Beaches

Part 5

The room was dark, but the layout was familiar: on his right there was a large television hanging over the fireplace, his grandfather's chair to his left, directly opposite it. One of Jacob's strongest memories was of the white haired old man sitting there with a cup of tea, his feet up on the stool, watching reruns of old detective shows.

There was a brown sofa with lacy white sleeves against the far wall. It had been a space ship and a submarine, amongst other things, when the weather had been too bad to go outside. To the right of that was a wooden cabinet which contained ancient volumes of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. To the left of it was the door.

Jacob went into the hallway, where the only light came streaking through the dirty window onto the table at the bottom of the stairs. When he'd been a child it had been the telephone table and had seemed enormous. He looked at it now, almost expecting to see the bright red rotary phone and the notebook for jotting down messages. In later years a stool had been added for his grandmother to sit - it had always been his grandmother; his grandfather never had much time for conversation - while she talked. Now there was just a pile of letters and a stray iPhone charging cable.

He stopped at the first door he came to.

The door.

It had started out as the front room, full of crystal doo-dads and frills. He'd only caught glimpses of it then and had never been allowed in; it was a grownup room, they had told him. When his grandmother had recovered from her fall and been allowed out of the hospital, she hadn't been able to climb the stairs, so they'd turned it into her bedroom. Then she'd died, and his parents had moved in. Emma had never been very good with stairs, so they'd set up her cot and everything had been fine and wonderful and...

...she might be in there now.

His hand hovered over the brass door knob and he tried not to imagine what he would find. The proof of his guilt, of his failing not just his sister but his parents as well? Would she have struggled? In panic and desperation, would she have managed to pull her cot over? Pull something on top of her? Would she be laying prone and half-decomposed in —

"Stop!" he said aloud. His voice sounded unnatural in the stillness. It spooked him. He shook his head and wiped his sweat soaked palms against his jeans. Whatever was in there couldn't be worse than he was imagining. The only way to stop nightmares was to open the door and see for himself.

Jacob put his hand back on the knob, turned it,and pushed open the door.