The Old House

The house stood silently by the sea, she thought. It was an annoying habit of Jessie’s; annoying to her, anyway. It was happening inside her, so no one else knew of or was bothered by it. She seemed incapable of experiencing life without being distanced from it by a screen of precise descriptive sentences from inside her own skull. A tireless, grammatically perfect narrator. This feature kept her in a living, or the semblance of one, for now. But sometimes she feared what the cost might be.

She stood at the foot of the driveway to the house that stood silently by the sea. No, her Narrator corrected, the old house or, more specifically, The Old House. Jessie stood on fresh-looking gravel between two much older gate posts from which the gates had long since been removed. Only the flaking, rusted spikes which had once secured the gates’ hinges remained to tell the tale of absence. The gate posts themselves were gothic things of pale stone, somehow still ornate and pointed after years of harsh weather from the sea, perhaps taken from the ruin of a church. An ill-matched slate rectangle had been crookedly screwed onto the right-hand post, announcing ‘The Old House’ in plain lines devoid of any ecclesiastical ornateness. The left-hand post bore a FOR SALE sign atop a wired-on wooden stake.

A driveway ran between the posts then on an incline, two tracks of over-bright gravel relieved by a tidy strip of green grass between them, up to a broad flagstone courtyard laid before The Old House. From the front it presented a sturdy rectangle, with three original—therefore draughty—sash windows on the upper floor, an elegant set of French doors below on either side of the front door. The peeling porch and its two simple pillars looked out of place, though at least its plainness matched the rest.

Jessie couldn’t remember feeling such empathy with a building before. She started moving towards it, dragging her suitcase along the gravel since it wouldn’t roll. It still snagged and sulked and wouldn’t come easily, so she hefted it up by its top handle and lugged it along. She couldn’t blame it for complaining: it contained everything she owned, every inch inside crammed. Like her, it was weighty for such a small thing.

She was a housesitter as well as a writer. She could only afford to be one by doing the other. Her dream was the reverse of the stereotypical writer’s dream, that of starving in a Parisian garret but producing work of such luminosity as to guarantee fame and glory (and best of all a living, unless such success was posthumous). Jessie hoped, instead, to create such glowing—yet somehow also commercial—prose while still alive, and achieve sufficient success that she could afford to rent if not buy a Marais garret all her own. In the meantime, she lived in other people’s houses, walked their dogs, stroked their cats, fed their chickens, worried neurotically that she’d overfeed their fish or murder their bonsai trees.

Reaching the porch, Jessie stopped to catch her breath and turned to look at the garden either side of the drive. Only to find it gone. A thick fog had rendered it entirely invisible. The incongruous gravel tracks she'd struggled up were glowing, as though luring her back out to the road then the train, back to her last sit in London, but themselves tapered out into the sea fog. The way out seemed closed, the house now standing not just silently but seemingly alone. Even silence was muffled inside the teeming, grounded clouds. You’d never guess the house was on the outskirts of a bustling, if tired and rundown, Devon seaside town.

Although The Old House was said to stand within view of the sea, she realised couldn’t hear it, nor could she remember hearing it at any point since she’d climbed out of a taxi down below. And she was cold to her very bones, the dampness settling onto every hair and fibre she bore. She fumbled in her coat pocket for the keys, trying six different keys twice before she found the one that would slip into the lock. She turned it to the left, but it didn’t work. She kept turning and turning to no avail until, in her panic, she turned the key to the right. The door sprang open as if pulled from within, and tendrils of fog entered the house ahead of her.

Jessie had been a sitter in over thirty homes. The Old House was the most unusual so far, though it promised to be the easiest. No dogs to walk or otherwise demand attention; no plants to worry over unless the garden lacked rain, hardly likely in the middle of a British autumn. The house was larger than it looked from the front, numbering thirty rooms of different shapes and sizes, but all bar one were empty. Almost nothing to dust. She was to stay there until the house sold and the new owners were ready to move in. No one knew how long that might be.

A front room, one with French doors, had been deemed suitable as a living space, as it still had thick curtains, a rug, and a gas fire that was a fake version of the real wood-burning stove in another room. That other room was large, with an old stone floor, its stove not safe to use. You could see runnels of dried but flammable creosote down the stovepipe, that had run down it mixed with rain, and would again.

It was plenty warm enough anyway, with central heating, plus a bright red Aga stove in the kitchen. A good bed, comfy chair, table, and lamp had been purchased for her. She slept well the first night, aside from the same moment of utter confusion and anxiety she often experienced early on in a sit. Her bladder woke her and, lying there in total darkness, she had no idea where she was. It took what felt like minutes for the Narrator to wake up enough to remind her, ‘You’re part of The Old House’. She wound her way up higgledy-piggledy stairs to the bathroom on the floor above, fumbling for light switches as she went. 

