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They draw up blinds and open windows. Fresh air and warmth seep in but the light, even at noon, struggles to find a way passed the trees, overgrown and heavy with dying leaves.
On the floor above there are three bedrooms and a bathroom and they open windows here too. The wind, no more than a fluttering breeze outside seems to gather force inside forming a tunnel from the front to the back of the house, channelling through the four rooms, disturbing the quilts on the beds, blinds at each window and, Sam notices, the ordinary chaos of Josh’s hair.
In the bathroom, water coughs cloudily out of the taps before taking a healthier turn.
In the room that used to be Josh’s there are basketballs, books and scavenged mementos of the nature going on outside. In this room they find a broken windowpane. The rain has poured through, soaking the rug and the end of the bed.
“If this is the only damage, its not so bad,” Sam says. Josh does not comment, just finds a wastepaper basket to put the glass in.
Sam hears a footstep out on the landing. Loud enough that they both turn but there is no one there.
“Just exactly how big are the mice round here?”
“Its not,” Josh says, his gaze travelling the distance of the landing and back again. “Its the house, it never shuts up. My dad used to say; ‘the house is settling’, but it scared me half to death when I was a kid.”
Sam helps Josh pick out the smaller slivers of glass from the rug, wrapping them up in a four year old newspaper. “Show me the back of the house,” he says when they have finished.
Through the kitchen door, there is a porch and then there is a break in the trees opening out to a violet horizon. Hills roll out in sensuous curves and darkening hues of green, richer for the torrents of rain that have fallen these last few weeks.
“You can’t sell this place,” Sam says.
Josh shrugs. “It’s got to go, Sam.”
“I don’t understand, if I had this-”
“We don’t use it.” Josh picks up a leaf, one of the first of the impending deluge and pulls insect bite clumps out of it. “My mom won’t be coming here again. Dad used to look after it, it used to be his thing really and now he’s gone.”
“But Josh. Look at it. I mean, have you seen this?”
“I don’t know, Sam. I never really felt at ease here.” He speaks softly as if concealing a betrayal. “Even when I was a kid.”
“I’ve never known you to feel at ease anywhere. Maybe this is somewhere you could just come.”
There had once been a tended rock garden here, borrowing the rocks from the scattered landscape. Tiny alpine flowers still cling to their crevices but the Summer colours have all but faded.
There is a bench where Josh sits, planted in the ground to stop the mountain winds carrying it away. He leans back on fractured wood and closes his eyes, stretching his legs, basking a little in the sun that always finds him whatever shade he searches for. Sam likes the shape of Josh in jeans and open-necked sweatshirt, tall and loose-limbed.
But this is only an impersonation of relaxation. He has been on edge since they left this morning and is still restless. He opens his eyes and catches Sam looking at him.
“There’s no civilisation for miles you know. Outdoors is everywhere.” A quick smile flickers on. “You have to practically launch a NASA probe if you want Chinese food.”
He gets up and goes again to the house, looks at it critically. “I’ve got to clean the guttering. There’s like a field of corn.” He looks back at Sam. “I think there’s crops.”
“What’ll I do?” Sam asks.
“Will you help me board that window upstairs? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
“Sure, but I can do something else.”
“Don’t do anything. Seriously, enjoy the view, write remarks.”
“I can paint a window or something.”
“Nah, I’ve got to get someone to work on the whole of the outside before I put it on the market. There’s no time for us to do anything big.” Josh frowns. “And look. These windows are rotten, they’re going to have to be replaced.”
Sam joins him in the narrow shadow of the house’s side wall. He runs a finger along a window frame, dark paint crumbles under his touch but the wood beneath is solid. “They’re not so bad. Its just the paintwork needs redoing.”
“I guess,” Josh says.
“Shall I make a start clearing the grounds?” Sam asks. The Summer growth has been left unchecked, grass and weeds creep across the garden and on to the porch. New growth cracks the wood at the base of the walls.
“Are you sure? That’d be great. You know, my mom pays a guy from the town to maintain the place.”
They survey the scene of gentle abandonment. “Does she pay him a lot?”
