11 The boy

She sighed her breath hopelessly, she took it as a challenge, as if a main character in a movie with a great plot; stuck in time of the 1800s. Then a thought rushed to her mind and to her body, she quickly went down the stairs. With a little light from the lamps on the walls, her bundled hair was slowly disarranging from the jiggles of her body in a hurry to the stairs. The length of her night gown touches the ground and could possibly trip herself any moment while in the sprint down to the stair case.

Her curly hair managed to hide among the darkness of the place, it is as if the darkness is caving her in, pushing her to the void of nothingness which human sight could not ever reach, if not for the dim lights by the staircase, she would have been trembling from the mood the house gives off.

Lilith was not satisfied from what she had seen earlier in the strange door. She only seen it but have not thoroughly investigated the place yet, she wanted to search through every splint corners of the wooden room.

She opened it wide gap. The same cleaning tools, dustier material, welcomed her, let alone the cobwebs at the corners of the small room, almost like a closet. Lilith was astonished by the irony in front of her, “The cleaning tools itself is not clean at all” The dust danced to her nose until it fell to her skin that she could feel the dirtiness, and she could never stand its dust. This led her to act and clean them, herself.

She sacrificed her clean hands to be dirtied by grabbing the dusty brooms out from the closet. The buckets and rakes, the scissors and many more. When out all at once, her damp piece of cloth spread through the wooden sections on the closet when her hand met a strange lifted wooden opening by the wall of the cabinet. She tracked this opening until she pries it open out of impatience.

Why is there a hidden room in this cabinet, what is inside here, that made the loud, thumping sound, what were those scratches from. So many questions filled her head in the very moment she opened the wall of the cabinet, and what lies behind it.

A room inside the cabinet surprises her eyes. It was nothing wider than Lilith’s room, but it was enough for a human to be resting or dwelling in. She looked askance in the room’s structure. Maybe it was the darkness in the room that created a shadow figure illusion of a crutch by the side of the left corner wall.

A crutch? Her face showed the perplexity of the crutch’s existence in this room.

She stepped in the three-walled room, and there were unwanted litters by the floor that crunched beneath her shoes, it flipped Lilith’s mysophobic switch, she immediately had the rush to clean the room, but it was not what she intended to do in this new discovering. The smell clouded her nose as she went deeper to the room. The stronger it gets, the more her obsessive in cleaning awakens. But she fought that urge and kicked the junk aside out of her way.

When something moved, a darker shadow from the corner of the room shifted, although did a slight movement, Lilith noticed it across the dark room.

A rat, perhaps. But it was too much of a height to be a rat. It looked like a crouching humanoid figure in her sight, the shape of it suggests in her imagination so. Lilith approached carefully.

“Hello? Have you been living here? Are you okay?” She moved slowly to this figure, holding out her hand as a gesture of unharmful person. She was reliable, and perhaps it sensed, too, that she is. Lilith gasped when a hand shyly placed on her open palm.

Although Lilith held out her hand in hope that it will respond to her good intention, she did not expect she will be holding a hand without a ring finger.

She slowly tried to draw it out from the deep shadow to the window where the moonlight was reflected. Its limb is gradually being revealed under the blue light, until its entire body is visible. In her shock, a boy about 5’2 stood crouched before her, what’s more surprising is that this lad seems to be handicapped. Now it explains the crutch she had seen by the wall.

“What is your name, boy?”

“Stewt” he whispered, looking at her hand which he held.

“Stewt? Huh, that is one strange name, don’t ya think? Who named you?”

“Mother Ada”

Lilith dropped widely, open her jaw by this kid’s address to Ada, which Lilith could have never guessed Ada had a child all along, perhaps she did not ask her in the span of half a week living in this mansion. But oh she realized this boy’s situation and wanted to clarify more why on earth there was a small room for such a handicap boy if there is endless door rooms in this house.

Yet, in their long discussion on their way up the stair, she stayed silence regarding the scratches on the door. The clutch pounded on the wooden stair. It felt as though anymore weight, his crutch will be dug on one of the steps. He was panting, with every careful step he took beside Lilith.

“And then mother saw me stealing food by the feast table, so she had to cut this,” he waves his hand at Lilith “so I will learn my lesson”

“Did you learn your lesson, then?” she chuckled, hiding the fact that she was disturbed by how Ada disciplined her child.

“Perhaps no. Maybe that is why Papa had to lock me in there” he continued to struggle with his crutch.

Now who is this Papa this kid talks about? It seemed as if he was abused, but he has not yet realized such actions. Perhaps he has been enduring the disciplinaries since he started to walk. She could barely stand the thought of a kid being domestically abused. Knowing that Ada, the maid of the house, is this kid’s mother, her teeth grit to how kind she was to her but not to her own child.