‘It was usually several days before the fumbling could cease,’ said the Narrator.

‘Shut up,’ she muttered.

As she walked out of the bathroom onto a small landing, then up two little steps to another landing, from which she’d have to go down again—‘The house was eccentric but characterful in its crookedness,’ said the Narrator—something brushed the top of her head. She assumed it was spider webs, which she’d long since grown used to, and sleepily swiped at her hair as she headed back to bed.

When Jessie got up later, she wandered to the kitchen to make coffee, where she noticed a thick, oily smell. The Narrator, who collected as well as produced, though less often, took a note to contact the owner about when the Aga had last been serviced. It was a pleasant, warm smell, actually, but it was her duty to take care of the place after all. She wasn’t paid, but nor did she pay rent or bills, which resulted in a pleasantly equal relationship, except with the few homeowners new to sitting who didn’t really get the arrangement. 

Looking out the kitchen window, she could see no fog, but only the rock wall, a cliff really, against which the house was built on that side. The building stood alone from the front, but seemed to grow out of the stone on one side. It gave the place a rooted, cave-like, almost primeval feeling in places. 

Jessie took her coffee to the Stoveroom window, and gasped in delight at the view. Below a small terrace was a lawn, bounded by a thick stone wall. Beyond it the narrow road, beside a lively stream. Another stone wall covered in brambles and ivy, then a green field in which rabbits, seagulls, and crows seemed to cohabit without noticing each other. The field sloped downwards away from her as if its grass was drawn to water, then there was the cobalt blue, sparkling sea.

She raced to dress quickly from her yet-unpacked suitcase, and, carefully pocketing the keys, went out the front door. The grounds made her gasp again. To her right, a sunken walled garden with a pretty handmade greenhouse, like something out of The Secret Garden. To her left, steep slopes as varied and eccentric in layout as the inside of the house, dominated by a huge old oak tree. A meandering climb away at the top corner, where the stone cliff dwindled and a fenced-off field began, was an elegant, metal but still delicate, white-painted summer house. Two benches inside faced each other, as in an old-fashioned fairground swing, so you were forced to look at your company—or its lack—rather than the wondrous sea view.

Looking down on the house from there, Jessie realised that further back, unseen from the driveway, was a third floor. The Narrator informed her that she’d really better do a full recce of the whole place. But first she wandered down and around the garden, thinking she might pick up a vase from a charity shop in town and cut herself an autumn bouquet.

She’d reached the front door again when the Narrator started singing Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. It was then she realised that despite the day being clear and bright, she couldn’t hear the sea. Surely she was close enough? Perhaps the sound of the stream drowned it out. But then she couldn’t hear that, either. She’d heard the kettle boiling, the door closing, the swish of the grass she’d walked through, the crunch of trampled gravel and fallen oak twigs. She knocked on a wooden porch pillar. The sound was five by five, loud and clear. But no sounds of water.

Going inside and up to the third floor via narrow stairs behind the bathroom, Jessie found a long attic of three rooms in a straight row, shotgun. She opened the door of the one overlooking the sea, to find it filled with thousands of live flies. She slammed the door, then walked to town to buy some spray.

That night there was a full moon. Jessie went onto the courtyard wrapped in a cardigan, to watch it rise, golden and bloated, from behind the cliff. It was a mild night, but then a bitter cold came over her and the moon vanished. The fog was back, as swiftly as a blink. She shivered and went inside, tussling again with the lock until she remembered that the key’s direction was counter-intuitive.

Jessie read in bed, Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, again. But when her eyelids became heavy, she found in reaching for the lamp that she couldn’t bring herself to turn it off. She turned it down until she felt uncomfortable, turned it back up a bit more. She slept through the night, but was awoken early by a jangling sound that seemed loud and yet to come from very far away. Cowbells? They jangled at 6:55am precisely. As she left her room, the Aga fumes hit her there, in the front hallway. She fetched her phone to send the homeowner a message.

A week into her stay, there was a pounding on the door. Two police officers stood there, one very tall and burly, the other slight and angry-looking. No masks. They sought a William Barclay, son of the last tenants. They claimed it was a welfare check, but it was clear he was a bad ‘un. When she went to check the post that had arrived, for his name, the tall officer followed her in, and she was too intimidated by his size to tell him not to. The other stayed outside, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Jessie couldn’t tell if he was angry at her, the house, his job, or his colleague.

