Behind the cellar wall

Text 1: The Green Door, by Farida Linnell

An original novel extract.

It was Marek who found the door, though it was not, at first, a door. It was a hollow sound. He had been knocking along the back wall of the cellar with the handle of his hammer, the way his uncle had taught him, listening for the change in note where old plaster had come away from brick. Knock, knock, knock: dull and solid, like knocking on a hillside. Then, near the corner, knock: and the wall answered with something thinner, a hollow, hesitant reply.

The owners wanted a wine store and a utility room. They had shown him the plans on a tablet, all clean lines and spotlights. They had not mentioned anything behind the wall, and he did not think they knew.

He worked carefully after that, chipping rather than striking. The plaster came away in grey slabs, and under it, instead of brick, there was wood: painted planks, the paint the flat green of old railings, and a keyhole with no key. Somebody had plastered over a door. Somebody had taken the time to do it properly, too, with a good straight edge, and then papered over the plaster, and then painted over the paper, and then, Marek guessed, forgotten, or tried to.

The lock was rusted through. It gave at the second push.

The air that came out was cold and dry and smelt of nothing, which was somehow worse than a bad smell, as though even smells had been shut out. His torch found a small room, perhaps two metres square. A narrow bed, made, with a grey blanket folded at its foot. A chair. A table, and on the table a candle burnt down to a flat white coin, a tin cup, and a child’s exercise book lying open, its pages filled with careful, slanting handwriting in a language he half recognised.

On the wall above the bed someone had drawn a calendar in pencil, rows and rows of small squares, and each square had been crossed out. Marek counted the rows without meaning to. Then he stopped counting.

Upstairs, the owners’ radio was playing, and one of them was laughing at something, a light, easy, Sunday sound. It came down the cellar steps and into the little room and seemed to stop at the doorway, as if it did not dare come in.

Marek switched off his torch and stood in the dark with the people who had lived there, and he did not know how long he stood.

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