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The house had been vacant for some time. Small, run-down, some might even say ramshackle, it clung to the side of my own home like a wretched Siamese twin. An oddity in the street—Isaac had once commented to me that he was amazed how such a place could exist in Wellington Pond—it was rarely the subject of discussion amongst the villagers, and I never once saw anyone glance at it as they passed by. It had always struck me as strange that a house that size, in a village this small, could simply be forgotten. But then I was coming to realise that there were many strange things about village life that would take me two lifetimes to learn.
The old lady had been a hundred and one when she died, two years before I moved in. She’d remained undiscovered for three weeks before the postman noticed a maggot crawling from the letter flap. They say she’d been trying to open the front door when she slipped and fell. Heart attack, maybe. Or just old age. How can old age be a cause of death? I’ve always wondered that, but it’s not the sort of thing you want to ask old people. And being old myself, not the sort of thing I really wish to dwell upon. So she died, and no one came to put the place up for sale, but neither did anyone move in. A complex web of legalities seemed to stymie any investigation into ownership, and so it had simply become the dead old lady’s home, ignored and then forgotten.
At least, that’s what I’d been told.
She used to employ a gardener, so they said, and he hadn’t returned since her death. The grass had grown knee-high, the rambling roses had erupted from arches, frames and trellises to probe inquisitively towards the property’s boundaries, and the herb garden had gone mad. Mint grew everywhere, and sometimes when the wind was right my own garden was filled with a delicious, warm herby aroma that always made my mouth water. But it made me feel queasy, too.
It was a strange place. Not spooky or disturbing, or weird-strange. Just so not there. Like the inevitability of death, next door’s existence crept up on me and surprised me into silence from time to time, and those days would always carry a shadow until sundown.
The day I saw the clowns, I was cleaning the upstairs windows. I was doing it from the inside, because I didn’t trust myself up a ladder anymore, and between wipes I saw a flicker of colour. I squinted, thinking perhaps the sun had struck the glass just right and thrown a rainbow across my eyes.
There was something strikingly biological about the colours in the clowns’ outfits, as if they had spilled from inside something living—pinks and purples, the red of blood, the yellow of bruising. There were four of them working their way through the neighbouring garden. Their movements seemed exaggerated, limbs lifting and falling again as if feigning stalking. And something about them was predatory. They must have climbed the high wall that bounded the bottom of the garden, and I wondered whether anyone had seen them on the riverbank beyond, dog walkers or joggers or people out for a casual stroll.
But even then I was sure that no one had seen these clowns before. There was something new about them. Not fresh, but unseen. It was as if they had only recently blinked into existence, and I was the first to view their splash of garish colour across the wilderness that next door had become.
I’d never found clowns funny, even when I was a kid. They never scared me, but I’d always regarded them as just a little bit ridiculous. The best clowns for me were always those who never needed to augment their humour with funny faces or ridiculous outfits. These four surprised me more than anything, and I watched until they disappeared from view close to next door’s back wall. Though not one of them glanced up, I had the feeling that they all knew I was there.
I pressed close to the window to see more, but my breath misted the glass, and the angle was all wrong. So I just stood there for a while, staring down at the calming, ordered patterns of my own garden before looking next door again.
Those four paths, trampled into the tall grasses and brambles and occasional ferns, looked like the fingers of a giant hand.
“There are clowns next door,” I said, and my words misted the window once more. I wiped the glass, dropped the cloth, and went downstairs to the phone.
––––––––
“Dad, it’s like when you were shouting about seeing a tiger in Asda’s. You spooked the hell out of the checkout girl, and you’re lucky they didn’t call the law.”
“I did see a tiger,” I said.
“Yeah, a bloke in fancy dress advertising some Indian soup, or something.”
“Chinese.”
“Eh?”
“The soup. It was Chinese. Sick joke, all about tiger penis soup, or something, and...”
“Right. So these clowns, maybe they’re...I dunno, a publicity stunt, or something.”
“In Wellington Pond.”
