I helped Dad out for a couple of hours, ticking off the names of equipment from his list as he foraged around in the barn and yelled out weird things like “Rottne H8”. By the end of the exercise he seemed pretty happy and I’d crossed off everything on his list, so I guess that meant the absent owner hadn’t pulled a fast one and nicked off with a random saw blade that Dad had paid for.
It was about midday by the time we finished. When we got back to the house Dad went off to find Mum. I decided that hanging around in his sightline might be a bad idea in case he decided I needed to be set some algebra lessons. Anyway, he’d been right about one thing – I did want to get a better look around. So far all I’d seen of the house were the central bits, the big room where the kids ate, our own dining room, and my bedroom and bathroom. Some further exploration was necessary.
Dad had headed straight up the stairs so I figured that Mum was probably going through the bedrooms. Which meant I should start downstairs, where I could avoid contact with both of them for as long as possible. I started in the corridor that led off to the left from the main staircase. It wasn’t particularly wide but there were plenty of doors leading off from both sides.
All the doors were shut but none of them were locked. The first room I looked into was small and narrow, with only a huge cupboard and an empty table inside. I went in and opened the cupboard – it was full of linen, nothing else. Tablecloths, I think. They were all folded super-tidily, suggesting that someone had come along with a ruler and checked and re-refolded every neat little square until they were perfect. Imagine that – a whole room for table linen, all of it crisply folded – and for what? So that for a few weeks every year a bunch of messy school kids could tip their dinners all over it? I could easily imagine Dorothea standing at the table, folding sheet after sheet, muttering under her breath. What a life.
The room right next door to the linen emporium was a library. It was massive, almost as big as the room where the kids ate dinner. It was at the other end of the house and I realized that it mirrored where that room was on this side of the staircase, like some kind of architectural balance thing was going on. I wandered in, pretty stunned by the size of it. It was lined with books and had a huge fireplace set in one wall. There were little tables dotted around, too, with things like old globes on them. There must have been thousands of volumes in there, floor to ceiling, all properly leather-bound and shelved perfectly neatly as if no one had ever even read them. Or rather, as if someone went around in here tidying and dusting obsessively, which was probably more like it. At least now I knew what Dorothea did all day.
I tried to imagine what sort of person would build a room like that. It didn’t feel like the kind of place where the previous owner would have spent his time. Hadn’t Dad said he was in his thirties with a kid? This felt like an older person’s room, the kind of older person who wouldn’t go in for having a little kid running about in it. Everything felt like it belonged in a museum. I wondered how long it had been there and who it had belonged to. I also wondered why the hell it was all still there. I mean, I was pretty sure that nothing in that room had moved for a century. That’s not normal, right? When you buy a house, you usually buy just the house, not everything in it as well. Even if you agree to buy some of the furniture, that doesn’t include stuff like books, does it? Except that here it didn’t seem that anything had been take out at all. It was the Dorothea thing all over again.
I went into room after room. It was the same in all of them. Nothing had been cleared. The place had been sold lock, stock and barrel, without anyone carting away the stuff that was already here. It obviously hadn’t seemed weird to my parents – although as we know by now, clear thinking isn’t their strong point. I can imagine my dad being really enthusiastic about the prospect of buying a house with someone else’s tat left dumped in it. At least it meant he wouldn’t have to furnish every room. In fact, I bet that was his exact argument to Mum. I can hear his voice saying precisely that. Darling, it’ll save such a lot of time and effort. We can concentrate on the important things. I guess that explains why most of our stuff went into storage.
But as I thought about it, it began to seem more and more strange. There were still paintings hanging on the walls. There were more books on more bookcases. One of the rooms was a study – there was a big desk with six drawers, three on either side of the old office chair pushed into the gap in the middle. I pulled at one, expecting it to be locked, but it wasn’t. It was full of papers. I tried another drawer, then another. They were all unlocked, stuffed full of things like ink pens and notebooks, grocery receipts and old, decaying elastic bands, which to me seemed completely whacko. I could understand leaving furniture where it was, maybe even paintings if you didn’t want to have to deal with storing them and selling them. But personal papers?
The one thing I didn’t see anywhere was photographs. This I noticed because I’d decided I wanted to see what the other people who had lived in this place were like. I mean, if Dorothea was anything to go by, we Strombergs didn’t have much to look forward to. Maybe that’s how everyone who lived in this neck of the woods ended up looking eventually. Maybe she was actually only forty or something. Perhaps living in the middle of nowhere prematurely sucked all the life out of you. I could believe that. So I looked around but photographs were pretty much the only things that I couldn’t find. Which made a kind of sense, I suppose – photographs are about as personal as you can get if you don’t care who sees your bank statements, right?
