The kitchen wall asked me what went into a mouth but never ate.
I said, “A spoon,” because I had spent the day carrying boxes and had not yet developed the appropriate fear.
Nothing happened. Then the voice asked again, exactly as before, down to the little cough before “mouth.”
I had turned on a switch beside the cooker ten minutes earlier. No light had come on, and I had left it at that. Now I turned it off. The wall fell silent.
When my cousin Dev arrived with the folding bed, I switched it on for him.
We stood beside the cooker until the question finished. The voice was Aunt Marla’s: thin, impatient, certain that whatever you said next would disappoint her. She had been dead four months.
Dev put down his end of the bed.
“You can sleep at my place.”
“And leave her in charge of the house?”
“I was thinking of the sofa.”
I had inherited the house because I had once told her I liked it. I was eight, and I meant the apple tree. The roof now had three leaks. The tree was gone. But my rented room cost more each year while remaining exactly the same size, and here I could at least choose where to put a bed.
Dev had already helped me move two wardrobes and a washing machine. He wasn’t obliged to investigate a dead woman as well. At thirty-six he was still waiting for the yellow bicycle Marla had given him at eleven and taken back a week later, after he rode it across her lawn.
“She said it was being repaired,” he said, settling the bed in the hall. “For twenty-five years.”
“Maybe the bicycle has questions too.”
“Don’t make it charming, Mina.”
That stopped me. I had made much of Marla charming at the funeral: the enormous hats, the bad driving, her habit of describing supermarket tomatoes as an insult. Dev had sat beside his mother and watched the floor.
He left. I ate a sandwich standing up and searched the kitchen drawers. Five corkscrews, no spoons. The good cutlery had disappeared before the estate was inventoried. Nobody handling the estate knew where it had gone.
The wall asked its question again.
I held up a plastic takeaway spoon.
“Here. An answer you can wash.”
As I tapped it against the wall, a little square beside the cooker rattled. It wasn’t plaster but a painted wooden flap. A finger notch had been filled with paint. I scraped it clear with the spoon handle and pulled.
Behind it was a chute, just wide enough to admit a comb. Someone had written POST YOUR ANSWER inside the flap.
That, at least, was an instruction I understood. I dropped the spoon down the chute. It clattered into metal below the floor. Something clicked, and Marla’s voice stopped halfway through “mouth.”
A new question began.
“What has teeth but cannot bite?”
A comb. We had owned a green book of those riddles. Marla used to read them to my sister and me, hiding the answer with one finger. She disliked us turning the page before she finished.
I looked at the comb in my open washbag. It was the only one I had brought. The house had already collected a spoon; I wasn’t going to supply the rest of its dinner.
I turned off the switch and called Dev.
“I don’t want to come back,” he said.
“You don’t have to. Did she ever make you do the riddle book?”
“With the prizes?”
“There weren’t prizes.”
“For you.”
He asked what had happened. I told him about the chute.
“Don’t put anything else in,” he said. “I remember that game.”
When he returned, he brought a torch, a screwdriver and tea in two jars. The kettle was still in a box we couldn’t find. We sat on the stairs while he told me how Marla would show him a pound coin, then close her fist around it.
“Answer right, you could try to snatch it before she shut her hand. Answer wrong, she kept it. If she caught your fingers, she got the coin and a reason to call you slow.”
“Did you ever win?”
“Once. She said I’d started too soon.”
I put my jar down.
“I should have asked you before the funeral speech.”
He screwed his lid back on. “You liked her. I know.”
I switched the voice on again, and we followed the sound into the cupboard beneath the stairs. Behind her winter coats was a speaker. Its wire ran through a drilled hole into the cellar.
Marla had always forbidden children to go down there. I had never bothered since inheriting the place: there were enough boxes upstairs. Now I took the torch and went first.
The chute ended above a tin funnel beside a cassette recorder. My spoon lay in the funnel. Dev lifted it out, then pressed the funnel down with his finger. A lever moved. The recorder clicked to the next question.
“What opens a lock but has no hands?”
“A screwdriver, if you’re desperate,” Dev said.
He pressed the lever again. Another riddle began. The machine didn’t know what we had posted. The weight of anything in the funnel advanced the tape.
On the shelf lay the green book, open beside Uncle Len’s pencilled instructions: REWIND TO START. EMPTY FUNNEL AFTER EACH GAME.
I remembered Len working in his garage, where he labelled everything, including the pencil for making labels. Marla had called him hopeless with practical things. Here was his wiring, neat as stitching, keeping her game going after both of them were dead.
“She made it sound as if the house knew the answers,” I said.
“She did that with me. Said it could hear if you whispered for help.”
“Could it?”
He followed the wire with the torch. “Speaker. No microphone.”
I unplugged the recorder.
Beside its shelf stood a coat rack with only one coat on it. Behind the coat I could see the upper edge of a door.
“Does that lead outside?” I asked.
“No. That’s where she kept the prizes.”
He shone the torch on it without moving closer.
“When we couldn’t win them back, she said we weren’t ready for them. I thought she sold the bicycle. Mum thought so too.”
I dragged the rack aside. The door had no handle. Len had hung it on a nail beside the frame, labelled DOOR, with its screws taped to it.
Dev stared at the handle. Then he gave me the torch and took out his screwdriver.
The door wasn’t locked. With the handle fitted, it opened at once.
His bicycle stood on a carpet square, polished yellow, its wheels raised on wooden blocks.
For a moment he looked eleven. Then he crouched and turned a pedal. The chain went round, dry and reluctant. Both tyres were flat. He pressed the bell. It gave a good, indignant ring.
My sister’s dollhouse filled one shelf. On another sat my mother’s blue bowl, supposedly broken at Christmas. A toy boat bore a label: STEPHEN—WHEN MORE CAREFUL. Stephen was forty-eight now. Behind the bicycle stood two unopened birthday parcels, wrapped in Marla’s reused paper and extravagant ribbon.
Dev wiped dust from the saddle with his sleeve.
“She said I’d ruined it.”
The paint was barely scratched.
“Do you want to take it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I mean tonight. I’ll help.”
We carried it upstairs between us. At the landing the handlebar caught in one of Marla’s coats. Dev backed down a step instead of forcing it, and I pulled the coat free. We had to move the folding bed again. Neither of us offered to leave the bicycle until tomorrow.
Outside, he strapped it into his van. New tyres, probably a new chain; it would cost something to make it rideable. He didn’t thank Marla for keeping it safe.
I photographed the shelves before touching anything else. In the morning I would call my mother, my sister, Stephen. I would tell them what was here and let them choose what to take. No questions to answer first.
Dev shut the van.
“Will you be all right?”
“Yes. Come tomorrow?”
“For the dollhouse. It’s heavy.”
After he left, I found the kettle in a box marked BOOKS. The missing cutlery was upstairs too, inside a saucepan in the cupboard above the cooker. I had spent an hour answering a wall while overlooking a perfectly ordinary cupboard.
I made tea. I left the riddle machine unplugged and put its plastic spoon in the sink.
Before opening the bed, I went down to the cellar once more. On the nail marked DOOR, I hung nothing. I left the handle where it belonged.
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