Josh shrugs. “I think he’s about 150 years old now. I think he might even be dead.”
He turns then to lean back against the wall, points to a patch of yellow and white birch at the beginning of what could be deep woodland.
“Mallory used to take me in there when we were kids, scare me to death with ghost stories and then run off and leave me.”
“That’s how my relationship with Mallory went,” he says and Josh laughs. Mallory, for all her kindnesses, has a cruel streak and Sam wonders how many of these stories involved Joanie.
Josh takes his cell phone out of his pocket, jabs at it a few times. “Why won’t my phone ever work out here? You’d think we were on Kilimanjaro.”
Sam tries his too. “Nope, no signal. Who are you calling?”
“Mom. I want to tell her the house is still standing,” he kicks at a loose board. “Which is half true.” He puts his phone away. “I’ll call her tomorrow.”
An unexpected silence falls. Sam has come to rely on the background noise of office and city to fill these gaps but in their absence a question creeps in. “Josh, is your mom dying?”
Josh hesitates. “I don’t…not yet. She’s staying with her sister.”
Sam has asked the question but is now lost for something to say. He combs through a vocabulary of platitudes finding nothing useful.
“Josh,” he says.
“There’s nothing to be done just now.”
“But you’d say if there was? I mean you can talk about it, even if -”
“Yes. Thanks Sam.”
They both turn back to the house, survey it in silence until Josh says. “Right. Broken window.”
First they nail board to the window frame upstairs using a haphazard technique. Then Sam works at the back of the house, staying out of Josh’s way as he works on the guttering at the front. He wears gardening gloves he finds in the tool shed, stored next to a smaller pair. He finds a spade, a rake, cutters but his gloved hands are the most effective tools.
He works out from the house, excavating a paved stone path from the grasses coming up between the stones. Then out further he finds a gravel garden beneath the creeping growth all the way up to a once-cultivated area at the edge of the woodland.
As he works the brittle air is increasingly perfumed with the vegetable scents of cropped plants and uprooted weeds. The breeze is still mild and rustles through the long grasses. Insects outraged by the upheaval crackle and hum away. Josh’s mice or other small creatures snap twigs as they escape.
Sam is certain the voice he hears is simply the sound of the breeze on the rise.
It is a woman’s voice just at his side talking quietly at the edge of his consciousness, pointing out which are weeds and which are garden ‘that’s honeysuckle, that’s foxglove, bittersweet, leave primrose and ginger…’ and not there at all when he stops and listens.
They work until daylight fades and dusk brings a drop in temperature. The wind gains force and whips the half-raked garden into tiny tempests. Spots of rain start to fall.
Josh has finished the guttering and he waits for Sam as he ties the last of the refuse sacks. Josh leans a shoulder against the wall. He has a beer and one for Sam.
Sam takes his and they stop to watch the wind folding through the branches of the trees.
“Who used to look after the garden?” Sam asks.
“Mom. She could get anything to grow, even on the side of a mountain.”
It is getting dark rapidly, a complete darkness in which the stars blink on like headlights.
Josh puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Lets go inside.”
Sam draws down blinds and switches on lamps. He goes out to the shed and brings logs and kindling for a fire. Then he settles in one of the armchairs with what’s left of his beer listening to the wind clattering in the attic, tapping tree branches at the windows and causing the joins and corners of the house to creak and complain.
When Josh comes downstairs he has showered and changed. He crouches down close to the fire warming his hands. Sam does not think he can get used to this endlessly silent version of Josh.
“Shall I get us something to eat?” Sam asks finally.
“I’ll get it,” Josh says standing. “You look like you’ve melted into that chair.”
“I’ve never been so comfortable in my life,” he announces.
Josh goes into the kitchen and starts pulling deli packages out of the refrigerator. “Doesn’t all this crashing and banging get on your nerves? Don’t you feel like the roofs coming off any minute?”
“Nah, Josh, this house feels pretty solid. I think its just going with the flow.”
A welcome bark of laughter comes from behind him. “Yeah, I like that. Houses aren’t supposed to ‘go’ with anything. They’re just supposed to stand there while things flow around them.”