Isaac remained silent. I knew what my son thought of the place I’d chosen to live. Since my dear wife had died a few years before, he’d told me that I’d gone soft in the head and softer in the heart. But I’d always been proud of the choices I’d made. Nothing ever happens in the Pond, he’d say, as if that was a bad thing.
“I know what I saw,” I said.
“But no one’s lived there for years. Since before you moved in, you told me.”
“That’s what the villagers told me.” I found myself sinking into the same sad shadow that always enveloped me when I talked to Isaac. We’d always been close as father and son, but since his mother’s death I had the impression he’d been counting down the years to my own departure as well. Maybe it was unfair of me, but I was certain I caught an underlying impatience in his voice sometimes. I knew he was busy with his wife and their high-flying careers.
Maybe it was just me imagining things.
“Well, perhaps the circus is in town,” he said, chuckling. “You remember that time you took me?”
“No,” I said, suddenly panicked because I could not remember. I could have sworn then that he and I had never been to the circus together. And even as he reminisced—the trapeze, the fire-eater, the clowns and the incredible jugglers—the memories remained elusive.
“You don’t remember?”
“Oh, of course,” I said, but no, I still didn’t. And Isaac knew that.
“Right. Okay, Dad, gotta go. Mandy’s cooking for some friends tonight, I promised I’d make a mousse for dessert.”
“Chocolate or vanilla?”
“Bye, Dad.”
“Bye.”
I put the phone in its base and stared at it for a while. It would not ring again until Monday, when my friend Patrick would call to see if I was going to the pub for lunch that day, which I always, always did.
“I saw the clowns,” I said, and the silence neither mocked, nor heard. I was the sole listener, and had been ever since Mary had died.
Sometimes five years felt like forever.
I went out into the garden. It was my work of art, and I often spent more of my waking hours outside than in. Mary and I had always loved gardening, and the several times we had moved house together had found us cutting back bushes, demolishing old sheds, and digging and planting vegetable patches before painting woodwork and stripping wallpaper inside. That had changed a little when Isaac came along, but not much. We’d always made sure that his room was well-kept, but as far as we were concerned our living space was our garden. You’re closer to things out here, Mary had always said, and though I’d never asked exactly what she meant, I thought I understood. Now, it was in the garden where I felt closest to Mary.
I passed the patio area outside the back door, breathing in the heady aromas of heavily scented roses and honeysuckle. Following a winding path that led through the heart of a wild area—given over to long grasses, creeping heathers, and a gorgeous array of wild flowers—I took pleasure in seeing birds bustling around the many feeders I had hung about the garden, and noted a few borders that needed weeding and turning over. That would be a task for after lunch. Mary had usually done the weeding, and I was still adapting to doing it myself.
This was my garden, not Mary’s. She had never even seen it. But I knew that she was here with me in every touch of plant or soil.
I approached the high fence between properties, and for the first time ever I was aware of the solidity of the garden next door. It had a weight to it, as if all those overgrown shrubs, trees, and grasses could exert a gravity upon my more ordered plot.
“I saw clowns,” I whispered, remembering a flash-image of the four of them converging on the house next door. And when I breathed in I smelled fresh meat. Their colours, like insides turned out.
I shivered. Paused, with one hand resting against a heavy wooden bench to hold myself upright. Then I tried to smile at my old man’s foolishness.
Something screamed.
I froze, in my sunlit garden with flowers painting a palette of beauty, bees droning, birds flitting between branches and feeders, waiting for the noise to repeat and looking around for any signs that it had happened at all. The birds still sang, unfazed by whatever the sound had been. The garden lay unchanged. My heart alone reacted, thudding at the memory of the piercing cry, an unreliable witness.
Listening to the garden sounds, I wondered whether I’d heard the scream at all. From elsewhere in the village came traffic noise, the barking of a dog, and the distant voices of people chatting. No one else seemed to have heard.
I was waiting for the scream again. It did not come, and slowly I relaxed. It could have been a cat, or the screech of brakes from somewhere, or perhaps a dog’s pained yelp as it cut its paw or sprained a leg.
