Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 21: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HAUNTED SUMMER 21 way up in terror, it wasn’t quite so frightening—at least not in the daytime. (I’ve not been up there at night to this day.) It was a long, sunny room, divided by a partition, and all the beds were along the walls for when more relatives came. I can’t think who the more relatives could have been; it was during the depression and all the relatives anybody ever heard of seemed to live in the big house or in one of the tenant houses around it. But, anyway, they stayed ready. Sometimes my grandmother would put preachers up there who had come to revival meetings. But usually they were empty. On one side of the partition were trunks; Aunt Phemie’s trunk with all her dead clothes in it; Uncle Hamilton’s trunk with his name and regiment painted on it from the last war; two trunks full of the Harvard Classics; a trunk full of my Aunt Tolly’s old ruffly clothes and parasols and big hats—she never threw anything away; a trunk full of big written-in books that looked old and legal; and some letters with faded ribbons, and brown ink that had once been blue. There were lots of letters, but no love-letters; that’s what I was looking for. ‘They all seemed to be about property. All my aunts ever talked about was property, so I guess that’s all the family ever wrote about, too. ‘There were several other trunks, but I couldn’t get them opened. The locks were too good. On the other side of the partition was an old white wash-stand, a small bed with a bright patchwork quilt on it that my grand- mother had made, and a chair—a rocking-chair, its seat very close to the floor. On the wall was a large framed picture of the Prince of Wales holding a Scottie in his arms. My Aunt Amelia had cut it out of a magazine when she was in love with the Prince of Wales, but after she got over it, it was moved to the attic, and everybody forgot about it but me. I used to go and look at it, seeing a lot of things about him that were different from ordinary people. So all these things were why I went to the attic sometimes, even if It did watch me climb the stairs. All the things I dis- covered in the haunted summer after I wasn’t allowed in my grandmother’s room to read what Aunt Pinkie called “ those trashy books.” She was standing in the doorway. of the attic partition. I was aware of her as my head rose above the floor level, as I sneaked up to the attic one day. My heart bounded out of me like a frightened frog. It hadn’t been an it at all. It wasa She. My eyes slowly travelled up to her face, fascinated with horror, half expecting no face to be there. comiclooks.comn