A World Other Than Her Own

CHAPTER 1-2

Turning her attention back to the task at hand, Claire looked out one of the windows. Again, there was a pair of them, one on either side of the double doors. That didn’t surprise her, but what froze her in her tracks was what she saw outside.

It was more of a case of what she couldn’t see. Right behind the window was a fog so thick that she couldn’t see any further than the windowsill. It was clearly daylight. It wasn’t dark outside, and even inside, she could see fine although no lights were lit. Beyond the window, the fog was as thick as rice pudding.

She got up and walked to the window. The fog was impenetrable. She walked over to the window on the other side, and it was the same. She hurried to the snug and peered out through the stained-glass windows at the top, but it was impossible to tell. The few clear panes of glass were so high up that what she could see might as well have been grey skies as fog.

One thing was clear; even had she been able to make her way out of the house, she would not have found her way anywhere in such thick mist. It would have been sheer idiocy to even attempt it.

* * *

With no escape route, Claire had to come up with a plan of action. She wasn’t sure she fancied inspecting the remaining doors. Either there would be other people behind them or there wouldn’t. She didn’t know which would be worse. She didn’t feel like seeing anybody, and she wasn’t sure she liked their odds of being sane. After all, it was possible that someone had locked her in, and if that was the case, did she really want to meet that person? On the other hand, she didn’t like the idea of being on her own in a house that size either. Whatever her reason for being there, the situation was far from normal and something was amiss.

She considered grabbing a book from the shelf and escaping into the relative safety of her room. Her room, as if it belonged to her or she belonged to it.

Despite her discomfort and niggling fear, her bodily functions got the better of her. She was hungry. In fact, she was ravenous. Claire didn’t know when she had last eaten something. Had she had something before going to bed? Where had she gone to bed, come to think of it? If she had retired to a large four-poster bed, she should have remembered it.

Claire shook the thought out of her mind. First things first. Although the temperature in the house was not cold, she was shivering. She desperately longed for a hot drink. She wouldn’t even have said no to a stiff drink had she found one. As it was, she had seen nothing even resembling food or drink – if the taps in her bathroom didn’t count.

She decided that it was unlikely that the kitchen was upstairs. It never was. It would have to be one of the doors along the downstairs corridor. She glanced in both directions and then took a determined step to her right. She would have to start somewhere.

She started with the first door on the right, on the same side as the enormous fireplace in the snug and opposite the front door. They were all wooden doors exactly like the one leading to her room. She twisted the handle gently, pushed, and the door opened easily and quietly.

She stepped into another room empty of people. It was silent. It was not a massive room, but plenty big for the purpose she supposed it served. The wallpaper was yellow, and there was another large fireplace on her left, a long, dark dining table in the middle and a serving table on the right. Through the large windows, she could see more of the mass of eerie fog.

She closed the door gently behind her. The room appeared to be a breakfast room.There was a dining table, but neither the table nor the room were big enough for a house that size. It was too modest. There was a serving table, so some sort of meals had to be served in this room. Big houses had breakfast rooms, the way modern people had breakfast bars in their kitchens – which in a similar way were useless wastes of space at any other time of the day.

If it was a breakfast room, she had to be close to the kitchen.

She was just starting to look for another door when her eyes caught something else. She could hear it too. A clock was ticking. There was a pendulum clock above the fireplace. The pendulum was gently swinging. The hands pointed at quarter past eleven.

Claire stood staring at the clock for some time. The pendulum kept moving, and after she had waited long enough, the minute hand moved too. At least time was moving. That was comforting. She didn’t know if the time shown was right, but it felt like it was sometime before noon. She hadn’t lost all her senses.

There were two doors on her right and two on her left. Claire stepped up to the door closest to her on her right. She put her ear to the door and listened. Nothing. She tried the door handle and went in to the next room.

It wasn’t much of a room. The modern-day word for it was kitchenette. There were cupboards everywhere with crockery in them. Opposite her was another open door into a large kitchen. She stepped briskly across the gap and into the kitchen.

It was empty.

She ran across the kitchen to the next door, which was also open. It led to a pantry. There were two doors to all of the rooms – breakfast room, kitchenette, kitchen proper and pantry. Two doors in each, perfectly aligned. It made sense. It was designed for the servants so that they could come and go freely without getting in each other’s way. Victorian genius – if that was the style of the house, and Claire was not sure of that. She was no architect.

She pondered that thought for a moment. She wasn’t sure what her profession was. In fact, she didn’t know much about herself at all. She didn’t know where she was, whose clothes she was wearing or where her mobile phone was, but she knew she owned one. She also knew names of things, objects, and she knew a bit about the layout of old country houses. She knew she had visited museums, but where, when and with whom?

It was too much for the moment. The kitchen was too large, and the only cooking facilities she saw were at a large stove she could only presume was at the back of the snug’s fireplace. The stove and the fireplace probably shared a chimney.

