The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! by V.C. Andrews Page A

Cory, his small face awed as he looked around and clung to my side, and catching his hand, and Carrie’s, I left behind the fascination of the old clothes, and all of us wandered off to pry into everything this attic had to offer. And that was considerable. Thousands of old books in stacks, dark ledgers, office desks, two upright pianos, radios, phonographs, cartons filled with the unwanted accoutrements of generations long gone. Dress forms, all sizes and shapes, bird cages and stands to hold them, rakes, shovels, framed photographs of peculiar pale and sickly looking people who were, I presumed, dead relatives of ours. Some had light hair, some dark; all had eyes sharp, cruel, hard, bitter, sad, wistful, yearning, hopeless, empty, but never, I swear, never did I see any happy eyes. Some smiled. Most didn’t. I was drawn in particular to a pretty girl of perhaps eighteen; she wore a faint, enigmatic smile which reminded me of Mona Lisa, only she was more beautiful. Her bosom swelled out beneath a ruffled bodice most impressively, making Christopher point to one of the dress forms and declare emphatically, “Hers!”
    I looked. “Now,” he continued with admiring eyes, “that is what you call an hourglass figure. See the wasp waist, the ballooning hips, the swelling bosom? Inherit a shape like that, Cathy, and you will make a fortune.”
    “Really,” I said in disgust, “you don’t know very much. That is not a woman’s natural form. She’s wearing a corset, cinched in at the waist so much her flesh is squeezed out at the top and the bottom. And that is exactly why women used to faint so much and then call for smelling salts.”
    “How can one faint and still manage to call for smelling salts?” he asked sarcastically. “Besides, you can’t squeeze out at the top what isn’t there.” He took another look at the shapely young woman. “You know, she kind of looks like Momma. If she wore her hair differently and her clothes were modern—she’d be Momma.”
    Hah! Our mother would have more sense than to wear a laced-up cage and suffer. “But this girl is only pretty,” Christopher concluded. “Our mother is beautiful.”
    The silence of that huge space was so deep you could hear your heartbeat. Yet it would be fun to explore every trunk; to examine the contents of every box; to try on all those rotting, smelly, fancy clothes, and pretend, pretend, pretend. But it was so hot! So stifling! So stuffy! Already my lungs seemed clogged with dirt and dust and stale air. Not only that, spider webs laced the corners and draped down from the rafters, and crawling or slithering things rambled about on the floor or up the walls. Though I didn’t see any, I thought of rats and mice. We’d seen a movie once on TV where a man went crazy and hung himself from an attic rafter. And in another movie, a man shoved his wife in an old trunk with brass corners and locks, just like these, and then he slammed down the lid and left her there to die. I took another look at those trunks, wondering what secrets they held that the servants shouldn’t know.
    Disconcerting, the curious way my brother was watching me and my reactions. I whirled to hide what I was feeling—but he saw. He stepped closer and caught my hand, and said so much like Daddy, “Cathy, it is going to be all right. There must be very simple explanations for everything that seems to us very complex and mysterious.”
    Slowly I turned to him, surprised he’d come to comfort and not to tease. “Why do you suppose the grandmother hates us, too? Why should the grandfather hate us? What have we done?”
    He shrugged, as baffled as I was, and with his hand still holdingmine, we both pivoted to look the attic over again. Even our untrained eyes could tell where new sections had been added to the older house. Thick, square, upright beams divided the attic into distinct sections. I thought if we wandered here, and wandered there, we would come upon a place for