The remains

Chapter 47

Molly enters the house in the woods before me. She is not bothered by the smell anymore than she is bothered by the creepy feel of spider webs that hang from the ceilings and the walls. In a word, the interior is trashed, with broken furniture scattered all about what was once an open living room. Looking all around me, I see that most of the walls have been opened up probably with claw hammers, almost all of the copper piping and wiring torn away by scrap hunters. There’s an old chandelier that hangs from the ceiling, its bulbs gone along with any crystals that once hung from it.

And that smell. It’s just as bad inside as it is outside.

“ Come on,” Molly says. “I want to show you the upstairs.”

Out the corner of my eye, I make out the staircase that leads up to a second floor. Its treads are no longer level, but leaning inwards. Just looking at them frightens me so that I can’t imagine stepping on them, bearing weight upon them. But Molly isn’t the least bit afraid. She heads to the stairs and in the home’s semi-darkness, begins climbing them, one at a time.

I follow.

As we ascend the staircase in near pitch darkness I begin to smell a new odor. It’s the same smell you get inside an old abandoned barn. The smell of cats and their urine. As we come to the second floor landing, a black cat scurries out from a room at the far end of the hall, runs right past us.

“ Hi Blacky,” Mol says, as the cat leaps back down the steps.

“ Obviously you two are acquainted,” I say.

“ We’re old friends,” she adds.

“ Look at all this room, Bec,” she goes on. “There’re two rooms apiece for us.”

I go no further than the first bedroom. There’s an old bare mattress set out on the floor, its rusted springs sticking out of the holes. There are dark spatter stains on the walls that remind me of blood. There’s an exposed light bulb that hangs down from a wire. If it were not for the sunlight that sneaks in through the cracked double-hung windows, the place would be pitch black.

I find myself shaking. I’m having trouble breathing. I get the feeling something bad has happened here. Something bad enough for the place to have been abandoned.

“ I’m going back down, Mol,” I say through shivering teeth. “I don’t like it up here.”

“ Don’t like it?” she says, running from room to room, jumping up and down on the bare mattresses. “It’s all ours.”

I turn back for the stairs. That’s when I hear the front door slam shut.