Home > The Magical Life of Lola Bloom

The Magical Life of Lola Bloom
Author: Adriana Barros

Chapter One

 

To Make Your Ears Fall Off

 

It wasn’t even ten o'clock that Sunday morning when the blue and white train whistled, cutting into the silence of King's Barn Yard Street. The tracks shook, covered by melted snow, the result of an unusually warm sun. Skipping through those water puddles in the grass without getting our feet dirty was the type of thing kids come up with for fun. For sure, it was the best idea to ward off the sleepy feeling hovering through the neighborhood. That's exactly what a little boy with a rosy skin was doing, until he got a warning from his mother who watched him from a few feet away.

“David! Get out of there, now!”

Just as quickly, he jumped out of the puddle and joined his family - father, mother, and a teenage sister. It was a rare sunny day in winter-battered city. Soon the street would be full of locals enjoying the daylight. But it was a different reason that brought this family to Majorna. After a long flight from Boston to

, Rodrigo, a good-looking man with dark brown hair, had arrived with his family to go straight to the funeral of his lonely elderly mother, who had lived in the same house more than fifty years. He had moved to the United States two decades before and rarely came back for a visit, hardly contacting those left behind. His children had never met his family in Sweden.

He was still at the ceremony when someone handed him the keys to the old house - 80 King's Barn Yard Street, just five blocks away from the cemetery. That’s all there was left from his past - an old, lifeless house.

They walked to that address. Facing the house from their place on the street, the family couldn’t help but notice that a painter had not been there since it was built, a long time ago. Some pieces of wood were hanging from the front of the house that once had a color of brown earth, today it was looking like clay. Through an easy-to-jump gate, even for a child, they could see a pile of wet foliage mixed with newspapers that no longer fit within in a mailbox that was falling apart, full of paper market ads. There is no way to tell why people insisted on leaving those papers there. The couriers probably were betting on the day that poor mailbox would fall to the ground, or someone maybe a little impatient would set fire to the property.

They still could see some white on the roof, a vestige of the last snowstorm. They also could see the round window of the attic.

“This is the house where I was born. It has been on the family since my parents came from Florida.”

“Dad, why have we never come here before?”

“Well, son. Those few times I came to town was only for work. I always had to postpone the family trip because it was too expensive. But now here we are, for the worst possible reason,” Rodrigo replied, his heart heavy with remorse.

“Let's go in. Watch your step.”

He went first upon the stone stairway leading to the door, followed by the rest of the family. He had to push the door a little, jerking his shoulder against it, but the front door finally swung open with a thin welcome creak that echoed inside the house. It had a cozy warmth to it. Walking carefully, they entered one by one and began to pay attention to the rooms filled with the past. Rodrigo could still smell the same yellowed wallpaper that had been there since he left Sweden.

The wooden floor had signs of time. The furniture was the same as when he left the house to study abroad. All the same, the old leather armchair in front of the TV, the dirty aquarium by the window, the frilly curtains made by his mother. It seemed that time hadn’t passed inside that house, if not for the scattered dust. The kitchen was very close to the entrance, at the right. On the left side was the living room, at the back, the stairs with a very old automatic chair that led to the upper floor, where the bedrooms were. Rodrigo began telling stories of his childhood while observing the details. His wife, Linda, listened fondly as she walked through the vintage kitchen. David, the little boy, found a toy in the backyard and stayed out there. Ellen, a pale teenage girl with long blond hair, decided to follow her father trying to show some interest in that so-boring Sunday. She was staring at a spider, which was smaller than a button rising the peeling wall of the room, when she was suddenly interrupted by a creak of wood from upstairs. She looked at her father, but he was too emotional to hear anything, so she decided to go up to see what was there. Stair by stair, she reached the next floor. There were four closed doors in a cold and dark hallway. She waited a few seconds but heard nothing. It could have been a noise coming from outside. As she turned around to go downstairs again, she heard a second creak from the last door. Now, she was sure the noise was from within.

She felt trapped between curiosity and fear. Curiosity won, for sure. She took a breath, trying to inhale some courage and walked to that last door that had a wooden lotus blossom pendant. She hovered for a moment. The silence in the house was chilling. Ellen could hear her own breath. Horror movies usually happen at night, so since it was still morning and the sun would take a few hours to set, there was no danger, she thought.

When she opened the old wooden door, it was only an abandoned room. A veil of dust from the window light showed a torn old curtain. There was a bookcase with lots of books, a rusty dressing table, a single bed and a wardrobe leaning against the peeled wall on the other side. The silence of the room was broken by a hollow knocking inside the wardrobe. The girl took a step back, then immediately some steps forward. She walked carefully until was facing the wardrobe door and turned the knob cautiously. Before she could open, the door was pushed from the inside, surprising Ellen so she almost fell on her back.

“MEOW!”

When it saw a crack of light, the two-color cat, half beige with a purple eye, half black with an orange eye, jumped eagerly for his freedom. With her heart pounding and one hand over her mouth, the girl held back a scream. Wide-eyed, she stared at the cat walking away, which before it left the room, stared back at her as if to say something. Its gaze was like a stone. Then it just hurried down the hallway.

“Ellen, everything ok up in there?”

“Yeah. Yes, dad, it was only a weird cat, I think.”

It disappeared. She looked around the hallway, but it wasn’t there. Maybe it was already out of the house, cats are fast animals.

Ellen returned to the bedroom and the silence was interrupted once more, now by her brother's laugh coming from the backyard. She was now breathing lightly with relief. She closed the wardrobe door and walked in the direction of the dirt-misted window. As she took the last step beside the bed, she heard a different crack on the floor below her feet. She stepped more firmly and noticed that the floorboard was loose, it could be easily removed. She bent over, took her gloves off and pressed her fingers to be able to move the board out of its place. Looking closer, she saw that it was a dusty space about the size of a shoebox, which kept one, two, three books, one of each color, as old as the rest of the house. She set the board aside, sat down, and took the first one from the pile. She swung her gloves a few times to dust off the first volume with its faded blue cover, leather tips, and rivets. There was no title on this book. Going through it, she saw that the pages had been a little ruined by time. From the first page, she could tell it wasn’t a common book but some type of diary.

 

“This diary This story belongs to Lola Bloom - Gothenburg, 1965.”

 

Lola was the name of an aunt she had never met. Her father wasn’t exactly interested in keeping in touch with the family he had left in Sweden. She didn’t know anything about her aunt.

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)