I looked at the fence I had been edging towards. It was almost six feet high, too tall for me to look over but not high enough to hide the evidence of next door’s abandonment. A willow extended probing branches, a rambling rose hung across the top of the fence for a third the length of my plot, and other plants draped over and through the close-boarded slats. It was a slow invasion, and I spent some time each week trimming and clipping, halting the advance.
“I should take a look,” I said. “Pull the bench a bit closer to stand on, peek over, see what’s going on.” I started dragging the bench, blood thumping in my ears as I struggled to lift it. I wasn’t as young as I used to be. But when I’d moved it close enough to climb on and hold the top of the fence, I paused and stood back.
It looked all wrong. It felt wrong, seeing the bench there. It was out of place.
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head, worrying at my sleeves with my fingertips as I felt sweat breaking out across my forehead. “No, it doesn’t belong there.” But instead of pulling the bench away I turned and hurried back up the garden, tripping on the patio and almost falling in through the French doors. I closed them behind me.
I felt no more settled inside my house than outside, so I put the kettle on and heard Mary’s voice echoing from the past. A cup of tea helps anything.
––––––––
“Is there a circus nearby?”
“Why would you ask that?” Kevin the shopkeeper replied, his hand holding my ten-pound note halfway to the till. He became motionless, staring, his held breath inviting my response.
“Well . . .”I frowned and shook my head. “Just wondering.
Thought I heard circus music.”
He counted out my change and deposited my tenner. He seemed suddenly unsettled, distant, and for the big friendly man this was unusual.
Kevin had been one of the first people I met when I moved to Wellington Pond. Following the removal truck into the village—frightened at the fact that it carried my whole life, and most of the evidence of my existence—I’d stopped at the corner shop to buy a bottle of wine. Kevin had been sitting behind the counter drinking coffee, and his open smile for a stranger had immediately warmed me to him. He was friendly, helpful, welcoming, and had not appeared at all cliquey, as Isaac had warned me most villagers were. My son hadn’t wanted me to move out of London mainly, I think, because it would be more inconvenient for him to pay his duty visits to me out here.
Born and brought up in the village, Kevin had said only good things about its inhabitants. He had sent me on my way with a free bottle of wine as a “welcome to the Pond”, and our friendship was instant.
Now, he frowned as he handed me my change, and barely caught my eye.
“Not that I’m interested,” I said, smiling. “Never bothered with them when I was a kid, and when they stopped using dangerous animals, I became even less interested. It’s the threat of bloody death that made the lion tamers entertaining, you think?”
Kevin shrugged, his massive stomach moving beneath his tee shirt.
“And I gave up the high wire just before I moved here.”
Kevin tried on a smile, but it was not his usual.
“Don’t worry,” I said, smiling. “I’m just clowning around.”
It was so quick, so fleeting, that I almost missed the flash of fear in his eyes. Then he turned away and started coughing, one hand on the counter and the other pressed to his mouth. Since that first time we’d met, Kevin had seemed to be growing larger by the month, and now watching his body quiver and shake as he coughed was strangely fascinating.
“You okay, Kevin?”
Kevin did not look at me again. He took a deep breath, staring down at his feet as he waited for the coughing to subside.
I left the shop and stood outside for a while, watching several cars passing by and waving to the people I knew. They smiled at me—Beryl the cake maker, Charles the taxi driver, Bernard the self-proclaimed village problem solver—and some deep part of me wondered if they all carried secrets.
Back at home, I unpacked the rice I’d bought from Kevin’s and started on my jambalaya. Mary had never liked what she called ‘dirty foreign food’, so since she’d gone I had been virtually living on Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican and Cajun food, and I could not remember the last time I’d roasted meat and boiled vegetables. Isaac was worried, saying that I wasn’t watching my diet well enough, and that he’d lost one parent and didn’t want to lose another, and I think that might have been the only time I ever really swore at him. For fuck’s sake, Isaac, I’m almost eighty years old, and I want to live a little before I die. He’d shut up, and I think my comment upset him a lot. But it was an incident that had faded away without ever being mentioned again.
