The Third Floor Bedroom

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Eliot Bryant

The third floor bedroom

        My body froze while i stood staring at the big elaborate red door, with the rusty '27' losing its colour to nature slowly and painfully as if the colour wanted to escape the prison that it had been painted on. My feet tapped to a rhythm that I made up in my head as I pondered many things that had happened here and all the memories that cannot be erased. My head tilted up like a gun on a turret trying to find its target which it did, my eyes latching on to the window, the third floor bedroom's window. I concentrated on it, having a staring competition with the window, I screened my eyes at the mountains of dirt and mud, built up from decades of neglect. If a cleaner were to come here, he would have to have a galactic war to get this stuff off, I smiled to myself remembering a similar joke cracked about that in times gone by. The smile disappeared quickly as I remembered what I had come here to do and the reason I had to face up to death for the third time and hopefully the last.As I thought about plucking up the courage to enter, I convinced myself I should relive what happened that first day, for old times sake and to tell you all why I have to do this.

        It was a chilly Wednesday, the first one of November in fact but me, Conor and smiley were trudging back from school as usual. I had my boiled sweets, pear drops, in my left blazer pocket as my right one had been torn off. I was swaggering home from school, trying to maintain a failing intellectual conversation which rapidly changed into a debate about football clubs. We decided upon the moment that we would go the-jungle-park-way, which wasn't actually anything to do with a jungle or a park, it was just some derelict land behind a row of houses which had overgrown with debris and nettles. We climbed down the banking on the side of the road, and stepped along what resembled a mud track, we followed this for a while as we spotted the discarded waste strewn all over the derelict area, there was the usuals that we saw every time we came this way, such as the two shopping trolleys that were welded together and the bell, that no-one knew where it came from.

        As we were walking down the ramshackle walkway we came across a house, well we had come across many houses like this one, discarded, useless, one time we went in and there was someone living there, but no this house was different, although it still had the few boarded up windows and the falling apart look that you only got on old Victorian houses. It seemed distant almost as if it wasn't there, this was rubish, naturally, but it did give out a presence, it had a feeling to it, that even to this day I cannot put my finger on. Anyway, this house had a big red door, in a  big red doorway that loomed over you as you stepped under it, and a great big brass '27'  under an elaborately shaped brass knocker, that looked as if it could pull the door off its hinges just though its weight alone. I said "Hello big red door"

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        Well Conor thought it would be a laugh to look around the house and nick anything that hadn't already been. It wasn't a laugh. At first, we kind of crept forward through the door, that wasn't locked, and Conor kept making sudden movements to make us jump.We didn't jump and so carried on into the grand hallway, but for this hallway, grand was a gargantuan understatement, the wooden banister (which did look a little rotten) was designed in the shape of angles cupping their hands and staring to heaven, their eyes blank as if they were on drugs. My mouth ...

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