a return to the house of death (3)

During their initial works to the reconfiguration and superficial presentation of the property the couple discovered a wheelchair pushed to the rear-most point of the small bare brick tunnel that comprised the main basement cavity. It struck the both of them as odd as they had made extensive excavations of the basement space already – it was in fact one of the first parts of the house they had explored once contracts had been exchanged – and unearthed little but the usual rubbish one would expect to find in a basement of such limited dimensions: a rolled up rug or carpet, some jeans, a couple of coat hangers and cigarette butts, an old record player with a crack across the breadth of the plastic lid, the standard detritus, they had supposed at the time, of a primarily comfortable urban life.

During each of these excavations, carrying the rubbish up the stairs and to a hired refuse skip in the street outside, they could say with almost complete certainty that there had been no wheelchair, and yet here it absolutely was. He was touching its chrome like the flanks of a lover to exemplify this fact, pulling it back slightly and then pushing it forward by the handles. Its presence was unarguable. Carefully he pulled the wheelchair backwards through the tunnel and to the bottom of the stairs, then lifted it up and carried it up to the hallway, surprised by the lightness of the item without the bulk of a cripple inside it; he imagined wheelchairs as heavy, unwieldy things, creaking and groaning in the gothic style, but this was a slick sporty model built from lightweight composite materials, wheels angled for speed and precise turning. In the light of the hallway they could see that the wheelchair was caked in blood, which in some places - where the blood had pooled, in the declivities of the padded seat cushioning, for example - was still tacky to the touch. They had both wanted to take a turn in the wheelchair but decided against it given the blood, and instead wheeled it out of the front door and hoisted it into the skip with the old carpets, the rug, the broken record player, all manner of other rubbish that had now been removed from the basement of the property. A wheel continued to spin for minutes after they had closed the front door behind them like a reliable generator of great woe.