Settled Sorrows

a ghost story about memory and loss

The 30 Days of Fright challenge (hosted by Wendy Cockcroft) is coming to an end. Today’s story is for prompt 22: abandoned old house, with possibly something in the attic. I modified the prompt a bit—the house isn’t abandoned, but it hasn’t been lived in for a while.

It’s a story about how our sorrows settle within us, within places, and how they change us. It’s fresh off the writing block, so to speak, so it may undergo some revisions in the future. Enjoy.

Settled Sorrows

“This’ll be a fresh start,” Giles said, as the car bumped along the unpaved country road, hemmed in on each side by leaning willows and aspens.

Emily looked out the side window and said nothing. It wasn’t the same for him, not really.

“We’ll try again.” A breath. “Now that you’re recovered.”

He was talking about the baby. The baby that almost was. The baby that died inside her.

Recovered. Was she?

Every word they spoke now, even about the weather or the dirty dishes or what movie to watch, was infused with the memory of the dead baby.

***

The house was larger and older than she had imagined, warm-grey stone hinting to yellows, with a turret, a gabled roof and more windows than Emily could quickly count.

It was not a normal house.

Giles had decided that sub-letting their flat in the city would be beneficial for both of them, but Emily had her doubts about leaving behind her friends, her job, their favorite restaurants. It felt like putting their lives on hold, not starting anew. It felt like she would wallow in her sadness, out here in the countryside.

A roundish woman in an apron, grey hair swept back in a loose bun, met them on the doorstep like an old friend. “Welcome!” she said. “Welcome to Willow Wood House.”

Despite Emily’s misgivings about the move, this new landlord’s warmth was infectious. “Thank you,” Emily said. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Mrs. MacLewen, your go-to person for everything related to Willow Wood. But you can call me Mrs. Mac, if you like.” She smiled broadly and turned her back on them. “Well, c’mon, c’mon. Let me show you around.”

They followed the woman through the main hall, in and out of wallpapered rooms, past a country kitchen, up the velvet-covered main stairs. Emily ran her fingers along the polished oaken banister. They went in and out of upstairs bedrooms. “I’ve fixed this one up for you, as it’s the master bedroom, but you’re free to do as you like once you get settled,” the woman said.

“What’s here?” Emily asked, regarding a simple door with a padlock. It seemed out of place. Rustic. Nestled at the end of the hallway.

“Stairway to the attic,” Mrs. Mac said. “But I’m afraid I’ve misplaced the key. Not worth going up there anyway, but I’ll give the key to you when it turns up.” She laughed. “I’m a bit of a mess in my own home down the lane, but I think I’ve kept this place up fairly well, in spite of no one living in it for a while.” She looked to them for confirmation.

“Oh yes,” said Giles. “It’s lovely.”

Their whirlwind tour found them back in the entry hall. Emily was smitten with the house. It was like something out of an old movie or novel, out of place in this day and age. Maybe putting their city life on hold for a few months wouldn’t be so bad.

The house was expansive and grand, but homey, and thinking of all the lives that had been lived among its walls made Emily and her grief feel a bit smaller.

Somehow, that was comforting.

Giles caught Emily’s eye. To Mrs. MacLewen he said, “So about the lease to buy situation…”

“Yes, of course. As I told you on the phone, after the two month trial lease period, there may be the choice to buy the place.”

Emily said, “What if we were interested in buying now? The price was so good and—”

Emily was surprised the woman cut her off. “Two month trial lease first.” She wiped her hands on her apron and put them on her hips. “You need to get to know the house. And it needs to get to know you.” She saw Emily’s amused smile. “Oh, I mean it. This house needs a certain kind of tenant. Someone who fits. It’s been in my family for generations, but I can’t hold onto it forever and… well… this house holds memories like a vase holds spring flowers. They shrivel and dry and fade, but when you look at them, you can still imagine the way they once were.” The woman looked around the sunlit entry hall a bit sadly, Emily thought. Then she laughed. “Oh, listen to me carry on, getting all poetic. Anyone for a spot of tea? C’mon through to the kitchen.”

