Now that you’re there, where everything is known—tell me:
What else lived in that house besides us?
ANNA AKHMATOVA, NORTHERN ELEGIES, #3
It was almost funny at the start. Well, I say funny, when what I mean is odd, but there was an amusing aspect to it nonetheless. Not anymore—we’re long past that—but for a while, when the children were still young and living in the house. It’s only me now; me, and the Presence in the room upstairs. It has a name, or I think it does, even if it’s one I’m reluctant to use. I suppose you might call it a ghost, although it’s not dead, not yet.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s what happens when one has lived alone, or nearly alone, for too long: one falls out of the habit of explaining. It’s rendered more difficult in this case by the fact that I don’t have an explanation. It has yet to be revealed, but it will, in time. I’ll form part of it, I think. It’s this aspect of the situation that frightens me. It frightens me very much.
We bought the house from the Millards, but they certainly didn’t advise us of any strangeness, some eccentricities of plumbing aside, and those were factored into the asking price. Of course, if one is trying to sell a property, the last thing one ought to do is suggest to potential purchasers that it might be haunted. I suppose it could be an attraction for a certain type of buyer, but it’s certainly a niche interest, and most sensible folk would consider it a disincentive to proceeding.
So I don’t think the Millards were trying to hide anything from us. They were simply a perfectly ordinary couple seeking to downsize. Neither was the house priced to sell, far from it. We had to bargain them down, and even then we ended up paying more than we’d intended, but they did leave the mirrors and chandeliers, which was nice of them. I’ve heard of sellers who’ve stripped houses to the boards, leaving the new occupants to eat under a bare bulb hanging from a length of exposed wire. The Millards weren’t like that, and expressed concern upon hearing of our problem with the dining room. Perhaps they were just being polite. My wife suspected they thought us mad, as they changed their telephone number shortly after and went ex-directory. I can’t blame them, really. Under the circumstances, I might have adopted a similar precaution.
We had been in the house for a couple of months when Lawrence, our younger child, complained of a draft in the dining room. He’d set up his toy fort there because the room was primarily for entertaining, and we weren’t going to be doing much of that until the house was given a fresh coat of paint, the Millards not having put much money into the decor recently. Lawrence was permitted to occupy the expanse from the dining room fireplace to the Persian rug, just as long as he put everything away in time for the cleaning lady to dust and mop every Wednesday. Of course, he never did manage to get things cleared up in time, but that’s boys for you. At least we weren’t tripping over armies elsewhere or impaling our stockinged feet on lead bayonets.
It was a Saturday morning when Lawrence mentioned the draft (or so we thought it at first): a wind coming up through the floorboards, or down the chimney, except there was no wind, none at all. Rather, it was like one of those damp chills that settle in the late January air, burrowing into the bone. We tried to trace the source, with no luck. Eventually, we called the builder who had repaired some of the damaged plaster in that room, but he declared he couldn’t feel any breeze; and it wasn’t as though our breath was visibly pluming to give him the lie because, as I’ve said, the nip wasn’t of that type. One might even have said that we were somehow carrying it inside us, like an infection transmitted solely within our little family group. We were the locus, but also the only carriers.
After that, Lawrence relocated the fort to his bedroom, but I noticed he didn’t play with it as much anymore, and ultimately it was disassembled and consigned to the attic. When I asked him about it, he declared that the soldiers felt uncomfortably cold to the touch. More probably, it was the associations for which he didn’t care, because by then our condition had changed. Worsened, you might say.
The first I learned of it was one Sunday evening, while I was sitting in the basement kitchen listening to Alan Keith on the Light Programme. If I remember correctly, he was playing the “Sanctus” from Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass. Actually, I don’t know why I say that. Of course I remember correctly: I haven’t been able to listen to Gounod since, probably for the same reason Lawrence dispensed with his fort and soldiers. It’s just one of those phrases one uses when telling a story. As I’ve said, I’m unused to sharing in this way, and little fragments of the ordinary keep trying to intrude into what is, by any standard, an extraordinary narrative. Regardless, there I was, a glass of sherry in one hand, the other conducting Gounod, when I heard my wife cry out. It was an expression more of surprise than terror—a startled yelp, one might have said—but it was enough to draw me upstairs.
Susanna was standing in the doorway of the dining room, looking in the direction of what we had come to refer to as the Odd Corner. At first I thought someone might have lit a fire in the grate, because a pale smoke or mist, about five feet in height, hung in the air. But the fireplace was empty and the substance did not diffuse, instead remaining fixed, like a blurred image on a photographic plate. As we watched, it moved ever so slightly, and a column extruded horizontally before being subsumed once again into the whole. After a few seconds, the pattern was repeated, and this continued for a good five minutes. By then the children had joined us, but they seemed more fascinated than frightened until, at last, it dispersed.
