The House on the Hill

Best seat in the house. 

That’s where this house was at. 

Head and shoulders above the rest, with views to die for.

There was no better place to build a dream house.

That was the theory anyway.

Life is a big fan of the curve ball and the kind of guy who has the money to buy a plot like that, the best plot going, well he should not be trusted when it comes to the shaping of his own dream. He has the money and he has the broad shape of a vision, but beyond that he should stand well back and allow others to deliver him something better than he could ever have imagined.

That’s what it’s about and that’s how it works.

Anything else is a travesty.

Now if there was a guy who built houses all day long and he made his money in what they call the industry,then that is a different matter. Even then, that guy will bring in people. He will ask favours and he will pull strings and he will give artisans and tradespeople a free reign. 

That is how it is done and that is how it is achieved.

Meddlers and micro-managers are a scourge on this earth and they need to learn when to shut up. One of life’s big mysteries is why no one ever stepped in and stopped the spoiled bullies before they grew too big and thought themselves too clever.

The house on the hill that should have been so much more than it became was compromised thanks to the ego of a small, big man. What should have been understated was overstated and then there was even more overstatement that went against any logic and some of it went against nature itself. The house was larger than it ever had any business being, there was a planner in the town with a new swimming pool. He hadn’t objected to that and he hadn’t objected to the plans for the house. This was a vanity project that had to make the house oversized to the point of being something like stately, but never quite achieved it.

The house became an abject lesson in something becoming what it was not, as opposed to being true to itself. A crass reflection of the person who commissioned the building.

Taste wasn’t just overlooked, it was trodden into the ground and mushed up like a wet cigarette butt.

Despite the flawed conception of this house, craftsmanship was evident in the build. Those co-opted into the building project were never going to compromise on that front. The overall effect though was something like taking the Mona Lisa and spending millions on cosmetic improvements. A twisted and insane drive to take perfection and prove a point that no one would ever understand, including the mad man behind such a desecration. 

During the day, the face of that poor and misunderstood creation was forlorn and sad. Two feature windows frowned out across the small town and the eaves of the roof made the expression brutally quizzical. The house looked out into the world and asked it what the heck it was doing there. A troubled existence with no one to counsel the structure as to the point of its being.

At night, the house looked angry. It squat there and issued forth a silent growl that made people give it a wide berth. Shunned by the world it became lonely and in its solitude it doubled down in its sorrow.

The egotistical creator of the house was fickle and flighty. He was forever telling people he was too busy. Too busy to build himself into a decent human being, let alone engage with anything worthwhile, and so he flitted this way and that in failed attempts at being conspicuously important.

Even before the build of his house of dreams was completed, he had tired of it and he abandoned it for another ill-conceived project. The house was orphaned before it was born. Subjected to an unwarranted and indecent rejection.

Born alone, rejected and neglected, this house was only ever going to go one way. That was the script and that was the direction of travel.

Life doesn’t always play the ball game expected of it though. 

Why would it?

The house that was too big to be a mere house, and so was very nearly a mansion on the hill, sat forgotten for three decades. A brooding and overlooked Halloween decoration. It’s existence was a joke that no one knew the punchline to.

The aesthetics of the place eventually called out to film makers and several low budget movies were made there. Vampires hissed and spoke in faux eastern European accents. Teenagers met grizzly ends in every single one of the rooms and one of them met a memorable death impaled on the ornate banisters, such was the distribution of the pieces of their mangled corpse. Walls dripped with blood and showers threatened a blood curdling conclusion to an innocent life.

After it’s dubious foray into show business, the place was sold to a boutique hotel chain, but they could never make it work. The building wasn’t quite funky enough to become a destination location and the drab town had nothing to draw guests in either. 

An undeservedly delinquent life looked set to end in pathetic dereliction, but then Norm turned up and he changed everything. 

The house wasn’t even up for sale at the time. The current owner had given up on finding a seller, having given up on estate agents and their wayward and nonsensical ways. Her take on that breed of so called professional was that they were very effective gatekeepers, in that only a very keen buyer would brave the company of such people. She was yet to discern what work they actually did other than talk a lot of gibberish and gobbledegook about desirable locations, gentrification and any and every area being on the up.

Norm made his enquiries and drove a bargain that was not hard, but in the end suited him and the keen-to-sell vendor. He had barely looked at the house, but he somehow knew it was the place for him. He’d led a quiet existence and had learned to keep himself to himself following a series of unfortunate misunderstandings that necessitated his relocation to pastures new.

The large and foreboding house on the hill had something about it, and from the moment he saw it, he knew it was the place for him. Norm saw something in that house that no one else could, and he dared to dream. He did not see a gothic monstrosity. Instead he saw monstrous potential. He just wished that his mother had been around to see it. His mother would have seen that hulking mansion on the hill and she’d have loved it more than even Norm could. She had that way about her. 

Norm missed that and he missed his dear mother. The house on the hill was for her. It was a monument that he would dedicate to that woman. He’d make this work, come what may. He’d make this house into what it was always meant to be.

When the sale completed, he quickly moved in. He had few possessions, but that was fine by him, and in some respects, it was necessary. Besides, the house had somehow managed to accumulate its own furniture over the years, and as he wandered from room to room, taking care to miss out the bathrooms, Norm’s smile broadened. Almost everything in his new home was perfect. He had the canvas and he had the raw materials, now it was a case of getting to know this house, developing a relationship with it and expressing himself in the only way he knew how.

Finally, as he wandered up through his new home, he came to the right eye of the house. The high, imposing window with a view over the town. He stood at that window and a single tear fell from his eye, “mother would have loved it here,” he said quietly to himself.

He stood there for an age, almost motionless. Then he drew up the only piece of furniture in that room. A big old rocking chair. He sat down and rocked to and fro as the sun went down and the face of his new home fell into moonlit darkness. The oncoming night was transformative for both the house and for Norm. A little piece of magic that went unnoticed in the town below.

Now, in the magical light of the full moon, Norm wandered the house again. Room by room but still avoiding the bathrooms, he traipsed, drawing a finger over surfaces and taking it all in. The place was empty and eerie and for many it was difficult to warm to. Some would say that it was creepy, but Norm didn’t think so, not one bit. The house spoke to him, and Norm spoke right back, and that was how it was always going to be with those two.

“You’ll do,” he whispered to his new abode, and with that, he walked back up the two flights of stairs to the rocking chair. He slept in it on that first night and in the morning he got to work and he did not stop working until it was done.

Fifteen years later, he opened his doors to the public. Only on a Wednesday and a Thursday, mind. This was the limit, he was not prepared to share the house and it’s painstakingly curated contents any more than those two days a week, for the house was his and he belonged to that house in a way that he could not explain. It just was, and that was that, always was and always would be.

To visit Norm’s Victorian House in all its brooding gothic splendour was to be transported back in time. One could close their eyes and smell the history. And that was the point. Norm had perfectly replicated every single detail of the Victorian era, right down the to the aromas of a household of that time. This was Norm’s dream and he had made it flesh. Two entire floors of Victoriana, but no access to the top floor, that was his and that was his alone. He would never share that with another soul. Not even his mother’s.

Of showers, there was no sign. Norm had had them removed in the first week of his occupancy. Too risky. He did not want a repeat of the misunderstanding that had so blighted his former life and led to the demise of the only woman he had ever loved…