Emily came last, lingering in the hall. She thought really what the old women meant was that she herself had to approve of the buyers, feel them worthy.

As she passed the main staircase, she thought she heard a giggle and the patter of small feet, but when she looked up, there was, of course, no one there.

***

Days of unpacking kept Emily busy, but each time Giles reminded her to “take it easy” on herself, his words drew back in thoughts of the baby that they wouldn’t have.

She knelt on the floor of the kitchen, pulling bowls and cups, wrapped in newspaper, out of a cardboard box. There was something satisfying unwrapping each one, as if these old common items were gifts just received.

Gifts. They had already received some baby gifts before the fetus died, she’d been far enough along. They’d kept them because… well, was there a protocol for that sort of thing? Do you give them back? Giles said they’d just use them for the next baby, when she got pregnant again. He had sent thank you cards. Maybe that’s what he wrote in the cards. She purposely did not read or sign them.

She had been in mourning. Why couldn’t she wear black for months and linger around the house and refuse social calls, like women in mourning back during the era when this house was built? She wanted more time to be sad.

Giles was ready to move on. Try again. But she wasn’t sure that she was.

It had been considered a “geriatric pregnancy.” She was thirty-six. She went to her last doctor’s appointment alone. “I couldn’t guarantee you won’t have complications if you try again,” the doctor had said. “There are other options you might consider,” she said. “Like adoption. It can be very rewarding, taking in a child in need of parents.”

Afterwards, Emily had sat in the car and cried. She wanted her own baby. Part of her knew it was irrational, even selfish.

But she had lost something—someone—that was hers. A part of her. She needed it to make her whole. Didn’t she have a right to her private, selfish grief?

“Em, are you okay?” She felt herself jump, like her spirit had been drifting out of her body and was suddenly pulled back. “You were zoned out, staring at the wall.”

“Oh,” she said. “I was just thinking about which cupboard the bowls should go in.”

The dead baby. It even insinuated itself into the spaces between the cups and the bowls, between the dishes and the cupboard. Between her and Giles.

***

In a small room in the front corner of the house, with windows overlooking what once would have been a small garden, but was now overgrown with wildflowers, Emily found a surprise. She found a library. A magical sort of library with books dating back two centuries. Fiction, science, religion, art and architecture, children’s books even. And an iron spiral staircase that led up to the next level and a turret with a window seat for reading! This room had not been on Mrs. Mac’s whistle-stop tour and Emily wondered if maybe the old woman wanted Emily to stumble upon it on her own and be surprised.

She smiled. A more genuine smile that she’d felt on her face in months.

She’d grab a book, she thought, and sit up here to read for a while. But as she started down the stairs, she heard something, like a woman quietly sobbing. It was the quiet sobbing that you did when you were re-living a sorrow in private. In secret. Alone.

“Hello? Mrs. Mac?” she called down the stairs. The crying stopped and Emily hurried down the narrow stairwell as fast as she dared. No one was in the library. She poked her head in the hallway. “Mrs. Mac?” It must be her; she often popped round for a visit in the afternoons. “Are you all right?”

“We’re in here!” she heard Giles call from the kitchen. “Just having a cup of tea!”

Emily rushed into the kitchen to find her husband and the old widow laughing, mugs and teapot on the table.

“But I was in the library—there’s a glorious library—and I thought I heard—”

“Oh my, look at the time!” The old woman had cut her off rather rudely, but Emily caught her eye and a slight shake of the head. “I best be off. Emily, be a dear and walk me to the door.”

At the front door, Emily said, “I thought I heard… well, you or some woman crying. I was worried.”