I stirred, and tasted, and all the while I had one eye on the French doors. I usually kept them open as much as possible, whatever the weather, enjoying the contact with the outside. But now it unsettled me. As I moved the frying pan off the heat to let the food settle for a while, I became more and more angry.
“Bastards!” I whispered, needing to say it but afraid that they’d hear. “Whoever they are...bastards!” I strode through the door and down to the bottom of the garden, standing on the triangular decking area with hands on hips and staring back at the neighbouring house. There was little to be seen that I hadn’t seen before, and nothing significant had changed. The windows looked the same, blank and dark. The sagging gutter had perhaps dropped another couple of inches. It was simply the house that had always been the dilapidated negative of my own, but when I blinked there was something else.
A splash of grotesque colour.
I returned indoors and ate, slowly and quietly. Listening. Hearing nothing.
––––––––
They waited until midnight before screaming again.
The cry startled me from a deep, terrible dream that I forgot instantly upon waking. It left me with a sense of imminent panic, my heart pounding and blood pulsing at my ears, and for a few seconds I thought I had plummeted into a bottomless sleep, and that the vanished nightmare was reality.
I sat up in bed and took in several deep breaths, and the scream came again. Mating foxes, I thought, but the night was too dark and loaded, and I’d heard foxes mating before. Their screams sounded terribly pained and childlike, and these screams were neither.
Not children.
“And that’s not pain,” I whispered. I tried to recall the noise, analyse it, playing it over in my memory as I sought to identify just what it had been trying to tell me. I moved to the window and opened it wider, gasping at the soft cool breeze that swept beneath my loose pyjamas. The moon was almost full and hidden behind light clouds, its diffused light silvering open areas of garden and deepening shadows beneath trees and bushes. Next door’s garden was dark. Heavy shadows pulsed there, as if the night had a heartbeat.
“It was laughter,” I said. A breeze ruffled across my garden and set plants swaying, as if agitated by my words. “Something was laughing.”
But what laughed like that? And why?
I slammed the window closed, seeking familiarity in my bedroom. I knew the furniture, the shape of the room, the smells and sounds, and I tunnelled back into my lonely bed, my refuge. I lay there for some time but something kept me awake. A shadow I was staring at, a shape on the wall.
After a while I turned the lamp on and saw a spread of dampness at the junction of wall and ceiling. It was the wall I shared with next door.
I turned off the light and rolled over so that I was facing the other way. Tomorrow I would try to find out more.
It was only a house.
––––––––
But when I stood on the pavement in front of my house and looked at next door’s front fence, the rusted gate, the overgrown garden, and the façade that presented a face that most villagers seemed reluctant to see, I saw something that set my skin crawling, and which gave the day no more comfort and safety than the previous night.
Above the house’s tilting, broken front porch roof, a faint smile was pressed into the moss-greened render, consisting of a spread of pale red funghi, dried like a bloody lipstick kiss, and whichever angle I viewed it from, it remained.
I was sure I had never seen it before. But at the same time I could not recall ever standing there and staring at the house.
“Clown’s kiss,” I said. A horn tooted along the street and I looked that way, startled, to see Jill McGovern driving towards me. She was waving cheerfully, and I tried to temper my expression to appear calm and content rather than scared and uncertain. Jill was a villager through and through, and had been one of the first to welcome me as one of their own. Even though I was not. Even though, as Isaac continually told me, I never would be.
“Jill,” I said as she drew up beside me and wound down her window. “I saw clowns in next door’s garden. There’s laughing, and a mark or something on the house’s front wall.”
“Oh, I don’t know anything about all that,” she said, waving my words away like annoying flies. “Can you give me a hand setting up some tables at the village hall for the fête tomorrow?” She was a nice woman, but totally self-obsessed. She would listen, nod and laugh when I spoke, but I was not sure she actually heard anything.
I took another look at the house—
The clowns’ house, that’s what it is now.
—and for a moment, at a dusty upstairs window that hadn’t seen a cloth in years, the insinuation of a fleshy face drew back into the shadows. I blinked and took a deep breath.
“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked.
“Only Harry is busy setting up a bottle stall, and one of his tables collapsed and he lost some bottles, so I don’t really want to ask him.”