“Then, your house is different.”
“Haunted, I think is the word you’re looking for.”
“Really, you think its haunted?”
Josh does not answer and Sam suddenly feels the chill of the wind crashing through the house’s defences. He pushes another log into the fire and watches the flames lapping at its edges.
Unpeeling himself from the armchair, he goes into the kitchen where Josh is boiling pasta and heating sauce. Sam opens a bottle of wine and pours them each a glass. He takes his to wander across the room, examining the geology of possessions the family’s comings and goings have left behind.
He stops to look at two photographs on display on the dresser. The first is a reverential picture of the lost daughter. One of the few to survive the fire, he has seen it before in Josh’s office.
The second is a favourite image of the father, taken in this room maybe twenty years earlier, before the first heart attack. A man in his fifties, in one of the armchairs by the fireplace. He has been caught by the camera, leaning forward, one hand raised mid-argument, the other holding a book.
A voice says, “You’re not telling me that’s the spirit of the damn law…”
Sam turns toward the voice thinking it is Josh but sees Josh’s father in the same armchair. The image is momentarily solid, as distinct as the photograph he has been looking at, and then it is gone.
He turns again because Josh has been calling him and has come out of the kitchen to see why he has not answered.
“I saw…Josh…I thought I saw…”
“You didn’t,” Josh tells him firmly, even as his own glance searches the room. “It’s the dim light. It plays tricks on you.”
“No, over there,” Sam says. “I heard -”
“The darkness has a different quality here. Its weird but you get used to it.”
Sam realises he will not be allowed to finish his sentences. “Did you get used to it?” He asks. “The different kinds of darkness.”
“No. But everyone else does.” Josh goes back into the kitchen. “I think it’s about ready, come and sit down.”
As Sam watches, the flames reach up in the grate reflecting fire in the glass of the picture frames.
He is called away again, this time with more urgency and he goes into the kitchen and takes his place at the table while Josh dishes out pasta and pours on the sauce.
Josh says. “We should have had something a bit more butch after all that ladder-climbing and nail-hammering.”
Sam allows him to change the subject. “A pig on a spit or something?”
“Exactly.”
The food is good and plentiful though and they open one more bottle of the red wine Josh’s father laid down the year before he died.
Eventually when the plates are empty, the wine almost gone and they have used up all the conversation about climate change and house maintenance Sam asks again about the state of advancement of Josh’s mother’s cancer. Josh reluctantly tells him.
Sam holds in his mind a lot of random information about a lot of subjects. This is why he knows, possibly better than Josh does, how close he is to losing his mother.
Another subject Sam knows a lot about is Josh.
“You shouldn’t be afraid to go and see her,” Sam says.
“I’m not –“ Josh returns. “It’s not that. You know there’s no time. I mean once 405 passes –“
“There’ll be 406. You need to see her now. Everyone will understand.”
Josh looks down into the deep red of his wine glass, his fingers travelling around its base.
“Not seeing her won’t stop her dying.”
“I know. I know that.”
“And you’ll still be the only one left.”
Josh looks up then. “You’ve got it wrong,” he says. “You’ve…that’s not it.”
Not even after this amount of wine can Sam bring himself to add. “Except you won’t be alone. You’ll have me.”
The storms have not yet finished with the house. The wind outside must qualify as a gale and it has brought rain, diagonal against the window, pattering off the tiled roof. The sounds of the storm translate to less explicable ones. Sam thinks he can hear footsteps, a child’s uninhibited step running from room to room on the floor above, something that might be sobbing, inconsolable, almost feral.
A door slams startling them both. “This is normal,” Josh says. “I mean I know its freaky but its just floorboards and pipes and draughts. It’s why I don’t come here.”
But Sam thinks the house is agitated. He feels this with perfect clarity but he has no idea how to soothe it and no intention of expressing this thought, which he cannot explain and especially cannot explain to Josh who seems equally troubled.
