Are You Haunted (part forty)

Are You Haunted

(part forty)

I will let you call me Lettie, if you know me well

You may kiss me in the moonlight, and I’ll never tell

No, I’m not a lass coquette-y with the village swells

The voice faded as the radiance diminished. He struggled from the position he’d fallen asleep in, his brow jammed against the wooden frame of the cot.

She was there. Wearing a velvet cloak, hands at her throat clasping it closed.

Against the roof beams, the velvet darkness seemed an opening to the night sky. Her face was a pale oval, and to Powell, her knowing smile might have been Isobel’s. He supposed he was making things up, that these were forms of shadow and light…

But he had heard her sing, in a coy stage diction, words he could not have invented. To a tune that jangled like an old-time piano’s.

“Your name.” Had he seen her features sharpen, eyes that were distinctly eyes, meet his? “Is Lettie.”

“There is an easier way in. You know the place.”

“Lettie, go haunt Dennis Tovey. I’m not the one who wants to know.” He rubbed fingers over the knob of spine above his shoulders, where a new pain seemed to have rooted.

“Too late.”

The window rattled, gripped by an insistent hand and shaken.

Powell rolled to his stomach and looked up. Heavy dew was dripping down the glass—a stripe, a second stripe, a little wash of it.

He had dozed, or been hypnotized.

The clearing showed a discouraging paleness; daylight meant a deluge of other people’s business. He pushed to his knees and peered out. Rohdl was crawling around where Lettie had told him to look.

The air buzzed with humidity.

“Hey there, Mr. Rohdl.”

Rohdl ignored him, or was lost where other people did not exist. He knelt parting clumps of grass. He had uncovered an iron grid angled a few feet above the stream.

It cost a surge of pain—neck, shoulders, temples—but Powell jumped into the bed, and crouched beside Rohdl.

“Does it come off?”

He tried; the air from the tunnel was not cold. Only imagination could suggest dread seeped from the dark, numbing his fingers. He pulled them free and tapped the back of his hand against Rohdl’s sleeve.

For all the unwashed stench and raggedness, the eyes were attentive. This wish to disappear, Powell understood…

But Rohdl must know.

“You were there, Mr. Rohdl, on the day of the accident.”

40

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part one)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)