Are You Haunted (part thirty-eight)

 

 

 

 

Are You Haunted

(part thirty-eight)

 

 

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To gain time, he risked letting go with a foot, just toeing the bannister below. A trick that as a schoolkid he could have done any day of the week. Spring off, touch down on carpeted steps almost without noise—

He padded at speed to the final crook of the railing. A passage here, lobby stairs left, street door right, cellar door also right. A short flight underground.

Safety was close, close…but so was the sentry.

But another schoolkid trick.

He crouched and inched backwards. If you were facing the room, you weren’t going, you were coming.

If you could manage the latch in silence; if the door were unlocked; if everyone stayed put…

 

He had looked at the clouds, down again to the poor belongings exposed, and a sheltering pity had glanced inside.

He had dropped his gear and taken off his boots.

All as though a guardian angel was telling him what to do.

The hotel’s was not like the cellar he had grown up with—a hole in the ground, a coal chute, his mother’s bushel-baskets under the kitchen floor. This was a dismal stamp of the rooms above…the fancy came to Powell, that the building had landed and impressed a dark copy of itself…

That all human constructions cast their berths in Hades from the start.

He came across a pit that looked like a wellhead. A drainpipe rose to curve at a beam, the end disappearing into a squared-off entry.

For maintenance of the pipe. Powell shinnied through.

He had felt netted in rules; he hadn’t known he could slice free and land on soft earth. You were lucky in the army to sleep four or five hours a night…

He fell into a doze. A warning intuition nagged him alert. He would not hear them as they searched. A flashlight playing across his socks would find him, if he did not move into deeper cover.

He wormed towards a vent giving light. He closed his eyes. He opened his eyes and knew he hadn’t been mistaken. He watched, entertained, as a beam danced over dusty air.

“Skinny bastard. I couldn’t do it myself.”

Miller, speaking, laughed at some response, and said, “No. No, I don’t think I will.”

Powell dredged up a poem his college dean had called scandalous, his reason for committing it to memory.

 

We do not believe the painted testimony of desire

Weaving melodies unchanging, softly drowning sounds of sighing

Words of desultory pessimism, wounded hearts and fretful crying

A hireling’s, a gamine’s, acquiescent unto liars

 

Why should we believe these touts of bankruptcy’s embraces

Whose triumphs sourly clink their song in coin-belts, syphilitic

While magnates apoplectic dispatch nephews to Swiss clinics

And toes are crushed by motor-cars’ brute jostling for places

 

Disbelieving matrons beg there shall be no discussion

Daughters dash with shoeshine boys in dives, bedecked with pearls

Grandmamas in whalebone stays must not be told for worlds

And speculators drop from towers unasked-for interruptions

 

 

 

38

 

 

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Haunted
Are You Haunted (part one)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2019, Stephanie Foster)