The Summer Skies by Jenny Colgan

Author:Jenny Colgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

There was no doubt about it: the bedroom was creepy. The hallway was creepy, the stairs were creepy—and creaky—and the landing was creepy. There was a faint scent of the pretty white magnolia on the air, which my front brain knew was just the old bubble bath I’d found in the bathroom cabinet a couple of hours before, but to my now overtired and feverish imagination, it was the trail of a ghost . . .

No, stop being an idiot, Morag, I kept telling myself. You’re a scientist and an engineer, this is ridiculous. And there have been too many scares tonight. The lightning, the near-crash, that bloody chicken.

I peed as quickly as I could. There wasn’t much I could do about my teeth, but I rinsed my mouth out—there was plenty of water, thank goodness for small mercies.

Then I tiptoed, utterly freezing, across the unheated hallway. There was linoleum underfoot, slippy to my bare toes. There were several closed doors off the corridor. I hoped I would get the right one. Second to the left. Off the stairwell. That was it. I tried a rattly old round white handle, heavy in the large door. It opened with a click.

The room inside had a chill to it, that strange sense you always get when a place has had nobody in it. Which logically would assume that people leave a trace, which led me back to ghosts again—but I banished that thought as quickly as I was able to; I was completely overwrought.

It was a plain room barring the now inevitable lines of bookshelves. They smelled musty, but it wasn’t an unpleasant scent—quite the opposite in fact. The house itself, although cold, wasn’t as damp as I’d feared.

The bed was a small brass double, with an incredibly old-fashioned bedspread on it, fringe hanging down from it. Underneath were actual sheets and blankets, no duvet, tightly tucked in as if it were a hospital.

I went to draw the curtains. Oh God. My own hollow-eyed reflection, lit only by the candle behind me was frankly terrifying. I realized, ridiculously, that I was too scared to carry on pulling the curtains, just in case I saw another face peering in at me despite the fact that this was the second floor. This was so stupid. I dived into bed, pulling the counterpane around my shoulders to stop from shivering. Inside, the bed felt as cold as outside.

Beyond the window was endless nothing. Normally I did not mind the erasure of the boundaries between land and sky. When I could see nothing but sky, with the occasional cloud wafting past far, far below me, I felt completely happy, plowing through my element, at one with the air above and the ground below me.

Here, though, in front of my eyes was a churn: an unhappy maelstrom of three elements—air, earth and water—all at war with one another, wrestling for territory, demanding and striking one another. You could not see where the ground began, or see if the rain was coming from up, down, left or right.

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