But Where are the Children?

The last door was the back bedroom overlooking the rather sad garden we'd already hacked our way through. Meinwen moved slowly through the room taking in the bunkbeds, the discarded toys, the mildewed walls.... She opened the wardrobe and looked at the flares, the striped dresses and lurid pullovers "They never grew up did they?" she said. "The two children in the photograph."

I looked at the room with new eyes* and saw what she meant. This was the bedroom of two children. Children who were born in the seventies. By rights there shouldn't be any children's things at all. They should be in their thirties now and this room should be decorated with teen idols and pop stars at least.

"I've not seen any evidence of their deaths," I said. "Perhaps they were taken into care before whatever happened here happened."

"Maybe," she said, "but I have a bad feeling about it." She rubbed at the dirt on the window to look down upon the overgrown garden. "It's as if the house stopped living," she said. "There should be more here to account for the passage of thirty years and there isn't. Even abandoned houses show some signs of modernity. Why haven't squatters moved in?"

"All the traps we found downstairs?"

"True, but they haven't even tried. You'd think there would be tales about this house. Kids always deem at least one house in the neighbourhood haunted. Why not this one. There's no signs of vandalism at all. No broken windows, no graffiti..."

"And no traps on this floor at all," said Winston, entering the room, "But just look at the stairs to the attic..."