Spirited (17 page)

I debated about ignoring the drip, but after a few moments, annoyance got the better of me. I groaned as I hauled myself from the bed and staggered through the darkened room.

Panic quickened my pulse as my fingertips fumbled over the hand-hewn beams and the grittiness of the lime mortar while I searched for the light switch?like when I was a kid and nearly freaked every night that something horrific and unseen was hiding in the darkness.
Plink.

I found the switch and flicked it on, lighting the room and blinding my eyes. The tiled floor was icy cold against my bare toes as I walked to the bathtub. I grabbed a towel from the rack and was about to place it under the faucet to soften the noise of the water, but the tub was dry.

I stood still and waited. Had I imagined the dripping?

I bent over the tub and ran my hand along the rim. Definitely dry. I must have been dreaming. Or maybe the rain had started up again.

I flicked off the light and returned to my room. The sound of the rain?the slow, steady rhythm that often reminded me of a heartbeat?always calmed my nerves. Especially when I was younger and she was having one of her episodes.

But tonight no rain fell.

I closed my eyes again. I didn’t want to think of her.

When I awoke the next morning, I ran over a mental to-do list. Saturday meant no school, but I had a million boxes upstairs to unpack, the brewery to explore, and maybe I’d catch a movie in town. I also had to study Horatio’s lines in
Hamlet
for the upcoming school production. Whatever I ended up doing, I had to get out of this place. The ceilings were too low and the dark beams too oppressive. That biting scent of hops, whether real or imaginary, made it hard to breathe, and I wanted out.

After the matinee finished, I trudged back toward the oast house. The avenue of oaks signaled the approach of the oast house, but I bypassed the drive and wandered straight through the middle of the fields.

Although the rain had held off all day, the sky remained heavy with clouds. The brewery doors were bolted closed, but I couldn’t resist taking a look inside. Just this once. I easily climbed through one of the front windows and landed with a thud on the wooden floor. I had never been inside before, and the overwhelming quiet here lingered differently from the silence in the oast house.

The brewery was in ruins. Dodging holes in the floor as I walked, I scanned the now-familiar lime plaster, most of which had crumbled off the walls long ago. High windows let the light in, but darkness pervaded the building, and many rooms remained steeped in a state of perpetual night.

Only shadowy markings remained of where the original fittings and machinery once stood, which gave the brewery the desolate look of an empty shell. What hadn’t been stolen or broken by neglect had been damaged by squatters and tramps.

I tried to make out some of the crazy writings on one of the walls, but the lighting was too low. I left the massive front rooms and wandered deeper into the brewery. I wasn’t sure if the old stairwell, or even the rotting floorboards, could be trusted, but I had the entire evening to kill.

The vast rooms seemed to grow as I wandered from one to another. Toward the back of the brewery, I found an old sign pointing to the stairs.

I glanced up the stairwell. No sunlight reached this dark corner, but something about entering the unknown thrilled me to the core. The hair on my arms rose as I ascended.

I slid my hand along the wall while my feet guessed at the next step. Finally I felt a landing underfoot and reached out my hand. My fingers grasped a doorknob, and I sighed with relief as a single shaft of pale light shone from under the door.

The door was much heavier than I’d anticipated. At first I thought it was locked, but I struggled with both hands to reach the light that would surely be waiting on the other side. Just as I was about to give up and make my way back downstairs, the door creaked under my weight and swung in.

The meager light filtering through the high windows momentarily blinded me. I took a step forward, clamping my fingers over the doorknob until my focus returned.

As I was now at the rear of the brewery, most of the space here was open plan. All the north-facing windows were boarded up. This left only the south and the west facing windows to light the room.

The space was entirely empty. And yet… And yet I got the feeling that I wasn’t alone.

I took a step backward. I scanned the space one last time to make sure I hadn’t disturbed someone living in one of the dark corners. A hazy flutter in my peripheral vision had me spinning around so fast I nearly lost my footing. I expelled a string of expletives and clutched my hand over my heart. Sweat beaded my brow, and I shook all the way to my fingertips.

