Before There Were Angels Read Online Free

little furniture until we collected whatever Belle had put in storage when she and the twins had moved to San Francisco. The twins, of course, slowed all progress with their running back and forth across the hallways and the stairs and the kitchen, and pretty much everywhere we needed to place boxes. But eventually our possessions were thrown into the middle of rooms, the boxes were emptied and our presence there was asserted.
    What we mostly had was clothes, and we started getting them onto hangers and shoving them away into the various closets and cupboards.
    My clothes were few , but new, as I had acquired a whole new wardrobe after entering the country. New wives never like the tastes of ex-wives, and Belle had declared that they all had to go. I must admit I wasn’t too upset about it; in particular I had been glad to see the last of the pink suit that Rafaella had surprised me with at one time. The boys, on the other hand, had legacy clothes. The boys belonged to Belle. I had only recently acquired them, although you would not have known that from any of our points of view. They viewed themselves as my children, except that I could claim no automatic authority over them - a perfect situation for them; all the permission with none of the restrictions of a natural father.
    I stood in our bedroom - the master bedroom, I suppose - and juggled hangers and clothes, sliding them impatiently onto the rod in the closet that was allocated for me.
    It was fun to be there, although packing and unpacking is always tiresome. I found a hanger sturdy enough to hold up my linen trousers, a nice thick plastic one that wouldn’t dump them onto the floor as wire inevitably did. As I turned away, I noticed the back of the closet door. Etched in long thick scratches were the words, ‘I hate you’, in what looked like talon marks torn down the door.
    I held my breath.
    Someone else had been here.
    Maybe someone else was still here.
     
    Chapter 6
     
    I liked the house the most before we had fully moved in, maybe because its sparseness suggested that it wouldn’t be hard to move out again, or because a cluttered house leaves far too much stuff for ghosts to mingle with or hide behind, shadows which could be innocent, or …
    No, actually, I think it is all about respect. When you have only min imal amounts of furniture in a house, you haven’t colonized it, it isn’t yours, the house belongs to itself and its other occupants every bit as much as it belongs to you, which is the very reason people cram every inch of their houses with the accumulation of objects and repaint all their walls at the first opportunity. New houses have to be tamed and made subservient to the purposes of the new occupiers.
    I don’t see it that way. In all likeliho od, we are only passing through there for a few years, or possibly shorter. Why disrupt the pre-existing working relationship?
    I kn ow this makes it sound as if a house is alive, but it is alive, full of the ghosts of the people and events that have gone on there, and this house was more alive or - as ‘alive’ seems a strange word to choose under the circumstances - more haunted than most.
    That first night , as the boys decided to share a room, Belle and I christened the house à deux, Belle shouting out her pleasure into the ceiling several times in a way that tended to disturb the decorum and sexual sensitivities of the twins but apparently not those of the house. The streetlights cast shadows into our room, but with no hint of malevolence, and as I covered Belle, I did not feel as if I was exposing my back to daggers or icy fingers.
    Maybe the house was watching us too, judging th e peculiarities and habits of these new occupants and gauging the extent, if any, to which they could, and should, disrupt our lives.
    Indeed, w e got through almost a week without incident, making it one of the few weeks of peace we were ever to have there.
     
    *  *  *
     
    They picked on George first, or maybe