Naomi's Room (12 page)

‘Hang on,’ said Lewis, putting up a hand. ‘It’s wide enough to see through now. Pass me that torch.’

He had set his torch on a box to give us extra light while we worked. I passed it to him. Bending, he peered through the hole, holding the torch by his cheek, moving the beam slowly through a long arc. He must have spent a minute or more crouched at the opening. Not a word passed his lips. Finally, he drew back.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look for yourself.’ His voice was shaky. Even without the torch, I could see that his face was white.

I bent to the hole, pointing the torch through, letting the long white beam play on the space beyond. At first, I could make out very little. Then, bit by bit, what I saw took shape. From a series of images caught in torchlight, I created a whole picture.

A second room lay behind the one in which we stood. It must not have changed in well over one hundred years. With certain alterations, it was the room in Lewis’s photographs, the room whose walls had glistened with blood. Dark stains covered mouldy wallpaper. Cobwebs hung in banners on every available corner and projection. Thick with dust, two chairs and a little table stood by the rear wall. What looked like plates and a jug still rested on the table. A broken oil-lamp stood behind them. There was a pile of books, thick with decades of dust. A long, narrow table that seemed a little too low for dining. A heavy wooden box. And on the floor, wrapped in what looked like sacking, three narrow bundles tied with string.

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. Lewis handed me a penknife. I slipped a blade under the lock and levered it upwards, snapping it. The lid lifted to reveal dark blue velvet padding into which was set a collection of surgical instruments with ivory handles: scalpels, a little saw, pincers, a drill, and other tools I could not name. Even after so many years, their polished surfaces shone in the light.

I laid down the case and continued to search the room.

We did not know what we were looking for, or if, indeed, there was anything in particular that we might find. A moment later, I heard Lewis call softly from my right. I crossed the room and joined him where he was kneeling by the wall.

‘Look at these,’ he said.

On the floor lay several lengths of chain, each fastened to a thick staple that had been bolted to the wall. The ends of some of the chains were furnished with leather collars with buckles, others had metal cuffs. The collars were unfastened. I felt as though someone had injected me with ice water. I remembered the child in the photograph, the one on all fours, with a collar round her neck.

Near the chains stood the long table. Had it not been for the medical paraphernalia, I might not have guessed its purpose so quickly. But I wondered why it had been necessary, even in the days before anaesthetics, to furnish it with stout leather straps with brass buckles. It was not so difficult to surmise the purpose of the grooves that had been cut through the surface, leading to small apertures in the centre and at each corner.

The large wooden box contained clothes, mainly dresses designed for a girl of about eight. Lewis lifted one item and let it hang in front of me. It was badly worn but still recognizable. It belonged to one of the little girls in the photographs.

‘I’m not easy,’ Lewis said. ‘We’ve been in here long enough. I don’t think we should push our luck.’

‘I think we should examine these first,’ I said, indicating the cobwebbed bundles on the floor. ‘We’ll only have to come back if we don’t.’

He nodded, but I could sense his reluctance. He held his hand out and asked for the penknife. I passed it over without a word. I wanted him to be the one to open it. He went to the first bundle and knelt beside it. It was about three feet long and as thick as the body of a modern vacuum cleaner.

The knife cut through the string without difficulty. The sacking was scarcely more robust. As Lewis hacked at it, the fabric crumbled, throwing up small clouds of dust and grime in his face. In a matter of moments, he had made a great incision lengthways along the bundle. Setting the knife aside, he pulled both sides of the opening away from one another. The sacking tore at both ends, falling away to reveal what lay beneath. I shone my torch on it.

Lewis swore gently, drawing himself away with distaste. The torch picked out a jumble of partly-mummified human remains. The body had evidently been cut up and heaped together in no particular order. The dried skull still had hair on it, long tangled hair, hair the colour of old gold. On the finger of one mummified hand, a small ring glistened. One thing was immediately apparent: the remains were those of a child.

Lewis stood. I was unable to take my eyes from the pitiful heap on the floor. At that instant, quite without warning, the temperature dropped. In moments it grew bitterly cold. Lewis pulled my arm.

‘For God’s sake,’ he shouted, ‘let’s get out of here.’

I could see my breath hanging in the beam of the torch. Turning, I saw Lewis by the opening, beckoning to me. Then, as though a change had come over my vision, I became aware that there was another source of light in the room. I looked round and saw that someone had lit the oil-lamp on the table. And by its light I saw that the room was no longer in a state of squalor, that the dust and cobwebs had gone, and that someone was standing by the far wall, watching me. It was the man in black, the white-faced man who had followed me to Venice and Egypt. He was smiling.

‘They would not be taught, sir,’ he said. His voice seemed to come from a long, long way away, or from deep down, from the depths of a pit. It was the voice I had heard in my sleep the night before. The man was holding something in his hand, something that shone dully in the yellow light. It looked very like a knife.

