Photograph entitled Haunted © by John D. Stanton 2006    www.3AMBlue.com.

HOUSE OF SOULS

by Ken Head © 2006

All day the town's been smothered in fog. It swirls through the streets, sticks like glue to walls and windows, doorways, street corners and around the old house hunched inside a garden so badly neglected that it doesn't need any more obscurity than dripping bushes and overhanging trees already give it. Blackened branches thrust against the mist. The last few leaves and twigs sink deep inside themselves, refuse to submit, the secret knowledge that spring will come again coiled tight in their hearts.

In its long decades, the house has always been a home, has hardly been empty. Builders and workmen have come and gone, alterations and extensions have been made. There have been births and deaths, farewells and reunions. The house has seen them all and given shelter to whoever's tried to make a life inside its walls, but now it's come to a rest so settled that even a warm and sunny day can't hide the tired chronicle of its age. Blocked gutters drip, drainpipes hang loose. Wood rots slowly under blistered paint. Decay ghosts silently through joists and floorboards.

By midnight, a wind's beginning to blow, softly, imperceptibly, through the streets. The wind is gentle but persistent. It knows its duty, as does the fog, and soon a pale moon is visible behind the thinning mist, like a house pet given up for lost one night, then greeted happily when it reappears unexpectedly at sunrise. This canny wind disperses the fog quickly, silently, while the town sleeps, nudging and probing first one way, then another, surveying new territory with the cautious curiosity of a playful kitten. It isn't, as some winds are, a thing there's any need to be afraid of and, anyway, this house can't resist. Its defeat can be heard sighing through all its rooms as the wind's breath infiltrates badly fitting windows, slides quietly under doors, ruffles dreary curtains and swirls, as if confused for an instant, around the hallway at the foot of the creaking wooden staircase.

There's a lot to learn, after all, whole floors of rooms to explore, for this is a house rich with memories, filled with the cries and whispers of vanished lives gone down into the dark. It's weary, though, not like a house that's been left empty and neglected for years, because people still live here, but as if it feels the slow, unravelling of time, its mainspring unwound to the still point that comes at the very end and is beyond repair.

Alone together in the house are three women. There is Susan, forty-six, unmarried, still sleeping in the narrow, single bed of her childhood, her needy, pain-nagged mother drowned in medicated dreams and, down the landing, at the other end of the house, the lodger, Miss Dipple, whose rent helps pay the bills, ageing and yellowing quietly, like the books she guards in the town library for five days of every ordered, regulated week. Miss Dipple's room smells of talcum and decent cosmetics, her sleep is still, untroubled by dreams less disciplined than her life. Even the bed linen understands Miss Dipple, for there is hardly a wrinkle in the sheets and around her neat, sleeping body the bed stays cold.

The wind doesn't know any of this. In the kitchen, it noses through cupboards and drawers, but is discouraged by staleness, the smells of yesterday's food. Elsewhere seems more interesting and soon the house senses the faintest tug of a breeze as the moving air investigates the hallway, the alcove under the stairs with its rickety table and somnolent, black telephone, which is dusted and disinfected each week by old Mrs. Peters, Susan's mother, who is very nervous about germs.

Inside the lounge, dried flowers carefully arranged in a vase by the door shiver in dusty expectation and rustle dryly against each other as they feel the prying fingers of the wind begin to touch them. The vase is imitation Ming, one of a pair given to Mrs. Peters on her long-ago wedding day, its flanks decorated with red-gold dragons in impossible landcapes and the mosaic of hairline cracks acquired when a bomb dropped on number twenty-five. She and dead Mr. Peters had been living in London then. The other vase was destroyed along with their son.

Shifting restlessly, the breeze explores the furniture, dust-filled, faded carpets, television set, book-case, the tall column of a carved wooden standard-lamp watchful in the corner beneath the weight of its fancy, frilled shade. Floral wallpaper, still barely clinging to the walls, slows down the air enough to make it see that these are not real flowers, not even imitation, only ancient, painted images on thick, damp paper.

Upstairs, breath held, the wind probes the secret world of bedrooms, steals across creaking floorboards, skiddy, ragged rugs, sidles nervous and skittish through keyholes, conscious that it trespasses in forbidden spaces. Among wardrobes of hung-up clothes, tiny, hand-sewn bags of dessicated lavender and worn-out mothballs tucked at the backs of tidy shelves, it discovers dresses and gowns preserved to ransom youth and beauty from oblivion, still fragrant with the memories of champagne dances on long, hot summer nights.

In their rooms, the sleepers drink in the last unconscious hours before their separate days begin. At the library later, brisk Miss Dipple will comment on the weather, confirm that she slept well, feel a momentary sense of ill-health, nonetheless, and be angry when the careless chatter of pretty, happy girls in short skirts disturbs the silence of the stacks. It's doubtful that she'll think much about Mrs. Peters, or that Mrs. Peters will think about her. Susan will go to work at the store as she always does and watch life pass by while she stacks the shelves. Long hours, low pay, the knowledge that people laugh behind her back, wonder why she's never moved away from the only home she's ever had.

If only they knew.

END

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