voice, she watched her feet as she stepped down and found herself entering another huge, almost cavernous room. The ground didn’t seem to crunch under the soles of her sneakers this time, instead it felt like sturdy wood.
Once again lifting her flashlight she cast the beam around the space, but it was impossible in the near darkness to gauge the dimensions of the room. Stepping forward, she let out a small cry of pain as she rapped her knee smartly on something hard, causing the harsh screech of wood against wood to echo through the room.
‘Are you okay?’ Killian’s disembodied voice floated across the stale air.
Ava sucked in a sharp breath as the vicious pain in her kneecap dulled to a muted throb.
‘I’m fine,’ she replied gazing down at the piece of furniture she’d collided with.
It was a wooden table of some kind, with a hinged lid and an attached chair. Recognizing it as an old school desk she looked up, flashing the light across the room and sure enough there were several more desks all lined up neatly.
Ava tucked the photo frame carefully under one arm. Holding the flashlight in one hand she reached out and touched the worn wood, feeling the rough grain against the pads of her fingers as she traced the grooves and indentations.
Peter, she mouthed quietly. Someone, at some point had carved his name into the desk, only the ‘r’ was back to front and the rest of the letters were a mismatched assemblage of different sizes and capitals. The owner of the name had obviously been quite young.
‘Well everything looks pretty sound down here,’ Killian suddenly appeared next to her. ‘Do you want to come upstairs and check out the second level? The light will be better up there as the windows haven’t been boarded up.’
‘Sure,’ Ava nodded despite the fact he could barely see her.
They climbed the main stairs which forked halfway up. She quietly followed behind Killian as he went from room to room, checking floors, ceilings, window frames and walls. She didn’t pay him much mind; her gaze was taking in all the details of the house she hadn’t been able to see downstairs. The space had been flooded with light from the many windows, despite decades of dirt and grime on the panes which were still in place.
Plaster had chipped away from the ceiling in many of the rooms. The exposed floorboards, likewise, were in a pretty rough condition and in almost every room the wallpaper peeled and drooped down the walls in great swathes. Drapes hung tattered at broken windows, but the furniture remained in place.
One of the first things she noticed was the sheer amount of small child sized beds. Due to the large size of most of the rooms, they had easily fitted three to four beds per room. Each was still made up with graying sheets and heavy blankets in not much better condition than the drapes.
Still it was eerie. Children’s tin toys lay splayed across the floor, china dolls were propped on beds or tucked into chairs in the corners of the room. It was as if the occupants had simply walked out and left everything as it was.
A rocking horse suddenly creaked and shifted in the breeze from the broken windowpane. Ava stepped closer, noticing a small tin carousel with brightly painted, chipped horses. Reaching out with inquisitive fingers, it slowly began to turn, the ancient mechanism nudged into motion by her touch. The haunting lullaby filled the room in its stilted and uneven way, the music barrel obviously having been damaged over time.
‘That’s creepy,’ Killian shook his head as he turned to leave the room and Ava followed.
They moved up another smaller flight of stairs to the third and topmost floor, as they moved carefully down the corridor Ava stopped dead in front of a plain wooden door. She couldn’t say why she’d stopped, all she knew was her heart was pounding loudly in her chest, her mouth was dry, and her hands had involuntarily curled into fists.
Reaching out slowly, she pushed the door open with a loud creak of protesting hinges and stepped into the room.
It wasn’t anything special. There was a small fireplace along one wall, and a single, solitary window opposite. In the corner of the room was an old bed, the mattress long since rotted away and beside it a plain wooden chair.
Her dark eyes locked on the bed and her chest ached like a huge weigh was crushing