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Dear Readers and Followers: Recently I reread this novella that I wrote some years ago. I liked it so much that I decided to share it here in the blog. I hope you enjoy the read, and do please post comments. Thank you for reading!

Chapter 1: Arrival

            The Manor House was considered beautiful in its time.  Now it is a relic.  The rippling glass in the windows bends the sunlight into bright splotches on the wide plank floor.  Teresa stands in the parlor, waiting for Miss. Micklewhite to produce a room key from the jumble in her desk drawer.  Beyond the waving window glass Teresa can see the pebbled drive, the car park, and the rise of the steep road that led up this hill from the tacky beach town below.

            Teresa found the Manor House on the Internet.  She was looking for an inexpensive hotel near the sea in Cornwall or Devonshire.  While Cornwall had the attractions of the touristy sea towns like Fowey, and Tintagel Castle, Devonshire had the moors.  Teresa, on booking the room for a week, even had a brief fantasy about riding a horse across the moor.  This was the very same land of Jamaica Inn fame, and chilling stories of smugglers and pirates.

            Key in hand, Teresa hitches up her bag and walks around to the back of the Manor House.  Here are several additions, and in one is her suite.  There is a tiny living room, and a galley kitchen.  Up a spiral staircase are a bath and a bedroom with sloping ceilings.  Dropping her bag on a chair, Teresa opens the window and breathes in.  She can smell the oily saltiness of sea air and, from below, the rich odor of newly turned earth.  She sees a garden with paths, a bench, and even a gardener wearing a smashed felt hat and smoking a pipe.  So perfectly British.  Teresa is charmed.

            The water heater and the electricity require pound coins to perform their magic.  Teresa checks her purse and counts five pounds.  She hopes they will be enough to keep her in light and hot water until tomorrow.  Pocketing her key, Teresa returns to her car for the groceries.  Milk, a loaf of bread, eggs, tea, sugar, apples, and a tin of biscuits should last her for a day or two.  Tomorrow she will take the tour of the Manor House.  It opens at ten a.m.

         The sun is slanting low through her window.  Teresa shuts it tight.  She takes two pounds and puts one in the slot on the water heater and the other she drops into the electric meter.  As the sun sets, she has some tea and biscuits while she waits for the water to heat.  She runs the bath and slides into deliciously hot water.  She is reading her Country Living magazine when there is a loud click and the lights go out.

            “Oh, shit!” Teresa mutters into the darkness.  She can see nothing at first.  After a minute or two her eyes adjust with the help of the faint light from somewhere outdoors.  She steps out of the bath, wraps herself in a towel, and feels her way to the door.  She knows the stairs are somewhere to the left.  Sliding one foot forward, then the other, she moves in the manner of an arthritic ice skater across the landing.  With her hands waving like insect antennae, she finally whacks the top of the stair rail with her wrist.  Teresa tries to picture the spiral staircase, but she can’t remember which way it turns.  It is even darker, if possible, in the stairwell as she creeps her toes to the edge of each step before lowering herself down.  She negotiates the turn successfully.  When her right foot feels a cool, wide piece of wood, she thinks she is at the bottom.  She steps out with her left and falls forward down the last two steps.

            Teresa slams on to the floor with a bone-cracking crash.  Her shoulder hits something.  Later she will know it was the leg of the coffee table.  She lies splayed on the floor, disoriented.  Every single body part hurts.  I’m too old for this, she thinks.  It’s one thing to fall when you’re a child, another when you’re sixty-three.  She doesn’t know where in the room she has fallen.  Wiping tears from her eyes, she is just able to make out the red glow of the water heater when the lights go back on.  She hears laughter, a woman’s voice, from the room next door.

            Hours later, bruises iced and with a flashlight beside the bed, Teresa falls asleep.