Read The Dynamite Room for Free Online

opened the lid with a click. The gears coughed rustily inside, and three figurines stood frozen mid-dance on the circular mechanism. The device chimed once, then was silent, and he shut the lid and returned it to its drawer.
    He picked up a wedding photograph from the dressing table: a bride and groom beneath the crumbling arches of a church door. The man looked mildly surprised, as if the camera had flashed before he’d had a chance to compose himself, while his bride smiled demurely, head cocked to one side like a bird. He studied them closely: the bride with her curls and coils of hair pinned elegantly; the groom’s own hair slick and shining, his face sharp and youthful, with prominent cheekbones. He put the photograph down and looked in the mirror at his own face, the contours of his own skin. Sometimes he barely recognized himself.
    In the bathroom, he took off his jacket and shirt and removed the dressing from around his shoulder. The blood was now clogged and black around the wound, which seeped a clear sticky liquid; every time he moved his shoulder the pain forced air through his clenched teeth. He gently bathed the wound in cold water, wincing as he went. The hole was deep, and he was worried that the knife had not been as clean as it had looked and that infection might be setting in. He could feel the throb of it, the pain of its pulsing, tiny spasms like fissures splintering down his arm and through his chest. He dabbed it dry with the corner of a towel and applied a fresh dressing from his kit bag, wrapping it around and tying it tight; then he tested his fingers, bending and straightening them.
      
    She woke with a start. He was sitting in the chair beside her, his pistol in his hand. One finger tapped rhythmically on the arm of the chair, and a collection of wooden splinters were piled like a tiny bonfire on the other arm. Outside, the morning was silent. Behind him, a sharp rectangle of sunlight burned its outline around the blackout fabric at the window. He looked right through her.
    She clamped her eyes shut, but when she opened them again he was still there.
    “Get up.”
    He hauled the bedclothes off her and she sat up blearily.
    “Come on!” he shouted. “Up, up!” He bent down for her suitcase and threw it on the bed beside her. “You can’t stay here.” He pocketed the gun and flung open the case; then he gathered the clothes up off the floor and threw them onto the bed.
    “You have to leave.”
    Barely thinking, she scrabbled things into her arms and scrunched them into the case.
    “Do not tell anyone that you have been here,” he said. “Or that I am here or that you have seen me.” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her so close to him she smelled his dirty breath. “If you tell anyone about me I will hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand?”
    She nodded and he released his grip, then gathered more clothes up, squashed them into the case, shut it, and threw it to the floor.
    “Go on,” he said. “Go!”
    She stood looking at him, suddenly unsure.
    He picked up the case again and grabbed at her wrist.
    “Come on. Get out! Go!”
    He hauled her out of the room and down the stairs, her feet barely touching them and the case dragging and scraping down the wall. At the bottom he pulled the front door open, and she expected him to push her out but he stopped short. She tried desperately to yank herself free, but he held her tight as he looked down the drive and across the road and fields. And then he muttered something—a curse, a word she didn’t recognize—and suddenly pulled her back in and slammed the door shut.
    “No!” she shouted. “Let me—”
    But one hand was already clamped against her mouth and, with the other holding her around her stomach, he hauled her off her feet so that she hadn’t the air or time to scream before she was being pulled—half-carried, half-dragged—down the hallway, her feet scuffing and kicking at the floor, and him puffing and