CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

June 19 Free Read 1082 wc

Chapter Two





                   ”I don't know, child. Pastor says-”





                   “Please, both of you-I'm not certain-just pack a quick bag and go! Go West!”


                   With that admonition, Pastor Janns rushed back to his Study in the South wing and we could hear him stacking books. I looked at Mamma and she nodded.


         


                   “Go, then, child, just a quick few changes of clothes, and meet me out in the patio. Quickly now.”





                   We each returned to our rooms and hurried to find the necessities. I reached the patio before her, but Pastor Janns already stood outside, satchel overloaded with books on his left shoudler. He reminded me of a colt straining at the stable door to get out and run. Clearly he was in a hurry and something had badly spooked him. As Mamma exited behind me with the cousins beyond her, I heard something now myself. An odd roar combined with a sort of rumble, as if the air itself were ruffled and perturbed.


                   I noticed each of the nephews carried a bag too; so did Pastor Janns, and he reached over and took Natay-lee's. Though he was older by a year, he was tall and wiry, whereas Jahro was sturdy and stocky, much more able to carry heavy loads, even though this sack was not so. With Mamma in the lead, we headed toward the outer door, located in the NorthWest corner of our compound. I saw that Mamma had locked the front door of our complex when the boys exited, and now she unlocked the outer gate, preceded us out, then turned to lock it behind us. She used an odd old huge skeleton key with a strange emblem inside the circle which formed the handle. Our compound had been in Mamma's family for untold generations; she had told me once that her family had been one of the first to found our city.


         Without a word now she headed out, straight West toward the far side of town. Our home sat on a hill, not as high as the hills to the North where cattle grazed in meadows overlooking the Harbor, but high enough that we could not see the Harbor or the see from our compound. When we eventually reached the diagonally crossing Swan Street, though, we were amidst buildings of only two and rarely three stories, and because Swan was diagonal and slanted downhill toward the Harbor, we were at last able to see the water, and soon we identified the source of the roar.





Chapter Three





         Several days passed before the imminent danger had receded with the flood waters, and folks within the Center City were able to return to their homes to assess the damage and to receover what possessions they could. Mamma did not give us notice at our hurried breakfast in the shelter far on the West Side. Instead, she rose from the table and announced she was going back to our compound. I cried out,


“Wait, Mamma! I'll go with you!”


“No, Fenrich, you remain here.”


and with that directive she was gone. I had to waste time finding a shelter caregiver to watch over the two boys, so by the time I rushed out the front door of the big temporarily converted Gymnasium and around its corner, Mamma was several blocks away. I trailed her at a run, but she moved preternaturally quickly and by the time I had reached diagonal Swan Street, Mamma had disappeared from sight. Actually, she had gone missing a few blocks earlier, but I of course remembered the way back to Center City and kept on moving East.


Still I kept moving as speedily as possible, as if sheer force of my intent would be enough to propel her back towards me, or at least to cause her to slow down till I could catch up. Note that I fully remembered that she had told me to stay, and that I really had no logical or mentally sound excuse to keep going. It was emotionally that I feared something was wrong-well, something “new” was wrong-beyond what had happened to our Center City just scant days before.


         The street on which I had been heading East, Denguer Road, was a lengthy but narrow residential street constructed back when the City was fairly new, perhaps two centuries ago. The houses were set close together, as befitted a new town which was uncertain of its surroundings and whether or not protection from enemies might be essential. The yards were narrow between the houses and the sidewalk, but lawns also grew prettily now between sidewalk and street. To my right, on the South side, a long block of one-story and one-and-a-half story homes stretched, and across the street was a row of mostly slightly smaller houses. Behind that was an alley running at an angle, East to West. Eventually, I remembered, the alley came out onto Sentinel Street, a long North-South avenue which ran directly behind the converted Gymnasium which was currently being utilized for shelter for Center City residents who had lost their homes-temporarily or for most, permanently, as the damage in that part of the City had been fairly extensive.


         In front of me diagonalled Swan Street, a very long street (as long or longer than Sentinel) that instead of running straight North-South, instead began at the Northwest corner of the city of Mellaigch, and ran on to the Southeast, ending near the Harbor-well, where the harbor had been until a few days before. Swan Street had become a row of two-story and three-story houses long since converted into apartment buildings. Although its neighborhoods (there were several) were nearly as ancient as the West Side of the city, Swan Street sported a lower economic contingent: the converted apartments frequently housed many  singles per building, some Apothecary students from the nearby College-some doctors of medicine just starting out in practice. Others were older folks-in their thirties and forties-who simply could not scrape up the income to live in a better home. Few were the families who called Swan Street home, and oddly, most of them lived farther to the North, quite near to the shadow of the Apothecary College, while the students seemed to gravitate from the middle of the street's length on farther South, though not as far as the Harbor. In that section lived fisherfolk, wharf boys who earned their pittance living at scrap jobs, ships' chandlers, and black-market merchants and entrepreneurs.