A sickening knot of disgust and anger twisted in Julia’s gut. Her father’s entry said they buried their firstborn, not their newborn. It could have been an older child. A child old enough to play with dolls and make paper flowers. Old enough to read. It could have been my sister, Julia thought. Her knees went weak. What in the world had her parents done? Had they kept their own child locked in this room? Had she died right here in this little bed? And why had they kept her hidden? Was she sick? Deformed? Illegitimate?
Another memory came to Julia and she put a hand over her stomach, suddenly nauseous. Mother always said bad things would happen if she didn’t behave. Is that what happened to her sister? Had Mother locked her up for misbehaving? Who would do such a thing? She shook her head. No, that couldn’t have been it. It had to be something else. Mother was strict, but she wasn’t that strict. Was she? And Father wouldn’t have gone along with it. Then she had another thought. Maybe that was why her father drank, to bury his guilt.
Overcome with the feeling that she didn’t know her parents at all, Julia started to tremble. She had wanted answers about her unhappy childhood, and now she was finding them. All this time, Mother had blamed her for Father’s drinking and death, but something else had been going on inside Blackwood Manor, something that seemed straight out of a nightmare. And now, no matter how awful it was, Julia was going to get to the bottom of it. Whether she wanted to or not, there was no going back now.
She steeled herself and entered the room, casting the flashlight into dark corners. The fusty smell of old wood and warm dust filled the air, stronger and more concentrated than in the rest of the attic, along with an underlying rancid odor that reminded her of finding dead mice in Big Al’s Diner. She crept over to the bed, moving slowly out of fear or astonishment she wasn’t sure, and tried the lamp on the bedside table. The knob clicked, but nothing happened. She shined the flashlight up and down the bedcovers. Brown and yellow blotches stained the wrinkled sheet and pillowcase, overlapping at different points in varying degrees of light and dark.
She went into the dormer and tried to look out. Black patches of mildew mottled the glass, but she could make out the hulking barn through the rain, the gray scudding clouds above its gabled roof. She imagined a little girl, her sister, standing where she stood, looking out and wondering what else lay beyond this grimy window. Goose bumps rose on her arms. The longer she was in the room, the more nauseous she felt. Pain and despair fell around her like a weight.
Something clunked behind her. She spun around and swept the flashlight around the bedroom, her heart racing. Maybe there weren’t rats in the attic after all. Maybe it was her sister all along, making the noises in the ceilings and walls. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
“Hello?” she said.
The only sounds were the creak and sway of the house, and the rain filtering through the leaf-choked gutters.
“Is someone there?”
Nothing.
Shaking harder now, she slowly got down on her knees and looked under the bed. The flashlight beam jittered over cobwebs and dust, but no living thing looked back. She stood, took a deep breath, and tried to slow her thundering heart.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she whispered. “There’s no one up here but you.” Unless your sister is surviving on rats.
She pushed the image away and swept the flashlight around the room again. Nothing moved. She gritted her teeth and edged close to the armoire. The door was open a crack. She opened it all the way and shined the flashlight inside. Moth-eaten dresses and yellowed blouses hung from the clothes bar, and several pairs of little girl’s shoes lined the bottom. But they weren’t toddler shoes. They looked big enough for a seven-or eight-year-old. My God, how long was she up here? All her life? Or only after she had grown old enough to misbehave?
What looked like a white dress lay crumpled in the bottom corner of the armoire. She reached in to pick it up, then let out a screech and jumped back. A small skeleton lay on top of the dress, its dusty brown spine curled against the inside wall. She stared at the armoire, breathing hard and trying to pull herself together. If the skeleton belonged to a child, she didn’t know what she would do. Scream? Throw up? Call the police? She held her breath and peered in again. The flashlight beam illuminated tiny brown ribs, an elongated skull, sharp teeth, and a segmented tail. It looked like a cat. She exhaled and straightened. Thank God it wasn’t a child, but finding the remains of a cat was still upsetting. Had the poor thing been left alone up here to starve? Who would do such an awful thing?
The same people who locked a little girl in this attic, her mind screamed. Your parents.
She pictured a little girl reading in the rocking chair, or having a tea party at the wicker table with her dolls. She could see her in the little bed, curled up with her beloved cat, trying to understand why she felt so lost and unloved. Suddenly, a profound sense of loneliness and misery overwhelmed her, as if every emotion absorbed by the bedroom walls had been released all at once. Either that, or her sister’s ghost was in the room with her.