Every House Is Haunted Read Online Free PDF Page B

though. I was too busy gaping at the Professor standing in the doorway, his cheeks rosy as polished apples, the breath fuming out of his mouth in great frosty plumes.
    “Someone has to see it,” he gasped. “So I know I’m not crazy.”
    He did look a bit crazy, I had to admit. His eyes had the thousand-yard stare you sometimes see in fishermen who have spent their entire lives working on the sea. The eyes of someone who is looking at everything and nothing at the same time.
    I was reaching down to retrieve the box of powdered milk when he grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the door. I managed to grab my wool cap off the kitchen table, and then we were outside, headed into the woods.
    The dead, naked branches of maple and white birch raked at us like long, bony hands, making harsh scraping sounds against our coats, while our feet kicked through ankle-deep drifts of humus, decaying leaves with bright colours long faded. A branch snagged the wool cap out of my hand. I started to turn back for it and was almost pulled off my feet.
    “No time,” the Professor said in a low, desperate voice. Then he uttered a shaky, distracted laugh. “What am I talking about?”
    I couldn’t answer that question, and it seemed he couldn’t, either.
    We walked for a long time. The overcast sky grew darker by slow, almost imperceptible degrees. The smell of the leaves was almost overpowering. To me it was the smell of seasons dying.
    The Professor began to speak. I couldn’t hear everything he said, and the things that I could make out didn’t always make sense. He said there were places in the world where it was like summer all the time, and spring, and winter—
but not autumn
. Oh no, he said, there was no place in the world where it was like autumn all the time. That’s what made it special.
    I began to feel afraid. It was getting dark and I was alone in the woods with a strange man who was dragging me God-only-knew where. I could feel the sky pressing down on me. The trees crowded in like co-conspirators in my own abduction. I wanted to leave, I wanted to go back home to my mother.
    I was breathing rapidly and I eventually became aware of a smoky smell in the air. Up ahead the trees became less dense and it looked like one of them was on fire. But there was something strange about it. Something I couldn’t pinpoint right away.
    We broke into the clearing and stared up at it—an enormous elm with a thick trunk and branches that curved upward like the arms of a candelabrum. It was not like any tree I had ever seen before. It was almost artificial, like a piece of art—a concept that became even more cemented in my mind when I realized the flames which engulfed it weren’t moving.
    Something finally clicked in my head. It was like one of those migraine-inducing three-dimensional paintings where you have to sort of cross your eyes to see the hidden image.
    There was no smoke because the tree wasn’t on fire.
    What I had at first taken to be flames were in fact leaves. The tree hadn’t lost them yet, which was strange in itself, but made even stranger by the intensity of the colours themselves. Starburst yellows, candy-apple reds, and oranges as bright as the vests worn by the hunters who regularly tromped through these woods in search of deer and moose. They were almost too bright to look at.
    “How . . .” I began.
    The Professor shook his head.
    “
When
,” he corrected me, and placed his hand on the rough, almost ornate, bark. “And the answer, my boy, would be autumn. Forever autumn. Right here. In this spot.”
    He was exultant, almost reverent, like a priest who has come upon the very first church ever constructed. I thought he would fall on his knees and pay worship to the tree. For a moment I thought I might, too.
    “Can you imagine it?” he breathed, staring up into the conflagration of leaves. “A place where it’s like this all the time?”
    I didn’t want to imagine it, not then.
    It’s hard to explain