It Has Character
JAY ARMSTRONG-BUNKER
It had been three weeks since she first noticed the house moving around her.
First it was the fireplace, moving an inch away from the wall. Then she noticed the taps, shifting back and forth from hot to cold. She almost thought she was imagining it, until one morning when the fireplace was in her bedroom and the front door had moved.
What she didn’t know was that the house had only started waking up. It had been the kind of sleep that feels groggy and lost, so it hadn’t realised it had moved at all. When it had become dormant, there was an old man with a great Irish wolfhound. The dog appeared to still be there, or at least a relative of the dog; the man was gone.
So the house was a little grumpy. The man had used to chat to it, and it used to respond by moving as he needed. Old homes need friends not strangers, and Sarah was a stranger.
In the early hours one frosty morning, when the sun was still rising and the air was blue, she wasn’t thinking of the house, as she had to give a tour to the new head gardener later that day. Until she went back upstairs after breakfast, and found the door to her bedroom had become a wall. Which formed a particular problem, as she was still in her pyjamas.
She tried hitting the wall, closing her eyes and convincing herself it wasn’t real, throwing things, even trying to whisper, speak, order and beg whatever entity was keeping her out, and finally, gave up. The wall through to her room remained stubbornly blank and solid.
There was less than an hour until she had to be at Elmbridge Heights and the mild panic of being late was beginning to set in. It was important to her that she make a good impression on this new gardener, the last one was insistent that head gardener meant he was in charge of her as groundskeeper instead of being her peer. She needed to clear her head. Tea would be good; tea fixes everything. As she reached for the tap, water squirted out vertically towards her soaking the front of her shirt.
‘What? What do you want?’ She only dimly registered that she’d completely lost her grip on reality and was openly conversing with apparently nothing.
What did it want? The house didn’t know. Only the house did know and was afraid of the answer – that the old friend was gone, forever gone, and the house was still here alone.
Alone with a stranger.
‘And where is Barry?’
The sudden shift from frustration to terror must have shown, because the wall by the fireplace parted in front of her eyes, far too putty for what she knew was brick. There was Barry in his bed, asleep and content. The house clearly had a favourite.
‘Thanks.’
The house groaned.
‘Look, I just need my clothes. We could – we could make a deal?’
She racked her brain for what to do. Stood in the living room, staring at the top of the back wall. Her bedroom was through that wall. If she couldn’t get dressed, she supposed she could just call in sick – or meet the new gardener in star-patterned flannel.
‘If I can have my clothes, I’ll leave for a while?’
There was an unusual still moment as Sarah waited for the house to consider her statement. Then, with a great rumble of complaint, the wardrobe pressed through the wall, landing beside Barry gently.
‘Thank you!’ She leapt into her clothes and was out the door.
Alone with the dog, the house began to do the house version of a morning stretch. Barry watched while the furniture moved and lifted from the ground. The windows opened, letting in the sharp winter air. The house took stock, finally, of its condition.
The furniture was almost all the same as last it was awake, and the new stuff was cheap but comfortable. Everything was clean and neat, except for a corner at the back of the living room with books stacked in piles. Classics and theorists piled around in a suggestion of half-finished study. Interesting. Under it all was an unfamiliar buzz – like giving a child an energy drink, the house was thrumming with something. A current; electric, new.
*
After their run-in over the bedroom door, Sarah was a little more wary of anything suspicious. Groundskeeping over winter meant a lot of trekking snow in and out and checking both buildings and gardens constantly, so every time she left she wondered what would be waiting when she returned.
Over the following days she noticed the creaks and cracks of the building more. She often caught Barry’s brush moving on its own to pat him and even thought his water bowl might be being filled when she wasn’t looking. Other than that it just seemed the furniture was shifting about.
Until the afternoon three days after the bedroom incident that she went to get food out for tea. As she reached for the cupboard the handle fell clean off, punctuated with a sharp thwack against the counter. The actual door fused itself onto the shelves behind it and refused to budge.
She wondered what the most sensible thing to do would be, but found that she couldn’t think of sense with this going on and decided to go out for dinner instead.
*
She returned through the freezing night to a well-stocked fire and a deliciously warm house.
‘Why don’t you just do things like that?’ She muttered.
Over dinner she had mused that probably, the most sensible thing was to leave or get some kind of ghost busting service in. But she found a natural curiosity, a secret desire for whimsy that made her want to stay. She’d had an idea; there were stories of magic, mischievous homes that played tricks, driven by elves, pixies, brownies – you name it, folklore was rife with sprites that messed with people. And what she knew of these was that all they wanted was a little payment.
*
The house was unhappy with Sarah. She had left fresh bread and tea out on the table when she went to bed. That’s not where those things go. Reggie had never left food out overnight. She would have to learn not to do that the hard way.
She was awoken in the dark of morning with cold tea dumped all over her.
‘Sorry!’ She called out. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’
Sarah started her day with a load of tea-soaked laundry. So whatever it was, it didn’t want food and very much liked Barry. The other thing she could think of was salt. The magical properties of salt.
The next half hour she spent outside, shaking salt onto the windowsills and doorstep, trying to focus on the thought of banishing evil and protecting the home.
The house had only one thought on the matter; I am not a slug.
