What Happened (Part 16)

A quick game of hide-and-seek might help more thoroughly describe and explore the house.  Let’s start in the Boy’s Bedroom.  We’ll designate Kenny as the seeker, this time.  He might lean his head against the small drop-leaf table in the corner next to the closet. “On your mark, get set, go!” Then the slow count begins as we scramble away.  Some clue to the general directions we go might be got from the sound of our fading footsteps, but the more cunning of us learn how to trample softly away.  He reaches ten and the search begins.

He looks rather uneasily into the guest room.  It is called the Toy Room, because of the often wall-to-wall sea of toys that are spilled from the closet where they are supposed to be piled.  But it is also a rather lonesome room, because nobody sleeps there, unless you are sick and quarantined, eating soup and crackers and orange-flavored baby aspirin.  The room has a single bed in the corner, a long gray dresser with infant things in the drawers, and the old crib Lambie, also called the “cib-cib.” No-one would dare hide in the closet there, because of the monstrous Hoofer said to guard its mysteries. But a glance under the cib-cib and behind the door is necessary to assure him that no-one is there. He hurries on.