Once it was gone, I approached the Odd Corner, my wife exhorting me to take care. I passed my hand through the place where the episode had occurred and noticed that the air was even colder than usual. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I ordered the children to stay out of the room before locking the door behind us and placing the key in my jacket pocket. But that night, as I followed my wife to bed, the door was open again. The children, who were still awake, denied all knowledge, as did Susanna, and the key had remained in my pocket the entire evening. I had not slept or dozed, so no one could have taken it from me without my noticing. Puzzled, I secured the dining room once more.
But when we rose the next morning, the door was ajar. Short of nailing it closed, there appeared to be nothing for it but to leave it unlocked thereafter, which we did.
There were no further disturbances that week, and the coldness in the Odd Corner was less pronounced. But the following Sunday, the mist was back and the pattern was repeated: an extrusion, an absorption, the sequence repeated for five minutes. This time, though, I was prepared. I had our Brownie box camera to hand and shot an entire roll from various angles while the form was visible. But when the pictures were developed and returned, they showed only an empty space. It was most peculiar and frustrating.
So it continued, week in, week out, every Sunday—not always at the same time, but usually about a half hour either side of 6 p.m. We had Susanna’s father and mother over for drinks one Sunday and tried to explain to them what had been happening, but they probably thought it was some form of unfunny joke on my part, as my in-laws and I had never really enjoyed a happy relationship. We invited them to view the phenomenon for themselves, yet they saw nothing, and their attendance only added to the general chill in the room. The anomaly was for us to witness, and us alone.
Then, some weeks after, we invited our local vicar to dine at our house while his junior curate was taking evensong. He was High Anglican, which we rather liked, but quite modern in his thinking, to the extent that some of the congregation regarded him as dangerously liberal. He listened sympathetically as we sat at the dining table, waiting for the cloud to appear. We informed him when it did, and he made a circuit of the spot, testing it with an index finger. He didn’t see anything either, but admitted that the air seemed frosty. Then again, he didn’t have much meat on him, and confessed that a great many places gave him the shivers, so he was always suffering or recovering from a cold.
We spoke with him about the possibility of an exorcism, but he told us that the Anglican Church didn’t really go in for that business, even at the High end. That would change a decade or so later, but by then I had decided against any attempt at banishment, even had the relevant authorities permitted it. You see, nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I led what many might have considered a dull, middle-class existence, first as the assistant manager, and later the manager, of a high street bank. I was perfectly content, but little of note distinguished my days, or nothing upon which anyone might have felt obliged to comment after my death. My eulogy was not, I thought, destined to shock the congregation.
Truth be told, the Presence made me feel special.
It’s strange what one can get used to: illness, pain, loss, grief. We’re resilient creatures, we humans, and can grow habituated to almost anything. The Odd Corner became another idiosyncrasy in an already quirky old house, like the gurgling of the pipes or the slight incline to the floor of the main bedroom. The children told their friends about it, daring them to run through the spot, which some did until we discouraged the practice. It struck me as rude. I didn’t want to go about offending or provoking whatever was there. It wasn’t as though it was bothering us. No crockery was being thrown around, and neither were we being disturbed by unearthly wailing in the dead of night. It was just an area of coldness, and a mist, or something like one. We even began using the dining room more frequently, but never on Sundays. Occasionally, I’d trot along to take in the show with my pipe and a glass of sherry, but it didn’t change much during the early years and the novelty quickly wore off. The children became bored with it sooner than I, and stopped referring to it, but Susanna remained bothered. She took to suggesting that we sell up, until the market took a dip and forced us to make do with what we had.
We rarely referred to the Presence in the Odd Corner—and it was an entity, of that we had no doubt—as a ghost, nor did we like to describe our experience as a haunting or an infestation. The algor apart, it didn’t correspond to any descriptions of ghosts in fiction, or the supposedly true experiences recounted in the more sensationalist periodicals. I can’t say it was harmless, exactly, because we were always aware of it, subconsciously or otherwise, and the tension between Susanna and me would ratchet up as the weekend approached, causing us to bicker over the most inconsequential of issues. For Susanna, the Presence was emotionally and psychologically disruptive; for me, it was a problem to be analyzed. What was it that we were seeing? What was the extrusion? And why did the event occur only on Sunday evenings? I investigated the history of the house, which had been built early in the nineteenth century, and of the land on which it sat, but found no record of a murdered servant girl or an ancient cemetery to suggest a cause for the phenomenon.
