A second door led into the house, probably to a kitchen. He wasn’t sure if he had the courage to open it. No, he decided that it was time to call in the professionals. There were limits to what he, as one man, should stick his nose into, although he had come no closer to understanding the mystery of the boy in the last half-hour.
But he might as well knock on the front door on his way back. He was pretty sure there would be no answer, so it was mostly so he could tell himself he had at least tried that too. Tried. Half-heartedly.
He turned to leave, and it wasn’t until then that he heard them. The sounds. He had been so busy breathing and coping with the stench while trying to think clearly at same time that his hearing must have gone into hibernation. But now he heard them. All around him something was creeping and scratching and munching. A particularly loud packet of cornflakes was moving slightly on the shelf in front of him.
Roald stared at it. Now he could also hear faint squeaking. Rats? The thought that the house might be riddled with rats made him jumpy. Mice, he could handle, or a mouse. But rats, hell no.
He took another step towards the external door but was stopped by a sudden, troubling thought. What if someone was in there? Roald had once had a friend who had never forgiven himself for ignoring the silence from the flat next door to his and the junk mail piling up outside. He had also blocked out the stench to begin with. After all, people were entitled to their privacy, that had been his friend’s thinking. They found the old man three weeks too late. On the living-room floor. He seemed to have died as he crawled towards the telephone.
Was Jens Horder lying in there dead? Or his wife? Was there even anybody in there? And what was the boy’s part in all of this? Who was he? Where did he fit in?
Roald rubbed his chin. He decided to steel himself. Or at least call out from where he was standing.
So he did.
A standard ‘Hello?’
And he noticed that all the noises stopped for a moment, only to return, somewhat tentatively.
And he called out again. ‘Hello, is anyone there? Hellooooo?’
He sounded more at ease than he felt.
By his third ‘Hello’, the noises had grown used to him. A dark shadow slipped past a tin on a shelf. A small, dark shadow, thank God. As long as they were just mice, it was OK. A small mouse… preferably a shrew.
Which wasn’t a mouse at all, according to the plumber.
‘Helloooo…?’
But some kind of mole.
There was no response except from the animals. So he might as well leave, mightn’t he? Or should he just check inside the kitchen?
The two rabbits that slipped out this time did nothing to calm his nerves. He felt as if they had been lying in wait behind the kitchen door. They dashed past him, out through the pantry, into the light and across the field. Roald closed the door behind him without quite knowing why. Was he scared of letting too much out of a home he had no right to enter? Too many pets.
It had said No trespassing on the sign down by the barrier. But, for pity’s sake, he had just lost a dog in a horrible way near this property, and his floral oilcloth was in the pantry. That definitely gave him cause to enter. He was entitled to know what was going on.
Or did it say No entry? Suddenly, he had doubts.
There wasn’t much light in the kitchen because the faded brown curtains in front of the window overlooking the farmyard were closed. Even so, a little of the daylight pierced the fabric and cast a strange golden glow into the room. The smell was just as foul as in the pantry, and Roald had to pinch his nose. There was also a fridge, containing God knows what. He had no desire to investigate it further, especially after he had tried the light switch just inside the door and discovered that there was no working light in the kitchen either.
Again, it was almost impossible for him to move about because of boxes, and stuff, and all kinds of rubbish. It was impossible to reach the door at the far end of the kitchen, which was blocked by a big crate of engine parts. Roald guessed the door led to the hallway. It fitted with the location of the front door.
With the help of an otherwise useless umbrella, he managed to reach the curtain across the junk, pull it slightly to one side and let in more light. He regretted his decision immediately when he saw what it revealed: the dusty cobwebs that covered everything like a sticky, grey membrane, the dead, dying and still-living spiders and cockroaches, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies populating the room from floor to ceiling.
An open box of Liquorice Allsorts lit up the place with its fresh colours and simple shapes. It looked as if it had been left there recently. His favourites had always been the pink coconut wheels, but surely they tasted exactly the same as the yellow ones? On the wall was a faded poster of different species of fish staring at him with their dead eyes. Roald looked down before taking his next step. More sweets. A half-empty bag of wine gums had landed in a flower pot and someone seemed to have emptied a bag of salt-liquorice balls across the floor.
Salt liquorice? How unusual.
And when he bent down to take a closer look, he discovered that the droppings in the dust weren’t Haribo, but from the rabbits. Their excrement was everywhere. Could three rabbits really produce that much poo?
Four.
Because, as he straightened up and accidentally kicked a hubcap, yet another rabbit jumped out from its hiding place. It disappeared through a half-open door to his right, leading to the living room, perhaps.
The noises increased in number. And volume.
He decided to take a quick look inside the living room and then get the hell out of here. It was all too much, but one thought troubled him more than anything: he wasn’t sure that he could cope if he discovered a dead body inside the house. Better send the police out here. And then there was the air. It was suffocating. It was so dense with dust he felt the urge to cough the whole time. And somewhere in the back of his mind was the knowledge that the dog had been killed by an arrow which someone had fired not that long ago. Someone unlikely to be dead.
And yet his conscience compelled him to look inside. Just a quick peek before he left. He cautiously opened the door a little more. Yes, it was a living room. Or it had been once.
A wall of things had risen in front of the south-facing windows at the far end of the room. Rays of sunlight were trying to get through the cracks in the wall and into the room, but on their way through the dust they faded to weak shadows unable to produce anything other than a pale imitation of light.
Roald felt like he had entered an underground mine shaft. He was standing in a narrow passage that wound its way through the objects, which had merged together into what at first glance looked like one dark mass. Now he tried to make out the contours that slowly emerged from the twilight. He saw umbrellas, again. A stuffed owl. At least, he hoped it was stuffed. In several places the junk almost reached the ceiling. He took a step forwards and saw a piano to one side. A bust, an upended sofa, a tailor’s dummy, a dining table, barrels, clothes, plastic bags, cardboard packaging. It went on. A couple of other paths appeared.
Stunned, he stared at an object hanging from the ceiling. It looked like a tree stripped of its leaves – a hanging spruce? It was a Christmas tree; he could see the star now. And the paper-heart decorations. Some were close to falling off the bare branches; others had already done so. One of them released its grip as he approached. The paper hearts looked strangely dull but, on the other hand, the darkness probably didn’t leave much room for colour. The crunchy sound of spruce needles under the soles of his shoes roused his sense of hearing. The sounds. There was scratching and scurrying all around him.