Mrs. Mac’s expression was unreadable. She nodded her head. “My Great-Aunt Felicity lived in this house for many years. When she was a young mother, her son William—Willie, they called him—fell down those stairs. He hit his head and died, I’m afraid.” Emily was taken aback. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but…

Mrs. Mac sighed. “I told you this house holds its memories. Tightly. I guess maybe it's loosening its grip with you folks around.”

“But I don’t understand—”

Mrs. Mac looked out the open door into the sunshine. “Sorrows settle into old places sometimes, just like they settle into people. Felicity had more than her share of sorrows in this house.”

She stepped out into the light, leaving Emily in the darkened front hall. “Maybe the house has decided to share its sorrows with you,” she said over her shoulder and tottered down the walkway.

***

Emily didn’t know what to make of Mrs. Mac’s revelations about Felicity or her ramblings about sorrowful houses.

What she did know, or feel was more accurate a term, is that when she sighed, the house sighed with her. When she slipped away from Giles, curled up in the tower window seat and let her tears slip silently down her cheeks, the house cried with her.

When she couldn’t sleep at night, and she slid out of bed to walk the halls, admiring the wallpaper, looking into rooms they didn’t yet use, trailing her fingers along the walls… something walked with her.

A childish giggle, a rustle of a skirt, the quick staccato of footsteps. Maybe those were the house’s memories.

And when she neared the attic door, one night, she heard it. A baby crying. From behind that door. Her heart broke. For herself and her lost baby. She ran back to bed, but she didn’t fall asleep. She lay listening for the baby’s cry. It didn’t come again.

****

Giles kept busy, working remotely from his new make-shift office at the back of the house. He knew her well enough to give her this new-found space she had never realized she needed. The house was so much bigger than their flat.

She never felt it with Giles around, but when she was ensconced in another part of the house, reading in the library, doing dishes in the kitchen, sipping tea in the parlor and watching a movie on her laptop, the house’s memories wove themselves around her, into her, through her bones. Willie—it must be—ran through the corridors and up and down the main stairs. “Be careful,” she’d call out before catching herself. There was no one really there. Felicity’s shoes might clack-clack over the wooden floor in passing. Emily sometimes felt a weight beside her, an energy in the air like that of a storm, as if Felicity had sat down with her. She would stay for some time, and if Emily was still and quiet, she might catch a sort of shadowy shape out of the corner of her eye.

None of this upset Emily. She had moved from being skeptical of ghosts to accepting that something not easily explained was happening in this house. To her.

Ghosts, memories, sorrows. Whatever Mrs. Mac chose to call it.

But then, too, there was the crying of the baby, behind the attic door. The sound came almost every night.

She didn’t tell Giles. This secret was hers, and she was afraid that if she told him, he wouldn’t believe her, and it would vanish.

And she couldn’t bear to lose anything else.

****

Giles had to drive into the city for work. “Just two days,” he promised. “You’ll be okay?”

“Of course.” Emily basically pushed him out the door. “I’ve got Mrs. Mac to look after me, and all the tea I can drink.” She laughed, and it felt good in her chest.

“It’s good to see you smiling,” Giles said and kissed her on the forehead. She watched him go, and closed the door.

She smiled as she heard Willie’s little feet patter down the hallway overhead.

****

“I brought you some cinnamon scones,” Mrs. Mac said when Emily opened the door. She held a plate wrapped in cling film. “And something else you might be wanting.”

Seated at the kitchen table, a pot of tea steeping and the scones already tucked into, Emily heard the clack-clack of Felicity’s footsteps in the front hallway. She looked at Mrs. Mac to see if the old woman had heard it, too. Her face gave nothing away, but her eyes shifted to the doorway for the slightest moment.

“I never did tell you about Felicity’s other sorrows. Well, the other big one anyway.”

Emily leaned forward, her teacup momentarily forgotten.

“And I brought you this.” Mrs. Mac produced a rusted key from a pocket. “I had a feeling you might be ready for it.”

