Chapter Fifteen: The Blue Light
When Edward left the attic before lunch, he walked down the stairs
and straight out the front door. He’d examined the attic rooms to
his satisfaction and glanced into the rooms on the second floor as
well. Grandmother Julia was sick in bed; Edward heard her heavy
breathing and a dog whining in her room. Aunt Velma was noisily
preparing a meal for ten people, and from the upstairs windows Edward
saw that all the children were in the woods. He crept silently to
the front doors and skirted around the house. He was quite skilled in
avoiding detection. He’d run away more times than he could remember
and could creep through a house full of people without being seen.
Sneaking to the Clerk’s Office was a piece of cake.
From the children’s description he easily recognized the building
from his vantage point behind a huge azalea by the back door. He
watched Cecil, Carla, Julia, and Abe standing on the porch of the
small building, near the massive chimney stack. The truck engine
roared and spat and suddenly became louder. “C’mon!” Abe
yelled, and they all ran toward the woods. After they leapt from the
porch, Edward saw the mysterious creature hop from the ground to the
other end of the porch, saw it crouch in fear as the truck thundered
through shrubbery, saw it slink inside the Clerk’s Office. Viewing
it now much closer and seeing its face, he was certain what it was –
who it was. He’d suspected when he’d heard Carla’s
description, but now he was certain. The creature was Hetta, someone
who’d been part of his life for as long as he could remember. A
slave, a cringing rodent of a person, barely human. She sometimes
lived in Mortessen Workhouse, where he’d lived too, but mostly she
roamed the woods, living on berries and grubs, begging for shelter
from Madame Fen when winter came. She did things for them they
loathed doing themselves, but mostly she hunted children when they
wandered away. And she tended the babies when they were first
kidnapped and brought to the workhouse. Her job was to keep them
quiet, and her methods often made the older children sickened and
afraid. She was a pitiful creature and not entirely harmless.
Edward approached the building. As he stepped up to the porch and
placed his hand around its pillar, he felt an odd stirring in his
stomach, a faint queasiness and inexplicable fear. Stacked on one end
of the porch were quite a few wooden boxes, a broken chair, and
stacks of burlap bags. He crouched behind these against the
foundation, unwilling to enter the building with Hetta there, and
waited until all the family had gone inside the house for lunch. He
head the wreck of the truck, the family arguments, the weariness in
the mother’s voice with three injured sons. Later the low sun
sliced light across the lawn through the trees, and Edward ventured
off the porch toward Aunt Velma’s garden. Providing for himself was
no problem. He didn’t need Julia to bring him leftovers. He quickly
picked a cucumber, a handful of tomatoes, a few string beans, and dug
a small sweet potato. Used to scavenging and hiding, this evening
felt to Edward like many others. He munched his dinner behind the
barn, found a spigot and cup, and satisfied his thirst. All the
while, he watched the Clerk’s Office for Hetta to leave. The barn
offered a small hay loft from which he could see the building’s
porch, and until sunset he studied the door but saw no sign of her.
From his vantage point, Edward could also look into the kitchen
windows of the house. The figures within were tiny, but the warm
light of the house, and the darkness of early evening before the moon
rose lit the scene like a theater. The family was sitting down for
dinner. The woman they called Aunt Velma, or Mom, flitted around the
room. Edward saw her shoo several boys from the room who came back a
few minutes later wiping their hands on their shirts. She handed
plates to Carla and silverware to Julia. She talked most to another
girl Edward did not know, and gave her platters of food to set on the
table. A big boy was tussling with Abe, and the woman slapped the boy
on the head. Then she caressed Abe’s head and kissed it. The
children leaned toward each other, whispering and laughing. The
mother circled the table as the children all sat, and she poured milk
into their glasses. Her hand rested on Julia’s shoulder, and she
gave another boy a quick hug. Edward was enthralled by the scene, and
unfamiliar emotions stirred in him. He watched the glowing kitchen
hungrily, not for the food, but for the affection and friendship
around that table, the gentle, caring touch of a mother. Edward
didn’t know what it felt like to have a mother.