Finally satisfied she tried the door. It jumped away from her hand inwards, warping like jelly and bouncing back when she recoiled. For a moment the horrible thought crossed her mind that she had banished herself from the home.
As she reached out again Barry must have seen her through the window and barked. This time the door wobbled but let her grasp the handle. It was very quickly apparent that the salt had not worked.
Over the next hour every time she reached for something it shuffled or spun away from her hand. She spent around a half hour chasing books on myth and folklore around the living room. The only thing that finally seemed to calm the place down was when she topped up Barry’s food.
Quick to take the opportunity, she pulled out butcher paper, chalk and pens and set them out on the table.
‘I know you can move things around. Can you write? Write to me. I want to work this out.’
The house wasn’t expecting this. A kind of bizarre amateur séance. It didn’t know if it could use language; it had never tried. Communication just happened through action usually.
The house lifted a pen and wrote.
In surprisingly neat and clear handwriting, Sarah watched the pen trace across the paper. Where is the man? The man. Ok.
‘Was he a groundskeeper?’
The pen paused. Yes.
‘The last groundskeeper retired. His name was Paul.’
No.
And then –
Reggie.
*
It was surprisingly quick looking through the old logbooks and records in the back rooms of Elmbridge Heights to find the name: Reginald Carter.
Almost 100 years ago he had taken the position as a young man, and spent fifty years before falling ill and dying only soon afterwards. Sarah felt a strange sadness – knowing she might have to break this news to a building.
What a strange thought; but then, the idea of a home missing its person wasn’t too much of a stretch.
To the church, to the graveyard. And there he was; Reginald Carter, lived 1897-1970, beloved groundskeeper of Elmbridge Heights. The walk back to the house was a somewhat grim one. She dreaded to think how the house would take it, but also felt some odd sting at the records left by Reggie. No surviving family, no other information. He had been groundskeeper. That was who he was, to the point that he worked himself to the end.
Sarah loved this job. She did. But it could be lonely, it could be consuming. Maybe she had too much in common with Reggie.
The door creaked open slowly as she approached.
‘Hello.’
The house groaned.
‘I can tell you about Reggie,’ she said softly. ‘But it’s not happy news.’
The fire went out. Barry whined.
‘He got sick, almost fifty years ago. He, um, he passed away.’
The walls darkened, shifting imperceptibly. The ceiling drooped above her.
‘I’m sorry.’ She whispered.
The house had known that. It was just different being told.
It hadn’t been happy when Reggie told it he was leaving for a while, sulked for the days of him packing up to leave. Without him, it had fallen dormant.
Stupid. Stupid.
For several hours, the living room remained crouched tightly around her and Barry. She read, leaning on the wall in a way she hoped could be comforting. It was kind of nice, in a way, like the house was hugging her close.
Slowly it began to expand again, the doors and windows reappearing. Sarah stayed still. After a while of no more movement she spoke.
‘Are you ok?’
The house had never had to wonder its feelings. It simply was.
On the table, the pen lifted once more: No.
‘Can I do anything?’
Where is he?
‘In the graveyard.’
Can I see him?
*
It didn’t take her long at all to unscrew the doorhandle. She had no idea if this would work, but it was the thing that seemed most fitting. Barry at her side, she walked the frosty ground towards the graveyard. The metal grew warm in her hand as she approached.
‘We’re nearly there.’
Finally, standing in front of the little stone tablet, she placed the handle on the ground, angled as best she could to face the grave.
‘Reginald Carter, 1897-1970, died aged seventy-three. Beloved groundskeeper of Elmbridge Heights.’
There was a moment of perfect calm. Then a tiny rumble started, grew louder, the ground shook slightly below her. Then came a great wooden creaking sound, the earth shifted, and the grave began to sink as the grass rose and bubbled around it, and it was sucked into the soil. In a few seconds, the grave was gone and the earth had reshaped as if it was never there.
The doorhandle remained innocently where she’d placed it.
*
Eight months later
The late summer sun poured through thick lattice windows in the mid-afternoon, basking the deep wood of the kitchen and dining table in gold warmth. The air was heavy with the scents of flowers and fruit, honey thick. At the sink a set of oven dishes gently washed themselves.
Sarah had the day off and sat in her little garden reading. Behind her Barry chased squirrels through the trees, and beside her between the apples and vegetable patch, covered in thickets of soft moss as though he was always there, Reggie’s grave rested.
Eventually the air began to chill and she was forced to go inside.
‘Hullo!’
The house creaked in reply.
‘Oh, you’ve cleaned my dishes! Thank you.’ She whistled, ‘Barry! Dinner time.’
She looked around the living room. It was much the same as it had been last year, with a few small changes. By the couch, her laptop waited for her to continue the public history article she had to read for her finally resumed degree. She had got around to retouching the fireplace, fixing a few cracks that had appeared in the mantle.
And of course, the constant floating around of her things being put back and taken out, the occasional scratch on the chalkboard behind the door where the house could write if it needed to.
Today there was new writing on the board.
Tomorrow you have study group, you were going to make brownies.
‘Oh I was. I’m sure I’ll forget to.’
The house creaked in understanding and floated the chalk up again.
Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you do it.
‘Thanks.’ She laughed.
