The House of Hidden Things

VI: Histories

Instead I could hear her shuffling around finding something else to knock over.

I take a book from one of the shelves, recalling an old memory of Edmund, hunched over books, glasses placed on the bridge of his nose. I open the book to a random page and the printed books were crips and clear and underlined. A few pages at a time or single words on a page of two hundred.

Detailed explanations of anatomy sketches. A detailed sketch of a human arm extended over pages, two side views of a pelvis bone and what looks to be a set of two beating hearts.

I put the book down and pick up another. It's the same. Medical studies. Annotated in fountain ink and underlined in pencil. Someone's handwriting. Slanted and curled around their vowels.

Even the sketches were done in pressed ink, dug into the page from a solid grip. They look almost exactly like the sketches I used to find Edmund pouring over when I was younger, and able to sit on his lap and watched him work. Some parts smudged and pencilled in over the top of faded words. Studies he would show me, sketch for me, teach me to replicate.

I pull another from the shelf, laying the book open on top of the one before it – all of them devoted to studies of anatomy on each of the pages. Except one. Ink seals the last few pages. Dried together and pressed in place. The spin cracks as I pry them apart and when the ink finally gives, all that rests between them is a feather. Large. Greying around the edges. Halted in it's decaying process.

I lift the feather off the textured page. A strange but pretty thing to keep in a book.

The light doesn't wink over the feather. No shadow touches the ends even as I lift it up to the streams coming through the floorboards above. As if the light simply bent around it, not daring to touch it's edges. The way light sometimes bends around corners.

Claws on wood pulled my attention away from the books and the strange, pretty feather. The ginger cat lay curled on the dark wooden table before the book shelf. She flicked her tail and pawed at the open tomb before her, claws pulling at the paper.

Pulling at the impression the feather had left between the pages.

I scratched the cat absently behind the ears. Using my free hand to pry the page from her grip. The impression is almost a perfect mirror. Long and thin, fading around the edges where the ends of the feather would reach and where the stem would end. Fading into a clear word, raised from the underside of the last page.

Words that can be seen, clearly, with the books spin topped towards my chin. I run a thumb over the letters, the name an echo on my lips: capti. Next to a word smudged beyond recognition. Capti meaning trapped?

Medora flicked her tail again, stretching away from my fingers to reach, tall against the row of books before her. The fur under my fingertips raised, her body coiled and still.

"What do you see? A mouse?" I ask, trying to calm her, but she whines. Low and long. Territorial. She lifts a paw and swipes at the black. The only empty space on the shelf, tented by a fallen Volume, resting in the space of the books I'd pulled from the shelve.

I reach out into the back to find a smooth expanse of glass. Another jar?

The glass was cat-eye height tucked behind the row of books, accompanied by five or six others. A row of milky, sealed jars. Each with a label of a date.

The relief is almost enough to make me laugh with how easy it was for letting a small room in a big empty house get to me. The shelf creaks when I turn one of the milky jars, touching my fingers to the smooth surface. The handwriting on the jar is slanted. The vowels the same looped hand from the book inscriptions.

I turn the jar further into the light, brushing away the dust covering a mummified hand preserved inside the jar. I recoiled, bumping my elbow into the table behind me. I wipe my fingers on my sweater, feeling my throat burn, my stomach roll.

Pieces of the jar had chipped and cracked, and the smell of the mummified hand wafted into the small space. Sulphur and rotting egg, stagnate water and moulded wrappings.

I didn't know what I expected to find, but it hadn't been this.

I had never seen the pieces my grandfather left behind. I had only seen the proof left in crevices and gaps in memories that seemed so normal until they weren't. I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat and forced myself to inhale. I made myself look at the jar. I didn't want too, but I needed to see it. 

In the centre of the glass jar, a desiccated mummy pilfered from somewhere. A single date was written on the side but it couldn't have been the date of collection (which would be expected):

Archive, 1877. No code system. No identifying labels. Twinkling light reflects back in glass, the dancing pattern reflected across the other rows of jars in the small room. How many more are there?

I shivered from the thought, my focus wavering, my throat burning from the bile rising behind it. Of all the things I had been used to, all the things I worked with dead and alive, it was the rotting flesh smell that lingered the longest. It seemed to cling to every surface, every strand of hair so that when I turned to sharply, the smell of it would come back in waves.

The rotting egg smell emanated from the broken rim. Clinging to my fingers, my skin.

The bile rose into my mouth. I stumbled out of the room, up the staircase landing to the bathroom, in time to heave into the porcelain toilet.