Behind the Photographs

Theo went home that evening and looked at the hallway wall with entirely new attention.

It was plastered, as far as he could tell, with no obvious panels or joins that might suggest a hidden space. The photographs hung on ordinary hooks. The skirting board was original, he thought, old and painted many times over. The ceiling was plain white with a simple cornice.

He looked at the photographs again. His family photographs, all bought or taken recently, none of them original to the house.

Behind them, the wall. He lifted one photograph off its hook and looked at the wall beneath. Plaster, painted over many times, no different from the rest.

He lifted the next. Nothing.

The third photograph was his parents' wedding picture. He lifted it off its hook and looked at the wall behind it.

There was a small mark there, low down, almost at the level of the hook itself. Not recent. Old, done in pencil by the look of it, faded but legible.

It was a letter, and then an arrow.

E. and then an arrow pointing upward along the wall.

Theo's heart was going quickly. He replaced the photograph, went to the next hook along, lifted the photograph of his grandparents, and looked at the wall behind it. Another mark. The same faded pencil. This time just the arrow, pointing upward, toward the cornice.

He looked up.

The cornice. Standard Victorian plaster cornice, running along the top of the wall where it met the ceiling. He'd never looked at it closely. He got a chair from his bedroom, stood on it, and examined the section of cornice directly above the marks.

It looked, at first, identical to the rest of the cornice. The same repeated leaf-and-scroll pattern. But when he looked very carefully, he could see that one section of the pattern was slightly different from the others. Not the plasterwork itself, but the paint over it. Slightly thicker on one small section, as though something had been painted over rather than decorated.

He got a torch and angled it along the surface.

Behind the paint, barely visible, was a seam. A horizontal seam in the plasterwork, about twenty centimetres long. Not a crack. Too regular, too deliberate. A join.

Something had been set into the cornice.

He was still standing on the chair, torch angled at the cornice, when his mum came up the stairs and stopped at the bottom of the hallway.

"What are you doing?" she asked, in the tone of a parent who had learned not to lead with alarm.

"Looking at the cornice," Theo said.

A pause. "All right," she said. "Do you want to tell me why, or is this going to be one of those things where you explain afterwards?"

"Probably afterwards," he admitted. "Sorry. I'll be careful, I promise."

Another pause. "Dinner in twenty minutes," she said, and went back downstairs.

He got down from the chair, put it back, and went to dinner. His parents asked about his day and he gave a more or less truthful account of it, omitting the part about the mirror and Edmund Aldiss. His dad talked about a problem at work. His mum talked about a book she was reading. It was a normal dinner in a normal house, and Theo sat through it with the particular feeling of someone carrying a secret that was not ready to be shared yet.

After dinner he texted Cecily: Found something in the cornice. Come early tomorrow.

She replied in under a minute: How early.

Eight.

Fine. You owe me a proper breakfast.