![]() ![]() "I know you, but things get messy when you get to my age. She tipped her head to one side, looked at me. My eyes were slow to adjust to the darkness: I peered into it, was getting ready to turn and leave when an elderly woman came out of the dim hallway holding a white duster. I smelled bread-baking and wax furniture polish and old wood. ![]() ![]() I stood in the hallway and called, "Hello? Is there anybody here?" Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good. I had been here, hadn't I, a long time ago? I was sure I had. The door had not been latched properly, and it swung gently open as I rapped it with my knuckles. I looked for a doorbell, in vain, and then I knocked. The stench of cow muck struck me as I got out of the car, and I walked, gingerly, across the small yard to the front door. It seemed unlikely, but then, from what little I remembered, they had been unlikely people. I wondered whether, after all these years, there was anyone still living there, or, more precisely, if the Hempstocks were still living there. I parked the car at the side of the farmyard. It took me by surprise, although that was where the lane had always ended. I remembered it before I turned the corner and saw it, in all its dilapidated red-brick glory: the Hempstocks' farmhouse. ![]()
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