Ane Riel - Resin

With the help of an otherwise useless umbrella, he managed to reach the curtain across the junk, pull it slightly to one side and let in more light. He regretted his decision immediately when he saw what it revealed: the dusty cobwebs that covered everything like a sticky, grey membrane, the dead, dying and still-living spiders and cockroaches, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies populating the room from floor to ceiling.

An open box of Liquorice Allsorts lit up the place with its fresh colours and simple shapes. It looked as if it had been left there recently. His favourites had always been the pink coconut wheels, but surely they tasted exactly the same as the yellow ones? On the wall was a faded poster of different species of fish staring at him with their dead eyes. Roald looked down before taking his next step. More sweets. A half-empty bag of wine gums had landed in a flower pot and someone seemed to have emptied a bag of salt-liquorice balls across the floor.

Salt liquorice? How unusual.

And when he bent down to take a closer look, he discovered that the droppings in the dust weren’t Haribo, but from the rabbits. Their excrement was everywhere. Could three rabbits really produce that much poo?

Four.

Because, as he straightened up and accidentally kicked a hubcap, yet another rabbit jumped out from its hiding place. It disappeared through a half-open door to his right, leading to the living room, perhaps.

The noises increased in number. And volume.

He decided to take a quick look inside the living room and then get the hell out of here. It was all too much, but one thought troubled him more than anything: he wasn’t sure that he could cope if he discovered a dead body inside the house. Better send the police out here. And then there was the air. It was suffocating. It was so dense with dust he felt the urge to cough the whole time. And somewhere in the back of his mind was the knowledge that the dog had been killed by an arrow which someone had fired not that long ago. Someone unlikely to be dead.

And yet his conscience compelled him to look inside. Just a quick peek before he left. He cautiously opened the door a little more. Yes, it was a living room. Or it had been once.

A wall of things had risen in front of the south-facing windows at the far end of the room. Rays of sunlight were trying to get through the cracks in the wall and into the room, but on their way through the dust they faded to weak shadows unable to produce anything other than a pale imitation of light.

Roald felt like he had entered an underground mine shaft. He was standing in a narrow passage that wound its way through the objects, which had merged together into what at first glance looked like one dark mass. Now he tried to make out the contours that slowly emerged from the twilight. He saw umbrellas, again. A stuffed owl. At least, he hoped it was stuffed. In several places the junk almost reached the ceiling. He took a step forwards and saw a piano to one side. A bust, an upended sofa, a tailor’s dummy, a dining table, barrels, clothes, plastic bags, cardboard packaging. It went on. A couple of other paths appeared.

Stunned, he stared at an object hanging from the ceiling. It looked like a tree stripped of its leaves – a hanging spruce? It was a Christmas tree; he could see the star now. And the paper-heart decorations. Some were close to falling off the bare branches; others had already done so. One of them released its grip as he approached. The paper hearts looked strangely dull but, on the other hand, the darkness probably didn’t leave much room for colour. The crunchy sound of spruce needles under the soles of his shoes roused his sense of hearing. The sounds. There was scratching and scurrying all around him.

He had to get out, and it couldn’t happen soon enough. And given that he had already moved some way through the living room, probably in the direction of the hall, he would continue that way. It couldn’t be worse than having to walk back past the fridge and the freezer. Roald cursed himself for having ventured so far inside the house; for even entering the house in the first place.

When his path was blocked by a big canvas sack and he tried to push it aside three startled rabbits hopped away and disappeared in the darkness. As he picked up the sack to move it he could feel its contents trickle out over one of his shoes from a hole in the bottom. He set it down, retracted his foot and looked at it. Animal feed had settled like a small mountain range across the path, and the now slack canvas sack collapsed to one side.

He straddled the mountains and continued along the narrow path. He felt the need to support himself against the bulging walls on either side, not least because he feared that something might come crashing down on top of him, but at the same time he didn’t want to touch anything. The thought of feeling a rat against the palm of his hand made him shudder. He held up his hands to each side, not touching anything, but ready to grab out for support.

And then they came.

Maybe he had knocked the sack into something when he moved it a moment ago, but whatever it was had triggered a collapse behind him. He jumped at the sound of things cascading and falling and sliding and crashing into one another. When he turned, he saw the whole of one side of the room cave in. The owl fell. A big old radio tumbled over the edge, pulling with it something from the other side as it did so. Some cardboard slipped down, and a sack… and a little light crept in. But only a ray.

An image of avalanches popped into his head. Mudslides. Would everything come tumbling from behind and bury him alive? Death by suffocation?

And then they came. The rabbits. From every hole and corner and crack. Roald clutched his head and screamed as he tried to outrun the panicking pets.

The path was widening slightly now. He had a choice between running up the stairs, where a narrow passage had been created down the middle, or following the route to his left, through the hall, across to the front door…

He skidded to a halt.

The rabbits had gathered in small clusters, most of them in the corner behind the stairs under a go-kart. The noise had stopped.

He realized that it hadn’t been an avalanche, just a minor collapse. All the fallen items had settled themselves again. Behind them, in a thick beam of liberated sunlight, the dead tree hung like a silent witness.

Roald looked about him. There was slightly more light at this end of the living room, thanks to a small window up on the landing. It must be the east-facing end of the house.

Then a short section of the wall between the hall and the kitchen caught his attention. Down by the skirting board there was a fairly large hole with a jagged edge. The furry inhabitants of this house must have gnawed their way through the wall. A cable with protruding copper wire stuck out, it looked like a confused caterpillar, and on the floor in front of the hole bits of insulation lay scattered between excrement and scraps of wallpaper. Something similar had happened to the wall by the stairs, and Roald dreaded to think what other surprises might be revealed if the walls were stripped. The wiring constituted a fire hazard. And how much more gnawing and nibbling could the house cope with before the whole place caved in?

His musings were brutally interrupted by the sight of a rat darting across the floor.

‘ Out ,’ he ordered it, pointing to the corner as if he expected the rat to obey his command. The creature disappeared in another direction, but he could still see the end of its tail sticking out behind a wellington boot.

And that was when he heard it.

A knocking was coming from the first floor. It wasn’t an animal making a noise or a bird pecking or the wind causing something to slam. It was a human being knocking. It was a human being who wanted to be heard.