THE COVERED HOUSE SAT in the bottom of the valley. The hump of kudzu was broad and the chimney stuck up from its center like a green finger pointing to the sky. The boy had noticed it as he followed the road from town to the other side of the valley. Away from the hovel. Looking for a place to hide. Knowing he had to get away from the man.
He left the shopping cart on the side of the road and went beneath. His eyes watching for the man hiding behind tree trunks or waiting for him to leap up from a rain ditch. He wrestled his way through, unable to see the house but believing if he only continued down he would get there. And then thicker trees held the vines above his head and he was able to walk upright and he saw it.
The house was constructed in a crude rectangle. The planks of the short porch were warped in some places and rotted in others. The house sagged in the middle, the vines thick across the roof and trailing down its sides in strands of bondage. It had long ago been painted white but was now dulled with decades of grime. Slats from the woodframe hung loose and bunches of sumac and honeysuckle hugged the posts of the front porch like great green overcoats.
The boy stood at the edge of the porch. The front door was open. Some window panes cracked and others missing. Vine and weed reached between the porch planks and wrapped the rails. He stepped onto the porch and the board gave with his weight but held and he took three more careful steps and then walked through the open doorway. A hallway separated the rooms down the middle, two on the right and two on the left. He looked from side to side, through the open doors of the front rooms. The walls spotted with mildew and mold and the floorplanks were spaced unevenly and vines slithered through. The floor was littered with dead leaves and broken window glass and chunks of plaster that had fallen from the walls and ceiling. The house mute with shadow and he breathed in the heavy scent of the organic world. His steps soft across the leaves and the floorboards speaking to him as he moved in small, cranky whispers.
The cracks in the plaster ran wild and crooked and the walls were stained from trails of rainwater that bled through the kudzu cover and into the crevices of the rotting roof. He moved to the end of the hallway and looked into each of the back rooms. One was the kitchen. A redstained castiron sink was set against one wall and a single vine spread across the counter and reached down into the drain. A castiron skillet and a kettle on the stovetop, each covered in cobwebs. In the middle of the room there was a round wooden table and one chair and beneath the chair there was a dark and deformed stain on the floorplanks that stretched out and reached beneath the table.
He turned from the kitchen and he stepped into the room across the hall when he saw the fireplace. Silvery streaks of water running down its sides and the bricks were streaked with black. The mortar cracked and fallen and the gaps between the bricks home to centipedes and beetles. The boy moved to the fireplace. Sat down on the edge. He listened, trying to figure out if he would be able to hear the man coming.