The Last Letter

The room was small, and the silence in it was not restful.

I have stood in a great many abandoned rooms. Most of them are peaceful. Most of them have finished with whoever used them and are getting on quietly with falling apart. This one had not finished, and I knew it within about ten seconds of stepping through the door.

The typewriter was on the desk where it had always been. An Underwood — the badge still gold under the dust, which is the sort of detail that stops you. The ceiling had been coming down on it for years. Plaster lay across the keys and had filled the type basket until the letters were buried in it. The roller was still white. Nothing had touched it in long enough for that to mean something.

A typewriter is not like other machines. You cannot use one absent-mindedly. Every word that ever came out of it was chosen by one person and struck, one key at a time, hard enough to leave a mark. Whoever sat here was thinking, and you can stand in front of the thing they thought on.

There was a chill on the shadow side of that room that the rest of it did not have.

I am not going to dress that up. I do not believe in ghosts. I do believe that some rooms have not finished with the people who were in them, and that you can feel the difference between a place that has let go and a place that has not. This one had not. It felt, quite plainly, like I was in somebody’s way.

So I worked quickly. One shaft of light was reaching the desk and it was already moving. I let the room go dark around the machine, because the room was not the subject — the room was the thing objecting. What I wanted was the plaster on the keys and the gold still showing through, and the sense that the last person to touch this had every intention of coming back to it.

This is why I go into these places, and I have never entirely managed to explain it. I have tried to set out what draws me there before — it is not decay, and it is not the pleasure of trespass. It is that some rooms are still occupied by something you cannot name and would not want to argue with.

There is a companion to it in The Keeper of Words — shelves of books nobody has opened in decades, holding their order out of habit. And in The Room That Waited, which is the calmer version of this: a space that stayed exactly as it was left and does not seem to mind who looks at it.

It belongs in The Forgotten Room — interiors held exactly as they were left, still waiting for somebody who is not coming back.

On a wall it keeps its distance. It is not a photograph that fills a room with itself. It sits quietly until the light is low, and then the dust comes up out of the shadow and you notice how much of it there is, and how long that must have taken. It rewards being looked at properly and gives very little to a passing glance, which is exactly what it did to me.

Most rooms let you stay as long as you like. That one wanted its privacy back. I took the photograph and I gave it.

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