But the other thing I noticed was that there weren’t any gaps for them, either – no spaces on tables or shelves where a frame might have stood, or shadows on the walls from pictures that had been removed. So it crossed my mind that maybe there hadn’t been any in the first place, which also seemed a bit weird. OK, so it’s not like we’re the closest family ever, but even we had pictures of ourselves dotted around the old house in Stockholm. I began to actively look for photographs. I pulled open drawers and moved things around on shelves. Nothing. I went back into rooms I’d already been in, searching. Zip.
That’s when I saw her. I was coming out of one room and about to go into another when the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. You know that feeling you get when you’re being watched? I turned to look down the corridor and sure enough, there was Dorothea, standing in the shadows at one end with her arms hanging loosely by her sides, watching me. What freaked me out wasn’t that she was watching me, exactly, but where she was while she was doing it. She was right at the end of the corridor, near the large window that was built into the end of the house. Through the window behind her I could see the dark wall of trees. To get there she would have had to walk right past the room I’d been in, so she must have heard me moving about inside. But instead of sticking her head round the door to see what I was doing like a normal person would, she had decided to walk past the door into the shadows and stand there, lurking, until I came out again.
I mean, it wasn’t that she’d been passing by, heard me and then paused to see me leave.
She’d been waiting.
Spying.
I stared at her but she didn’t move. In the end I turned and walked away, heading back to the main hallway and the stairs so I could carry on my exploration on the first floor. I felt her eyes on me every step of the way. I had this sudden, crazy urge to look over my shoulder, in case she was doing that half run, half walk of hers right at me. I imagined her moving faster than I had thought possible, scuttling full tilt down the corridor as she stared at my back with those old, watery eyes stretched wide, ready to … to what?
I forced myself not to turn round but it was a struggle. It was even harder not to run. But I managed it. By sheer force of will I nonchalantly went to the stairs and started walking up them, one at a time. Halfway up I glanced down but there was no sign of her. Maybe she’d had a reason to be in one of those rooms after all and she’d gone back in to do whatever it was she’d been there to do. I told myself that had to be the answer, because otherwise she’d somehow managed to hot-foot it right behind me down the corridor and across the main hallway without me either hearing or seeing her as she did it. And that wasn’t something I really wanted to think about her being able to do, if I’m honest.
My heart rate didn’t return to normal until I’d made it all the way up the stairs.
On the first floor, two of the big bedrooms had been turned into dorms for the kids – ten basic camp beds set in rows in each, one for the boys and one for the girls. I didn’t bother going into them as they were rooms where the original furniture had already been taken out and besides, I figured that whatever secrets they might have contained had long since been mined by fingers smaller and grubbier than mine. I didn’t go into Tomas’s room either, which was right in-between. Prying into stuff left behind by people who were long gone was one thing but going through his stuff, psycho tree-hugger or not – well, everyone’s got to have a line, right? That was mine. I also avoided the room that I could tell my parents were in. I could hear the murmur of their voices through the door, rising and falling as I passed.
Most of the other rooms were pretty bare. Thin beds, white walls. A couple of the doors were locked and I thought about trying to break in but then I remembered Dorothea’s spying and thought I’d better leave it until I knew for sure she was occupied elsewhere. Who knew where she was lurking at that moment. Anyway, there’d be plenty of time, right? All winter, apparently. Better leave some activities for later on, is what I was thinking. Besides, I peered through some of the keyholes and there didn’t seem to be anything different inside the locked rooms compared to the unlocked ones – they were bedrooms, that was all. It made me think that the fact they were locked was just an oversight rather than a deliberate move to keep people out.
I did finally find a photograph and I didn’t have to go through a locked door to get to it. It was lying face down in the bottom drawer of a chest in one of the disused bedrooms. It had obviously been there a while. I brushed off the dust as I picked it up and turned it over. It was big enough to hold in two hands. The picture was black and white and showed the outside of the house – I recognized the double doors easily enough. It must have been taken in summer, because there was some kind of climbing plant with big open flowers hiking its way up the walls around the entrance. Three people stood on the low steps that led up to the door – a man, a woman and a kid. The man was standing on the top step, right outside the door of the house. His arms were crossed and his chest was puffed out, as if to say, “This? Yeah, this is all mine. All your asses? Yeah, they’re mine, too.” You know the sort. Beside him, on the two lower steps, stood the woman and the kid, both of whom looked pretty miserable. Beyond them, in a line, stood all their servants. It didn’t tell me much really, other than that it is genuinely possible to capture boredom on camera. So I put the picture back where I found it and there ended my quest.
As I headed back towards the stairs, I thought I saw something in the shadows. But when I turned my head to look, there was nothing there.