#feuillyweek

The Musain is just like that, though. Some people say they’ve seen ghostly spectres roaming about, particularly during the summer - boys with long hair and blood on their clothes. An old man with a potted plant, wrinkled and grey. A child, gap-toothed, starving, runty.

Musichetta likes to joke that the place is haunted. Feuilly thinks he could believe in phantoms, if he saw one. But he hasn’t, and neither has Musichetta, as far as he knows.

Often, Feuilly hears things, though. A burst of laughter in an empty room when he’s locking up for the night. Creaking floorboards and cracks like lightning from upstairs. Sometimes singing. Sometimes screaming. Dripping, too - water? Wine? Something else?

These things should, by all means, scare Feuilly, but…

But. There is something oddly familiar to their cadences. Something that jumps to the tip of his tongue with every bloody cobblestone, every broken chair leg he hallucinates in the early morning light. It’s both ominous and comfortable, foreboding and confidential. Intimate. Like the Musain is telling him something that only he is allowed to hear, or that is only known by few.

And he’s never burned a batch of something in that oven. Not once in two years of working there.

Feuilly bakes and makes fans out of the brown paper napkins from the dispensers. He gossips with Musichetta and recommends books, movies, museums to any customer who asks, and even to the ones that don’t.

And sometimes, he catches the flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye; and at least then, he knows he isn’t alone.