Chapter 319: Big People, Small People [bonus]
Christmas on Spinner's End was gray. Brick, coal soot, the dust drifting down from the factory chimney, all of it mixed together and smeared across the windowpanes, and no matter how you scrubbed it never came clean.
The street sat on the eastern edge of Cokeworth, hard against the abandoned textile mill.
Spinner's End wasn't long. Two rows of red-brick terraced houses pressed in on a narrow road, the flagstones cracked in several places, withered weeds growing yellow in the seams.
The numbers ran from one to twenty-one, odds on the left, evens on the right.
The Snape house was the last one in, the number no longer legible, a rusted iron plate hanging on the doorframe with nothing left but a crooked shadow.
The other houses had hung some scrap of Christmas decoration, a string of cheap colored lights, a plastic wreath, a fake tree twenty centimeters high on a windowsill.
The Snape house had nothing.
Most of the paint had peeled from the door, baring the gray wood beneath. The handle was brass, oxidized to a greenish black.
Inside it was cold too. The fire wasn't lit, and on the sitting room table a few empty bottles lay on their sides, left where they fell.