Large houses are difficult to keep an eye on, to control, my mother used to tell me, looking fraught and harried, before bustling out of the room to find the housekeeper or the butler or the tweeny maid to demand a full reckoning of what was happening in the far corners of the house. Lockwood Manor had four floors, six sets of stairs, and ninety-two rooms, and she wanted to know what was happening in each of them, at all times.
It was the not knowing that seemed to concern her most, but she had a long list of specific fears too: mold that squatted behind large pieces of furniture; rotten window frames that let in an unwholesome breeze; mice that had gnawed a home in a sofa; loose floorboards whose nails had pricked their way free in the heat or the cold; wires that sparked and spat; birds that had nested in a wardrobe in some forgotten servant’s room, scratching the walls with their claws; damp that had bled through a gap in the roof tiling; a carpet that was being feasted upon by hungry moths; pipes that rattled their way to bursting; and a silt flood that slithered ever closer to the basement.
For my grandmother, who had grown up in the time when every task had a servant assigned to it, when calling for tea necessitated the maneuvering of a veritable regiment, it was the servants she suspected. They were lazy, slapdash in their work, prone to stealing; they spent their time idling and daydreaming and making mischief. She wore a vast selection of pale gloves, neatly pressed by her own personal maid, ever ready to sweep a pointed finger along a mantelpiece or a shelf, and if she found the merest whisper of dust she would summon the housekeeper. Because my grandmother was also of an age where the lady of the house did not deign to speak to any servants but the housekeeper, the poor woman was forever being called away from her tasks to rush through the back corridors of the house and appear in front of Lady Lockwood as if from the ether.
There was thus relief felt among the servants when my mother and grandmother died a few months back in a single awful motorcar accident, and I did not begrudge them it; I knew what harsh taskmasters these two women had been, and besides, I had seen the servants weep dearly at their funeral, so I knew they also cared. I swore that I would not share my relatives’ habit of making impossible demands on the servants, and yet my mother and grandmother’s role—that of keeping an eye on the house, that of keeping it in mind—was one that I reluctantly took on my own shoulders, like the fur coats I was also left; scratchy, heavy things that bristled with the claws and teeth of the beasts that had been skinned to make them, and swamped my form completely.
Ever since I was a young child, I had suffered from attacks of nerves and a wild imagination that made sleep hard to come by. It was my favorite governess, the one who used to sing lullabies to me when I was a few years too old for them, who taught me a way of tricking my mind into sleep: I should picture myself walking through Lockwood Manor, she said, gliding through the rooms one by one, and count them as if I was counting sheep—and before I could finish even one floor, I would be asleep. It was a method that worked just as she said, although it did not succeed in removing the monstrous nightmares I suffered once I had fallen asleep—dreams of a beast hunting me and, sometimes, of a desperate search through the corridors of my home for a blue room in which I knew some horrible creature was trapped and scratching at the walls, a search which baffled me when I woke up, knowing that there was no such room at Lockwood.
But after my mother and grandmother passed away, it no longer felt like a simple counting game, a trick to help my mind ease into sleep; it took on a new and frantic urgency. I could not sleep until my mind had completed a full tour of the house, and if I made a mistake—if I forgot the buttery, or the bathroom on the second floor with its sink ripped out, or the housekeeper’s bedroom with the narrow eaves—then everything was ruined and I was compelled to start again from the very beginning, my heart rabbiting in my chest, my back prickling with sweat.
Sometimes, though it was mad to think so, I felt that if I did not concentrate, if I did not count all the rooms and hold them all in my mind, everything that my mother had feared would occur, and more; that the very edges of the house would spin apart, that the walls would crack and crumble, that something truly terrible, something I could not even fathom, would happen.
Lockwood had too many empty rooms. They sat there, hushed and gaping, waiting for my mind to fill them with horrors—specters and shadows and strange creeping creatures. And sometimes what was already there was frightening enough: empty chairs; the hulk of a hollow wardrobe; a painting that slid off the wall of its own accord and shattered on the floor; the billowing of a curtain in a stray gust of wind; a lightbulb that flickered like a message from the beyond. Empty rooms hold the possibility of people lurking inside them—truants, intruders, spirits. And when there is enough space for one’s mind to wander, one can imagine that loved ones are not dead, but only waiting in a room out of the way, a room you forgot you had, and the urge to search for them, to haunt the corridors and the rooms of your house until you find them, becomes overwhelming.
But there was respite on the horizon, because the house would not be empty for long, and myself and my father and the servants—not that we had many by this stage, for we seemed to find them hard to keep—would soon have company. For it was August, and trucks were on their way from London, evacuees from the coming war looking for shelter within the walls of Lockwood. A population feathered, furred, beaked, hooved, ruffed, clawed, and taloned would soon lodge here, and when the rooms were occupied again, when they had a purpose, and were full to bursting, my mind would settle again, and the house would settle again. No more empty, echoing rooms; no more bad nerves; no more ghosts. I was sure of it.