Are You Haunted (part five)

Are You Haunted

(part five)

The door sat too low for anyone to walk through upright. It bore traces of whitewash, stains of algae…

He believed Guy now. He had expected some trick, some way the Big Chief would show him up for a thief, pretending he hadn’t, as watchdog, been over every inch of the place. Bricks sat piled in front of the shed…not many, but enough.

The grass stood tall around them.

“You all dig in and have yourself a look. Door ain’t locked.”

Powell wasn’t nearly curious enough to bother. But he must save a little face with Guy. He sat on his haunches and tossed bricks, finding some pleasure in the way they burrowed sharp corners, to cant like the monoliths of a rat-sized temple.

He grabbed the handle, and a rusted hinge popped its nails. Three punked verticals stubbed and shredded. He heard an unfriendly laugh from Guy.

“You’re makin a lot of work for yourself, Kenzie.”

Powell put his head inside, saw the mossy floor solid. The wall stones, flush as they were stacked, still let in light. Guy’s manner was beginning to weigh on him. He was like Breedman, another fellow southerner Powell had never expected to meet where he’d come across him. Breedman too had been a little lowly, had seized on the chance to taunt a college boy, force him into ignorant choices, ride him hard for them.

He crawled ahead. Nothing, was the answer. Nothing kept here…

Only a pile of burlap sacking. He smacked it, and when no snake slithered out, sat on it. He might wait a while. He had no carpentry skills, he could not fix the door. He had no money, he could not pay for it.

L’aborrita rivale a me sfuggia

Far below was the center of a black cave, an effect of flickering torchlight. He thought it could not have been real torchlight. There had been a terrible fire…not so many years before his birth, that he had not often heard the story of it, eight hundred burned to death.

That was their way, his parents, to measure existence terror by terror.

They had seen in their time, their full measure of terrors.

But they were at peace, if the world could be said to be at peace. The tiny figures, robed in white, so striking in appearance…

People crowded, less conspicuous in the balcony seats, so less concerned about fidgeting, coughing, speaking their judgments well aloud, sometimes eating. Heinz remembered a hot, close atmosphere of attic-stored furs, oniony sweat, old perfume decayed to musk. A conversation distracted his attention from the aria, when he wanted only to concentrate on this hallucinatory swelter and stink and vision.

“Kant was not precisely correct.”

5

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part six)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)