CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

March 5_Today's Tasty Treat: free read 510 word count

Chapter 8

         As Rory had talked to Farmer Jennell, and then rushed up the drive to locate the source of the noise he thought to be an explosion, young Alice-niece of Aunt Jennie, Proprietor-was scrounging in the Tool Shed behind the General Store in the Village of Knox, only twelve miles West of Rory's new cabin, and about a quarter-mile East of the entrance road into The Big Forest. Alice had long been forbidden the territory of the Tool Shed, but something seemed to have changed, even to have broken loose, in her Aunt Jennie's strict reserve since Tuesday afternoon's fated discovery by Alice of some spotted, mildewed, fox-paged, ledger-journal-account book, upstairs in the storeroom, tucked away on a paint-scrappy, faded, lemon-yellow wooden two-shelf bookcase, back in the far right corner. Aunt Jennie insisted right away that there was not anything in that corner, that the bookcase was nowhere in sight and in fact not even in the storeroom, and that the old ledger should not have been anywhere Alice could ever have found it, even if she had been looking for it. Of course Alice had not hunted it; she had not even known of its existence, and when she found it in the corner on top of the otherwise empty bookcase, she was only mildly curious, due to the odd location. She had not even tried yet to open the covers when she thought she heard Aunt Jennie calling her back downstairs.





         Later that night, lying sleepless in her narrow twin bed beside the attic window, watching Moon beams play across the roof peak just overhead, Alice had occasion to ponder this event. She could not understand who-or what-had summoned her; Aunt Jennie had been turned toward the archway when Alice rushed in, as if she had been expecting her, yes; but Aunt told her at supper that she had not called to Alice, she had been waiting for the customer, who seemed to have forgotten to purchase some items, and was currently lurking between the shelves of seeds and the shelf of garden implements. Aunt Jennie thought Alice had called to her! So she turned to see whatever was the matter, knowing that Niece Alice could sometimes tend to be a flighty girl, lost in flights of imagination, just like her namesake in the fanciful Lewis Carroll nonsense. Aunt didn't believe her niece had ever actually fallen down a rabbit hole; but she did have a tendency to daydream and to be easily distracted, and she might even have fallen asleep upstairs in the storeroom, resting on the plank floor in the sunlight from the West window, and been awakened by a house spider crawling across her muslin stocking. It could have been something as simple as that: a flighty young girl, daydreaming or napping, startled by a spider, or one of the odd lizards that appeared this far North only during the months of May-August, before the long winter set in once again.





         It could have been that simple, yet it wasn't.





from The Haunted Greenhouse