The house was still and silent. I sighed. “Of course, Jill.” At least it would get me away from here for a while, and the idea of company was pleasing.
I eased myself into her passenger seat and she started talking. As she drove, I tuned out.
We passed a few houses on the left and right, flitted through the shadow of the railway bridge, and then the road curved sharply around the high church wall and entered the village square. Between the bakery and the scruffy garage where old Max stood pumping diesel, a small thatched house sat back slightly from the square. I could not recall ever noticing it before. Its front garden had gone wild, and one of its upstairs windows had been smashed by a tree limb that had grown right into the house. Its thatch was holed.
“That place,” I said.
“What?”
“There, next to the garage. Who lives there?”
Jill slowed the car, then sped up again, leaving the square down a winding lane that led between two orchards.
“Old Max, I keep telling him to slow down, take a break and sit back a little. He’s eighty-nine, you know? His mother lived until she was a hundred-and-one, father, I don’t know, some say he ran away years ago, but Max won’t talk about it.”
“And you won’t talk about that house with the smashed window and broken thatch. No one can live there, surely? So what’s the story?”
“The story?” Jill sounded suddenly glum, and the silence after she had spoken was loaded. With sadness, I thought. Or perhaps something else.
“Something’s going on,” I said, and it was as much to myself as Jill.
She slammed on the brakes. Her little car slewed across the country lane, bumping as the wheels slid sideways over the badly maintained surface. I braced myself against the dashboard, tensing, wondering why she had braked and waiting for the impact of metal against the stone wall. But Jill stared calmly from her window as the car came to a halt.
“Leave,” she whispered. The car was still rocking, creaking on its springs, and I could not be sure of what she said. Not one hundred percent certain. But I shook my head, and she turned to look at me as if she had seen a ghost.
“I can’t,” I said. “This is my home now. I’ve made it my home, and you’ve helped me do that, Jill. You and lots of others. I’ve felt welcomed into Wellington Pond, and I love the village now probably as much as anyone. Why should I leave?”
She held onto the steering wheel and looked straight through the windscreen, and for a moment I thought she was going to talk about tables at the village fête again, and Max’s age, and Harry’s smashed bottles. But instead, she remained silent.
“I know what I saw, so who are they?” I asked.
She did not respond.
“Well, fuck them,” I said.
Jill blinked rapidly, wiping grim reality from her eyes like irritating dust. Then she started the car again and sighed heavily, smiled, and as we pulled off she told me how she and her boyfriend used to scrump apples from those orchards and make home-made cider.
I sat back in the seat feeling more isolated than ever before. Back in the city after Mary had gone, I had felt alone surrounded by millions of people. Such an impersonal place. So lonely. Now, the community I had come to call home was taking on the same feeling. As we approached the village hall and I saw the bustle of the car park and playing fields, I vowed that today would see the end of things. I’d visit the house next door and find out what those weird people were up to.
We parked, I stood from the car, knees popping and my back taking a few seconds to straighten. I hated growing old. My mind was still middle-aged, but my body betrayed me. Jill marched off to order someone around, and I leaned on the open car door and looked out past the hall.
Across the playing fields, where a gang of kids kicked a football around and a teenaged couple lay close together beneath an old oak, was a house I had never noticed before. Half of its roof had caved in. Its fences were slumped down beneath the weight of rampant roses. Windows were dark and foreboding.
I held my breath, then slowly let it out. I’m just seeing what I want to see, I thought. If you’re looking for a white Ford you suddenly see a hundred of them, and wonder why there are so many.
Yes. That was it.
I followed Jill into the hall and started moving tables around. And all the time I did my best to deny the red smear I’d seen on one high gable wall of the house. I had no desire to go close enough to know the grin.
––––––––
After a couple of hours setting tables for the following day’s fête—a couple of hours during which I heard as much gossip about the butcher’s lesbian daughter, the threat of parking charges in the village car park, and Mr Robinson’s hedge as I could stand—I decided to walk home. All that time I’d spent dragging tables and unstacking chairs I had been avoiding the subject of strange clowns and empty houses, and so naturally that was all I’d thought about. So now that my good deed for the day was done, I decided that there was something else I could do.
