The dining room.(Short story)

Elroy Armitage was free to roam the rooms of the Maid & Bracken Hotel.

He could go anywhere he liked. The rooms upstairs, the ground floor and even in the cellar below. But one place he kept right away from was the dining room. In particular the section which had been reclaimed in the latest renovation when the wall in the north-eastern corner had been knocked down. Written history tells that this space had once been the hotel's cold room, and it was here that dead bodies were kept for the purpose of a coroner's inquest, there being no other facility in the town.

In fact this was Law, inn-keepers fined if they refused a dead body, regardless of the corpse's state of decomposition, or if the person had died from an infectious disease. Some lunch and dinner-times, Elroy would stand next to the dining room bar, just inside the door, to watch the people eating their meals. He found it both relaxing and fascinating. And he liked hearing the sounds the cutlery made on the plates. But this was as far as he would go into the room, the tables and chairs a barrier between him and the old-fashioned morgue.

The rest of the hotel was full of favourite places for him. Often, late at night, he'd go into the upstairs bedrooms just to listen to the sleepers' breathing. And he found a kind of solace in the movement of curtains as the wind came in through their opened windows. Sometimes, when they were closed, he'd unlock the clips and slide them up. And if he felt like playing a prank, he'd change the time on their clocks so the alarms would ring when they least expected them to.

The ...