This house is heaven. That’s what my mum always told me, growing up: “Treat this house with the respect she deserves, love. This is our sanctuary, our little slice of heaven.” And she really meant it, too, a devoted worshipper at the altar of House and Home.
Shoes off at the front porch, no slamming of doors, mirrors wiped clean after a steamy shower and especially no wet glasses on wood or my mother would come swooping in with a cloth and a frown. All the normal rules my school friends and I griped about. There were other rules, though, that I kept tucked close to my chest. I instinctively knew not to talk about them. Rules like saying goodnight to the house at bedtime, or thanking the house for hot water. And the final rule, the most important one: “Tell the house your wounds and worries, dear, and the house will look after you.”
All little quirks of my mother, the woman who patted every door frame as she passed through it. An odd woman, but no denying she was devoted to her family and her home, that’s what the obituary says.
She died last week. It still doesn’t feel quite right in my mouth when I say it: sharp, stinging, as though I’ve swilled vinegar instead of mouthwash. My husband says I cried when I got the news, but I don’t remember. He’s probably right, but all that comes to mind is that dreadful feeling I had when I put the phone down, like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me to reveal a gaping hole in the earth beneath. I was in free fall, Alice down the rabbit hole.
I digress. My mind has a tendency to do that these days, but I think it’s understandable, considering. I was talking about heaven. I was talking about the house.
I almost expected to find her here, you know, when I came back from the funeral. Sitting at the kitchen table, relaxing in the bath, napping in her armchair. Her favourite places to be, and she’d been a good person, she really had, so where would she be if not in heaven? She wasn’t here, obviously. Instead there was an envelope waiting on the kitchen table, my name written neatly in red ink in my mother’s handwriting. I opened it right away but it took me almost an hour to read it.
“Look after her.”
That’s all it said. ‘Her’ being the house, of course. The bloody house. Even after she’d gotten sick my mum had refused to move, had refused to go to hospital, had even refused hospice care. “I can’t leave the house,” she’d cry every time we brought it up, and who were we to deny an old woman her dying request?
So. The house was mine. I’d been anointed the last votary of a dead religion, the only one left who knew the rites. The monthly staining of the wooden floors, the weekly washing of windows with first salt water then purified water, the hundred other things my mother did and swore the house was grateful for: they were all mine now. My duty. My burden.
That night was the first night of the rest of my life. I think even then I felt it. Although I can’t be sure: there’s no hiding from what I know now, even in my memories.
I slept badly, at first, tossing and turning, disturbed by even the tiniest shards of moonlight filtering through the old curtains. The darkness felt heavy, suffocating, as though my mother had been Atlas holding the sky on her shoulders, and the world without her threatened to collapse. I felt it pressing down upon me, burrowing me into the mattress and making my limbs leaden with an exhaustion I couldn’t sate: grief.
Eventually, encouraged by my mother’s memory and my desperation for a good night’s sleep, I whispered “goodnight, dear house” into the darkness. The ritual of it eased my mind, transforming the oppressive yawning-mouth darkness into the familiar black velvet of my childhood. A deep dreamless sleep claimed me almost instantly.
I existed in a simulacrum of life, shedding grey days like a discarded snake skin. After breakfast I’d move to the back porch, finding immense peace in the silence and stillness of the lake. Hours passed in a blur; sometimes I’d abruptly return to myself to find that my tea had gone cold and my phone log showed multiple missed calls. Always when I stirred there was something to do for the house: more wood for the fire, or a pipe frozen over. It seemed I could only rouse myself to look after the house, all that I had left of my mother.
I found myself slipping back into all the old habits: greeting the house as I came in the front door, apologising when I spilled a glass of water on the bare wooden floor of the hallway, resting my palm against the knotted centre beam of the kitchen as I cooked breakfast. Without these habits I just couldn’t shake that lingering, serpentine feeling that I was letting my mother down. That I was letting the house down. I felt as though I was losing myself to the overwhelming grief, retreating to hide, cowering, in the comfort of my childhood.
