Aftersight by Brian Mercer

Author:Brian Mercer [Mercer, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astraea Press, LLC
Published: 2013-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

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It wasn't like a dream, I wrote in my journal early the next morning. It seems as real now as is it did then. More real maybe. I tapped my pen thoughtfully to my lip. How could I explain this sense of longing? Not longing for the woman, necessarily, but for the love that I'd felt, that sense of complete connection to another human being.

What's happening to me?

All morning it haunted me. Before we even ventured into the luncheon hall for breakfast, Becky, Sara, Nicole, and I had resumed our search for a way to reach our upstairs neighbors. Yet the anger I'd felt the night before had disintegrated into a fog of lingering desire, of a love found and lost in almost the same moment.

"A fine parcel of psychics we are," Sara said as we retraced our steps from the night before. "All this otherworldly help and we can't find our bums in our own back pockets."

"I'm doin' the best I can," Nicole snapped.

"Let's just tell Mrs. Apple and let her take care of it," Becky said. "I'm hungry. Let's get breakfast."

I was trailing behind the others, letting them turn the corner into the next hallway without me. Moving from door to door, I twisted knobs and peeked in rooms. When I got to a broom closet I'd seen the night before, I reached for the overhead light, a string turning on a naked bulb. The space was filled with dry mops, feather dusters, and dustpans. Containers of cleaning supplies sat on old wooden shelves. Three buckets and an ancient steel vacuum cleaner guarded piles of folded sheets and linens.

I worked my way toward the back of the storeroom where the room elbowed to the left and out of view. Somehow I knew before I turned the corner what I'd find: a door. Small, unassuming, it didn't have the intricately carved wood or brass doorknobs of Waltham's other doors. This one was plain, with an ancient-looking iron handle and a thick coat of paint that seemed to glue the door to its frame.

Surely it would be locked. It look liked no one had used it in generations. But I knew before I even reached for the handle that it would turn easily. With a rusty creak, the door swung back to reveal rutted, water-stained steps moving up where light shafts exposed swirling phantoms of dust.

"Guys," I called out uncertainly. "Guys? I think I found it."

The stairs led up, not to the fourth floor but to a dusty old attic. It was exactly the kind of attic you might imagine in a place like Waltham, with unfinished wood floorboards and cobweb-filled rafters and old junk piled here and there, neatly but haphazardly. Tattered white sheets had been thrown over gatherings of grimy old furniture so that they looked like a party of ghosts on Halloween. Small dormer windows let in just enough eerie grey to lead the four of us back to our corner of the manor house, just above where we slept.

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