She moved back to the kitchenette. The pantry was too dark as it had no windows. The kitchen had windows, but the size of the room bothered her. She didn’t want to be there. The kitchenette was small and cosy, lit by a row of small windows near the top of the wall like in the kitchen. There was an old-fashioned fridge in there with a small freezer on top. They were the rounded type that she remembered seeing – 1950s, ’60s, ’70s perhaps? What interested her even more was the modern-looking kettle on the small worktop along with a toaster. They weren’t top of the range either, but they were electric. The thought was crazy, but at least she hadn’t gone back in time.

Claire grabbed the kettle and shook it gently. It was empty. Below the windows was a Belfast sink. She went over to it, turned the tap on and waited. Water came out. It was clear. No rusty taps. It looked drinkable, and in any case, she was going to boil it. She filled the kettle and set it to boil.

There was a breadbin next to the toaster. She opened it, peered inside and saw a loaf of bread. Now that was old-fashioned. The loaf wasn’t wrapped in plastic. It was just sitting there, white and soft, smelling divine.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said out loud and pulled the loaf out. There were drawers under the worktop, and one of them was full of cutlery. She took out a knife and cut two thick slices of the loaf. Then she popped them in the toaster.

Above the worktop was a press with a glass door on it. She pulled out a small plate and a mug. It was a mug, not a teacup – a good proper mug, like the one you’d drink your morning coffee out of. Claire wasn’t sure she had morning coffee though. She wanted tea for the time being – the drink of comforts, the beverage of the lost and lonely, the potion to cure all ailments, the brew of kings and queens. She found herself smiling at the thought of a cuppa.

She turned around to the fridge. She opened the door and found only one item inside – a bottle of milk. She took it out and let her eyes wander around the room. There, next to the fridge on the worktop, was a plate with a lid on top of it. She lifted the lid and, sure enough, there was the butter. Who in their right minds kept butter at room temperature these days? That probably was exactly the point. Not in their right minds. She sniffed at the butter, but it seemed fine.

She found teabags, brewed her tea and buttered her toast. Then she picked up the bottle of milk. It was a glass bottle with one of those odd bottle tops on it that twisted to one side. There were no labels on it. It was as if a milkman had brought it – in that fog! Surely not. She put her nose to the top of the bottle and got the disgusting scent of milk. Milk always smelled rank to her, but it hadn’t gone off.

The bread was delicious. It was proper country bread with a crispy crust, and the butter melted into the slice, running down her fingers and her chin as she ate, oblivious to the mess she was making. She sipped her tea in between. It was hot and dreamy – like something else completely, but it was such a pleasure to eat and drink. It was an ordinary thing to do, something that people the world over did every day, several times a day, sometimes for pleasure but mostly for the nutritional benefit. It was a wonderful thing to do.

Claire enjoyed her brunch so much that she made herself another cup of tea and another two slices of toast. Once she was done with that, she washed her plate and cup and the cutlery she had used and put them away. Then she boiled the kettle once more, made herself a fresh cup of tea and headed back out.

She stopped in the snug at the bottom of the stairs. If she was going to head back up to her room, she would need something to do. She could grab a book. At the end of the day, she had already taken liberties helping herself to several slices of toast and mugs of tea.

She stepped closer to the shelf and eyed the spines of the books. Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White. All classics. She had already read most of them, but the Charles Dickens was a new acquaintance to her in all but name. She grabbed the book and headed back up the steps.

Upstairs, she glanced in both directions down the hallway, and it was silent. The hallway was dark except outside her room. There were no windows as there were rooms on both sides.

Claire resisted the temptation to investigate the rooms. She was curious, but she was also frightened of what she might find – and what she might not find. Discovering that she was indeed the only person in the whole house would be too unnerving.

She turned left towards her room. She stopped at the door and stared at it.

There was a key in the door. Right enough, a little silver key, old-fashioned with a circular top that you could slip a chain or a bit of ribbon through. Having a key was great. The only thing was, it had not been there when she left the room.

Or had it? She knew the door had not been locked and there had been no key on the door on the inside, but had she actually checked for a key once she had been outside the room? She had been preoccupied with the chandelier – still breathtaking – and the quietness of the outside. She could not be sure if there had been a key or not.

With another look up and down the passage, she tucked the book carefully under her arm and twisted the door handle. It was open. She took the key, put it in a tiny pocket at the front of her dress and stepped inside, teacup stretched out ready to be thrown at any intruder. What she would do beyond that, she didn’t know.

The room was empty. From the door, she could even see behind the screen, but all that was there was the chair, the mirror and her nightclothes.

She stepped in quietly and put her book and mug down on the chest of drawers. She slinked towards the large wardrobe and pulled all the doors open. It was empty. Metres and metres of hanging space, and there were no clothes inside.

The bathroom door was ajar. Claire couldn’t remember how she had left it. The door was open, but when she stepped in and the light came on, she stared at another empty room.

She stared at her pale, bewildered face in the mirror for a few seconds and took deep breaths. Was this what it felt like to lose one’s mind?

Claire returned to the bedroom, fished out the key from her pocket and locked the door securely, putting the key back into her pocket. She was too familiar with that newspaper-under-the-door trick to leave the key in the lock.