The Lady In The Attic

The Lady In The Attic

By Paul McCann

It was a cold winters night and he went upstairs to bed in the attic and quickly got under the blankets to try and get warm , it was in the days before air-conditioning , or central heating , The attic was always cold with snow and frost covering the rooftops at night.  

As he went to draw over the curtains he noticed the mist that had fallen down allowing no vision of the houses and streets outside . He got into bed and closed his eyes but in a quiet contemplation of the day that had been . He had lost a few close friends in the rioting on the street . The peace that once was had left the city and now there was turmoil every day .It was hard to adjust for a lad of his age to the unrest and there was nothing that could change the way it was .

His thoughts were broken by the sounds of cats crying from the back alleyway outside  . They sounded like banshees wailing and the more that they cried the more he began to think that somebody close to him might have died .

He tried to block out that thought and tried making excuses for the sounds of the cats t6hat were crying thinking to himself , maybe the cats had cut their paws walking over the broken glass over the tops of the back yard walls or maybe it was the cold winds or even they could just be hungry and were crying to be fed  and suddenly the all the crying stopped and there was a silence .

.Then outside his bedroom door he heard whispers followed by a knock upon the door and then she appeared from nowhere , right in front of him there in the corner of the room .She stood in the corner of the room facing him .

A shroud covered her body that was shimmering with light and when he saw her, he tried to scream but his voice was locked in his throat , in fright he hid under the blankets out of sight from the lady in white . Then outside he heard a few gunshots that continued and ended up in a sporadic gunfight that went for a while .

Although he was scared, he had to  have another look to see if the lady was still there in the corner .

He peeked out from under the blankets and saw she was gone .

Somehow, he felt a little sad that she was not there .

The next day he told his family about the lady he saw in the attic but they dismissed it as him having a  dream but he knew different . It was as real as real could ever be .

From that day he was reluctant to return to his attic bedroom however it was the only room where he could sleep because there were many people in his family and he was the only one with a room of his own . So, he thought twice and returned to the attic .

That night he went to bed but he couldn’t sleep because on the outside a wild wind was howling then some dogs started barking in the middle of the night and it was too hard to sleep . He tried to relax and calm down and imagined he was a stray cat outside in the alley alone on a cold winters night under the full moon .

Then the sound if the bitter wind blowing increased and suddenly it stopped and he saw the lady in white standing there looking at him . She never spoke  a word and he watched as she disappeared into thin air .

He sat up in bed and thought to himself ,

This isn’t right , how can I explain again to people who don’t believe me.

He knew what his eyes had seen and just like that , suddenly his eyes closed and he fell fast asleep .

In the morning outside the ground was covered with snow . He wasn’t all that eager to get out of his nice warm bed but with only a week of school left to go before Christmas holidays he was inspired by the joy of the Christmas season and got dressed for school  .

As he walked to school the streets were littered with broken bottles and pavement slabs from the daily rioting .Some of the small parlour house had been burnt out and boarded up with wooden sheets .There was an uneasy silence on the streets like a retreat from the madness .

Suddenly a sniper started firing from a rooftop. He felt the bullets skimming past his ears . As he instinctively fell to the ground for cover, he noticed a lady who walked past was hit by a snipers bullet and she fell to the ground and landed on top of him . where he lay . Her lifeless body lay there m covering him from further snipers fire .

When the shooting stopped peace fell around the place .

He tried to adjust to what had just happened sitting up and in front of him was the lady who had been killed .

He stayed with her until an ambulance came .

In shock he watched as the medics covered the lady in a white sheet and put her inside the back the ambulance before making sure he was ok .

When he went home he told his parents about what had happened and they informed him that the next day they wouod all be leaving the house never to return . A week later he all his family got out of the country to start a new life in a land far away   .

The End