Dec 11, 2018 6 min read

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¦ CHAPTER FIVE

The attic

The story so far: Sally is intrigued by the picture hanging over her bed of a girl with a doll and by her mysterious disappearance. Now Sally has a cold, and Aunt Sarah will not permit her to go outside – or up to the dusty attic.

Sally wandered into the big parlor that she had glimpsed the night before through the bead curtains.

“I’m going out for a short time,” called Aunt Sarah. The door opened to let a flood of sunlight into the hall, then closed with a soft thud as darkness returned. Sally ran to a window and peeked out. She watched her aunt’s profile, beneath a black hat, sail grimly along over the tops of the bushes.

Sally turned and faced the room. “I’m all alone,” she said aloud. How very big the house felt suddenly. Sally sat down on a small flowered stool in front of the fireplace. As she did so, she heard again the tiny tremble of music she had heard the night before. And her eyes found, between two velvet-draped windows, what must be the melodeon.

Sally walked over to it. A very pretty and graceful instrument, it resembled a small piano. Its wood was highly polished and smelled faintly of lemon. She shyly touched one of the yellowed keys, and the tinkly musical note flew lightly about the room.

She turned to look at the rest of the room. Most of the furniture was upholstered in some kind of velvet, worn dull in spots and shiny in others. The wood that framed many of the chairs and love seats was carved with flowers and bunches of grapes. Maybe it looked like this when the other Sally lived here, Sally thought.

Two tall cupboards with rounded glass fronts stood against one wall. Sally walked across the room to peer into them. One was a jumble of huge seashells, pink, violet, bone white. The other held a set of teacups and saucers, and beside them was another set exactly the same, except that these were doll-sized. She wondered if they had belonged to the other Sally, and she longed to touch them, but did not dare open the cupboard. One of the tiny cups, she could see, had lost a handle.

Sally moved restlessly on, with an odd feeling that she was looking for something. “The doll!” she finally whispered. “I wish I could find the doll!” What if the doll was still in the house? What if she could find her? What if she explored the whole house, even-the word attic flashed into her mind and her thoughts went bounding up the stairs, to a mysterious place that Aunt Sarah had called dusty and dirty. But hadn’t Aunt Sarah said something else about the attic, the night before, in her room, something about the old things in the picture being stored in the attic?

Aunt Sarah said not to go up there, she told herself. But she only said I’d “better not.” That isn’t exactly the same, is it? I’ll hurry and I won’t hurt anything. I’ll just look. This might be my only chance.

Sally could feel the huge attic yawning far, far above her, beneath the tall trees that shaded the house. And she shivered. Attics were full of black shadows and queer shapes, especially strange attics-especially forbidden attics.

But she found herself at the bead curtains.

She pushed through them into the hall. Her knees were shaking, but she made herself go on, up the long stairway.

Sally did not notice, as she made her way up the winding staircase, that Shadow was following close behind. She was hurrying, sometimes taking two steps at a time, for there was no time to lose. Aunt Sarah might return at any moment.

As Sally stepped onto the carpet of red flowers in the upper hall, she took a deep breath and opened the first door that she came to.

A wooden stairway showed faintly. It rose steeply up from the doorway and disappeared into the deeper darkness above. Sally’s knees began to shake again, and she would have scurried back downstairs had it not been for the doll. She might be up there, she told herself. She might.

There was a light switch on the wall, and Sally clicked it on. A dull, watery light appeared above her. Heart pounding, she started up the stairs. Suddenly something soft brushed against her leg. She was so startled that she scarcely kept herself from falling. She stood there in a panic, not knowing which way to go, and then she saw that it was Shadow, who had run ahead of her. Sally could hear him moving around, bumping across the attic floor. Nothing else at all was moving in that great, silent house. She took another deep breath and continued to the top.

The tiny windows high up on the walls were so covered with dirt and cobwebs that it seemed the sun must never get through them. A tall mirror, leaning against an old chest of drawers, reflected a dusty picture of herself, looking quite lost and bewildered beneath the heavy cobwebs which hung like gray lace from the rafters. Sally began to walk around the attic, peering into corners, behind old bureaus and broken cupboards, and chairs and sofas with the stuffing leaking out.

Pushed back against the walls were a number of old-fashioned trunks, some tall and thin, with fancy golden keys protruding from their fronts. Others were squat, their rounded tops edged with brass.

Just then, a finger of sunlight managed to make its faltering way through a tiny space in one of the cobwebbed windows. It shuddered across the attic and fell on a trunk, lighting up a small brass rectangle attached to the front of its rounded lid. Sally walked to the trunk and peered down at it. She bent closer, and rubbed at the dust that coated the little brass plate. “Sally,” it said.

As if in a dream, she reached out and lifted the trunk’s heavy lid.

NEXT WEEK: The diary