The little white house

This is an excerpt from "The Re-education of Mr. Crane" to be released Fall 2009:

The house was small, well kept and had absolutely nothing of interest about it. It was the house that its neighbors really didn't even notice was there. The nice old woman that lived there had a group of young men that would come and take out her garbage, in the autumn they would rake her leaves and in the harsh cold Arcadian winters shovel the walkway and driveway.

The house was only seen by the most intimate of visitors; postal carriers, newspaper boys and the occasional meterman. They would stroll in smelling the dead flowers and cabbage soup, remembering their own grandmothers, dismissing any sounds that they might hear coming from the basement.

They were wrong to dismiss this gray haired old woman.

They would walk out with a smile and a cookie that she had baked herself, tossing their clipboard or bag into the car they arrived in, on to their next stop. She would wave just in case they were looking back and then would allow the curtain to fall back into place, concealing what was going on inside the plain white house.

Her steps were heavier sounding then normal when going down the basement stairs, taking her time, holding the railing and taking little old lady breaths. She often turned on the lights, since the basement was such a dark and dreary place, the fluorescent light hurting her eyes as it illuminated the large space under her house.

Books. There were Books by the stack, all piled without reason or sense, throughout the basement. She had them on so many different subjects, all handbound leather with old pages and familiar smelling ink.

The doorway to the holding cell was heavy wood with hand forged hinges from over a century before. The window had little bars that were designed to be petite so that the person kept behind them could not grasp onto the entire bar with a hand. No leverage. That was why she was there. To keep things off balance, to make her dark haired prisoner question many things, none more prevalent then why he was there.

She would sit across from his cell and whisper many things from the books she read, whispering always so that his subconscious would hear, even while his waking mind was screaming and wailing.

The torment was subtle and when it came to making him doubt whether or not the torture would ever end, she had no equal.

She preferred the rocking chair, mainly to give her nerves a slight rest, rocking back and forth as she smiled at him, through the bars, past the bruises on his face. You see, his imprisonment was not caused by things he had done. No dear reader, his imprisonment was due to your trespasses...

"Don't worry boy," she said with a weak voice and soft moist eyes. "You'll be back out in the world, Granny tells you true..."