I missed my mother, I missed my husband. Most of all, I missed my daughter, the sound of her high, fluting voice and her peals of laughter. Sometimes I would be convinced she was just round the corner, just up the stairs or behind the sofa playing an elaborate game of hide and seek. I’d lift my head from whatever last will and testament I was trying to make sense of, sure I’d seen her darting back behind the door. But it was always just the house and I.
The first crack in the wall appeared three days ago. Then a second, and a third. At first it was verging on comical, the idea that they’d been so intertwined that the house could hardly stand in its foundations without my mother. And then it was terrifying, the realisation that she had left it to me, had entrusted it to me, and I wasn’t looking after it right.
Then it had rained, and the bathroom window had leaked rainwater drops like tears. I knew then that something had to be done. Without really knowing why, I walked through the house and catalogued every flaw, every cracked wall, flaking wooden beam and fraying curtain, more meticulously than any estate agent. Then, feeling the fool but somehow compelled to continue anyway, I sat in front of the gaping crack above the fireplace and spoke to the house.
I talked about how sad I was, how much I missed my mother; how lonely I was without my husband and my daughter, halfway across the world; how it felt to be back home, how comforting and peaceful the house was compared to the hectic life I’d temporarily abandoned.
The talking eased my worries, such a remembrance of my childhood that for a moment I fancied I could smell my mother hovering behind me, the familiar scent of her perfume and woodsmoke and cooking oil. I had the strangest sensation of the air changing around me; my ears popped. I felt almost faint, dizzy.
I watched the crack in the wall above the fireplace reseal and fade like a scar. A memory came back to me, almost violent in its insistence.
My first time shaving, sitting in the cooling bath water with my stolen razor. The door locked from the inside: I was embarrassed, both of the dark hairs limning my legs like apricot fuzz and of my secret, shameful decision to cut it all away, slicing my youth away with it. The razor clenched tight between twitching fingers. A slip of the hand. Blood spilling out like the seeds of a pomegranate. A thin ribbon of skin hanging from the razor blade, limp and pale. The door to the bathroom swings open, my mother flooding in. She swoops me up and dries me, pressing a plaster onto my shin and kissing it better.
She made me tell the house, I remember, made me whisper the injury into the centre beam of the kitchen. I had to promise to leave the plaster on for a few days, to keep it clean, but that night, unable to resist the temptation, I peeled it away.
My skin was smooth. There was no cut, no oozing blood, no weeping divot where the skin had been excised by my carelessness. The house had heard my wounds and worries and had looked after me, just as my mother had always promised. Just as it always did.
I hadn’t thought of that night in, god, years. Not since I’d left home, in fact. It struck me as strange that I could have forgotten something like that so entirely.
Last night I could not sleep. I was sure there was a sound coming from high above me, a faint susurration like linen bed sheets being rustled feebly or the hushed breathing of a sleeping animal. I lay there in the blinding dark, mummified by sheets made sticky by my sweat, and worried. I began to conjure terrible images of a jagged hole in the roof, icy rain pouring in and eating away at the wood of the house. I had to go up to the attic. I had to make sure that all was well, and then I’d be able to sleep.
It was impossible to believe my mother used the attic ladder regularly in her old age and yet it unfolded without a sound, oiled and clearly well-maintained. This only increased the niggling sense of unease blooming in my belly like algae. I felt older than my years as I climbed up the ladder, terrified that the old rungs would splinter and break under my weight.
I slowed as I reached the top, hesitant to reach out and flick the light switch. I told myself it was just anxiety about the ancient lightbulb, that it might blow a fuse and shatter into a confetti of glass. The feeling swelled, waves lapping at my chest until I was breathing fast and shallow. I know now that although I couldn’t put it into words, I was convinced there was something up there in the dark waiting for me.
I flipped the switch; a sunburst of citrus-yellow light flared from the old bulb, illuminating suitcases and boxes and nothing else. I could smell myself, the sour sweaty scent of fear, and was embarrassed. This was my home – nothing here would hurt me.
There was no yawning hole in the roof letting in the rain. There was nothing out of place except, and I noticed it just as I turned to leave, the knotted wooden beam in the centre of the attic. The beam cut straight through the floor and into the high-ceilinged kitchen below, and although in the kitchen it was uniformly one colour, here it was discoloured, dark in patches like spilled oil.