Open my eyes. Make up my own mind about whether or not anything mattered.
Leave, I thought she’d said. But perhaps she had merely whispered a word I could never know.
I deliberately chose an off-road route, afraid that if I stuck to the road I’d be offered a lift by any well-meaning villager passing by. I didn’t want a lift, obliged to sit and converse with someone else. I wanted to walk. I wanted to be on my own.
I climbed over the stile beside the village hall and cut across the fields. At first I considered crossing directly back towards the village and passing closer to that other abandoned house. But something about it repulsed me. I kept glancing over my shoulder as I walked, and it was only when an overgrown hedgerow shielded the building from view that I started to relax.
It was a warm, still evening. Flies and bees buzzed, birds flitted and sang, and the dipping sun seemed reluctant to leave. My feet swished through the long grass, kicking up showers of seeds that caught the sunlight. I felt a sneeze grow and fade again. My eyes watered.
There’s nothing there, I thought, and looking around I could not believe that anywhere even close to here could be dark, bruised, corrupted and tainted with mad laughter. This was a good place, and it carried its shadows well.
The village was quiet, the meadows even quieter, and after another field and a couple of sweet-smelling orchards I entered the village close to the old abattoir. The building was long-since abandoned, but there was nothing that troubled me about it. It was a comfortable dilapidation like my own old age, not a forced decay. There had been talk of turning it into a café for summer visitors. I’d always thought that a little grotesque. I preferred it boarded up and silent, a memorial to the many thousands of creatures that had cried their last inside.
I wended my way behind the small new estate they’d built just the year before, and past there, behind the overgrown corner of another orchard, I found one more house that I had no memory of seeing. This was larger than the other two. Though I had walked this path several times before, it was entirely possible that I had simply never looked that way. I moved back and forth along the old wooden fence. Trees shielded the house from view, but I could tell that it was empty. An upstairs window was smashed. Ivy smothered a couple of downstairs windows. Some roof tiles were missing, tufty plants grew from the guttering like a green fringe, and the overgrown garden seemed on the verge of possessing the building for its own. I could not see any clownish smile, or kiss, or any other mark, but that did not mean it was not there.
But tempted though I was, I could not make myself go closer to investigate. I tried to convince myself that it was because the fence was too rickety to climb, the undergrowth grown too dense to push my way through without snagging my clothes or skin on thorns.
In truth, I was scared.
Leaning against the fence, observing the house through a narrow gap and with leaves disturbing my view, the flash of dirty colour was almost too brief to register.
I gasped and stepped back, closing my eyes and turning away. Too tired, too worried. Maybe too old. I shook my head, but knew that I had to turn around again.
The broken upstairs window seemed to pulse with a forceful, rotten rainbow as a face came close and moved back again, close, back. The third time it retreated from the window it stayed away.
I hurried home, trying to rationalise. It was a shadow thrown by trees. A skin of wallpaper inside the old house flickering in the breeze.
But no tree grew that close to the house, and the evening was calm and still.
“This is just stupid,” I said. Grasshoppers scratched their agreement. The buzz of bees echoed my words. I resolved to discover what was happening here. A village like Wellington Pond always had one deserted house, a place that kids could believe was haunted, adults could think was used by kids for drinking or screwing, and which would spend years and years slowly rotting down towards the ground, until some developer bought the plot and demolished the house and built something new. One house, yes, that was a given. But I had seen four today, since my eyes had been opened wider and my suspicions had sharpened my senses. Four, without really searching at all.
Four clowns had arrived next door.
––––––––
It wasn’t often that I spoke with Isaac twice in a day. Sometimes we went a week or two without talking, and that was fine, he had a busy life and I couldn’t expect him to worry about me morning, noon and night. But as soon as I entered my house I picked up the phone and sat in my living room, looking out across my front garden and nursing the phone in my lap. I’d brought his number up on speed dial and my thumb hovered over the green button.
My son might still be in work. He worked long hours. My call would be an annoyance, nothing more. Even when he had all the time in the world, I only really heard impatience and boredom in his voice.
