The Prince of Mist - Part 5

Hi guys, sorry for the delay. I don't really have much of an excuse for not updating this time, so sorry. Just as a quick recap, last chapter we met Roland who invited Max snorkelling the next morning, which I presume will be covered in this chapter.
Or not? The chapter starts in the evening of the same day in which we meet Roland, with Max's dad waking him up by calling him for dinner. The projector is also mentioned, so maybe we'll get to see what some of the tapes contain. They sit down for dinner, where Max tells them about his new friend and Irina somehow manages to persuade their mum to let her go diving with them. Why you would take an 8 year old diving, I'm not entirely sure. Max also offers to take Alicia along, which is sweet of him, something she seems to acknowledge as well; maybe the bratty behaviour is more to do with coping, seeing as she has in a sense more to lose by moving. They start up the projector, with some doubt as to whether it will actually work; if it does work, I get the feeling it will be family videos as opposed to actual films.
So the film starts up and it's obviously an amateur at the helm. It depicts a walk through a forest and the majority of the family get fairly bored. Until the statue garden appears in the frame. Despite the poor quality of the film, the Carver family are fairly disturbed by what they see, and to Max's eyes, there's something not quite right about the clown statue in the middle. It hasn't said what yet, but I have a feeling it might be something to do with the direction it's facing. Just a random guess there. Max gets the feeling that Jacob, the boy who drowned, filmed it, but he's not allowed to watch some more to find out. So after being rather creeped out, everyone but Max and Alicia go to bed. Which is when Alicia tells him that she's seen the clown before, without having been to the statue garden. Instead of actually seeing it, she's seen it in dreams, starting from the day before they arrived. So the garden is definitely linked to the house in some way, or maybe specifically to the children in the house. Max assures her that it was just a dream and nothing to worry about (which will probably come back to bite him later) and she leaves to get to bed, accepting his offer to go diving in the morning just before she goes. Max himself goes up after clearing away the projector and films, feeling more connected with his older sister, which is nice.

So overall, a pretty good chapter. Finally, things are starting to happen! We've had another look at the statue garden, really bringing up more questions than it answers. And we've also seen Alicia being more vulnerable and less like your stereotypical bratty teenager, which is a nice surprise. I think I might be beginning to like her.

Signing off,
Nisa.