenses. The first thing was to settle in.
Her hands touched the large support beams in the main room. They looked like they had been made from tree trunks they were so thick. Every log was cut perfectly to fit and though there didn’t seem to be any electricity running to the house from the outside, she had seen several solar panels on the roof. She was digging the Alaskan self-sufficiency already. The place was fully furnished and though it was not of her taste exactly, it was perfect for the setting, and she wasn’t about to be ungrateful. Aria suspected her tastes would be changing. She actually imagined she would be doing some changing herself. In fact, she already felt different, she realized.
Aria put her bag down in the bedroom, her bedroom, she reminded herself, and grabbed a blanket off the couch to cover her shoulders. There were a couple of rocking chairs out on the front deck, and the deck was high enough that she could see the ocean in the distance. She sat there for some time, knowing that her great aunt Martha must have sat there doing the very same thing many times. Her cheeks were beat red and her teeth chattering by the time she finally tore herself away from the view and went in to start a fire.
No Alaskan home was complete without a raging fire she decided, and Aria was satisfied that she had successfully started her first fire all by herself in the small fire place. That was the first time she had put her Girl Scout training to use in years, but it all came back to her pretty easily. She started off towards the kitchen and was happy to find several days-worth of groceries still in the cupboards. It looked like her great aunt relied heavily on canned goods, so for the most part she didn’t have to worry much about cleaning out food that had gone bad. She started a mental list of things in her head that she needed to pick up when she made her first run into town. The list quickly became too long though, and she was soon searching for a pen among the many kitchen drawers.
In the third drawer she opened, she noticed a strange drawing on the bottom of the drawer. It looked like a strange star with many points and weaving lines that ran through it. Her fingers touched the drawing and she realized that it was burnt into the thin wood.
At that very moment, smoke entered the kitchen and as she turned around she thick black smoke billowing from the fireplace and filling the air. Covering her mouth, she walked closer and realized that something in the chimney must have caught fire – or maybe it was just blocked. She had no idea how these things worked. She quickly filled a trashcan with water and doused the fire before the entire house was smoked out. Still, she had to open every door to the house to air it out properly. As she contemplated dealing with the problem with the fireplace she realized just how exhausted she was from her trip. She decided to lay down for a few minutes. Of course she was quickly off to dreamland, only waking must have been hours later, although there was no way to tell by the light outside. It never seemed to get any darker. She had heard it could daylight for months up her but it was still weird to experience. But what actually awakened her was not the light, but the cold. She realized that she had left the doors wide open.
Throwing on a thick sweatshirt, Aria quickly headed to kitchen to make some coffee and looked at the mini -mess in the living room. There was soot on most of the objects near the fireplace and the whole place now smelled like an old fire pit. She ripped up an old box she found and laid the cardboard out in the fireplace so she could wriggle in a get a look up the chimney. She did not see any light, which she decided was bad. It must be blocked, she decided.
Her fear of heights did not rest solely in flying. She was afraid to get on anything over her own height, so she was not exactly enthusiastic about what she had to do next. In the end her fear of freezing trumped her fear of heights, and so after a couple of cups of coffee and a lot of nervous looks at the precarious roof, Aria looked around for a ladder. Truth be told, she was not too thrilled to find one on the garage wall. She also found a tall wand looking thing that she thought may be the tool used for just this sort of cleaning. With the ladder settled against the house and the cleaning contraption in hand, she prepared herself for the climb. Her hands shook as much as her insides as she scaled what felt like a mountain about halfway up , before pausing to look down. She shouldn’t have done that, she quickly realized.
Aria gasped and grabbed the sides of the ladder for dear life. The vertigo made the entire world seem to swim before her for a moment and she closed her eyes tight to stop it. She was almost prepared to open them when she heard someone underneath her laughing.
“What in the world are you doing up there?”
Aria gripped the ladder harder, steeling herself in case he was going to shake it. She knew it was a man, but she was too petrified to look down. She was all of ten feet of the ground.