“Sorry I scared you,” she whispered.

Adrenaline coursed through my veins as I stared at the girl. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

“I let you in,” she said.

I nodded uncertainly. “Do your parents know you’re here? I don’t think it’s safe to play in here.”

The girl considered me. She cast her eyes down swiftly before looking up again. “I’m Isobel,” she said quietly. “Who are you?”

“I’m Tyler. I live over there.” I pointed toward the boarded-up windows. “In the house across the fields.”

Isobel’s eyes widened slightly.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” I stammered. “I was just taking a look.”

She gave me a furtive once-over.

“It’s going to get dark soon. Maybe you should go home too.”

Isobel glanced around the room. “But I live here,” she said. “I am home.”

A million thoughts ran though my head. Was she a runaway? Was she making up stories? Was she homeless? Abandoned? What should I do?

“Do your parents know you’re here?” I repeated.

I stepped back into the light of the room and Isobel followed. She didn’t look as if she’d been living in a deserted brewery. She was dressed kind of weirdly in scruffy old clothes, but otherwise she seemed okay. Although I had to admit, I hadn’t exactly had much experience with the homeless.

“It’s okay,” Isobel assured me. “I could tell you weren’t like the others.”

“What?”

“The other people. I didn’t like them.”

“I think you should go home now,” I said. I started for the stairwell again, but Isobel stayed where she was.

“I told you,” she said, “I live here.”

Her eye contact was unnerving, and I was beginning to think she was telling the truth. I wished I knew what to do. Should I call someone? Inform the authorities? Would anyone even care? “Isobel,” I asked, keeping my voice casual, “how long have you lived here?”

She thought about it and shrugged.

“For a long time?” I pressed.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“I go to high school. I just joined the drama club. What about you? Do you go to school around here?”

Isobel shrugged again.

The setting sun streamed an orange light over the wooden floorboards and illuminated a million dust motes flying through the air. It also cast a clearer light on Isobel. Her hair was pale like the sunburnt grass in the fields, but her eyes were forlorn and as dark as the empty stairwell. She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. It was something else entirely.

~*~*~

That night as I lay in bed blindly staring up at the ceiling, images of Isobel alone in the brewery, hiding in the darkest, coldest recesses, flashed through my mind.

I’d tried to get her to leave. I’d offered to take her somewhere, but every time she had refused my help. Even though she was probably hiding out, I couldn’t forget the look in her eyes. The dullness of resignation and the spark of need. God knows, I’d seen that look before.

Earlier when I’d come inside the oast, Dad was at the table with his crosswords. I stood in front of him wondering if I should tell him there was a little kid out in our fields. When he looked up, he just said, “Dinner’s in the oven.” I knew then. He wouldn’t be able to help either of us.

Isobel was my problem.

I got out of bed and went to the window on the landing outside my room. I squinted, trying to see the brewery in the darkness, to see anything at all. The world was in shadow, and Isobel was hidden in the bleakest one of all.

As I walked back to my room, the familiar
plink, plink
from the bathroom beat out a slow and somber meter that chilled me to my bones.

I got up early on Sunday morning. I grabbed a duffel bag from the corner of my room and filled it with blankets from the hall closet. On my way out I raided the fridge and threw in a couple of bottles of water and whatever I thought a little kid might eat.

Each stride across the frosty field grass crackled as the weight of my steps snapped the frozen blades. When I reached the brewery, I tossed the duffel bag through the same window I’d entered the day before. The bag’s impact sent up a cloud of dust that greeted me as I jumped down from the stone sill.

Picking up the bag, I strode through the rundown rooms toward the stairs in the back. I placed my palm against the stone wall of the stairwell and slid my hand against its length as I climbed to the top. I knocked once on the door.

Then I waited. Not a single sound stole out from the other side of the door, no indication that anyone was even there. “Isobel,” I called. I knocked louder this time. “It’s Tyler. From yesterday.” I leaned against the door and placed my ear to the cold surface. Still I heard nothing.

