The Humming Room Read Online Free Page A

The Humming Room
Book: The Humming Room Read Online Free
Author: Ellen Potter
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woods, dropped into a strange cavernous room, and then left all alone.
    Roo collapsed on the floor and began to cry. Her sobs were awful—the agonized tears of old sorrows and sorrows too new and raw to understand. She jammed her wrist in her mouth and bit it to make herself stop, but she succeeded only in turning her sobs into a muffled wail. She cried and cried until, quite suddenly, the tears stopped. She lifted her head. Through bleary eyes she gazed around as if trying to remember where she was. Her fingers slipped into her jacket pocket and closed around the green snake. Snorting back mucus, she shook her bangs out of her eyes, and went out into the hallway. She paused to listen. There was only silence.
    Cautiously, she started up the hall, noting things along the way. The right side of the wall was covered with fresh Sheetrock, the screw heads still showing. The other side of the hall was painted a soft blue. There was an open door just past her bedroom. Peering in she found a smallish room with no furniture. The wooden floors were stripped down, dull, and pale and waiting for varnish. Up ahead, the hallway took a sharp turn. Everything here was different, as though she suddenly had stepped into another building. The right-hand walls still had the bare Sheetrock but the walls on the left were a liver color, peeling and grimy. The floors didn’t gleam as they did down the other hallway. Here they were scarred and worn, beneath a ceiling that dripped bare lightbulbs. The temperature had plummeted too, as though not even the heat wanted to linger here.
    Was this the east wing, where she was forbidden to go?
    She stood very still for a moment, listening. No, not listening exactly. It was more like sensing. She tested places in this way. In some places the air felt very full. These places smothered her; too many people came and went. She preferred the places where the air felt wispy, where everything passed through lightly and carefully. The crawlspace beneath the trailer had been like that. The dirt floor showed the occasional pinprick footprints of mice or the smudged ripple of a snake, but that was all.
    This place, though, was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. The air was dead, as if all living smells had been deliberately scoured away.
    She pushed on the doorknob of the first room she came to. This room was full of ancient, wicker-backed wheelchairs. Heaped on one of the wheelchairs were several white smocks, yellowed with age. There were three other doors in the hallway, one an old bathroom with its plumbing ripped out, and the other a room so tiny it could only have been some sort of closet.
    The last door in the hallway wouldn’t open, but Roo could feel that it wanted to. She leaned all her weight against it. It budged a little but still would not give way. Holding the knob, she drew back and gave the door a sharp kick. With a crack the door flew open, and an acrid smell hit Roo’s nostrils, layered with the parched odor of dust. The room was large and painted the same awful color of the hallway, but there were curtains with a childish pattern of yellow and red rocking horses, faded where the sun hit it in the center but still bright along the edges. Lining two walls were a half-dozen iron bed frames, painted white, with no mattresses. The beds were small. Child-size. There was a washbasin in one corner, and a beadboard cabinet against the far wall. That was all. Except for the smell.
    This must have once been part of the children’s hospital, she thought.
    She walked over to one of the beds and ran her hand along the cold metal headboard. She sat on the bare springs and bounced a few times, listening to the squeak and breathing in the smell of rust. From this perch her sharp eyes slid across the room, studying every inch. She had learned that if you concentrated on anything long enough, the hidden things would show themselves. Sure enough, at the far end of the room, beneath a
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