The questions died away, the words fading as the memories
surged over her, until all she felt was the past, like light. It
made her happy, and she was no longer afraid. The pain faded.
The metallic taste in her mouth and the dripping of something
wet all along her body was lost and drowned out by that white,
beautiful light.
And then by the darkness.
Chapter 9
Adalynn
Welson, South Carolina was pretty much the end of the
world as far as most people were concerned. The tiny town of
less than five thousand sprawled over many acres through
endlessly diverse terrain so that the main street and the town
itself were hardly more than a handful of buildings clustered
together against the flow of time.
Time had ebbed and bled away the life of the sprawling
yellow house that belonged to another century. In 1885, it was
in its glory, freshly constructed, birthed from the land where
its foundations drew their strength. In the present day, it was
nothing more than a shambles of a structure. The exterior was
peeling paint, the shutters hung askew or were missing
altogether over what glass was left in the windows. The porch
had half fallen away, and the strange turret built alongside the
far right of the house that extended up all three stories was
domed with the red and gray of peeling shingles that had been
put up in the nineties to replace the original wood.
To anyone else, it was a pile of ruins, the wreckage of
someone’s great aspirations and dreams brought to life in the
middle of nowhere, but to Adalynn it was perfect.
She’d bought the house for eighty-seven thousand dollars.