The kitchen of House 104 smelled of burnt chicory root, wet lime plaster. The sour, damp wool of clothes dried without wind or sunlight.
It was an inside stripped down to bare survival shape. The first thing Len noticed, stepping across the scrubbed pine threshold, was that not a single inside door remained in the house. The pantry doorway, the cellar entrance, the narrow stairwell leading to the sleeping loft—every pine door had been unpinned from its strap hinges, hauled out into the yard, and chopped into stove kindling.
Where the doorframes stood, the raw wood had been planed flat and coated in thick coats of bright white lime wash.
There were no closets, no curtained alcoves, and no dark corners where clothing hung from wall pegs. The kitchen chairs were three-legged stools without backs. The table was an unpainted frame stand board raised on frame stands five inches off the floor to prevent dark voids beneath the apron. And along every baseboard, a wide edge of white plaster had been troweled into the angle between the planking and the floor to eliminate the thin, level seam of shadow where floorboards met the wall.
In the center of the table burned a single lamp.
