But as more of it came into view, they noticed something else. The walls were solid wood planking, old but still intact. The roof was covered in ancient shingles, many missing, but the frame underneath had held. There was one small window on each wall, four in all, broken or filthy, but enough to let in light.
Adeline slipped the key into the lock. It stuck at first. The mechanism had not been used in years. She jiggled it carefully, and at last it turned with a click.
The door, swollen from moisture and tangled with vines, did not budge. Silas put his shoulder to it and pushed.
With a groan of old wood and rusted hinges, it swung inward.
The smell that hit them was overwhelming—mold, mildew, rot, and the stale closed-in odor of a place left unopened for decades. Silas pulled out his phone and switched on the flashlight, aiming the beam into the dim interior.
It was filthy, exactly as expected. Dirt and dead leaves covered the floor. Cobwebs draped every corner. Small animal droppings suggested mice had claimed the place long ago.
But the structure itself was sound.
The walls were solid. The floor was intact. Wooden planks creaked but held when Silas stepped inside. The ceiling was higher than they expected, maybe eight feet, giving the room an odd sense of vertical space even if it had almost none horizontally.
And there, in the weak evening light coming through the grimy windows, Adeline saw something that made her heart lurch.
“Silas,” she said, pointing. “Look.”
He shone the flashlight where she indicated.
On the far wall, half-hidden beneath grime and cobwebs, something had been carved into the wood. Letters.
JW, 1847.
“Someone’s initials,” Silas said.
“And a date,” Adeline whispered. “Eighteen forty-seven. That’s almost a hundred and eighty years ago.”
They looked at each other in the dim beam of the flashlight.
This little structure, this so-called pile of junk that everyone had laughed at, was nearly two centuries old.
And suddenly Adeline’s feeling that it had been meant for them no longer felt like desperation. It felt like destiny.
The next morning they returned with the few supplies they had managed to scrape together: a broom rescued from a dumpster behind the hardware store, some garbage bags, and a bottle of water refilled from a public fountain. It was not much, but it was what they had.
They had spent the night in the Honda again, parked discreetly behind a gas station, sleeping badly and waking stiff and cold. But they drove back to the shack with something close to excitement stirring beneath their exhaustion.
In the morning light, it looked, if anything, even worse than it had the day before. The vegetation was so thick that from certain angles the structure vanished entirely into a mound of green. The roof sagged in the middle. The windows were nearly opaque with dirt.
It looked exactly like what everyone in Riverside had said it was.
A pile of junk.
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