Josh pours the last of the wine into Sam’s glass leaving his own half-full. Sam wonders how often this simple, essential gesture has been repeated in this warm kitchen. He closes his eyes and sees 9 or 10 people crowding around the table with children on laps and the remains of a shared meal before them. Ella on the record player, candles burnt to wick, a husband’s hand lingering on a wife’s as the remains of a bottle is poured at the end of a party.
He opens his eyes. “If you sell this house, can I buy it?”
“You’re insane.” Josh says.
“No, I’m serious. This is a great house.”
“You can have it,” Josh offers expansively. “But don’t blame me if it falls down around your ears.”
“It’s not going to fall down.”
“And don’t blame me if you have to share it with all the dead members of my family.”
Sam can’t find a reply to this and Josh waves aside the dramatic gesture. “I’m going to go in there. Coming?“
When Sam follows him he is reviving the fire, which is little more than embers now.
“You saw him too?” Sam asks.
Josh does not turn round. “I don’t have to come here to see the ghosts.”
Sam switches off the kitchen lights and joins Josh beside the fire. Sitting in the armchair he had previously found so comfortable, he sips his wine and watches the flames growing and dancing in the fireplace.
“What time should we take off in the morning?” Josh asks. He sits in the chair across from Sam, flicking through the battered paperback that has been there since they arrived.
“Whenever,” Sam says. “We could do a bit more work on the house. Finish the path.”
“Or we could just get up and go.”
As Josh speaks they hear the crash of falling timber coming from outside. Josh’s eyes widen but he does not try and investigate. “Or once we’ve extracted the tree from the car.”
Sam puts aside his wine glass and closes his eyes. “Okay.”
He is not aware of falling asleep but when he wakes he looks for Josh and finds that in Josh’s chair there now sits his father, reading by the light of one lamp.
When he wakes again he is alone. The fire has gone out and Josh has gone to bed. He has a woollen throw around him and feels the memory of a kiss on his forehead. One of the lamps has been left on for him but otherwise the darkness is complete.
His mouth is dry from the wine and the room spins gently as he stands. Outside the storm has quietened but the wind still blows restlessly through.
He has not woken up completely, just enough to take himself upstairs looking in on Josh on his way to his own room. Josh is asleep though not peacefully.
Sam finds that Josh has made up his bed and it takes him only a few moments to undress and fall asleep again.
The dream that wakes him takes place in this house. Josh’s father is there, stepped straight out of the picture frame, leading him through the house, from room to room. As he goes he points things out to Sam, places that are damaged or need attention; a damp patch becomes a flowing Niagara, battalions of ants construct cathedrals and parliaments beneath the floorboards and a faulty bulb sends lightening forking across the bathroom mirror. In Josh’s room the broken window glitters with diamond shards of shattered glass.
The last place is the room in which Sam sleeps. Josh’s father stops and points to the corner, urging him to take action here and Sam wakes and sits up. He is soon aware of a presence in the room with him. One that breathes slowly and becomes as Sam gathers in his subconscious, Josh.
Sam gets out of bed. He whispers Josh’s name but gets no answer. The darkness is so profound that Sam’s sight can define only an alteration in its texture but he follows the sound of the breathing. He cannot say whether Josh is awake or not. Perhaps he has followed a well-trodden route to his parents’ room in his sleep. Or perhaps a less well-trodden path to Sam’s.
Eventually Sam is close enough to touch the arm of the strange darkness, an arm in a long-sleeved Tshirt. The pattern of breathing alters and then resumes as he does so.
Sam takes him by the arm with the idea of leading him to his room. Josh does not move but brings his arm in, pulling Sam nearer. They stand together. Josh’s head next to Sam’s so that Sam can feel warm breath at his ear.
When Sam wakes he is downstairs in the chair by the fireplace, the woollen throw is on the floor at his feet. Light is slicing boldly through the gaps in the blinds making criss-cross laser beams across the rugs.
He must have spent the night in this chair. He is fully dressed so he must not have moved from it. Even so he looks for Josh next to him. The sense of his presence is so tangible, the clear physical memory of him, the weight and warmth of a missing human body.
