The Boarding House - Toni Castillo Girona (fantasy novels to read .TXT) 📗

bad.”, she said, almost in a whisper.
“How could you possibly know that?”, he inquired.
She sighed.
“I've been through a nightmare lately.”
“Have you?”
“Indeed.”
He toyed with the plate for a while, not feeling hungry yet but almost. She went on:
“I was married to an English man for ten years, and I worked in the United Kingdom for almost seven out of those very ten years. I lived in a small town, a stone town as they called it: Stamford.”
He nodded.
“I see, and now you are back, is that so?”
She smiled bitterly.
“I wouldn't say that, but well, all things considered, maybe it is so.”
He looked a bit confused, so he asked her: “Where's the nightmare in that?”
“At first, I was quite enjoying my new life there, but after one whole year I got bored.”, she elaborated. Her eyes expressed sadness. “So I guess I could say I've being bored for almost six entire years.”
“What about your husband? Are you still married?”
“Not at all. I got a divorce.”, said she, triumphantly. “Now, I don't feel like going abroad any more. I want to stay here, in my home country, until the day I die.”
He started to feel a bit hungry. He stopped toying with the plate and grabbed the sandwich quickly, startling her.
“It turns out I am a bit hungry.”, he confessed, biting it.
“I knew it.”
He ate the sandwich without uttering a word; she stared at him all the time. As soon as he finished the whole thing, she smiled and said:
“Aren’t you going to tell me what the matter is?”
He shrugged.
“I don't know. Should I?”
He pondered for a while. It was starting to get late, so he had to think about going to work the next morning. He was a bit drunk, though not as drunk as he would have been in case she had served him beers all evening long, which was the very first idea, it had to be said. Thus, instead of pouring down his misery, he got up and in no time was headed home, leaving her in that bar, seated at that table, where an empty plate rested all by itself quite near to the edge; he did not come back that evening; not even the next one: it took almost an entire week until he dared to do so. She was still there, of course, because she worked there, so they met again and they had a little chat about trivial matters. This time, he did not drink beer; he contented himself by having coffee and talking openly to her. It was a relief to realize that, after so many years, he finally had found someone to talk to; from then on he walked into that bar every time and again, and all those visits converged in an actual date: they went to the cinema to watch a British film titled Never Let Me Go

, based on the novel written by Kazuo Ishiguro

; it was near its ending when a certain Miss Geraldine would say: “We didn't have the gallery to see into your souls; we had the gallery to see if you had souls at all”

. At those words, spoken so coldly, he could not help it but water his eyes; she realized that and put her left hand over his right one gently. He turned his head slightly towards her in order to look at her face. A sole tear seemed to be trapped in its way down her cheek; he made it disappear by touching it smoothly with one of his fingers; she closed her eyes almost instinctively and he wondered if his touch would be cold; her skin was warm so he did not command his finger to get away immediately: he allowed his finger to rest right there upon her skin for a bit longer instead, thinking all along if he would dare to move it far beyond her cheek, maybe all the way down her beautiful and unprotected neck. “There are no deferrals,”

said another voice coming from the film, “and there never have been.”

She opened her eyes and stared at him. The film was building up to its very ending, but that did not seem to be of any importance to them; so whilst in it Madame bid her farewell to that couple of hopeless clones by saying: “Poor creatures, I wish I could help you.”

, they kept staring at one another, not daring to make the slightest move, neither of them, until she put her head to rest against his shoulder whilst reaching out for his hand. “Stop the car; I have to get out.”

said Tommy in the film. That scream they were not prepared to cope with; so while Tommy was totally devastated, kneeling down upon that wet soil of England, they were quite in bad spirits: the ending came not so long after that intense bit; that very last sentence was actually a bitter statement: “If the lives of all those who we are supposed to save are so different from the ones we live, we are all completed.”

“I think I love you”, she said, still resting her head against his shoulder.
He smiled and kissed her on her forehead. Someone finally does

, he thought.

