Walking through the early morning mist, I remember years ago thinking I was walking on clouds. When the mist was higher it would wrap itself around me pulling me to the old mansion.
It all started with a dare that I could not refuse: entering the local haunted house. I pulled the board from the entrance and an earthy musty smell raced out, as though it had waited too long to escape, and disappeared into the undergrowth. Opening the entrance further, I caught my first glimpse of the damage inside. Stairs were misshapen, lurching this way and that. Rustling erupted, balls scurried into the depths away from the light. Once inside the dust swirled around my feet and a breeze caressed my cheek like fingers, but I didn’t feel threatened.
That was the start of my friendship, if you can call it that. There was a sadness about the place, as I wandered through the ground floor avoiding the rotten floorboards. Each room was larger than my whole house, and such high ceilings, their former glory on show. The walls were stained with graffiti here and there: a total ruin. I continued through, looking in any cupboards I came across. Hidden in the back of one of them was a beautiful carved box. Inside it I first met Angeline. Well, I found her treasures: dolls, drawings of animals and a book with her name inscribed in elegant handwriting, copperplate I think:
Angeline Mary Constance Ballard, in the year of our lord 1891.
I sat on the floor reading her book, dust settling. Suddenly a tap on the shoulder made me jump. I looked round, nothing, then a faint tinkle of childish laughter made me laugh too. I tried talking to her now and again, the dust blew in my face, then the laugh. On reading about her life, there was melancholy in her words, an only child, no playmates, only servants for company.
That started me coming quite regularly to talk to her. Occasionally I would see the house in its heyday and a small girl, black hair neatly plaited, with large brown eyes with a wistful look. Probably my imagination but it comforted me that maybe I was making her happy in spirit, that maybe she did now have a friend.
