The Dynamite Room Read Free

tiles and grass sprouted between the two chimney pots. She walked around the outside but everything was closed. The shuttered windows on the ground floor even had planks of wood nailed across them. She tried the back door but she couldn’t get the handle to turn no matter which way she twisted it; instead, she stood on tiptoes to look through a glass pane, but something was covering the window inside and she couldn’t see in.
    She went back to the front and tried the door again.
    “Hello!” she called as she peered up at the windows. “Hello!”
    She tried to force the handle one more time, shaking it, then looked around. The house and its garden were surrounded on three sides by woods, the trees standing silent in the heat, and beyond them it was a good mile back to the village, or half a mile in the opposite direction to the shore if you knew your way across the salt marsh and mudflats. She slung her gas mask box down by her suitcase and walked across the scorched lawn. The splintered door of the chicken run was hooked open, the chickens gone. She crouched down beside the rabbit run but that was empty as well. She scanned the undergrowth of the trees for the white bob of Jeremiah’s tail, and she called out to him, but there was no sign of the rabbit. The flower beds had been turned over to vegetables but most of them were dead now, the soil sucked dry and the leaves crisp and withered. In the middle of a circular flower bed, now surrounded by rings of shrunken cauliflower heads, stood a stone cherub on a granite slab, his skin freckled with lichen. It took all of her strength to wiggle him far enough to one side so that she could pull the spare key, wrapped in paper, out from under him. She ran with it across the grass to the door, but the key wouldn’t turn at first and she had to rattle it around in the lock for a while, until finally, reluctantly, it clicked. She pushed the door open and the sunlight glanced in ahead of her.
    The house smelled unfamiliar. Her feet creaked over the floorboards and the oak paneling was cool to her touch. All the doors from the hallway were closed; she opened them one by one, finding the rooms dark and musty, the fixtures and furnishings indistinct. All the windows were filled with blackout frames.
    She stood at the foot of the stairs and called out again.
    “Hello?”
    Holding on to the banisters as she went, she followed her voice up the staircase. At the top she looked both ways before nervously making her way down the corridor. The bathroom light didn’t work; even the tiny window in there had its blackout frame in place. There were no towels hanging over the rail. No toothbrushes or toothpaste in the blue spotted mug.
    She stepped back into the corridor and stopped outside the next door, her sweaty hand on the cool, brass knob.
    “Hello?” she said quietly. She turned the knob and nudged the door open. The room was dark and hot. At first everything seemed to be in its place. The neatly made four-poster. The old oak dressing table. The slightly tarnished mirror. The little side table and tasseled lamp. But no bedside book. No half-drunk glass of water. She took a step back and found herself staring at the bulky oak wardrobe. Her breath quickened as she reached out for both handles, and then, after a silent count of one, two, three, she flung open the double doors. It was empty. Her mother’s clothes were gone.
      
    She sat there on the four-poster bed, her feet dangling, until her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and shapes began to emerge from the wall: pictures hanging from the picture rail, her mother’s treadle sewing machine, the corn dolly hanging on its hook. She began to feel cool again as the sun fingered its way around the side of the house, no longer pressing at the shutters. She tried to think, forcing her eyes shut in the hope that when she opened them again, the room would be full of light and everything as it should be. Twice she got up and shut the heavy