The Old House

If you are a guest in an old house it doesn’t pay to be too fanciful. I’m very sceptical about the supernatural but sometimes strange things do happen. I’ve just spent New Year with friends in their little house. The house is the type that squats low in a wide open landscape. Built around 1720, its little pointed windows gaze out onto flat and wintry fields. It is a house that has sheltered many lives.
On the first night I woke up at 3 am to the smell of onions being fried with meat. Curiously, enquiries the next day showed no one had been in the kitchen at that time. I took it to be an unusually vivid dream, put it to the back of my mind and enjoyed the New Year’s party without another thought.
The following morning arrived damp and grey. Outside a thick fog pervaded everything; inside the kitchen was welcoming and warm. Time passes quickly in friendly company but in the spare early twilight of a New Year’s afternoon the sitting room led me on to think of its past history. What hopes and fears, sickness and suffering had those rural walls seen over the years?
Later, sitting by the fire, the evening was jolly enough. Cheerful company, wine and good food soon dispels any lingering ghostly spirit, but as the fire in the ingle nook died down the atmosphere in the room chilled.
I was back to thinking about the miseries faced by the rural poor in the 18th C, when a large white moth fluttered against the outside of the small window.
It struggled towards the warmth and light several times before disappearing into the night.
The sight of the creature brought me back from my reverie and my friend remarked that a moth visited every night, no matter the weather or time of year. She followed on with,
“I hope it’s no-one I know.”
I laughed with her, but inside my heart lurched. What if I’d conjured up an unquiet spirit by my musings?
Later, cosily tucked up in my bedroom under the eaves, as the clock struck 3am, I realised a trip downstairs to the bathroom was needed. Reluctantly I left my warm bed and crept down the creaking staircase.
The light was still burning in the little arched window in the front room, though the fire was just a pile of cooling ash.
All was deathly quiet and still. Trying not to think about spooky moths I crept across the floor. I was almost safely to the other side of the room, with my hand already feeling for the reassuring door latch, when I heard an unearthly, wheezing,
“Heh, Heh, Heh!”
With a lurching heart I shot out of the room, across the hall and into the safety of the bathroom.
On returning, heart still hammering in my chest, I rested a nervous hand on the back of the sofa, summoning my courage to creep back across the floor. At once the demonic sound happened again, and then again.

I had been frightened out of my wits by an elderly piece of furniture with a wonky leg and creaking spring. As the floor flexed under my weight, the sofa moved and I could summon the noise at will.
Safely back upstairs, trying to snuggle under a cooling duvet and attempting to get back to sleep, I swear I heard the old house creaking with laughter all around me.

The photo is of a Death's Head hawk-moth, a very rare visitor to the U.K.

The Stick Ape - A short story

It was still daylight and she was in bed. It felt odd. She heard talking in the garden outside the room and thought of those long afternoons when, wilful and cheeky, she had been sent to bed long before her sisters. That was a while ago, in another life. Her mind wandered to other high summer evenings, when she’d tossed, hot and sleepless, listening to the click of her father’s spade as he worked outside in the garden. It was on one of those evenings that, in the oak tree just beyond the garden hedge, she had first seen the outline of an ape.

Her stick ape had loomed larger and larger every day until it dominated her waking hours. Even in snow the ape was there, looking down, its stick arms stiff with cold. On frosty nights she thought she heard it scraping and tap tapping on the window. In the summer it hid behind the leaves, ready to swing across the gap between tree and hedge and into her bedroom. Then she grew afraid that her thoughts might let it in.

Her sisters said they couldn’t see it and laughed at her, saying she was daft. They told their mum she was silly. Her mum smiled at her fondly, looked in the wrong place and said abstractedly that it was probably an angel watching to see if she was good. She knew it wasn’t an angel. It’s stick like frame hung over her waking hours, threatening and gleeful that no one else in her family really knew the truth.

To start with she tried pulling the curtains more tightly, but that only made the ape more real, its presence more imminent, so she slept with the curtains undrawn. Each morning, on waking, she needed to see out of the corner of her eye that it was there, just to make sure it was still safely imprisoned in the tree.

One day the urge to watch grew so strong she moved her bed directly opposite the window. That night there was a terrible storm. The sort of storm that pulled down telephone wires and tore birds out of the trees, dashing them and their nests onto the ground.

She had never heard such a storm before. She lay alone in her little bed, looking out as the darkness suddenly lit up like fireworks. Huge jagged streaks ripped across the sky. Slashes of light shone behind her eyes long after the lightening had gone.

The wind tore the noise of the thunder away and rolled it around the wood. She heard the tufted leaves on the ends of the branches slashing together and the whole wood hissed with distress.

Again and again rain hit her window like hailstones on a cold tin roof. Wind gusted down the chimney, leaving patches of sooty grime in the hearth. As the latch rattled and the backdoor opened, the lino lifted as the wind came under her bedroom door.

She relaxed when she heard her father’s voice, back from the pub. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but knew he talked of the wind. Her mother’s lighter tone answered in agreement, then their footsteps came in unison up the stairs. They whispered briefly at her door, then there was silence in the house. A silence more acute because of the tearing noise outside.

She thought of her stick ape. In her mind she saw his body lean forward, changing shape as it moved in the wind, springing back and forward, back and forward. She strained to see the tops of the trees from her bed, waiting for the next lightening flash, needing to make sure he was still there. When it came the brightness burnt strange patterns on her eyes, blinding her to what was going on outside.

She shivered as she heard the crack of a bough splitting, then ripping sounds as it fell, twisting through smaller branches, down into the undergrowth. From her bed she felt sorrow for all the animals out in the wind. She pulled the covers up to her chin but still peered out into the blackness, not sleeping until the storm eventually stilled.

In the morning washed sun streamed in her window. She lay dazed, watching the dust fairies dance in a beam of light. As she moved her legs in the bed, the dust fairies swirled and climbed. She tried sleepily to recall the night before. On remembering the storm, she sat up in bed with a start. Once out of bed she staggered, and the light coming in blinded her for a moment. Then, running to the window, she looked outside. Down in the garden tall blue flowers lay flat and battered across her mother’s once neat borders. Her cat picked his way cautiously among the debris. Tufted bunches of oak leaves lay mangled on the path and lawn. Larger twigs straddled the hedge. Beyond the hedge the tree was still standing, but the ape was gone. Where it had once loomed down at her was just a gap, a space of blue washed sky. She could see the track it had made as it leapt through the trees and bushes. She imagined it running along a road made by the fallen branches. As she stared at the path its retreating form had made, she was engulfed by loss. Loss so profound that it clutched her chest and squeezed her throat. The stick ape was gone forever.

How she missed its looming branches and its sketchy shape. From now on she would sleep with the curtains tightly closed, not bearing to open her eyes onto the space it had left so empty. For a long time she told herself it was freedom, but mostly she knew it was loss.

Now, years later she was in another narrow bed, looking at another sky through open curtains, with her thoughts flitting back to that childhood room and the stick ape that had waited beyond the window.

Outside the garden had grown silent in the dusk. Evening was rapidly approaching and, as the light dimmed, she began to feel an old familiar presence. Had her thoughts called it? Was it coming for her? Was it there outside the window? She thought she saw a movement from the corner of her eye but her head was heavy and hard to turn. The room was getting darker now and finally she was sure what crouched beyond the window. There was comfort and dread in its return. Slowly she turned her face towards the dying light. Just before the final dark she felt it close by, looking down on her again and this time she realised there would be no storm. It was there and she knew this time they would go together.