The Buried Book Read Online Free Page B

from under the deck and into the field on the opposite side. Badger? He shivered wondering what else might be living under there. He pounded his foot on the first step and jumped back, waiting. A bird flew out from its nest up under the porch roof. That was it.
    Jasper tested the first step with his weight and then the next and next until he was tiptoeing across the porch toward the open front door. A bouquet of dead flowers hung from a wire above the door knocker. They fell apart at his touch. The door hung crooked from its one good hinge. The heavy wood wouldn’t budge.
    “Hello?” he called out, poking his head through the narrow gap between the door and jamb. It was rude to enter a house uninvited. He waited for several seconds, but no one answered. He turned sidewise and slipped through the broken door into the front room.
    Inside, the smell of smoke still hung in the air. The floorboards were largely intact except for the ones near the burnt openings in the walls. He kept wide of the blackened boards, taking four tentative steps inside, half expecting to fall through. The cracked window glass rattled, and the boards creaked as he inched his way from the vestibule into a dining room. Several broken chairs lay strewn across the floor. Sunlight filtered in through the tarry grime, casting a brownish glow over everything. The shadow of a table big enough to seat sixteen men still lingered on the damaged rug. He could almost hear the workmen laughing and the clink of silverware on plates as he walked past a chair. The bird had returned to its nest in the porch rafters and chirped at Jasper through the hazy window.
    On the other side of a narrow corridor, he found a kitchen twice as large as the one where Aunt Velma did her baking. A huge cookstove with six burners stood in the corner. Its kindling bucket was still full. In the opposite corner, an old icebox stood open and empty. Everything else was gone. All the dishes and the pots and pans had been taken from the hanging racks and shelves. The washtub was gone. The plaster walls were blackened with smoke, but none had been eaten away by flames. Jasper looked back at the cookstove. It didn’t seem to have been touched by the fire. He ran a hand over the dirty glass in the back door and looked out to see flowering weeds growing through the slats in the porch.
    At the opposite corner of the kitchen, a set of steep stairs led up to the attic. They were covered in fallen leaves and debris from the trees outside. A ray of sunlight came pouring down the steps through a hole in the roof above. Jasper stared up at a piece of sky that had no business being inside the house.
    It wasn’t a good idea. The floor at the bottom of the stairway was littered with animal droppings and mud. Warning bells rang between his ears as he mounted the first step. The handrail held steady when he tested it. He gripped it hard and took another step. He shifted his weight slowly from foot to foot as he went, listening for a fatal crack, waiting for a step to give way. None did, and step by creaking step he made it to the top.
    The roof rafters were black where they hadn’t fallen away. Some hung in broken splinters or were cracked at their middles, and others had collapsed completely onto what remained of the attic floor. Through the ripped-open roof, Jasper could see out over the fields that stretched from the west side of the house for over a mile until they reached the sky.
    He watched his feet as he stepped away from the stairwell, testing the floorboards one at a time. On the opposite side of the attic, away from the missing rafters, he found what was left of two beds tucked under the eaves of the house. The blackened mattress covers bled white feathers onto the ground. He took a few tentative steps toward them and could see that some small creature had piled the stuffing into a makeshift nest in the far corner. It might be a raccoon, he realized, stopping in his tracks. Raccoons are mean