Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [20]
In the dim library, Holmes gave a grunt of disapproval at the smell of must. This had been my father's study, where he had kept accounts and written letters, typing with remarkable facility on the enormous Underwood type-writer, its mechanism so heavy my child's fingers could barely propel the keys to the ribbon. The Underwood, like the desk and the two chairs in front of the pristine fireplace, was draped; the carpets here had been rolled up against the wall, and emanated a faint trace of moth-balls.
The stillness in the house was proving oppressive. I cleared my throat to remark, “How many acres of dust-covers do you suppose they used?”
Holmes merely shook his head at the disused and mouldering volumes, and went on.
As we worked through the rooms, various objects and shapes seemed to reach out and touch my memory, each time restoring a small portion of it to life: The looking-glass near the door, for example, had been a wedding present that my mother hated and my father loved, source of much affectionate discord. And the fitted carpet in the back parlour—something had happened to it, some catastrophe I was responsible for: something spilt? An upturned coffee tray, perhaps, and the horrified shrieks of visiting women—no, I had it now: Their horror was not, as my guilty young mind had immediately thought, because of any damage to the carpet, but at the hot coffee splashing across my young skin, miraculously not scalding me.
My eye was caught by a peculiar object on the top of a high credenza: an exotic painted caricature of a cat, carved so that its mouth gaped wide in a toothy O. But shouldn't there be a flash of yellow, right where that stick in the middle . . . ? Ah, yes: Father's joke. He'd found the cat in Chinatown and fixed a perch across its open mouth, then arranged it on the precise spot where my mother's canary, which was given the occasional freedom of the room, liked to sit and sing. How Levi and I had giggled, every time the bird opened its mouth in the cat's maw.
As I worked my way through the rooms, there was no entirety of recall, merely discrete items that sparked specific memories. I felt as if some prince was working his way through the sleeping events of my childhood, kissing each one back to life. Or tapping them like a clown with a trick flower that flashed miraculously into full bloom.
Not that I'd ever much cared for clowns, nor had I been one for fairy tales: The passivity of that sleeping princess had annoyed me even when I was small.
Only when we reached the very back of the ground floor and Holmes pushed open a swinging door did I discover a place that felt completely familiar, wall to wall: the kitchen. No cloth shrouds here, just white tile, black stove, shelved pots, a row of spoons and implements. The wooden table where I'd sat down with plate, glass, and home-work. The ice-box (unchanged from my infancy) from which I'd taken my milk, tugging at its heavy door. The pantry, startlingly equipped with food-stuffs: biscuits and coffee in their tins, flour in its bin, preserves in jars that had gone green beneath their wax seals.
Ghosts are most often glimpsed at the corners of one's vision, heard at the far reaches of the audible, tasted in lingering scents at the back of one's palate. So now the house began to people itself at the furthest edges of my senses: A wide-bottomed cook, her back to me, laid down the wooden spoon she was using to stir a pot and bustled away through a door. It happened in one short instant at the very corner of the mind's eye, and she was gone when I turned my head, but she lived in my mind. Then at the base of the door I noticed a trace of long-dried soil, and with that, through the window in the upper half of