Amelia

AMELIA

Adam abandons the car with its flat tires, and storms back inside the chapel. I follow him through the boot room, the kitchen, then the lounge, until we are both standing in the middle of Henry Winter’s secret study. Adam stares around the room. I’m not sure what he’s looking for or hoping to find. I preferred it when I thought we were leaving.

White rabbits are definitely a theme in here … they leap all over the wallpaper, the blinds, the cushions. The interior design choices are unexpected for a man in his eighties who liked writing dark and disturbing books. But then as Adam always says, the best writers tend to have nothing and everything in common with their characters.

Adam stares at me with a strange look on his face.

“If you know anything about what is really going on here, then now would be a good time to tell me,” he says, in a tone he usually reserves for cold callers.

“Don’t start trying to blame me. This place belongs to the author whose novels you’ve spent the last ten years of your life adapting. I never liked him. Or his books. And everything I’ve seen this weekend suggests that you’re the reason we’re trapped here.”

Adam looks at the antique desk again, the one that used to belong to Agatha Christie. It’s made of a dark wood, and quite small, but there are ten tiny little drawers built into it, which I only really notice when he starts pulling them out. Each looks like a miniature wooden box, and when he tips the first onto the palm of his hand, a small bronze statue of a rabbit falls out.

“I’ve seen this before,” he mutters, already moving to the next drawer.

Inside that, he finds an origami paper bird, just like the one he always carries around in his wallet. I watch in silence as the color seems to drain from his face.

I do not enjoy seeing my husband like this. Other people all see a different version to the man I know. They have no knowledge of his moods, or his insecurities, or his regular nightmares about a woman in a red kimono being hit by a car. He doesn’t just wake up breathless and covered in sweat when he dreams about her, sometimes he screams. Adam has spent a lifetime running away from the things that scared him the most, and although the boy now looks like a man, he hasn’t changed so much.

Not in my eyes.

He opens another drawer and holds up an antique-looking iron key.

The next is filled with copper pennies. There must be over a hundred of them, each one with holes for eyes and a carved smiley face.