Lost Souls

2

The Rusk family stood at the bottom of the spiral staircase, looking up at dozens of heavily polished steps leading to the rooms above.

"Some one's spent a lot of time on their knees polishing all those," Katie said softly to no one in particular.

"Probably me now though," her mother responded ruefully.

Katie offered her a warm smile. She was glad of any conversation as lunch had been a fairly quiet affair with hardly any words passing between the family. Alex had cheered up after his third glass of cola, and Amber had nodded for a while on her dad's lap. Katie and her mum had cleared the plates, and hurriedly washed, and left them drying once everyone had finished eating, and now with the daylight fading fast, everyone had decided it was the right time to explore the rest of the huge house.

"Right then guys," her father said. "Race you all to the top." Before anyone could reply, he'd sprinted away.

"Come on kids, we can't let him beat us," their mum yelled, as she too hurriedly bounded up the stairs two, three at a time.

"Parents huh!" Alex muttered, as he took hold of the banister and slowly began to pull himself up the stairs.

Amber had grabbed Katie's hand the moment her mother had started her dash to catch her father, and now she was leaning her head against Katie's side. "I'm too sleepy to run anywhere now," she said, as she stifled a yawn.

Katie tilted sideways and kissed Amber's head. "It's been a long day sweetheart. Shall we just take our time reaching the top?"

Amber squeezed her hand in reply and together they started the climb.

As the stairs creaked beneath their feet, Katie noticed how dusty the old paintings that decorated the walls were, and hoped someone had been arranged to come and clean them, otherwise she knew she'd be given the task. At their old house, all the children had been given various jobs to earn pocket money, and hoovering and dusting, much to her annoyance had been Katie's.

The canvases ranged from old country scenes, with farmhouses, fields filled with sheep and cows, to hunting pictures, in which men rode gigantic horses through lush pastures of yellows and greens in pursuit of their invisible quarry.

Katie was passionately against such pastimes, and as an animal lover she subconsciously hoped their prey had escaped capture.

Several oil paintings showed Dovecot Manor through the centuries, and in one the house actually looked far prettier than she could ever have imagined. It had clearly recently been built, and the stones were a far lighter shade of grey, with no signs of the weather beaten damage they showed now. Flower beds surrounded the driveway splashing colour to the otherwise drab gravel, and three ornate water features could be seen in front of the house, one sending a huge tower of water, at least ten feet high in to he air, before it came crashing back down into the dark green, moss filled water below. Drapes of lavender were hanging in the windows, and outside two men were on their knees pruning rose bushes that had bloomed into beautiful red, pink and white blossom.

In sharp contrast to the scenes of beauty, hanging between the paintings hung rifles from various times throughout history, and Katie wondered if they were from the periods represented in the hunting scenes? Reaching up to run her fingers carefully over a gun's barrel, she also wanted to know if they were valuable antiques, and whether they could still be fired. She could picture her father and Alex standing on the low wall at the foot of the rear garden firing at anything that moved, and hitting nothing. She grinned at that thought, before becoming aware of the tiny fingers digging into her flesh.