Naomi's Room by Jonathan Aycliffe

Author:Jonathan Aycliffe [Aycliffe, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472105097
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+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.

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