I clambered over boxes and piles of clothing to get a closer look, worrying about rot and mold. My heart was thud-thud-thudding in my mouth and ears, a constant, hypnotic beating that seemed to disconnect my mind from my body, severing me in two like an axe through wood. It wasn’t rot. It took me a few long, disjointed moments, but I finally realised what I was looking at. Blood. The beam was stained with it in many places.
Stabbed into the wood, like a fragment of bone jutting out of broken skin, was a thick shard of glass.
I don’t know why I did it. Even now. But I pressed my thumb against the shard of glass, watched the blood well up through the torn skin. Without thinking I brushed my thumb against the wooden beam, a soft kiss of a motion, and gazed at the smear left behind. Blood over blood over blood. Above it a wrinkled knot in the wood twitched, carved itself open. An eye looked back.
I screamed; I couldn’t help it. The sound fled my chest like a bird taking flight. The eye blinked. Dark, long-lashed, familiar. Almost unconsciously I moved closer. It looked like my mother’s eye, my grandmother’s eye, like my eye. I stepped closer again, moving until we were eye to eye, the house and I.
Who else could it be, looking back at me?
Its stare had caught me like a fishhook through the soft skin of my stomach, tugging insistently somewhere indistinct below my ribcage. Legs locked and trembling, I was paralysed, unable to turn away.
“What are you?” I breathed, throat tight, anticipation and fear mingling into a hot flush.
It had no mouth; it could not speak.
I heard a faint fluttering noise rippling from somewhere above my head, like the wings of a butterfly. Something white unpeeled itself from the eaves, trembling softly despite the stillness of the air; bone-white plumes, like wispy grasses, somehow growing out of a wrinkled, threadbare linen. The fabric moved again, unfurling itself in the breezeless air, and my perspective shifted. Feathers, flesh. Wings.
There were tears in my eyes as I stared at the living, moving wings erupting from the wood of the eaves. The eye watched me as I dropped to my knees, overwhelmed. It blinked. Single as it was, the blink became a wink, an invitation into a sordid secret: Now you know.
I gasped out tiny hysterical breaths of sobbing laughter. The eye. The wings. The knotted beam of wood that rewrote itself into a spine studded with misshapen vertebrae. The eye, the wings, the spine. Theyethewingsthespine. My breath was staccato and getting faster, almost inaudible with how little air I was choking down. The house was alive.
One of the wings curled towards me, feathers whispering with the movement, and tentatively, gently, the house held me. Although at first I shuddered, the wing was warm, comforting, like my mother’s embrace; I relaxed into it, softening like wax in the warmth. Exhausted by the shock, the sudden revelation hollowing me out, I found myself drifting towards sleep. It became an effort to stay stiff and upright, to hold my eyes open. The lightbulb still shone golden atop the spine and through half-closed eyes it became a corona of light, a halo.
At last I slept.
The naked light of dawn begins to filter through the threadbare curtains as the sun crawls into the sky. I’m sitting in the attic with my head resting against the knotted wooden spine of the house.
Yesterday I was so lonely, adrift and despairing. Today I sit cocooned in the warm embrace of my angel. I know now that she will always be here to protect me, to heal me, to lay balm upon my aching, grieving soul.
I think of my daughter, out in the cold world without me, surrounded by dangers: biting dogs and leering men and roaring storms that rip apart houses like wet cardboard. I think of her and I am scared for her. Who does she have to watch over her? I want her here, with me. I want her safe and soothed, like me.
I call my husband. He picks up, worried. I don’t know how long it’s been since we last spoke.
“I miss you both,” I say, “please come home.”
More nervous noise spilling down the phone like drain water. I don’t quite understand the words he’s saying. I run my fingers through her feathers, over and over.
“The house is mine now, love. I can’t leave yet. Please, come to me. Bring her with you. Bring her home.”
He agrees, I think, so I end the call. I smile. The house sighs, a warm breeze that ruffles the curtains and prickles the hairs on the back of my neck. She’s happy. I’m happy. She looks after me and I look after her. This house is my sanctuary, my place of peace and healing. This house is heaven.