“This is for me to sort out,” I said.
I stood and marched through to the kitchen, opening the back door and stepping out onto the patio. The sun was setting now, and the air had that heavy feeling that only a warm summer evening can carry.
My garden was no longer my own. The shape was mine, the spread of plants, the wild parts attracting butterflies and bees and birds, the tended borders now eruptions of colour. But there was something else going on that I had never planned. The colours were just a little too deep and rich, too wet. The reds were too thick, the yellows too stark.
It’s the light. It’s later than I’d thought, darker, the shadows are spreading and making everything seem heavier . . .
But try as I might, I could not convince myself that all was well. Flowers hung heavier than they should, stalks stretching, as if made of sculpted flesh instead of delicate petals. Towards the rear of the garden, I saw a rose bush dripping into damp soil.
My heart started beating harder and faster, skipping a few beats every now and then, fluttering like a trapped bird attempting to flee. I backed towards the doors and stepped inside. The shadowy kitchen was cooler than the garden and more like home.
I watched shadows fall, a glass of cold milk from the fridge in my hand. I was shaking. More than once I spilled milk and it splashed across my shoes, speckling the flagstone flooring. But as the darkness grew, I felt better. It hid the garden away.
Sitting at the small dining table in the kitchen where I was so used to eating dinner for one, I looked at the phone again. I still didn’t like wireless phones. I’d preferred it in the old days, when you had to go to where the phone was kept to speak. Mary and I had bought an old church pew from an antique shop and kept it under our stairs, and that had been our phone seat. She’d made cushions for those longer phone calls. When Isaac had gone to university we had often sat there together, our heads pressed close so that we could both hear our son’s excited voice.
I suddenly wanted to hear my son. I dialled, expecting the answer phone again, but instead Isaac said, “Dad.”
“I’m really worried, Isaac.”
A sigh. “What about?”
“Well . . .”I couldn’t really tell him, could I? The clowns I’d seen moving in next door, the fallen houses with red smears that reminded me of a clown’s made-up mouth, the laughter that might or might not have been dreams. The dampness on my walls, spreading, consuming, that had not been there days before.
“Dad?”
“My garden looks overgrown.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about that. You’re just a bit older than you were, that’s all. So what if a few weeds take hold?”
“It’s not that,” I said softly, but I couldn’t find a way to tell him exactly what it was. I’d weeded and tended the garden earlier that day, and the day before, and most days before that. In the summer especially I was out there for much of the time, and several friends had commented that mine was the best kept garden in the village. High praise for someone who, in the little time he had left, would never really be accepted as a true villager.
I couldn’t tell him just how wild the place had become.
“I’ll pop up on Saturday, Dad.”
I was standing by the French doors looking out. Things seemed to be moving out there, even as the darkness swallowed them. I’d never known that plants could laugh.
“Dad? Saturday? Can’t stay long, we’ve got a meal thing in the afternoon, but I’ll come up and give you a hand in the garden. Dad? That okay?”
“Yes, thank you, son.”
“Cool. See you soon.”
I dropped the phone onto the kitchen worktop. “Dinner, then bed,” I said. “Tomorrow’s a whole new day.” That had been Mary’s favourite saying. Only once had she ever been wrong.
––––––––
I stood in my open front doorway and looked out towards the street. It was mostly quiet. I could hear subdued voices in the distance, and smell the scent of barbecue, and the idea that others were gathered and having fun made me feel even more alone.
I’d had the idea to go to the White Horse to see if there was anyone there I could speak to. I wanted to ask about the house next door and the old woman who’d owned it. The villagers had said that she’d died in there, but now I couldn’t remember exactly who it was who had told me.
And I wanted to ask about the other houses I’d seen. Those tumbled, old, overgrown places, hidden in plain sight across the village, ignored and passed by as if ignorance could hide them even deeper. It must have worked. If I had seen any of them before today, I’d not registered them at all.
