Five Mile House by Karen Novak

Author:Karen Novak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596918665
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

IN RESOLUTE SILENCE, i withstood the invasion of Five Mile House. Those heavy-booted men stomped through my hallways, my rooms, swearing and laughing, oblivious to the fact they were uninvited. My days and nights rang with the high-pitched whines of machines designed to cut and pierce. Dust clouds clotted the air, settling over the floorboards in ever deepening drifts of white. The men hammered and hammered, pulling back up and reinforcing what I had so long hoped would come down. For over a century I have watched as the water rotted and the mildew ate and the sun parched the bones of this creature. And now I watched as it was methodically resurrected. They built it new bones of new pine and restored its flaked, failing hide with a thick coat of fresh plaster. Above the noisy vanity of their efforts they could not hear, day by day, the growing roar. Had I warned them, attempted to warn them, had they heard my voice over the racket of their work, it would have only served to spur them onward. They held that book, the story of it, as a prize. They did not understand that the book was no more than bait, the intriguing morsel meant to draw them, by means of their own hunger, into the bile, the bowel, the dark dissolving juices of Five Mile House.

I spent my days waiting by my window, in my tower, caged anew by the arrogant scaffolding erected to preserve my prison. I waited by my window, because I knew Leslie would return. She had not climbed the hill since that morning months earlier when her own ghosts had usurped my intent to speak. Still, I knew she would return; everything that belongs to Five Mile comes back to Five Mile, eventually. I waited. And I planned.

I was waiting by my window, my mind full with imaginings of darkness and rest, when Leslie came back to Five Mile. She climbed out of the truck and held open the door for her children, Jack Wellington, and his mother. The five of them stood looking at the house, faces upturned in the hot, bright morning sun, an island of placid curiosity amidst the hurly-burly rush of workmen hoisting planks and mixing mortar. Their eyes were set on the tower; they were seeing but not seeing me. Diana's expression was that of childlike delight; the children themselves looked bored. Leslie regarded the tower with that same singular defiance, her jaw set, shoulders squared. She was refusing to participate from the beginning. I realized then, in a crush of despair, that even if I could make myself heard, she might choose not to listen. I might have only one word before she shut out my voice. I might have only one word, to set her on the path toward salvation for us both.

The women and their children approached the front steps, and I grappled with my limited language. I heard them enter, the little ones clambering on the staircase; their mothers scolding them to slow, to take care.

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