The fog came every night. The fumes crept throughout the house. The Aga people, despite many calls, never came to check it. The wifi signal ebbed and flowed. Something brushed the top of her head affectionately, every time she crossed the top landing. Every three days she’d go to the third floor and spray new flies, vacuum up dead ones; it seemed to make no difference. A heron stalked the field between house and sea, lurking by the bushes at its edge, hoping to feast on rabbit. There were mice scrabblings in walls and ceilings after night fell. The Old House creaked and groaned, as old houses will. Jessie usually paid little mind to such noises, but the intense silence made them stand out like Braille on paper, and as the days passed it set her nerves on edge. She tried to play internet radio to drown them out, but the signal was too weak.

She could work, at first. A crime novel, inspired by her close proximity to places Agatha Christie had lived. There was an outdoor table overlooking the sunken garden, where she worked for as long as her laptop battery lasted, in dry weather. But it was getting too cold for that. Once indoors, the voice of the Narrator, which usually gifted her books and stories, grew ever fainter. She went on long walks, slept with the lamp on.

Three weeks in, on a morning when she’d been awoken at 6:55 by the distant sound of women’s voices singing, there was a pounding on the door again. It was too early to be neighbours or the postman; perhaps it was the police again. Jessie was getting dressed, and decided to ignore it. Then the pounding moved to her own French windows. She froze in the middle of pulling a jumper over her head. A minute passed. Then there was the sound of a key sliding into the front door lock and being turned. The door was opened slowly, and a man’s footsteps could be heard on the stones of the hallway floor.

The Narrator returned, loud and clear, inside her head. ‘Which is SAFER? Which is LESS DANGEROUS?! Let him know you’re here, or pretend you’re not?’

Jessie borrowed his voice, shouting, ‘HELLO?’

A man’s voice said hello back, and she heard him withdraw outside, slithering like a serpent. She finished dressing, and drew a deep breath.

‘He knows The Old House,’ said the Narrator. ‘The Old House knows him.’

An affable-looking man with a salt-and-pepper beard stood just the other side of the slightly-ajar front door. He didn’t say hello, or introduce himself.

‘You’ve left your key in the door.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Your key. It’s in the lock, see? You want to be more careful.’

‘That’s not mine.’

‘It must be.’

‘I have six, on a ring.’

‘Ah, well. It must’ve been returned by a tradesman or gardener. I was the tenant, see. We hired such. The owner, too. One will have returned it.’

‘I would hope not.’

‘You should get a dog,’ he said. ‘How do you like the house? Beautiful, isn’t it.’ He made a song-and-dance about texting his son to check whether he’d returned a key.

She went to get the post he’d come for, shutting the door. All the post was addressed to men, but there were four names besides his. Some envelopes clearly had cards or official documents in them. She picked up only those addressed to him, and went back to the door. She didn’t dare set him off by saying she’d heard him insert the key. She knew his type. All bonhomie on the outside, but the mask would slip.

It slipped three times. First, when she asked if his son was called William, and said the police had looked for him. Then when she said that this was all the post there was and no, there was nothing from a bank or the DVLA. The third time after he had, with dreadful acting, claimed to have just received a text from William, confirming he’d returned a key.

‘What, in the middle of the night, in thick fog, by leaving it in the door?’ she said, with as much of a sneer as she could. He’d let his mask drop, and so did she.

He stood there glowering at her, then muttered something about his wife. There was a compact blue car behind him on the courtyard. He went to it, opened the driver-side door, and seemed to be discussing something with someone in the passenger seat. But Jessie could see no one there, no top of a head above the headrest. Perhaps the woman was small, like her, but she could see no one in the side mirror either. The Aga fumes were so strong as to nearly smother her, suddenly. She could hear the buzzing of flies, the burble of a stream, the crashing of waves.

He came back to the door. ‘I want the rest of the post.’

‘There’s no such thing.’

Without another word, he pushed past her into the house. Jessie ran outside, down the driveway, clutching her phone. She turned back to the house halfway down the drive, to find she could no longer see it. It was the inverse of the early evening when she’d arrived. The garden was clear, every detail standing out and glowing in the morning sun. But the house itself, The Old House, was wreathed in thick sea fog, inside and out. Or was it fumes? The curtainless windows, those aside from her own, were milky on the inside, the empty rooms impenetrable. Creepers of fog curled and writhed from the open front door, then dissipated in the daylight.

She called the police, asked them to send someone, but not the tall one please. Then she walked down stone steps and through a peeling iron gate into the sunken garden, for flowers.

‘Well, this would make a story, anyway,’ said the Narrator.