Unfinished Business

As I walked into the bedroom, a cool breeze gently blew past my ankles, causing me to look down to see if I was brushing against something on the floor. I was in a house I had known well when I was a teenager. My aunt Toby was a widow even then, but she had been the most sophisticated and glamorous person I knew. Now she had died, and I was the executor of her will. I found myself back in her house on the edge of Exmoor, still full of the things she had collected on her travels around the world. The house seemed familiar but strangely empty.

Aunt Toby’s presence always lit up her surroundings. She reminded me of Rosalind Russell as Auntie Mame. I was trying to become a hippie, free-thinking and adventurous, but whatever I thought of doing, she had been there before me. The house without her was just a house. The incense holders, the tiger skin rug, the African carved masks, the extraordinary Japanese statues, the bonsai trees – they were all nothing in her absence. When she was there, she had stories to tell me about all of them, so each piece had its own special meaning.

I had driven to the house on a Friday afternoon with the sun already setting, shining in my eyes as I drove west. My plan was to stay for the weekend, decide which pieces would be kept within the family, and find a dealer to handle the sale of the rest. Once the house was empty, it would go on the market. I knew there would be issues with the house itself. It had been built by Toby’s late husband, in the days before buildings were inspected for meeting standards for electricity, plumbing, and structural integrity. It had always been perfectly safe (even though my late uncle Desmond was color blind, so he had to keep asking Toby which wire was which), but it was entirely built of wood, making it impossible to insure, and modern buyers would want it to match modern standards. It would fail an inspection on multiple grounds.

For tonight, I planned to sleep in the guest bedroom. No one would have been in to launder the master bedroom bedding that Toby had been using before she died. It was this bedroom that made me feel an eerie draft, very different from the warmth of the house when Toby was still alive. I turned on the old-fashioned electric radiator to take the chill from the room.

Toby wasn’t really my aunt; she was a second cousin. Her branch of the family tree had died off, and her entire estate was left to my younger sister and myself. My sister had children who would go on to inherit from her, but I was divorced and childless, so anything I took would just be to make my remaining years more comfortable.

I walked back to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee to go with the takeaway kebab I had bought in town for my dinner. The kitchen was bright but seemed cold. I found some spicy sauces to enhance my dinner, and sat on a hand-carved wooden stool by the marble island. Toby had told me once that the marble surface had come from a funeral home that was going out of business. I wasn’t sure if that was a fact or not – many of her stories were far-fetched, but a surprising number had turned out to be true. In any case, decades of being in Toby’s kitchen had removed any prior associations with death.

The piquant chunks of greasy grilled lamb nestled in salad and stuffed into pita bread made a satisfying dinner, followed by strong sweet black coffee. I walked around the house, reacquainting myself with all of Toby’s treasures – cedar chests, brass warming pans, portraits of our common ancestors, old wooden spinning wheels, and many more. She had been 96 years old when she died. That meant that she had lived alone in this house for fifty years. Everywhere was clean and well-cared-for. I could imagine her walking in through the door and greeting me.

It had been a long drive from London. I decided to retire to the guest bedroom, write up some notes, and get an early night. After turning out all the other lights in the house, I closed the door to my room, now much warmer, cracked the window to allow some fresh air in, and drew the curtains. There was a padded armchair, and I took my laptop out of my overnight bag, plugged it into the power, and began my list of household contents.

After an hour or so, I felt that breeze again around my ankles. The curtains weren’t moving, the room was still pleasantly warm, but my feet were cold. I also had the odd feeling that someone was watching me. Was I imagining a haunting presence? Toby would never haunt anyone. She was exciting, a free spirit; she would never be bound to a past life. She would be off on her next great adventure if there was an afterlife, or becoming worm food if there wasn’t. Desmond had built the house, and apart from the two of them, no one else had lived there. And if Toby had sensed a ghostly presence, she would certainly have had it investigated, told the family, and invited the local paper to run an article on it. I shrugged, fetched a blanket from the ottoman at the foot of the bed, and wrapped myself in it to keep warm.

Suddenly, I heard a loud noise, a shout or perhaps a cough, and I jerked awake and looked up. I must have fallen asleep at the laptop; my phone showed it was after 11 o’clock. There was silence now. The noise must have come to me in a dream. I closed the laptop, washed my face and hands at the sink, and went to bed.

The bed was quite hard, with heavy covers, and starched linen sheets. It took me back to a time before we all had duvets and gave me a feeling of being swaddled and protected from the elements. I picked up my phone to check for messages through all the usual apps and email, before snuggling down and switching off the bedside light.

Five minutes later, I sat up and turned the light back on. In the dark, the room felt ominous, heavy with some alien presence. It was embarrassing, being afraid of the dark like a small child, but I wasn’t going to lie awake worrying. I closed my eyes again and willed myself back to sleep.

When I heard the noise again, it was 1:30 in the morning. By the time my eyes were open, it had stopped again. It seemed less like a voice this time, more like a cough. Then I felt the pillow next to me move as though someone had laid their head on it. There was no going back to sleep now. I sat up, pulling the bedcover around my shoulders, and picked up my phone to read a story.

I still had the sensation of being watched. The light was still on, and I could see the room quite clearly. There was no one there. Feeling foolish, I got out of bed and walked around the room, checking the door was properly closed, looking behind the curtains, and closing the window. There was nobody there. Nothing had been disturbed. Returning to bed, I fluffed and turned the pillow I had been resting on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something wrong with the other pillow. On closer examination, it turned out to be a couple of coarse black, short, straight hairs. Wouldn’t I have noticed them when I went to bed? Perhaps not, as I had been tired. Had my uncle Desmond had short black hair? I thought that was possible.

I sat in bed, doomscrolling on my phone to keep my mind occupied. I was still wide awake this time when I heard the noise. It was suddenly clear that this was not a voice or a cough – it was a bark. Was there a dog in the room? Surely I would have seen it while I was walking around. I remembered the hairs on the pillow. Short black hairs. A memory teased against a corner of my mind. A dachshund, Toby’s pet from twenty or thirty years ago. He had a funny name – Guinness. I hadn’t thought about him in decades. But yes, he had been the other inhabitant of the house all those years ago.

In the cold light of day, I would have discounted all this as coincidence. But it was the middle of the night. I put the phone down and called out encouragingly. “Guinness? Come up here, boy.”

There was a pause, and just as I was about to decide the whole thing was a fancy cooked up by my overtired mind, I heard a soft whining. I spoke again, more playful, welcoming. “Come on, Guinness, up you come.”

Once again, I felt the pillow move. There was nothing there. I put the light out and rolled over to face the pillow. “She’s not coming back, Guinness. You’ve been a good dog, looking out for her all these years, but you can rest now.”

There was another sad whining sound, then I felt a small muscular body cuddling against my chest. I made sure he was covered by the bedclothes, and I felt his little heart beating next to mine as the two of us drifted off to sleep, remembering Toby. The next time I woke up, it was morning, and I was alone.