Shelved

Shelved Part 3

The next morning the stairs creak and groan as I feel my way upwards in the dark. I run one hand along the cold paint of the stonework to guide me as my shoulder brushes the narrow stairway's opposite wall for balance. At the top of the stairs, the attic door's latch gives a rusty squeak and clunk before it grinds open. It's still dark enough that if my breath makes fog I can't even see it in front of my face. It's the old routine, over and over again.

It's hard to feel excited today. The discussions I have with Keith and Maureen about what I'm trying to do grow ever more frequent. I don't know why they can't be supportive. Still I persevere. Today of all days I don't think I'd care if I stomped back down the stairs to make sure they heard me and went back to bed.

In the attic, the first light turns a ghostly blue and silhouettes appear, phantom-like, out from the dark. Something's different, the objects on the shelves look unfamiliar. This doesn't look like anyone's shelves that I've seen before. My heart gives a lurch. It's still too dark and I feel a deep unease as I wait there while the spectral contents of the room manifest in the shadows ahead of me.

A doll is sat on one shelf, and a toy house next to it. This all seems wrong. It looks too modern. If the shelves show me things from the past, why does this seem so recent – when on earth could this have been? A horrible thought strikes me - was everything that I've been recording really from the history of this house? What has it been showing me all this time?

A toy car on one shelf is clearly made of plastic. There's a Mickey Mouse clock next to it, a globe and a large, gilded photo frame, but what sends a chill through me is that I recognise them. All of these things are in my bedroom downstairs, right now.

My pen wavers on the jotter page but I'm so confused I don't write anything. On the other side of the shelves there's a Barbie doll and books by Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter. There's a handful more girls toys - ponies and stuffed animals and a crisp looking Beano annual dated 1987 - two years after I was born.

My jotter and pen drop to the floor as I rush back round to the photo frame. I need to know whose picture it shows. I can't see the photos inside because of the dark and fight every impulse to grab it and turn it to the light.

On the floor all around me are crayons, toys and pieces of screwed up paper and I nearly swallow my tongue when I realise how close I was to stepping on something. A cold sweat breaks out over me – in all my time here – years – I have never seen anything like this. If I touch something and it all vanished and never reappeared then I don't know what I'd do. A mystery like this, how could I ever focus on Arthur or the others ever again? I can't even think straight. Since when have items appeared off the shelves and on the floor? I notice pictures on the walls now – bold splashes of paint in childlike renderings of the world, even scribbles of crayon on the wall around them.

Heart pumping, I go over to the desk to look what's on it. Sheets of paper are scattered about along with crayons and felt tips. Bright, scribbled doodles and loopy, meandering writing are sprawled, uninhibited over them. It's all I can do to restrain myself from touching them to see clearer. I hold my beard back and dare not even breathe as I struggle to make out what's on there.

What is clearly meant to be a girl with long, orange strands of hair and a triangular dress holds the hand of an adult male and female beside her. The mother's hair is drawn with the same colour as the little girl. The sun has rays coming off it and they are smiling. The adults reappear several times in the pictures, but in these it seems that from blue dots coming from the eyes of the female – safe to say the mother- that she is crying. The father holds a bottle in one hand and has a wide open mouth, face scribbled in red. In another picture the woman throws something at the man who sits and holds his head and the little girl cries.