His heart heavy with disappointment, Charles left the cold empty kitchen and climbed the back wooden stairs through a narrow dark hallway that led to the butler’s pantry on the main floor. From there was access to the main hall and the long, curving staircase.
For some reason, today the tall staircase looked especially daunting to the young boy. Ordinarily, he could run up and down them half a dozen times a day. But now, as he trudged up the stairs wearily, his limbs moved in a torpid sluggishness. His head felt hot, but his hands felt icy cold. Charles remembered the expression Mathilda used repeatedly when complaining of various aches and pains as he heard the faint rumble of distant thunder and thought, “I must be under the weather.”
Charles’ destination was once again the comfort of the library. He hoped with every step that Marie had completed her chores and he would find the room empty and quiet. As Charles walked along the ever-darkening upstairs hall, he felt an all encompassing stillness and quiet, except for the interrupting howls and whispers of the tormented wind. Seeking refuge through cracks and crevices around windows and sills, and snaking its curving path along the floorboards and baseboards, the damp wind curled around Charles’ ankles like a living vine. It moaned in eerie whines that grew ever louder and moved the heavy draperies in a ghost-like rhythm, chilling every corner of the storm-darkened hall.
Charles wanted to run fast down the dark hall to gain entrance to the security and protection of the warm, firelit library. But his weak legs moved ever so heavily, as of one in a dream.
Suddenly, lightening flashed in a blinding white brilliance on the hardwood floorboards and an ear-piercing clap of thunder shook the windowpanes.
At the end of the long dark hallway the casement windows blew open to admit a damp ghostly mist that crept along the floorboards ever so slowly toward Charles. The eerie creepy menace began to rise and take form, becoming a ghostly apparition swaying in hypnotic movement, reaching out with clutching arms and clawing fingers.
Charles stood motionless, stricken with fear. Was that one of his ancestors from the family portraits coming to life? He wanted to cry out and run, but his weak, weighted legs were unable to move. He breathed heavily in short gasping breaths as his heart pounded furiously. He waited in terror in what seemed like an endless nightmare as ghastly faces in the ancient paintings lining the hall morphed and warped in distorted waves floating before his fevered eyes.
As if frozen in a hypnotic trance, his heartbeat pounded in his ears. Pound, pound, pound it went, louder and louder, until finally, after what seemed an interminable time, he was able to slide one foot ever so carefully, and then the other. As Charles inched along the hall, one small step at a time, his brave little heart mustered the courage to edge himself slowly and steadily toward the library door, nervously anticipating whatever new calamity might befall him.
