The Root Cellar Read Online Free PDF Page A

she had to know, like what should she get for breakfast? Where was the front door key? What should she do if strangers came?
    A tap dripped. The wind rattled an upstairs window. A stair creaked. “There aren’t ghosts,” she told herself firmly. “Sam was right, it was shadows. Ghosts are made up for books and movies. They don’t exist.” Unbidden, the image of the girl in the upstairs bedroom flashed in her mind. A ghost? Was that why everybody had laughed? They really did not know she was there? “Impossible,” she said aloud, her eyes darting around the room. “It was shadows.”
    Silence fell once more. Under the table the cat made a chirruping sound in his throat and jumped up onto Rose’s lap. She screamed. Then she laughed shakily and began to scratch him behind his ears. She liked cats. Over the years she had befriended many hotel and alley cats. This cat was big and soft and gray. “Grimalkin is a good name for you,” Rose told him. “Lots of fairytale cats are called Grimalkin. I wonder how the Henrys found that out.” He put his head down, closed his eyes, and began to purr.
    There was nothing left to eat on the table but toast crumbs. Rose got up and searched the cupboards. She found a box of Shredded Wheat, but there was no milk. She sat down again, crushing a dry Shredded Wheat biscuit, staringglumly at the chair where Sam had sat. She had never felt so completely without comfort.
    Suddenly she remembered waking in the night and finding the glade in the bushes. She leaped to her feet and ran outside, half afraid she would discover that it had been no more real than the girl in the upstairs room.
    The back yard in the morning was full of red and yellow and brown leaves blowing in the fresh wind. Rose pushed her way through the bushes and there, where she had remembered it, was the glade, and in the hollow fence post she found the bouquet of leaves and berries she had put there in the night.
    She sighed with relief. “It’s a good secret.” She picked up Grimalkin, who had followed her, and carried him back to the house.
    For one frightening second as she opened the door she thought she saw old Mrs. Morrissay in the corner of the room, but when she looked again there was no one there.
    “This room
is
full of shadows,” she said loudly as if to dispel them by the strength of her voice. Nervously she set about exploring the house, partly from curiosity, partly because she wanted to make sure there were no ghosts anywhere.
    The rooms were all depressingly alike in their need of repair. The bedroom over the kitchen, obviously Sam’s and George’s, was fullof electrical paraphernalia, half-played games, paints, and an easel set up by the window.
    Aunt Nan’s workroom off the living room was so full of books and papers that Rose could not imagine being able to write in it. Aunt Nan’s and Uncle Bob’s bedroom at the other end of the house looked as though it might be beautiful if it were put to rights, for it was big and sunny. Upstairs, over the living room, was her own room and the other where the girl had been making the bed. It was where the twins slept.
    She looked that room over very carefully and could find nothing in its clutter of clothes and toys and electric trains to suggest what she had seen the evening before. She began to make it tidy, not because she was anxious to please the twins but because she felt that by making her own order there the room would be less likely to change itself into some other room. She folded the clothes, made the beds, put the toys and books in the big wooden box under the window. Then she made the train tracks into an elaborate pattern and set the train on it. She found the electric cord and, by the time she was really hungry, she realized the morning was over and she had spent it playing with a six-year-old’s toy trains. Uncharacteristically, she giggled. “They don’t have to know,” she told Grimalkin.
    As she came through the kitchen door she was