But perhaps it was because I spent more time considering the puzzle and found myself seated more regularly in the dining room come Sunday evening, waiting for the Presence to manifest, that I noticed the refinement before anyone else. Slowly, over the space of a decade, the Presence began to assume a more pronounced form: a woman. I could make out the shape of her hips, and her shoulder-length hair. She wore trousers, not a skirt, which struck me as important somehow. Had she been a revenant from some previous century, would a dress or skirt not have been the more likely mode of attire? The movement in the mist, it became clear, was the raising of her right arm to point a finger at something, followed by the lifting of both hands to her face in startlement, though whether delighted or appalled, I could not say. For some reason that was more to do with feeling than observation, I surmised it was the latter, especially when a dark hole started appearing where her mouth ought to be, gaping in what I identified as horror.
I mentioned these developments to Susanna, though only very reluctantly did she consent to observe them. Before turning away, she did concede that, yes, we were now looking at a woman, probably young, and wearing what looked like a sweater and trousers, even if no colors showed themselves beyond the yellowish tinge to the mist itself, the woman consistent in her insubstantiality.
She stares at something in the center of the room.
She points, before putting her hands to her face.
Silently, she screams.
Two years later, I succumbed to appendicitis. After the operation, I caught an infection that kept me hospitalized for two weeks and left me virtually incapacitated for a further fortnight upon my return home. I was unable to tackle the stairs without help, so my recuperation was conducted largely in the bedroom I shared with Susanna. There I took my meals; there I read; there I listened to the wireless; and there I slept. The Odd Corner barely crossed my mind, so absorbed was I by my own discomfort, so intent on my recovery.
Finally, when I could trust myself on the stairs, and the pain and exhaustion had become occasional and irritating rather than persistent and debilitating, I reimmersed myself in the tidal flow of family life. More than a month had passed since I last set foot in the dining room. Lawrence told me that he had poked his head in once or twice and could confirm that the Presence was still with us. He shared this information in the manner of a man explaining the mowing habits of a neighbor, or some mundane occurrence equally unworthy of note.
By contrast, my daughter Juliet, in common with Susanna, had now conceived a profound aversion to the room and refused to set foot there. I put this down to her age—she was seventeen—and the influence of her mother. My wife and I had been drifting apart for some years, and my recent illness had done nothing to bring us closer. She and Juliet had always been confidantes, so I was not surprised to discover the daughter taking the mother’s side. I did not resent either of them for it, or so I told myself, even as the shadow of divorce loomed larger.
By then, Juliet had been accepted at Oxford, where she would read Classics, and so was not likely to be with us in the house for much longer. Lawrence, one year younger than his sister, and not as academic, was making noises about a career in the army, the prospect of military service appealing to the child in him. Our finances had improved dramatically, thanks to some astute early investments coming to fruition, leaving us in a comfortable position even as Susanna and I consulted our respective solicitors. There was no bitterness between us, only the sadness of two people who retained a fondness for each other but acknowledged that this was not the same as love: recalling the latter, Susanna was unwilling to settle for only the former. We agreed on wording acceptable to the lawyers—there is a boilerplate to it, so I asked only that I not be depicted as a cheat, bigamist, or wife-beater—and thus the matter was settled.
I could have sold the house. Susanna encouraged it, but I resisted. This decision caused the sole raising of voices between us during proceedings. She couldn’t understand my attachment to the property and made it obvious that she ascribed some of the blame for the collapse of our marriage to the Presence in the Odd Corner. She termed it an obsession on my part, but I begged to differ. Now I realize that she and Juliet—yes, particularly Juliet—had recognized an aspect to it that took me longer to discern. That was why they had to leave: because the Presence continued to change, growing more defined, enabling them—us—to see it for who it was, or who it would become.
I am alone in the house now, except for the Presence. Susanna has remarried and lives with her new husband in Scotland. We are more than civil to each other, but the subject of the Presence never arises when we meet, nor is it discussed with Juliet and Lawrence. It haunts us all, though. This has, at last, become a haunting.
I spend most of my time in the dining room, waiting. Each Sunday the Presence appears. It is a woman, perhaps in her early twenties. She points in horror at something on the floor. She raises her hands to her face. She screams. She resembles Juliet.
What is a ghost? I have pondered this question. Indeed, of late I have been thinking of little else. I have concluded that it may be an echo—or a premonition—given rudimentary form, unbound by time, but tied to place. I believe the Presence has always occupied this space and will always occupy it. When we entered the house, we roused it and made it visible, but only to ourselves. It is a part of us. It is past, present, and future, all at once. It is a Juliet that was, is, and has yet to be.
I admit that I am afraid. I have come to understand what it is that lies unseen on the floor. Sometimes I can even glimpse it. I see no point in trying to leave, even should I wish to, since I would only be drawn back. It has to be this way, because otherwise there would be no Presence. I am part of it, for I, too, have always been here and will always be. I fear that great pain lies ahead for me, even violence. I see it reflected in the face of the Presence. This will not be a good death, and it is close. The room is always cold now.
The Presence appears. Juliet is here again.
Together, we stare.