Off Season - Jack Ketchum [6]
Now, about that attic.
She’d been up there earlier and it was pretty messy. Her sense of order urged her to give it at least a perfunctory cleaning. She supposed she ought to. But first things first. First she’d see if the fireplace was working. She went outside to gather some kindling and a few logs from the woodshed. She took some sheets from the sports section of the Sunday Times and rolled them into long tight bundles and then crisscrossed the kindling on top of them. Finally she placed three logs on the grate and checked to see that the flue was open. She lit a match and put it to the newspaper. The smoke began to draw, and soon there was a good hot fire going.
Poker, tongs, and shovel lay in a stand beside her. She used the poker to adjust the logs, placed two more on top of them, and then sat back awhile, enjoying the warmth from the fire. It was throwing heat quite well. So the room would be fine tonight. She brought in the last old overstuffed armchair and decided she could procrastinate no longer. It was the attic now or never.
She opened the door and started up the stairs.
They creaked, naturally, but seemed safe enough. There was a second door at the top of the stairs. She opened it and stepped onto the landing and reached overhead to turn on the light.
There was not much point to cleaning. The place was a mess. The floor testified to whole flourishing colonies of mice there. Shit city. And she wondered about bats. Everything she remembered about country living told her that when you had mice in the attic you had bats, too. Maybe she’d look for them come nightfall. And maybe not. But she decided to forget about the cleaning.
The pitch of the roof was so sharp that the job would be hell on her back. And there was nothing much up there, anyway. A few hangers scattered around on the floor. An old mattress, water-stained and weathered. A heavy old dresser, most of its drawers missing. A rusty scythe.
That was about it. There was only one window and that was small and completely clouded over with dust and dirt. Next to the chimney there was a pile of old magazines, an almanac from 1967, and a few old comic books—Detective Comics and Plastic Man. The comics looked good. She gathered them up and the smell of them, the old musty paper, pleased her. It was a smell she was very fond of. It stirred adolescent memories of a dime store in upstate New York, circa ‘64. Mown hay in the summertime. Malteds. Good things.
She put the comics aside next to the landing and walked to the window, stooping slightly from the waist.
I’ll give it an airing, anyway, she thought. She found the latch and swung the window open toward her, stepping back slightly in order to accommodate it; and in so doing she realized she’d kicked something. It was difficult to see very well in that far corner of the room, but she had . . . scattered something. She’d heard something roll across the floor. With the window open now the light was a little better, but she still had to kneel in order to see. She peered at the floor. Now what the hell was that?
She was looking at a pile of bones; a small, neat pile. Exactly what kind of bones she couldn’t really tell, though she guessed they belonged to some sort of bird—or birds, because there were some long tail feathers and some smaller, white ones mixed into the pile. She recognized a few of the bones—a tiny humerus, a few sections of vertebra. She saw that they seemed to have been picked clean. Probably insects. They looked pretty old. The real question was how they’d gotten there. She’d only disturbed a few of them when she’d kicked them; the rest were stacked into a small pyramid a foot or so in diameter. As if they’d been swept there in front of the window and then forgotten. Someone had swept the floor and then neglected to finish the job. She guessed that was it.
But why only bones and feathers? The floor was covered with droppings. Yet somehow none of them had found their way into the little