Stories and Articles

Lost idyll ...

by Ean Lawrence

The old house stands aloof.  It is stained, long-abandoned, turning blank eyes onto an unsympathetic world.  A spectral moon, hanging low and big in the winter’s night sky, imparts a glimmer to the house’s crystalline coating.

I have often strayed into the rooms and passages, but never during the night.  It was always a delight to leave the noisy reality of a bright afternoon in summer and sink into the deep silence of the empty house; but now I feel as strange as an owl abroad in daylight.

I am drawn by an anxious yearning through the decaying portal from the peace of dreams to a place of unsettling shadows.  I hear a faint voice.

Did I not know that all houses in which men have lived and died are haunted?  This, then, is a haunted house.

I am admonished to tread softly.

A chill air passes over me, and I move with an unaccustomed timidity, glancing nervously into deep-shadowed corners.  I stop in a beam of moonlight that pierces the kitchen window.  The voice again speaks.

There is nothing to fear.  The spirits that haunt this place can only be seen by the spirit alone, though they can be sometimes heard by discerning souls that are willing to hear them.

I can’t say that I am reassured by what the voice says.  I am beginning to doubt that the voice I hear is outside my head.  In dreams, the origin of the voices that are heard can be so easily misplaced.  I am not sure if I am asleep or awake; yet how quiet it is, how otherworldly.

These introverted rooms and passages, now so silent and still, must once have echoed with the voices of children and the patter of shoeless feet.  Does there not seem to be the traces of tiny feet upon the stained floor?  Does it not seem possible that little faces stare out from the dark corners and mutely ask why you are here?  Where are those children now?

Some are, no doubt, sleeping with flowers above their heads, untouched by the song of the lark and the bark of the fox; some are busy men and women worn down with care and loss, far away from this hushed spot.  Do they remember the old haunts and the happy games of innocence?  I see a vision of mothers soothing their children to sleep with lullabies learned in that half-forgotten time.  Perhaps the men and women, toiling in factories and being engulfed in the labyrinth of corrupted ambition without a string of hope and crowding onto hellish commuter trains, are shadowed by visions of the old place.  The voice returns.

You can take nothing with you out of this world, not even the toys of your childhood – certainly not the pile of possessions accumulated over a lifetime.

Suddenly, it seems like sacrilege to be in the house of a thousand regrets.  I no longer hear the laughter of children but sense, instead, the shudder of pity at an insupportable grief.

Now the rooms seem sad and desolate.  The moonlight seeps into the house and creeps along the corridors like a sigh.  All of a sudden, the silence and solitude, that once were a comfort and a boon, have become heavy and oppresses me.  What now appears to be a weird and unholy half-light, weighs upon my imagination, and I am saddened and dispirited by the memories that plague the house.  I strain to hear the voice, but it is lost in a crashing silence.  A dread descends upon me, and I hasten to leave the house.  It is a relief to pass through the door.

The garden is washed silver by the moonlight.  Although the shadows here are more intense, they seem to emit less menace.  But as I move along the path that leads out of the garden, strange shapes loom up before me.  Even though I am familiar with the layout of the garden, the map I have in my head is one illuminated by sunlight, not by moonlight, and it takes me a moment or two to realize that the bizarre shapes that confront me are the distorted silhouettes into which the combination of time and neglect have transmuted the once shapely topiary.  In bleached alcoves, cold stone seats have been claimed and taken possession of by Nature: rapturously adorned with ivy and softly upholstered with moss.

The light of the sunrise begins to deepen in richness.  A fragrant air lays to rest the anxieties of the night, and soft, sleepy notes are whispered in the trees as the chorus greets the dawn that tentatively creeps in and dispels the hoary veil that cloaks everything in an aura of mystique.

The voice speaks again for the last time.

You may not know a life although you live it; but there will come a time when you will come to know it - and to understand it.