I felt something tugging at my arm, then I was being pulled away from the figure in black. Lewis was dragging me back through the opening. The attic beyond it had changed too. There were drab curtains at the window, a mirror hung on one wall, candles burned in brass sticks on a long, low table.

And then I was being pulled down the stairs, half stumbling, half falling. The door lay open. Lewis got me through, grabbed the door, and slammed it. His hand shook visibly as he turned the key in the lock.

A voice whispered seductively in my ear.

‘It will grow easier, sir. I do assure you.’

I looked round quickly. There was no one there.

We took a while to recover from what had happened. Laura was badly affected, though withdrawn rather than hysterical. Her reserves seemed to have broken down entirely. Scepticism had been a means of blocking out her growing awareness of a new reality that threatened to undermine the fragile world she had built around herself.

It is not that she was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist or an unyielding rationalist, someone for whom the supernatural might carry a threat of dissonance. She went to church from time to time, she read her horoscopes in newspapers and cheap magazines and half believed them, she once consulted a faith healer when she fell ill with shingles and was in great pain. To believe in ghosts, to run from apparitions of the long dead, would not have been hard for her.

Her problem lay in coming to terms with Naomi’s death. If Naomi were truly dead, either an angel in the arms of Jesus or bones in a country churchyard, that was hard but manageable. But to learn that she might in some sense still be alive, conscious and accessible, to be all of that yet in some different dimension, struck Laura very hard. She could not rest, knowing Naomi might need her, knowing she had no immediate means of fulfilling that need.

Lewis took me aside some time after the incident in the attic. We were in the garden, where we had gone to seek refuge from the house.

‘You will have to find it all out,’ he said. ‘Your wife needs more than reassurance, man. She needs to see it in black and white, a reason for all this, an explanation.’

‘Do you think there can be one?’ I asked. Laura was not far away, sitting on a garden bench watching small birds build a white nest in a chestnut tree.

‘I don’t mean that we can find a scientific explanation for the manifestations, of course not. That’s neither here nor there. But something happened in this house a long time ago, something that is still troubling it. Perhaps knowing just what it was will make it seem less threatening. Fear of the unknown is the worst of all.’

I agreed. And I said I would begin work on the investigation. Would things have been different had I said no? Would I have done what I did if. I had not known?

I haven’t seen Laura in days. She must be sulking somewhere. I wonder if she knows what I’m up to. What I’m writing. I wonder if she has come across the photographs . . .

For the next three weeks, I buried myself in research. I divided my time between the public library and the County Record Office in Shire Hall, with occasional side-trips to the University Library and Trinity College. In those days, the public library was still at the back of the Guildhall. The librarian in charge of the Cambridgeshire Collection took me gently through the complexities of Burgess’s lists of ratepayers, the old street directories, and the general directories for Cambridge, which went back as far as the 1790s.

For weeks I walked down miles of archive corridors, waded through acres of printed and handwritten papers, and all to come to the man in black. Or was he coming all the time to me, were we hurtling towards one another, like planets converging, about to strike, to plummet into the carved and tilted centre of things?

The simple act of research was more therapeutic to me than a rest or holiday could ever have been. I was doing what I knew best. My days were spent among archives, unearthing names and dates and long-forgotten facts. For all that the field was so different to my own, the techniques were sufficiently familiar to instil in me a sense of routine, a delusion that what I was doing was commonplace and that the anxieties I suffered were everyday anxieties.

I asked Laura to go and stay with my sister in Northampton. She was at first reluctant, but her experiences in the attic had opened her to persuasion. She would not tell me exactly what she had seen, for all that I pressed her. When the attic had shifted, she had been at the other end. I did at least ascertain that she had not seen the man in black. That was all she would say.

I persuaded the college authorities to give me the use of a guest room, making some excuse about renovations at home. For the first few nights, I was fearful lest I be followed to college. I listened for footsteps as I walked home from the library in the dark. In bed at night, I held my breath each time feet sounded on the stairs outside my room. But they passed by and I was left alone with my beating heart.

Piece by piece I assembled a file of notes and photocopies. I still have it here in my study, a thick black arch-lever file locked away in my corner cabinet. I never need to look at it now, of course: I know everything it contains in detail, intimate detail.

His name was Liddley, Dr John Augustus Liddley,
MB, LSA, MRCP.
The letters
LSA
stood for Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. The qualification passed out of common use after the Medical Act of 1858, but before that general practitioners regularly gained it. In Liddley’s day, there was still much rivalry between the medical estates: physicians, surgeons, and, bottom of the heap, apothecaries. Nurses and midwives weren’t even in the running. The elite remained the elite: the College of Physicians did not rub shoulders with the College of Surgeons, nor the latter with Apothecaries Hall.