Are You Haunted (part seventeen)

Are You Haunted

(part seventeen)

Powell tested a handle of the kitchen faucet.

Then jumped, at water spitting out like a phantom cat. He let it run a few seconds, weak, rusty brown. He guessed he shouldn’t have tried the hot. The boiler wasn’t going, so the cleaners would use cold. He turned the other handle, and from this a shade closer to yellow flowed, whistling and thin.

He wondered now how many daylight hours he had left. The sky was still blue. The shadows of branches awakened nothing…

From army lectures on finding due north, using a tree trunk for a sundial…

But the lectures themselves, that he’d listened to them, got handed paper bulletins to study, Powell recalled.

It is a prisoner’s duty to escape.

This, and a rule from “European edible flora”, a foragers’ rhyme about berries, red and blue. He decided to explore upstairs.

From the landing he counted five closed doors, at first glance not caring about the narrowest. He thought again. He crossed and opened the cupboard, peered into its corners, crouched and felt the floor. Nothing dropped, nothing overlooked, that might give character to the Drybrooks who’d lived here.

The first bedroom was bare-floored, windows uncurtained, pink paper on the walls…

And a pleasing view. Powell could just make out the river with its satellite clouds. Or they looked like clouds, dotting field stubble, mud-brown and mirroring the sky. The river was in flood. He heard a motor, hurried to the other window and caught sight of a big sedan, dark green, cresting the rise on route seven.

On the strength of this link to civilization, he made up his mind. He would dump his blankets in this pink room. He put his head inside the others along the hall, tried the toilet before using it, pulled the chain and stood while the bowl filled…and the toilet burbled on.

He took the lid off the tank, jiggled the floater. Maybe Guy would notice first thing tomorrow and yell about it.

The next flight led to the attic story. Powell hated going up, but common sense told him, get a picture of it. It would be better knowing, when he started hearing noises after dark, that the rooms were empty.

Four more closed doors.

He didn’t see why the house was shut up like this. Saving heat in the winter? But it made things gloomy and secretive, and Powell liked doors standing open.

No lavatory up here, no electric wiring. Four short-ceilinged rooms lit by dormers, the inside glass clean, floorboards swept. No pools of shadow, no nesting bats, a modicum of cobwebs. Nothing interesting but a cistern, a big wooden box at the end of the hall. Fed by rain from the roof, speaking something to how the plumbing ran.

17

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part eighteen)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)