As a child I grew to regard the house as a malevolent entity, and tried my hardest to avoid spending any time inside. On my way home from school I would drag out the long walk through the marsh as long as I could, would arrange as often as possible to stay the night at a friend’s, and would eagerly spend every school holiday far away at my father’s house in the city.
It is, of course, just a normal house, if somewhat isolated, and my personification of it as a malicious creature purely a projection of my unhappy childhood. But even now, on my return, I have found it difficult to shake off my unease while inside. I choose to sit outside, despite the cold and the dark and the flooded lawns, rather than lock myself inside, alone in there with nothing but my grief. I look up at the window of my mother’s room, the flickering glow of the candle I had placed at the foot of her bed the only light inside, every other window a void as black as a freshly dug grave.
My mother has been ill for as long as I can remember, confined to her bed and surrounded always by a collection of nurses and carers, well-wishers and occasionally friends. It felt to me as if time here had no meaning, held in a state of endless suffocating stasis. I yearned for escape, and took my chance as soon I was old enough and able.
I returned a week ago. My mother’s health degenerated shockingly quickly, and out of the blue I was called and told to return as soon as I could, that if I did not come now I might miss the chance to see her once more before she was gone. I made the necessary arrangements with work, and arrived here by train the next morning.
I decided to walk to the house from the station, along the old gravel path that ran out through the marshes to the house. Its surface was pitted with vast holes filled with black muddied water, as if it were itself a scale map of the surrounding terrain. As with all things, the distance seemed to have diminished with time, another instance of that inevitable contraction of space that occurs somewhere between childhood and adulthood in direct contradiction to the irreversible expansion of the universe. But at the the path’s end the house still stood there like a redblack skull against the sea and the sky.
There was barely anything left of my mother. Her presence used to be tangible, formidable even in the confines of her bed, but now her body was barely visible even as an outline under the thin white sheets. Her face, gaunt and disembodied, lay on a thick pillow, an ancient bust on a plinth. The skin was stretched so tightly across her bones the set of her face was pulled into a constant silent scream.
Every day I sat on a chair at the end of her bed, watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the sheets over her chest for continuing signs of life. Around me in an unseen blur moved the nurses, turning her, feeding her, talking incessantly to her as if she could hear, as if she might respond.
In the evening the nurses left, and we were left alone. Me, my mother, and the house around us. The creak of the floorboards, the whisper of her breath, each inaudible in the noise of the day but by night loud enough to keep me from sleep.
A storm blew in on Saturday night, winds howling outside like screams of anguish. The power went out about midnight and I sat in the dark, listening to the rage outside. Eventually I must have fallen asleep, for I dreamt I was adrift in a great sea, my face turned down into the depths. The soundless immensity below me was filled with the shadows of unrecognised beasts, each one appearing huge at first until I realised that it was dwarfed by the what lay below it, on and on ever increasingly until the final creature I could perceive stretched on from horizon to horizon. Yet beneath that I knew lay something larger still.
I awoke in the chair. Sun shone in through the thinness of the curtains. My mother was dead, her eyes wide open in a final defiance.
The power was still out and the phones were down, both the landline and my mobile phone. Outside I discovered the seawall had been breached, the house now surrounded by an unbroken sea that lapped gently at the edges of the lawn. There was no sign of the rowing boat that was usually tied to the jetty beyond the seawall, and there was no sign of the jetty, either. I brought a chair out from the kitchen and sat out on the sodden lawn in the unnatural stillness that the storm had left behind, my eyes closed beneath the pale sun that hovered both above and below the horizon of the new sea.
I waited all day for help, but none came. I saw no passing boats, no activity of any kind. When the sun went down I looked back to the town but saw no orange glow of street lamps, no sign of the bright glare of emergency spotlights. There was only darkness and stillness and silence.
I could find no torches in the house, searching around in cupboards illuminated by the light of my phone’s screen. I found some candles on the living room table, and I lit one of these and placed it on my chair at the foot of my mother’s bed. I did not like the idea of her there alone in the blackness of her room, overcome by a sentimentality I did not previously know I had.
I could not bear to spend the night in the house with her. I could feel the walls closing in on me, the corridors shrinking, the floors and ceilings pushing towards each other, an overwhelming sense of being buried alive.
I fled out into the garden and sat in the chair I had placed there. I sit there now, weeping under the starless sky, the garden illuminated slightly by the candle’s glow at my mother’s window. My eye keeps being drawn back to the light, an involuntary response to light in darkness.
The candlelight flickers, dims, then brightens again. A pause, before it dims again, as if being drawn away from the window, and then it is gone. The lightlessness is complete, infinite, almost physical in its totality, leaving a blackness so uniform it feels artificial in some way, as if a cover has been placed over my eyes.
Then there is a glimpse of the light again, illuminating for a scant second the window of the upstairs bathroom that lies adjacent to my mother’s room. Darkness again, followed by a glow from the next window, the one at the top of the stairs. More darkness, and then a distant glow visible through the marbled glass of the front door, way back at the far end of the house, back further than surely the house extends.
It approaches slowly, down the long hall, growing bigger and brighter until it must be right there at the porch window. The door handle turns, the door creaks open, and the light rushes out towards me. She says my name for the first time in years.
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Notes.
1. Another story written in 2013
2. And unpublished anywhere until now
3. As far as I can remember at least
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