You think we're dancing? ... That's all we've ever done.

 

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(diaryland) March 26, 2006 - 9:48 p.m.

The house had been sold a lot in recent years. It was somewhere in the Belgian countryside. I think it must have been pretty nice there, but I don't know much about Belgium. It was an old, grand place but not leaky. The only thing obviously wrong with the house was that it wasn't very close to the shops.

The house had seven bedrooms and a room on the first floor that had probably been used for small musical concerts. It was open directly onto a big staircase that curled out at the bottom. When the scientist's family moved in, there was a large cabinet right in the centre of the back wall. It looked like it had been built in, but the scientist's wife, who had a great interest in Queen Anne furniture, thought that it was an English piece of a later date to the house, maybe by fifty or so years.

Behind that wall was a corridor and a series of storage areas that nobody had used since people didn't have servants anymore. It was very dusty and the mummified corpse of a bat lay in one of the cupboards. The scientist realised that there was some space unaccounted for, right behind where the cabinet was in the other room. While the children unpacked their things in their rooms, the scientist and the scientist's wife pulled out all the shelves which had been nailed into the cupboard space. They were trying to find a secret door handle.

That night, the scientist's wife couldn't get to sleep. She felt as if she was in a mystery novel. There was absolutely no evidence of the walls on either side of the secret space as having a door in them. She realised that the way into the secret room was through the cabinet.

The scientist's wife went down to the kitchen and made a warm cup of milk. On the way back to her bedroom, she walked up the stairs and through the room with the cabinet in it. The moonlight came in through the window behind her and highlighted a beam of dust that led to the corridor to her bedroom. For now, the mystery was getting some sleep.

As soon as they woke up the next morning, the scientist and the scientist's wife were fiddling at the sides of the cabinet with spatulas and wooden wedges. The scientist's wife didn't want to damage the cabinet because even though it wasn't original to the house, she remembered all she had learnt about Queen Anne cabinets and knew that this was a reasonably good example. They were trying not to make any loud creaks in the cold morning because the children had ended up very grumpy when they had gone to bed the night before.

As the cabinet began to work its way out of the recess, the scientist's wife ran downstairs to get a dust sheet to ease under it because the edge of the cabinet was scuffing the parquetry floor.

Just as the scientist and the scientist's wife had pulled the cabinet out at least thirty centimetres on one side, the second oldest child poked its head around the corner of the doorway into the corridor. Most of its hair was leaning to the left.

"Did we wake you up?" asked the scientist.

"Yep," said the second oldest child. It hadn't cleared its throat yet this morning. "What are you doing?"

"We're finding a secret room behind the cabinet," said the scientist's wife, pointing at the dark slice between the back of the cabinet and the wall.

"I can fit in there. Do you want me to have a look?" asked the second oldest child.

It was a good idea because their arms were tired and the cabinet was made of thick, dense wood. The scientist's wife said, "Yes, slip in the gap. Tell us everything you see."

The second oldest child picked up a torch that was standing up next to the wall. It turned the torch on and slid through the space. The child's pyjamas made a slithery noise over the two edges of the gap.

"I see a drawing of a big, fancy candlestick on the back of the cabinet," said the child. It did not yet know the word for candelabra. The drawing was almost a metre high, and scratched in black ink on the shiny wood. The picture of the candelabra was quite detailed and it had the image of a human ribcage on the centre stem.

"Ooh! I found a door handle!" said the child. The was one of the most exciting mornings it had had in a while.

The scientist's wife told the child to open the door right away.

It was slightly difficult to turn the handle. It was OK for a door handle that had not been open for exactly three hundred years and two days.

The door opened inwards. The child was not scared when it entered the room. Even though it was completely dark in there, and it had a slight smell of rot, the child knew that it was morning, the most cheerful time of the day, and that its parents were just a metre or so away.

The torch lit up no cobwebs in the corners of the little room. The walls were black. So was the ceiling and the floor. The child shone the torch on the sole of its bare foot. The foot was now filthy.

The scientist and the scientist's wife waited patiently on the other side of the cabinet for the child to say what was there. They gave the child time to see for itself. They all heard the faint pounding of footsteps run somewhere else in the house.

"There's a small table in here," said the child, finally. "There's a book on it which has thick pages in it with nothing on them." The book was bound in an embossed leather cover, and the blank pages had not yet been knifed open. Two of the folded pages in the centre were stuck together with a brown blob which nobody at the time realised to be semen.

"There's nothing else in here," said the child, appearing back in the room with the book in its right hand, squinting at the daytime light.

An hour later, when the scientist's wife squeezed through the enlarged gap behind the cabinet, a thin slate roofing tile was found leaning against the wall behind the table. The scientist's wife picked it up and blew the black dust off both sides of it. On the underside, a word had been scratched fairly deeply in beautiful curly script.

It said, "Glenn."




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