His dream does not dissolve as he gets up. It hangs about him in the smoky cold of the morning. He searches for coffee and finds an unopened pack among the few dried goods in the kitchen cupboards.
While he waits for the coffee to filter through the ancient percolator he follows the path he took in his dream. Finds a patch of damp in the kitchen just where he had been shown though he has to move furniture to find it. The floorboards too, at the front door show signs of life, early rising and already hard at work. He goes upstairs to the room that used to be Josh’s. Here he finds that the storm has torn off their, evidently inept, attempts at boarding.
“We did a fine job there.” Josh has emerged from the third bedroom. He has pulled on jeans and wears a long sleeved T-shirt.
Sam stands back from the window and turns to Josh whose eyes focus on him and not the window.
“Yes,” he says. “Craftsmen, we are. Master craftsmen.”
“Did you sleep downstairs? I couldn’t wake you.”
“I think so,” Sam says. “Did you sleep all right?”
“I…yeah. I did. I think I might have been sleepwalking, though.”
“Really?” The question is answered with a resigned shrug and Sam does not press for details. He nods at the window. “Shall we have another go?”
“Fuck it, I’m going to track down the caretaker. His job, right?”
Sam nods vaguely. “I thought he was dead.”
Josh turns away, pads downstairs in socked feet. “Not necessarily a problem.”
“Right.” Sam follows him.
Josh draws up blinds and open one of the windows. Light floods in.
“It’s going to be a beautiful day,” he says as the crisp air chills the room. He leans out. “I’m going to check outside, make sure the storm didn’t do any damage.”
When he has found his shoes and jacket and gone Sam pours himself a coffee. He drinks it slowly, standing in the kitchen, trying to clear the fog of sleep with hot, bitter liquid but still feels he will soon wake up into a less strange reality.
He clears up from last night’s meal, stacking plates and glasses by the sink for washing up. As hot water runs into the sink he hears a woman’s voice. The one he heard yesterday carried on the air. Now the words are gentle but indistinct, a conversation drifting in from a foreign country. When he turns off the taps to hear better there is nothing.
Leaving the washing up soaking he slips on his trainers and goes out by the kitchen door.
As he walks around the house he finds the wind has blown down many of the dead leaves from the trees. Sunbursts of light elbow their way in through the new gaps in the branches and a golden carpet covers the ground he cleared yesterday.
He finds Josh at the front of the house. He has his hands deep in his jacket pockets as he looks down at a fallen branch. It is a large branch from one of the older birches severed and fallen close to the house.
“I should have looked after the place better,” he says. “This could have gone straight through the roof. Could have wrecked the place.” He turns to Sam. “Will you be ready to go soon?”
“Sure,” Sam replies. “But don’t you want to stay and clear up a bit? I need to rake leaves.”
Josh shakes his head. “I’ll come back soon. I will, Sam. But I guess I’m going straight to my aunts.”
“Right. Yes, you should. I’ll talk to Leo –“
“Do you think I’ll be too late?”
He recalls the distant voice he has heard twice now. “Maybe,” he says and Josh nods.
“Are you all right, Sam?” He asks. “Are you completely freaked out by my house?”
“You’ll have to do better than a couple of ghosts if you want to scare me off.”
Josh’s gaze wanders over him. “I had the weirdest dream last night,” he says.
“Yeah? Me too.”
Sam edges the fallen branch from the path with his foot as Josh closely examines the shapes of the clouds.
“There’s some coffee, if you want it,” Sam says and they both go back into the house.
Later Josh is upstairs, getting ready to go. Sam can hear the faintest sound of sobbing but is not sure whether it is Josh or a new sound from the house’s repertoire.
He goes outside to sit on the bench looking out on the hills in their morning light. A view of intense but peaceful beauty he has now started to think of as his own.
After a while Josh joins him on the bench and Sam slips an arm around his shoulder. Josh laughs, surprised.
“Listen,” Josh says.
“To what?”
“The house. Its quiet now.”
There is nothing but a gentle disturbance of the air and golden leaves falling around them. Josh is right, the house is quiet for the moment.
End
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