Seeders: A Novel by A. J. Colucci Read Free Book Online Page B

insisted on comfort and luxury.
    Sean was sitting on the parquet floor at the foot of a bookcase that covered an entire wall. He was surrounded by piles of old clothbound books pulled from the shelves, some of George’s favorite authors: Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Dickens. He’d loved poetry and there were collections by Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and beatnik poets who were part of the British revival in the sixties: Roy Fisher and Allen Ginsberg.
    Isabelle sat down beside Sean and rested her chin on his shoulder. She wrapped her arms around him and angled her head to read the title of the book in his hands, Captain Courageous. “Oh, that’s a good one.”
    He curled up his legs and rested against Isabelle’s chest like a baby, never taking his eyes off the page. His hand reached back and stroked her cheek. It was how they spent many evenings after the accident when there were so many sleepless nights. She kissed the top of his shaggy hair and made a mental note to give him a trim as soon as they got home.
    Isabelle knew the books would occupy Sean for hours, so she got back on her feet and continued the house tour, moving under the ornately sculpted archway into the great hall near the bottom of a curved staircase. Upstairs were six bedrooms that would have to be explored later. For now, she carried on with the inspection of the ground floor, peeking behind doors. A laundry and maids’ quarters were both empty except for piles of rubbish on the floor. A storage room was stacked high with old furniture, books, and cardboard boxes covered in thick dust. She warily opened the door to her beloved music room, where her father had played his cello and her mother accompanied him on piano, with young Isabelle doing her best to keep up on a small violin. The piano was gone and the empty cello case lay open and grieving. There was nothing else in the room but a broken music stand.
    It was clear from inspection: The house had not been cared for. Everything was coated in water stains and mildew. There were cracks in all the walls and peeling paint on the ceilings. It would take weeks to clean and months to restore, a project she decided would not be attempted on this trip.
    At last Isabelle found herself in front of her father’s laboratory. To Isabelle, this room was George. She took a deep breath, pushed open the doors, and the collapse of her initial excitement was complete. Gone was the sparkling white, high-tech room she remembered. The walls of the lab were sloppily painted in mustard yellow and the counters were bare of any scientific equipment. The metal cabinets were rusted and dull, and an old-fashioned sink hung lopsided and dripping. Pots of wilted plants were stuffed in boxes that filled the room with a warm, fetid smell.
    Beside the back door, an old terrarium contained dirt, but nothing more. Isabelle squinted, imagining a little girl with a thin ponytail peering into the tank, cradling a tiny box with one hand and scooping away dirt with the other, burying her beloved toad behind a Venus flytrap. “It’s also a cemetery,” she said, and a slender man in a white jacket stepped behind her, placing a hand gently on her shoulder. His soothing voice whispered in her ear, “I think that’s lovely. Every terrarium ought to have a graveyard. Are you sure you’d rather not feed him to your carnivorous friend in there?” The girl replied, “Oh no, he needs a proper burial.”
    Isabelle blinked away the memory and found herself standing once again in the bleak laboratory. The voice of her father sounded all too real, and at the same time completely wrong. There was something dreadfully wrong about the whole place, something unsettling about the house and the entire island. Growing up it had seemed crisp and clean, flourishing with life, excitement, and adventure. Now there was an eerie gloominess everywhere, an almost malignant force.
    “This is much better than we found it.”
    Isabelle startled as