Are You Haunted (part one)

Are You Haunted

(part one)

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind Saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The walls that remained almost sheltered like a roof, when the wind pitched up and drove the rain. They were edged in dust, dust sifted with charred splinters and shards of glass. It was dry on this lee side. The rest was mud. Powell’s shoes were caked with the worst mired there, clotted pebbles throwing him off balance.

He remembered this, how it felt. Only then he’d had army boots to snug round his ankles. Wet socks were misery. He would need to roll tight against the farthest corner, pull his jacket over his ears, and sleep.

The immigrant Rohdl spoke, from the other side of the wall. “What have I done? If I have done anything, then goddamn. Prove it. Or why should I go?”

Rohdl was welcome to all the territory in this burned out ruin he chose to claim.

He called out: “There, Mr. Kenzie. You heard that.”

Powell, wanting only to lie down, came to the wall and looked over it, meeting Rohdl’s eyes in the half-second of a lightning flash. “No. Sorry, I didn’t.”

But the voice was constant. Rohdl heard it, telling him, “Go. Get out of here.”

He could carry on, fighting his ghosts, and it would make no difference. Powell had grown used, once, to sleeping through thunderous racket. Rohdl might dream aloud, ramble in his delusions. These states, dreaming and waking, might shade one into another, as his English shaded into German.

Lightning sheeted the sky now, but the chamber walls were shown by its daylight intensity to be bare. Nothing scrappable would have passed the shortages of wartime. Tomorrow Powell might find a sturdy stick of wood and root around in the mud. Without too much effort, he could fill a bucket with washers, bolts, screws, surviving bits of metal trodden deep…

If Mr. Guy would lend him a bucket.

1

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part two)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)