Demolition E-Book

Cora Buhlert

• Herausgeber: Cora Buhlert
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The stately mansion stood tall for one hundred years. But after the death of its last owner, the old house has been neglected and forgotten, its garden overgrown by rose bushes.When three children stumble upon the old house, it gains a new lease on life, doubling for Sleeping Beauty's castle in the children's imagination. But unbeknownst to the children, the old house is under threat, for real estate developers have no use for enchanted fairy tale castles…This is a short story of 3300 words or approx. 10 print pages.

Leseprobe

Demolition

by Cora Buhlert

Bremen, Germany

Copyright © 2014 by Cora Buhlert

All rights reserved.

Cover image: © Lio2012, Dreamstime.com

Pegasus Pulp Publications

Mittelstraße 12

28816 Stuhr

Germany

www.pegasus-pulp.com

Demolition

The big old house stood alone at the end of a long winding street on the edge of town. It had been a stately mansion once, with stained glass windows, carved double doors and a roof crowned by several small turrets. Its large garden had once been well kept, with prize-winning rosebushes, statues of white Carrara marble, ponds full of goldfish and a lawn that was always green and always cut to a length of exactly half an inch. A wrought iron fence with an ornamented gate surrounded the garden, keeping the outside world at bay.

In its glory days, the house had been a social magnet for the entire town. There had been glamorous balls in the winter, elegant dinner parties in the fall, barbecues in the summer and cheerful garden parties in the spring and everybody who was anybody in town had once walked through its wide double doors, flattered to be invited.

But then tragedy struck the old house and the family that lived there. Wars claimed sons, childbirth and disease claimed daughters and stock market crashes claimed wealth. One by one, the family had withered and died, until there was only one daughter left, a spinster who grew old and strange along with her house. She’d died a few years ago, an old woman of eighty or ninety, alone and forgotten and not even missed until the postman found her mummified body at the foot of the once grand staircase.

Ever since then, the old house had been deserted. But neglect and decay had begun to leave their traces long before. Over the years, the once white walls had turned into a weathered grey, the stained glass windows were broken in several places and the wrought iron fence had turned to rust. The prize-winning rosebushes had taken possession of the garden, turning it into a blooming jungle. The once neatly clipped lawn had turned into a meadow full of daisies and dandelions, the marble statues were overgrown with moss and the ponds had turned into shallow pools of black water, in which all the goldfish had long since died.

Nobody in town seemed to know who had inherited the house after the old lady died and nobody much cared either. The old house had simply been forgotten, left slowly rot away at the edge of town, fading from memory like an old photograph from better days.

But then, a few years later, new life suddenly filled the old house, new life in the form of Emma, Aidan and Olivia. Emma and Aidan were ten, Olivia but eight years old. They all lived further up the long street on which the old house stood, in the new subdivision of Magnolia Bluff that had sprung up on the outskirts of town some ten years ago.