Are You Haunted (part six)

 

 

 

 

Are You Haunted

(part six)

 

 

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“Well, then, I’ve wasted my education. You have learned better things listening to the dreams of factory workers.”

“Social approval is the only model of ethics known to the average person. To be allowed in, or to be kept out. And if you are kept out, then of course ethics are of no use to you.”

“Do you want to know my name? Why don’t you tell me yours?”

“My name,” he told her, “is Heinrich Rohdl. I have been telling you about these people.”

She reached for the hand he’d used to dismiss her interruption, and shook it, a sideways tilt to her head. The gesture, and the smile, meant something of mischief that Rohdl could not read. He knew Mr. Guy had gone to look at the shed with Mr. Kenzie.

“I’m Isobel Gilshannon.”

“So the house is not empty, though they will say it is,” he finished.

He had led her to a trellis wrapped in brittle vines. In and among these dead were a fecundity of new shoots, hairy tendrils of morning glory. He had wanted her to note this prematurity, see the rectangle of fierce green, the grass inches taller than the rest.

They heard Guy’s breathing, his rounding the house; his curse, as he brushed the lilacs. He came to them rummaging in a back pocket, his straw hat blooming white in the sun.

“Gilshannon. How you spell that?”

“Chief, you can call me Isobel.” She planted her feet, and looked up into Guy’s face. “Have you been playing mean pranks?”

The hand with the notebook dropped. “What the hell.”

“Mr. Rohdl tells me he sees someone pass by the window, dressed in a white robe.”

Rohdl stood absorbed, plucking at dead vines, tender in extricating them from the living.

“I heard him about that window. That window he see’s over where he came from. He don’t know what he means, but he don’t mean this house. You come on to the car.”

She followed, hearing the anger in his voice escalate. “Lady, you are some kinda troublemaker. You got no business on this property. But let me tell you…”

He spun, stopping close to the toes of her loafers, almost forcing her chest to his belly.

“Do you mind?” But Isobel was the one to step back.

“I get in that house every day. I never seen any sign anybody been there. I lock everything up. Now you tell me what the hell you mean, pranks.”

“Oh, maybe you wouldn’t. But you say so yourself. Nobody’s been inside. You’re the only one who wants to keep people out. And poor Mr. Rohdl would be easy to spook.”

 

Powell heard a mechanical sound. A wheel, off its bearings, that creaked with each rotation, but was like a death cry, like the rhythmic final breaths of a person trapped in rubble.

Man or woman, you hadn’t known.

He thought of the extraordinary discovery he had made in the cellar at Liège. He recalled a verse, written by a poet of the Great War.

 

You cannot put dead things on trial

Gibbet the limbs and rags that hang

Already from the blasted stump

I paused beside my father at the station

He held a flag

I may have seen it jostled

From his hand his eyes

Rippled like a shell pool in a gust of wind

 

 

 

 

6

 

 

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Haunted
Are You Haunted (part seven)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2019, Stephanie Foster)