The House

By N. M. Sirett©

THE HOUSE

The house itches. I scratch the memories of it with a limp finger. They flake like scab-heads falling.

Floorboards creak. Lamps crack under their own heat. Electrical wiring fizzes in the early hours. Pipes clank. And the wind howls at the windows. Making the glass rattle and the doors open on their own – or by the tiddlywink-flick of a tiny fingernail.

Sometimes the movement of the old house sounds human: footsteps, unseen sniggering, whispers and heavy outbreaths, a baby crying; a soft, susurrous hush in a secret corner steeped in shadow, or the wispy sob of a small child.

Dolls blink and twist their heads. Run along the skirting and vanish into wardrobes where they’ve been stored since time immemorial.

Nobody’s been in here since…

There’s a fusty smell in that room. And the cobwebbed ceilings are scarred with plaster cracks, like black veins. Moonlight strikes the tiny window and high ledge. It is a small square of glass with lattice leading, stencilling Xs on the opposite wall. A thousand treasure maps marked there. But dig and all you will find is a hole into the unlit corridor beyond and the dark figure of a woman who floats along it.

She does the same route every evening. Drifts downstairs. Eyeless. Sockets full of grubs. Hair all sooted black, skin rucked clean by flame. A pale, convulsive hand slips down the banister. It is the last sight of her. The disembodied part, sloping away into the darkness of the lower floor.

Dead sound down there. Stillness.

Oh, her hand. Is it the same hand that clasps around sleeping ankles? Twitching the ends of blankets in the midnight hour? Slipping off covers to reveal the rapid drop in temperature – just there… that cold spot. The hand fades. Looks to reattach itself to a shadowy arm.

Somewhere there is a hole in thin air where all things in this house slip. An unearthly hive of entity-networks. Entrances and exits, in and out of the material plane. They move from that wall to that mirror… or from that bathroom to the last bedroom on the left. Or through the interstices of the brickwork where door jamb meets wall and hinges cry tarnished melodies.

Wallpaper peels like dead skin. Scratched off and rived by something sharp. And that clumping sound. That thud. What drags its heavy self across the floor in the pitch-black night? Why is it heaving so? Cumbersome yet deliberate?

Who’s here?

Under the bare ceiling light, after a trembling flick of a switch, the answer is nothing. Nothing is here.

The house is a tombstone. Left to rot on the moors. In the bleak wilderness and the strangled grey. Only the wind acknowledges its presence. Its empty, rickety shell. Knocking at its bones in fury and haste. Steaming up its windows with howl-shaped lips.

This house is forlorn. Gives up its ghost. Utters no lament. Only the dripping of a solitary tap echoes the once-groans of despair. A scurrying rat in the larder. A spider creeping behind a ball of dust. Ants stomping noiselessly in a barren cupboard.

Another itch and she reappears. Disturbing the stale air. This floating lady. She drifts past the stove with its heavy, cast-iron frame – seemingly so solid against the diaphanous movement of her breeze-like apparition. Into the parlour she goes, by way of the wall. A momentary image of tousled hair splintering the floral lace of her gown lingers before she quietly disperses like disturbed mist. Blending – amorphous – into another ethereal tunnel.

This place is a wretched cement box, leaning crooked against the gathering clouds. The black rooftop steamrolls the horizon. The skies above are annealing steel plates of ice-cold apathy. Casting down a whiteness upon this place like burial sheets shrouding the dead.

Every eave has a hook for a noose. Every window is a spyhole into the grave. Every door is a prison with no key. Every turn and twist, every heinous nook, every snarling ingress, resonates with animus. The walls bleed black blood. A vile and sticky viscous of decayed beetles and lung-dissolving mould. A mushrooming misery. Dank and wet and cool like a dead thing in a swamp. Beneath its foundations lies desecrated, unhallowed dirt. Each plinth is mired in the feculent midden of wilted bones, teeth, and ash.

The house itches. I scratch at skin. It flakes away to join the dust of this place. I too fall to pieces, blending with the rooms and the quiet time that each space holds. A silent termination. The ghost’s clock has no hands. The house is a ticking ghost, now ghosted by the world. A forgotten exoskeleton.

The wind is as rough as thistles against the body of this place. This itchy place. Fingers of air scratch at its bulk. In the distance, purpling heathers rub against frigid rocks. Agitated by erratic squalls.

A restless prickling slowly crawls up the walls. And I scratch – here, in the house.