The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,43

way through the gate and began walking north along the road’s weedy shoulder. The ground was wet, swamp plants and nettles swung heavily at her legs, but she kept going, concentrating on each step so as not to slip. The fireflies were finished now, there were no chartreuse motes, but the crickets had started up. Their sound wasn’t the pleasant one crickets were supposed to make, but something so harsh and percussive she covered her ears.

She walked until the house was well behind her, turned to get her bearings on its light, then kept on until she came to the neighbor’s house, the one she often stared at on her breaks, where Asa Hogg had lived, the Civil War veteran. And no one since, judging by the look of it. If Jeannie’s house resembled a haunted house in a bad Hollywood film, then this one looked plucked from a fairytale, where the forest clasped everything in its enchanted embrace. The moon’s brightness exaggerated the effect. Vines not only covered the siding and roof, they seemed to be the only thing keeping them from collapsing. A birch tree grew through the broken boards of the porch and lichen covered its shingles in silvery fur. Saplings stooped and twisted to get inside—one branch grew into one window and looped back out the next. The forest wasn’t just hiding the house but eating it, gulp by greedy gulp.

She swung her hands at the vines until she opened a path to the nearest window, found a stick, made a swirling motion to clear away the broken teeth of glass. But when she peered in she could see nothing, and it took her several seconds to realize that this was because there was nothing inside to see. Where the floor had been was only the bitter damp smell of dirt; where the walls had been was nothing but ugly little dunes of plaster. There was no furniture, no sign of habitation. Time’s nibbles had swallowed the house whole.

She was pushing her way back through the vines when a car drove past on the road. This happened nine or ten times a day, but never once at night—the traffic in 1920 must surely have been heavier. Its headlights sliced across the house but missed her legs. She had a glimpse of the driver’s silhouette and he seemed to have a girl’s head leaning against his shoulder like in the old days when that’s what girlfriends did. The car slowed down near Jeannie’s house—were they looking for a place to be alone? The light, small as it was, must have scared them off, because whoever was driving floored it now and the red taillights shrank into insignificance and disappeared.

Jeannie’s house? No, Beth’s house. Beth’s house. Beth’s.

She had never really considered it from the distance before, not at night. The kerosene lamp she had left in the parlor threw rays out the window that resembled a campfire’s, fan-shaped and yellow. In the blackness, it was a brave and defiant sight, like someone was puffing on embers to keep them alive. Higher, with a crisper light, she could make out Scorpius and the swarming white band of the Milky Way. And it seemed the same even there—that a spirit was puffing and blowing to keep them alight.

There was nothing to explore in Asa Hogg’s house, no stories or secret messages. She walked back to the road, then stood there hesitating. Go. The imperative had taken her what—half a mile? She wondered how far it had taken Beth, that word added so defiantly on the end. Had she made it to the city? Had it been everything she dreamed of or did forces conspire to drive her right back?

She might have fled there herself, had she gotten in the car. Had she gotten in the car she would have driven all night to Boston’s airport and not come back. She was disappointed at the slowness of things, there was no use pretending otherwise. The job was barely half finished, there were two rooms left that had to be stripped even before she started on the papering, while that other job, the healing business, had hardly progressed at all. She wanted walls that were impassive so as to become impassive herself—but why had she ever imagined walls were impassive?

She thought of it again—the tactile sensation of grasping Beth’s hand. Comfort had been exchanged, in the deepest way possible, and it hadn’t just flowed from her hand back through time, it had