8

A

ccording to his landlady, that guest got published once: Walls

was his first and last novel's title. A young lady who lived all by herself went nuts after her father's death. Trapped in a small flat, she would spend her days knocking walls down whilst her terrified neighbours wandered when the entire building would collapse. That would happen eventually, of course, and all of them would perish irremediably, whilst she would become the sole survivor of the tragedy. Cheerful

, he thought. Curiously, his landlady had that book somewhere in the boarding house, because when she knew who that guest was, she decided to go buy his book.
It was a heart attack. Apart from the police and a doctor, some relatives would come to the house in order to take care of his belongings, above all his laptop, where it was supposed he would have some pages from his new work; an unfinished book, probably. His death was briefly covered by a local newspaper, and she could read some vague remark on a widespread one whose name she could barely recall. She decided no guest would stay in that room, because now it was stained with angst and sorrow; her husband could not agree more with her; therefore that room would remain closed forever. About his last novel, she did not hear a word: he was extremely careful all the time so that she rarely found his laptop switched on without him being around and, besides, she had to admit she did not give a shit: the reading of Walls turned out to be a bit boring. When she opened that door and found him laying down upon the bed, her first thought was he was somehow sedated. It would not be after calling his name twice that she would dare to have a closer look: to her panic, he was not breathing. He was laying down face up, eyes opened, arms resting upon the white sheets; the room's guest keys glowed from his cupped left hand. On the bed table, right beside the bed lamp, a paperback edition of a book written by Ian McEwan, Atonement

, with a bookmark slipped between pages 76 and 77, rested quite unaware of its owner's death. Apparently, he found something of the utmost importance in the last sentence in page 77, for he underlined it using a highlighter: She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance

. The laptop was nowhere to be seen, so she would wonder for a while where it was found in the end, and who made the discovery. Opposite the bed, standing upon a narrow marble table and in a quite impressive old vase decorated with dragons and mountains, some yellow dahlias – her preferred ones -, were withering. She hasted to get them out of that room, because it was pretty obvious to her that some odd malevolence had impregnated them, and she did not want them to die: so he put the dahlias downstairs, in her private rooms, and made some phone calls. She put them on the window-sill, hoping that some morning sun rays, slightly intensified by the filter-effect in going through the window-pane, would make them recover. Not too long after that, the boarding house would be full of strangers and she would wait outside the room, upstairs, leaning her back against the white wooden rail, worrying about her dahlias. A lot of questions would come, obviously, but there would be no further inquiries, for it was pretty evident, according to the doctor, that that guest had died of a heart attack.
When she went downstairs and she was sure there was no-one else in the house apart from her husband, she decided to check on her yellow dying dahlias. She hoped they would be better: after all she got them out of that room where only death seemed to dwell. But when she got in her private rooms, she could see that the vase was now completely empty. She heard a noise behind her, so she turned around to face it. It was her husband carrying a big blue scum bag; from there, some sterns could be seen emerging awkwardly, as if they were not just dahlias, but something else willing to escape. What have you done?

, she asked him fiercely. He could barely respond; he looked at her instead still holding that blue scum bag full of withered dahlias, hesitated, moved his head down clumsily after a while, stared at that scum bag of his as if mystified by some ancient secret, and after his first and only unsuccessful try of making up an excuse, he was headed out of the room, stumbling whilst crossing the door, right under its frame, therefore losing his balance and making the scum bag fell upon the floor. She looked down horrified at those dying dahlias, some of them now spread upon the tiled floor, for that fall had tossed them out of the bag. What have you done, for God's sake?

, she asked him once again, almost crying. But it was pointless; he would not be able to say a word, kneeling down upon the floor, trying to gather himself; she would not make a try to help him up, thus conveying him to a certain isolation he probably did not deserve at all, and so he would feel alone and lonely, and in his pain he would summon the same angst and sorrow that would dwell for years on end in that guests' room, only one storey above, and in doing so it would be more than just a wooden white door what they would decide to close forever. She would eventually get out of the room leaving those dahlias lying upon the tiled floor, squeezing up whilst getting past the door so that she could avoid touching her husband, who would cleverly resolve to stand still until she was nowhere to be seen.

9

“W

e have to trap him”, he said.
From his left, seated at the dining room's table, it came her nod. “But how?”, she demanded to know.
He sighed and closed his eyes as if hesitating, folding his arms. It was a nice morning though a bit cold. Because he had not got out of the house yet he could not know whether the cold had, in fact, something to do with that supernatural presence upstairs or, on the contrary,