Free The Wind of Southmore by Ariel Dodson

could hear it groan and sigh as it settled
itself, a last resting place. She felt sorry for it. She wouldn’t have liked to
end her days there, stabbed by a sharp tooth of stone.
    “ Is that the wreck?” Alice had woken and was trying to see out
of the narrow window behind her. “It’s a beauty.”
    “ It’s very old,” Arlen murmured quietly. “I’ve seen something
like it – once before. I can’t remember where.”
    “ Shall we go and explore it?” Alice had barely been listening.
After a good night’s sleep everything almost seemed like a very
bizarre dream, although Robbie’s accident and the argument with
Arlen played unhappily on her mind, and she was eager to make it up
to her sister.
    “ I don’t know,” Arlen said slowly. “I seem to – recognise it. I
– ” she stopped suddenly. “Come with me to the library. You’ve
never been into it.”
    “ No,” Alice agreed, and followed, rather half-heartedly, it
must be admitted. Her sights had been set on the wreck.
    Down and
down they circled, passing the thick wooden door that led to Aunt
Maud’s room at the bottom of the stairs. Not even Arlen had been in
there, and Alice couldn’t help wondering what she did with her
time. She did seem to disappear an awful lot.
    They
passed the small, cold bathroom which still required the use of
buckets of water, and stepped into the shabby hallway. It must have
been very grand and impressive once, when the castle was young, and
the people who lived in it were wealthy and cared to show it. But
now it was drab and very dark, and the shadowy portraits of
ancestors and a large, ancient tapestry peered blindly into the
gloom. They must have been young once, and bright in their fresh
oil paint and coloured threads. But the damp sea air had loved them
too well, and patches of mould had formed in the corners. The once
fine threads of the tapestry were so thin and worn that the picture
had blurred into a shapeless mass of dull greens and reds and
greys. The memories of what once must have been people hovered
palely in the background, but they could not escape their faceless
forms, and were lost, trapped in the blur. Alice shuddered. This
was not a nice place.
    What was even more depressing was the way that the hall
disappeared further down. Just vanished, for the end rooms belonged
to the part of the castle that had been destroyed, and although the
hole had now been blocked up, it was horrible to think that there
had once been more rooms and stairs and floors and people .
    Fortunately, the library was through the first door opposite,
too far in to have been caught in the mass of falling rubble all
those years ago, and it was through its tired, oak doors that Arlen
now led her sister.
    Alice
found that she was almost holding her breath. She had seen too much
television and read too many books not to have some preconceived
notion of what to expect, and her imagination was running wildly on
shining mahogany staircases, handsome oak desks and polished
leather furniture, a blazing fire, and books, books, books,
climbing the walls to the sky. Once again, she was sorely
disappointed.
    She was
led into a very wide, round room, with high ceilings and long
walls, the original of those Hollywood movie sets. But, as with the
rest of the castle, nothing had been maintained, and many of the
bookshelves had long since disappeared into oblivion. The stone
walls were glaringly bare and grey, and Alice, gazing upwards,
could see that the vaulted roof must have fallen in parts at some
point, and had been loosely patched with timber. This was not
sophisticated enough to prevent the ills of the cold and damp, and
a steady train of greenish-grey mould was slowly moving down the
walls from the ceiling in a large, unpleasant stain. Alice
shivered. This was nothing like the libraries she’d seen and used,
underfunded as they might have been. The room was chill with the
damp sea air which seeped in via the dilapidated roof, the