Sunlight is bathing me in warmth and light, not a lot of it, but enough to show me that I'm not in the cellar and I'm not wet and cold. I am, however curled up, clutching an extremely scratchy item to my cheeks that are wet with tears.
I sit up when another sneeze bursts from me. Dust. I'm on the single bed in the closet room, cuddling the scratchiest teddy bear in the history of teddy bears. It's the moth-eaten one wearing the sailor suit.
I think I have a cold. My throat hurts, my head is aching, and my nose has become completely blocked. I usually feel like this when I've cried all night.
Did this bear belong to a child? Poor kid! Well, maybe years ago, when he didn't look like a zombie bear, he'd been softer and cuddlier. Now he is a dust bomb in a prickly skin. I push him away and get up.
The floor is covered in dirty footprints, the same kind covering my bedroom floor yesterday morning. I think my pyjama pants had been partially wet at some point, it is covered in the kind of stains dried sea water tends to leave on clothes, and the material is stiff in places.
What was that pain about? Did my period start?
It's a couple of weeks too soon for that. Scanning the bed, I see no new stains added to the multitude already marring the mattress, despite the red smudges marking my pyjamas.
I forget about my achy head and stuffy nose as thoughts of a wounded man struggling to survive flood my brain. Did I sleep-walk to the beach, find the man, brought him home, fall back to sleep... leaving him to die in the cellar?!
I nearly yank the door off its hinges and fall into the hallway. I'm freaking out, my heart trying its best to break from my chest.
"No, no, no, no, no!"
The cellar door is standing open; I'm almost crying by the time I trundle down the stairs and pluck the light cord, my eyes feverishly darting around the room.
The first thing I notice is the absence of blood. The second thing I see is my footprints covering the entire floor. Only mine, as far as I can tell. None of them is big enough to have belonged to the injured man. There is no man in the room, not injured or dead. Relief starts to flood my veins; then the panic starts up again.
Maybe he didn't even reach the basement!
I'm not sure which wall contained the door. It had been too dark, and we'd been stumbling around and around, trying to find the stairs. At least... I'd been stumbling around and around... There's no man in here, and there really isn't even a drop of blood. That would've been impossible if the man had been here because he'd been streaming with the stuff.
Did I dream it?
But my PJs are sea stained. I'm sure of it... and it has red blotches on it... I study the floor, every scuff mark near every shelf, until I find one that might possibly have been made by a wall moving inward.
How the hell would it open?
There's no clear sign of a door, no opening instructions, and no obvious lever. The one the man pulled last night had not been obvious, either. It had been recessed into the wall. I move stuff out of the way and feel the entire breadth of the wall, up and down, and then I find it barely identifiable. I try to pull it. It is stiff, and I have to use all my strength.
With a loud click, a section of the wall separates from its neighbour. The seam is perfectly aligned with the edge of a shelf set. Invisible. Holding my breath and swallowing loudly, I pull the unyielding door wider.
The landing is empty. I feel my way down the stairs and along the corridor, startled by the sound announcing the door's closure behind me.
What if I cannot get it open again?!
There's no time to worry about that right now. I blunder through the darkness toward the ever-increasing light at the mouth of the cave.
The beach is empty.
No washed-up debris, no torn men, nothing. I see footprints in the sand, but there seems to be only one pair. It leaves the foliage patch in a nice straight line, stops far above the water's current low-water edge and then seems to go crazy all over the place. From there, the trail leads back to the foliage in a jagged, criss-cross pattern. All the marks in the sand were made by one set of feet.
Probably mine.
I'd been down here, but I obviously wasn't awake at the time, and I'd been alone.
How on Earth did I know how to get here... and back?
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YOU ARE READING
The House
Mystery / ThrillerBelle, an art student in need of a place to work on the paintings for her evaluation, makes the mistake of leaving it to her bungling cousin Craig to find that place for her. And find her a place, he did... "Craig! You said this house was, and I quo...