Emily could barely restrain herself from snatching it out of the woman’s hand. “That’s the key to the attic door, isn’t it?”

“Let’s have a look up there, shall we?”

***

Mrs. Mac allowed Emily to do the honours, turning the key in the old lock. It opened with a satisfying sound. She followed the old woman up the narrow wooden stairs, cautiously, reverently, like entering a sacred space.

Mrs. Mac pulled a chain hanging from the ceiling so that the room was barely illuminated by the old bare bulb and the light from a small square window across the room.

Emily held her breath. The room had a rocking chair, an antique surely, as well as an old crib. The blankets within it were obviously newer, as was the rug beneath the chair. The room had clearly been swept, though a few cobwebs clustered in the dark corners. A chest of drawers stood against one wall, and a small writing desk sat next to the window.

“I wasn’t sure how you’d take it, dear,” Mrs. Mac said, studying her face. “You see, Giles told me a little about what happened to you and well…” She didn’t mince words. “This was the nursery. Felicity had a baby girl. Mabel. She fell ill and Felicity tended to her here… until the poor child died. Nearly broke Felicity’s heart, it did, least as my mother told it.”

Impulsively, Emily said, “I heard her. Mabel. Crying up here.”

Mrs. Mac smiled and patted her hand. “Yes, I imagine that you did.”

***

“I think we should do it,” Emily said. “I want the house.”

“Woah, hold on,” Giles had been home less than a half-hour and the two of them were sitting in the living room having a drink.

“Mrs. Mac said we could have it. We talked while you were away. She wants us to have it.”

“I know. She called me and made the offer. But I said we’re still on the fence. It’s a lot to think about.” He downed what was left in his glass. “And to be honest, I’ve seen some…well, heard some… weird things here…. like things I can’t explain.” He looked to Emily for a reaction.

The relief he saw there was obviously not what he had been expecting. “So you know, then. That’s why we have to take the house.”

He set down his glass on the coffee table and crossed his arms. “There’s a lot of work that might need doing. And it’s an awfully big place for just the two of us—” He stopped, realizing his faux pas.

“It won’t be just the two of us,” Emily said with conviction.

“So you do want to try for another baby?” He asked the question tentatively. It was the first time either of them had said the word “baby” since… then.

“Or if not,” she said, “we can think about other options.”

“You mean like adoption?” Each time he had suggested it before, Emily had closed herself up like a book.

Now she stood up, open, restless. The house was waiting for her. “Yeah, or something like that.” She could hear Felicity’s clack-clack on the upstairs floorboards, heard Willie’s childish giggle.

It wasn’t all sorrows that the house held onto.

“Look,” Emily sighed. “You go relax. You had a long trip. I’ve got some things to tend to anyway.”

As she left the room, she imagined she heard her own footsteps make a clack-clack-clack on the floor, though she was wearing fuzzy slippers. As she climbed the stairs, she felt like her own dress was swishing against the floor, though she was wearing comfy sweatpants.

When she reached the attic door, and heard Mabel crying softly, she was pulled to the sound as if the baby were her own child crying.

The sun was all but gone and the moon was rising, shedding wan light into the attic. After some time, when Giles came quietly up the stairs to find her, he saw her rocking in the chair, cradling a swathe of blankets in her arms. Emily knew he saw her, but she didn’t look up. What she didn’t know was that the way the light and the shadows enveloped her form made her look different, like someone else.

But she felt it.

She heard Giles step quietly back down the attic stairs. She heard him on the phone. “Mrs. Mac? Yes. Yes, we’ll take it. We’ll take the house.”

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Further Reading

Consider reading some more of my other recent posts for the 30 Days of Fright writing challenge.

And more…

It's Been Too Long

Bone-Mother

The Verdant Butterfly (Sable Butterfly) has kindly put together this round-up post of everyone’s writings from week THREE of the challenge. Please read and support these other amazing writers.

30 Days of Fright - Week 3

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