I closed my eyes and thought of the village square. Even though I had only seen it that afternoon, I could not see the thatched cottage in my mind’s eye. I saw Old Max pumping petrol in the little garage, the grocer’s on the corner, the bed & breakfast place set back slightly from the square, the bakery, the stream that cut the square in half, bridged in four places for road and paths. I saw the red phone box set against the tall wall bounding the church yard, the church itself proud and grey in the shadow of ancient oaks, the attractive houses lining the road that passed by across the square’s eastern edge. But I could not see that abandoned house. I knew it was there, I could imagine what it should look like. But the painting on my mind needed changing.
I opened my eyes again, and suddenly the thought of going out into the darkness held no allure. If that house was so troublesome for me to remember, then what if I approached someone and they...?
They’ll look right through me.
I shivered. It was a horrible idea. A ridiculous idea, too, because Wellington Pond had taken me willingly to its bosom, the villagers welcoming me not as a stranger but as a villager-to-be. But it felt like a cooler, more sinister place now. In the darkness there was not only the village, settling down for the night; the barbecuers, chatting softly and laughing gently as stars speckled the summer sky. There was also deception. There were places that should not be, and in those places, things that should not be.
I closed the front door and threw the bolt. Even though this place had only been my home for several years, it still felt like my castle. Mary had never been here, but I carried her memories rich and full in my mind. She would never be cast aside, ignored, forgotten.
“It’ll all be fine,” I said, and my voice echoed comfortably from furniture and walls that I knew so well. “Tomorrow’s a whole new day.”
––––––––
I watched TV all evening without seeing anything, then went up to prepare for bed. In the bathroom I switched on the light and saw my ghostly visage peering at me in the big mirror above the sink. I gasped, shocked, and wiped the mirror free of condensation. It did no good. I still looked pale and wan, as if a fine dust had settled over my eyes.
Or my face.
I wiped a hand across my skin, but the greyness remained, pale, corpselike. My skin felt slick and greasy.
Washing and cleaning my teeth, I hummed a tune to help me forget the things I had seen and heard. It was an old Chas and Dave song, one which Mary and I had once danced to in a London boozer many moons ago. It had become our song.
Trying to imagine the singers’ cheery faces, I saw only leery clowns. Closing my eyes brought them into sharper view. Opening my eyes, I saw only myself. Greyer than ever. Puffy around the eyes, red across the nose and around the mouth.
Changing.
Retreating to bed—the one safe place in any home, from a child pulling covers up over its eyes against the darkness, to an old man like me seeking sleep to escape reality—I reached over to turn off the lamp. Only then did I notice the area of dampness on the wall and ceiling. It had spread since earlier that day. It had bloomed, too, like a bruise finding colour after its initial, angry darkness. Purples and reds, oranges and yellows, and the plaster wall and ceiling had taken on the pitted, textured appearance of old skin.
I debated whether to turn out the light, but decided that the darkness would be worse.
There was no sleep for me. Only a twitchy wakefulness.
I heard creeping in the attic above my head, creaks too regular and purposeful to be caused by the house settling or mice skipping across attic boards. Something kissed wetly, a sound like moist lips opening and closing again, opening and closing, and the damp seeped across the ceiling and down the walls. It flowed, like a mix of melted wax finding its own shape.
“Isaac,” I said, shaking. “Mary.” But they were both far away from me now. I tried to move but I was frozen, trapped in my bed by the illusion of safety. The pure, deceitful illusion.
Distant laughter droned in, dulled by heavy walls and heavier shadows. And then another cackling burst from much, much closer, above me beyond the ceiling. Less than eight feet away. It rose and fell, and beneath the mad laugh I heard the insistent scraping of sharp, coloured nails.
My whole house creaked and groaned as it settled into its fate. Glass cracked somewhere downstairs. Floorboards warped. A door buckled in its distorting frame.
I tried to shout for help, but an altogether different sound came from my mouth. It was answered from the house next door.
The ceiling began to sag and crack as something forced its way through from above.
Reaching for the phone that I’d brought to bed with me for the first time ever, I wanted to call Isaac. But I was worried that he would hear only maniacal laughter. And I was afraid that although four clowns had arrived one late summer’s afternoon, five would leave.