The Seahorse and the Boy
There were things in that house that she struggled to forget, even though they were, in and of themselves, perfectly ordinary, and certainly much less horrible than what she’d experienced. A framed picture of a smiling woman with a little boy who shared her face in the background, playing with plastic toys. A plaster seahorse, a tiny and not very attractive thing, like a charm pulled from a cheap bracelet - and placed carefully in a bell jar as if it was a sacred object. She didn’t know how these things and others related to the animal scream of the killer as he chased her down the hall, down the stairs, her brain frantically trying to process the environment while also operating her limbs at a speed they weren’t used to. Perhaps they didn’t mean anything at all. But she doubted it... A grandfather clock with a spiderweb crack in the glass of its door, the brass chime smeared with generations of fingerprints. A woman’s casual wear from the 1970s, housecoat and gloves placed reverently ...