Naomi’s Room by Aycliffe Jonathan

Author:Aycliffe, Jonathan [Aycliffe, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472105097
Publisher: Constable Robinson
Published: 2012-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

I do not want to tell you what we found in that room. Nor would you believe me if I told you all. Isn’t it strange, after all this time, after so much else has happened, that I should be so reticent? But there was an intimacy about what we found, about what we saw, a privateness that even now hampers me. It was as though we had broken in on something intimate, like sex or a long death. We were interlopers in someone else’s darkness.

Lewis and I enlarged the hole until it was wide enough to walk through without difficulty. Laura joined us. She was quiet now, subdued by the discovery. I lent her my torch and she swung it back and forth across the cobwebs and the squalid furnishings. Once, she shuddered as a mouse scampered away from the beam. She turned to me, handing back the torch.

‘I’ve seen this room before,’ she whispered, very quietly, next to my ear.

‘You can’t have . . .’ I began.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘In sleep. I’ve dreamed about it more than once.’

‘But when you saw the photographs . . .’

She shook her head.

‘It wasn’t like that in my dreams. It was like this.’

I wanted to ask her more, but she moved away. She seemed reluctant to enter the room, or to be near it. I wondered when she had had such dreams. And what had taken place in them.

Lewis was the first to step through the opening. I followed him moments later, my feet slipping on a thick layer of dust. Something scuttled across the rafters above my head. I shone my light across the ceiling, but there was only darkness. There had once been a skylight, but someone had nailed boards across it long ago. Without light, it would have been dark in here, very dark indeed. It was at that moment, I think, that I first realized what should have been already obvious to me – that, once the wall had been closed, no one could have entered or left the little room.

We left the bundles in the middle of the floor till last. I think we both had an idea what they might contain. I glanced through the pile of books. They were for the most part medical publications. On top were bound copies of old medical journals: the first volumes of The Lancet issued between 1830 and 1832, several years of The Medical Times and Gazette, and a much-decayed set of The British and Foreign Medical Review. I found several textbooks dating from the middle of the last century: Watson’s Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic, a late edition of Cullen’s Materia Medica, Good’s Study of Medicine, and Bichat’s Anatomie Générale.

On one of the chairs, I found a long, shallow wooden box or case, almost buried beneath a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. Sweeping these away, I lifted the box and carried it to the table. There was a brass lock on one side, rusted hard.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.