deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: I spend hours cataloguing the museum’s dusty back room. A c

deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: I spend hours cataloguing the museum’s dusty back room. A capricorn skeleton, disassembled. A seer’s orb that only shows sinking ships. A trunk of seal skins, faded with age. #WhaleBoneProject I did not choose to work at the Museum, not freely. But I had no family, and no home, and there were no better choices, so I took my place here. Some people like it here. They wander the beautiful rooms, gaze upon priceless artifacts, or paintings, or elegant reminders of past times in the forms of furniture or clothing or decorative trifles of great expense. It is beautiful, I suppose. The rooms where the staff live are small and drab. We are required to remain in the Museum, you see. We cannot leave for the duration of our contracts, neither by night nor by day, by the light of sun or moon. We belong to the Museum. Some have been here for decades… or centuries, perhaps. Time passes differently here. As the newest member of staff, I was sent to do the ‘dull’ work of cataloguing the old exhibits. It had not been done for a long time – the last new member died in the doing, and the one before him got promoted before finishing. It can be dangerous, but I found that I liked the work, and chose to continue it even when another worker came. It is not right, that what we have here is not all treated with the same respect. Some of the artifacts are dangerous, and kept locked up. I found three which no longer moved on their own, their curses faded or their clockwork run down, and moved them into Inert Storage. Some of the paintings required tending. Some only need restorations or repairs, and for those I have the tools. Others require company, or… alteration.The ones that speak I moved into a room together, where they may engage in conversation. Others I have restored and repaired. The ones that I altered… I was not given leave to do that. But the poor things had been suffering for so long. I painted scars over bleeding wounds, filled empty cups and dishes, opened doors in ancient cells. The paintings weren’t even catalogued. No-one would know what I’ve done. Or so I thought, at least. But when I had finished that work, a memo came down from the Management. “Alterations have been detected,” it said sternly. “This is a Museum. What is here must be preserved, not altered. If the guilty party does not confess, actions will be taken.” I considered, then brought out the paintings I had restored, humbly apologizing. I had not realized that repair was not permitted. A wasp-faced manager examined my work carefully, for far too long for my comfort, then shook her antennaed head. “This is not the alteration we detected,” she said. “Restoration is permitted.” I humbly indicated a particular painting of a suffering penitent. “I believe I may have accidentally painted over one of the spiders,” I said meekly. “There are so very many.” She put me on bread and water rations for two days, and the matter was allowed to drop. I had to be more careful, after that. I was glad they didn’t interfere until I was finished. I had completed the major store-rooms, by then, though how many years it took me I do not know.I know that my contract was close to completion when I reached the lowest level, the store-rooms which had not been opened for many years, which were all labelled ‘assorted’ in faded ink on parchment labels nailed on crookedly. I filled out catalogues of strangeness, in those rooms, and with every room I became more uneasy. The things in these rooms were not beautiful, or interesting, or sometimes even identifiable, but there was a power here I’d found nowhere else. I could feel it trickling down over my skin, inching out to peer at me, breathing in the darkened rooms. I lit lamps, and knew the light was unwelcome and… sometimes, desperately craved. It was stranger than anything else in the Museum. I was in the fourth room when suspicion became certainty. I had carefully cleaned the skeleton of a Capricorn (extinct now), disassembled, the bones laid in rows on ancient velvet. I placed the seer’s orb in a new box, and made a note of what ailed it – all it would show was shipwrecks, some ancient, some modern, all tragic. Looking at all the tiny people in the water, the ships burning or broken or dissolving into mist, made me feel sorrowful even after almost a decade in the Museum. I opened an old chest, and found a pile of sealskins, old and faded. I took each out carefully, dusting it and tending the leather, making notes of size and colouration. And then, when I lifted up one of the last, I felt a faint shiver over my skin. There was no life left in this ancient skin, and yet it had once been alive, and blood calls to blood… all the more here, for the Museum houses a great deal of blood in different forms.I knew it, when I examined it in the light. Four feet and three inches long. Silvery grey. Dappled. A faint scar under one eye-hole. I’d seen that scar on my great grandmother’s face, in the one picture we had of her. She’d been lured onto the shore by love, as selkies usually are, and she’d stayed willingly for a long time. But no selkie can leave the sea forever, not and live heart-whole. So when her children were big and bonny, she’d sought to leave… and the man who said he’d loved her had stolen her skin away, hidden it in a place she never found.She died not long after. Of a broken heart, the family knows. Humans don’t die of broken hearts, but a selkie who can never go back to the sea doesn’t live long. I have only a trace of the selkie blood in me, enough to give me a little way with small magics, to qualify me to work in the Museum. No entirely mundane person can work here. But I knew that skin, and it knew me. And then, holding my great grandmother’s broken heart in my hands, I knew why I hated the Museum. Why the terrible power in these rooms existed. You see, this is not a Museum of History. Oh, it claims to be. It fills its public rooms with pretty treasures, and does not describe the suffering behind them. But this is a Museum of Pain. No wonder they detected my alterations, when I tried to spare a few painted sufferers. They fill their store-rooms with the haunted and the cursed and the soul-touched, with mementoes of broken hearts and broken lives. How long have they been collecting these awful relics?And what draws on this well of misery? What is being fed here? I do not know. But I finished my catalogue, and then I went over the maps of the Museum. Not the official maps, nor the public maps, nor even the maps given to the staff lest they be lost and starve before they find their way out. No, I found the old maps, while I catalogued. The ones of the original building, before the additions that turned a single structure into a maze that covers more ground than the palace itself. And in the center of that original building there is drawn a chamber with a single door, labelled ‘The Heart’. And when I lay out the lines of the new buildings over those of the old, that chamber is still at the heart, and the corridors that seem like a maze all lead toward it, or around it, like a spider’s web.Whatever created this horror, it is there. I catalogued the magical weapons some years ago. Some still have life in them, and this afternoon I will take up a spear and a short sword that were pledged to the light before their bearers died their dreadful deaths. I will find that chamber. I will find my way into it. And what is there I will destroy. And if I fail, I will still succeed. If I do not return, the firepots I have placed in the storage rooms will overturn and burn this hellish nightmare to the ground.I send out this final missive, with a copy of the finished catalogue of the Museum of Pain. One way or another, the broken hearts here will rest in peace.*(The Great Museum burned to the ground two days before this missive was received at the People’s Library. No-one who lived in the city at that time will forget the terrible, unearthly screams that issued from that fearsome blaze, or the blood that ran from the doors and windows without quenching the fire. The Curator who wrote the account did not sign it, and has not so far been identified. We know only that they were brave… and they were right.)Note: I started out to just write a story about a scary museum, not a critique of museums as a concept, but… well, all museums have exhibits that carry memories of pain, or grief, or loss. And many, many museums have what they know to be stolen, and will not return, and thus keep the pain alive. Many thanks to @deepwaterwritingprompts for the fascinating prompt. -- source link

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