When it was fully dark, Edward left the barn and walked to the
Clerk’s Office. The building was empty. Silently, methodically, he
searched every bit of it – the trunk and its contents, the chipped
plates and cups that matched the ones Julia had brought him, the
fireplace with its broken chair, the piles of books he could not
decipher, the vacant upper floor. He discovered the secret panel and
the ladder descending along the chimney stack to the hiding place.
Unlike Julia, he followed it quite far, climbing down the length of
the stack and into a tunnel via a small door whose hinge squeaked.
The tunnel was small and badly built, but Edward, who had been in
terrible danger many times in his life, thought nothing of crawling
along it, his head bumping the earthen ceiling, his hands grazing the
rough boards along the sides. Eventually he came to its end, just
where he expected it to be. He reached out and grasped the rope
ladder hanging below the lady statue and swung his body out into the
larger tunnel. He assumed Hetta had come this way too. Where was she
now? Had she returned to the empty house where he’d slept on the
floor? Or was Hetta crouching at this moment beneath Julia’s bed?
He had come full circle, back to the tunnel.
Edward was sick of tunnels, sick of hiding in holes. He wanted to
avoid Hetta. He climbed the rope ladder into the hidden chamber under
the lady statue. With all his might he pushed against the base of the
statue, bracing his legs. Finally it lifted, and he heaved it over.
It thudded on the earth. As Edward rose from the tunnel into the
night air, the heavy aroma of boxwoods enveloped him and the earliest
moonrise shone on his face. He felt again the same strange feeling
deep in his gut. This place smelled and felt familiar to him, but it
made him uneasy. He was more safe now than he’d ever been in his
life, yet a tiny kernel of subdued terror was lodged deep in his
mind. He could not shake it.
Lights flickered on and off in the house from room to room. For a
while the voices were loud and there was much movement. One room on
the second floor stayed dimly lit, and shadows passed in front of the
window shade many times. Once the shade lifted and Carla and Julia
stood there talking, looking out into the night. Carla seemed to be
looking right at him, but the girls turned away. Later the room was
dark. And in the end every window went black as Edward sat in the
garden observing the passage of the moon overhead. The familiar stars
he knew well twinkled into brilliance through the pine trees, but
other lights, flashing lights high above also road across the sky.
Edward found himself mystified again by this strange world into which
he’d been thrown.
He wanted to return to Julia’s house, but he was afraid. So he
crept up to the shrubs near the windows and looked inside. Now he was
quite close, unlike before. He looked in the kitchen windows where
Aunt Velma finished washing the dishes and turned off the light. An
old dog lay next to a funny chair. Edward had never seen a chair
quite like it. The dog looked up at him and wagged her tail. She
smiled as only sweet dogs can smile. Edward gasped and covered his
mouth, but the dog did not bark. Her tail bumped the chair and it
rocked back and forth. For the first time in many years, Edward
laughed. Why would anyone want a chair that rocked like that? The dog
began to stand, and to avoid being discovered, Edward left the
kitchen window and went to look into another room. He silently,
methodically rounded the house, studying each room from the safely of
the evening’s darkness.
Thus it was that Edward was peering into the Assembly Room as Abe
slipped into the room first, and as Cecil, Carla, and Julia came in
only moments later. Edward stood directly outside the window to the
right of the fireplace. Against the dim hallway light, he clearly saw
the children enter, but they could not see him in the shadows of the
tall camellia bushes. He could not hear their words, but he watched
Julia hide within the folds of the curtains on the other window, the
tin cup clutched in her hand. He watched Carla creep under the table
and then the chair. He watched Cecil stand with his back to the room.
And he watched Abe recede into the shadows. Almost immediately a thin
line of blue light appeared for a split second where Abe stood. It
was shaped like a tall rectangle, like the outline of a doorway. It
flashed cobalt blue and then was gone, and the other children did not
see it, turned as they were with their eyes away from Abe’s
location.
When the chandelier burst into brilliant light and Aunt Velma scolded
the children, Edward disappeared in a second as he was so good at
doing, into the bushes, into the darkness, into hiding.
(To read the next chapter, please click here.)
(To read the next chapter, please click here.)
[Ten Days at Federal Hill is copyrighted in its entirety by the author, M.K. Christiansen.]
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