The door creaked open slowly. I jumped back, so I wouldn’t fall forward. Isobel stood before me.

“May I come in?” I asked.

She smiled and stepped aside. The brewery, which had been icy downstairs, wasn’t any warmer up here. I set the bag down and unzipped it. Isobel stood over me and watched with interest as I unpacked the blankets.

“What are these for?” she asked.

“For you. Yesterday I noticed you didn’t have any. I brought you some food too.” I left that in the bag as Isobel didn’t seem interested.

She picked up one of the blankets and ran her fingers along the corner where my initials had been hand-sewn many years before. “Thank you,” she said.

I sat in the stream of light from one of the windows, and Isobel did the same. She watched my every movement like a little bird and seemed to be waiting for something startling to follow.

“We have to figure out what we’re going to do with you,” I said. “You can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Your family must be worried about you. Don’t you think we should let them know you’re okay?”

“No.” Isobel’s face fell. “We can’t.”

“Sometimes if we do something wrong, we worry that we might get in trouble. But it’s not always as bad as we first thought. If you’re hiding because you’ve done something wrong, I can talk to your parents about it. Or whatever.”

Isobel shook her head. “I don’t have any parents. Or brothers and sisters.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t any closer to understanding her than I had been the day before. “Tell me about the other people who were here. You said yesterday that there were others.”

Isobel turned away from me. “I don’t want to talk about them,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”

I leaned back against the wall and stretched out my legs. “Well, I just moved here.”

“Do you have any sisters?” Isobel asked.

I smiled. “No. It’s just me and my dad.”

Isobel tilted her head to the side. “Don’t you have a mother?”

I cleared my throat. “She’s not well.”

“Where is she?”

I didn’t usually discuss this with anyone, but Isobel leaned closer and studied me intently. She tilted her head to the other side and blinked expectantly.

“She was in a hospital for a while. She’s out now, but… well, she just needed some time by herself. So my dad and I moved here.”

Isobel lowered her gaze. “Will you leave when she gets better?”

“I don’t know. Why? Don’t you like being on your own?”

She shook her head. “I like it when you’re here.”

I had an idea. “Why don’t you come to my house? It’s right across the field.”

“I’ve been there before.”

My brows rose. “Really? I’ve never seen you around.”

“Not since you’ve been there,” she said. “Before. I don’t know when, but it was a long time ago.”

“What did you do there? Were you, like, playing?” If she was homeless, she might have been squatting in the oast house before my dad and I arrived.

“I didn’t want to go. They took me there. Then I came here.”

“Who made you go?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. She jumped up and ran toward the stairwell.

“Isobel,” I called, and ran after her. I reached the stairwell and descended to the ground floor. The room before me was empty. I marveled at her speed. I ran through the remaining rooms and out toward the front of the brewery, my footfalls echoing loudly in the empty space.

Isobel had disappeared. Had she gone out the window? I walked to the ledge and peered out over the fields. They, too, were empty, but she had to be here somewhere, hiding within the walls of the abandoned brewery. “Okay,” I called. “I get it?you’re scared. We don’t have to talk about it right now, but you can’t stay here. I’m gonna go home and think about this for a while. It’s going to be okay.”

I sighed and climbed onto the sill with one sad thought tumbling through my mind: how do you help someone when they don’t want you to?

Later that night recurring dreams tormented me. Over and over I raced through the fields, chasing Isobel and calling her name. She ran toward the brewery, but the building swayed on its foundation, threatening to collapse. As the stones crumbled, a giant haze of dust rose into the air and hovered above like an ominous storm cloud. But Isobel kept running. When I finally reached her, I grabbed her wrist and spun her around. But it wasn’t Isobel. It was my mother.

Plink.

The dripping broke my restless sleep. It seemed to be calling to me.

I stumbled out of bed and reached for the light switch, but something stopped me. Whatever spell had been cast on me and the oast house would be broken by the intrusion of light. Experience had taught me truth was best discovered in the dark.