In This House III

 

In the darkness, she dreamt. 

She saw the village in which she lived. Elm trees, which lined the roadside of her culdesac, shed their leaves, floating down slowly in a snowstorm of bonfire reds and yellows. The sun in the sky split on the horizon, leaking a crimson red across the sky. In the windows of the suburban homes, a homely orange glow radiated from the windows, and shadows passed back and forth behind the blinds and somewhere a mother stood on her doorstep and shouted, her voice echoing, for her son to return for dinner. 

At the top of the street was her house.

Three police cars were parked outside, one of which had yet to switch off the wailing siren which cast electric-blue strobes across her garden.

Inside, her husband sat across from the policemen in the living room. His face and hair and clothes were all dishevelled and his eyes were shot red. 

Then she saw her daughter's room. The girl lay, curled in a ball on her bed, clutching her teddy. The curtains were drawn and her television droned in the background.

All of a sudden, her daughter shot up in her bed. She tossed her blankets from around her and the teddy was flung at the wall. The girl grasped her eyes and her breath, slow and inquisitive at first, began to quicken.

And then it was darknenss. The house was gone. The street was gone, the village, the police cars, all gone. Instead, she looked at a small shack in the woods. It leant sideways in the wind and its planks rattled on their hinges and outside of its door on the sawgrass sat a bundle of pales and a rake.

 

The voice, the same voice she had heard from the hallway, returned.

“I had to take away her eyes”.

 

*

 

She awakened where she had slipped into unconsciousness. Her back was against the wall of the hallway, and she looked along it. Overhead, the bulb that hung and lit up the yellow walls was swinging slightly. 

Planting her hands on the ground, she pushed with her legs and used the wall to help her to her feet. As she slid up the wall, her back hit the handle of a door.

She turned around, clasped the doorknob, and pulled. It didn’t move. So she pushed, and the door swung forward and she toppled forward along with it and sprawled onto the floor of a dimly-lit room. 

 

As she lay on her stomach on the carpeted floor, she remembered

 

(my fucking mouth)

 

And felt along her face with her fingers. Her eyes glazed over with tears, her stomach churning. 

Pulling herself to her feet, she looked around the room hopelessly, aimlessly. It was a homely little living room, not unlike her own mother’s back in the village. There was a sofa opposite a box television in the corner. There was a mahogany mantlepiece, and from its fireplace coals shifted and a dying blue flame flickered weakly between them. 

Her heart slowed a beat as if allowing her to listen to her surroundings, but it was silent, save for the storm outside which, impossibly, had picked up it’s intensity again and screamed and made the pictures on the walls flitter on their nails. 

She approached the pictures on the opposite end of the room. Oblivious to the sound of her footfall, the wood snapped and popped under her body weight as she crossed the carpet. 

 

The picture frame she reached first was dancing wildly back and forth on the wall, its string threatening to slip from the rusted nail and hit the floor. 

A sharp breath shot from her nose when she looked at the photograph.

She stumbled back, her arms flailing for purchase on something to keep her upright. 

At first, she figured it to be a mistake, a trick of the mind 

 

(I hope this is all a trick of the bloody mind)

 

And so stepped forward again, reaching out with both hands and clasping the picture frame in place which rattled wildly now against the wall.

The picture showed the hallway from which she’d just came, but the wall on one side had been stripped away, or knocked down

 

(or made disappear)

 

And behind where the wall is was a row of bodies, tall and short, man and woman, standing upright and drained grey of colour.

She squinted.

Six bodies. Their face's featureless. Their eyes, their mouth, their nose…

 

She spun around and looked towards the door to the hallway. It stood ajar. Running over, she threw the door open and stared along the walls. The hole in the plaster from the horse's hoof had spat chunks of yellow and white dust and debris onto the carpet. And from the hole, a stream of red blood leaked from the darkness, along the wallpaper, and dried in a pool on the floor. 

Her heart lurched and she backed away into the living room where the picture frames battered against the walls and a glass ornament on the mantlepiece danced precariously on the wood and then a picture frame was thrown from the wall, landing with a dull thud on the floor. It was no longer just the walls shaking but the very foundations of the house which convulsed. The box television toppled over. The wind bellowed outside as if howling for help and something came through the roof.

With a deafening thud, an oak tree exploded through the wooden beams and crashed along the floor. Now the wind was no longer outside, no longer some distant noise from a faraway world but it was there along with her and it whipped her hair along her face and sprayed ice-cold rainwater across her arms and legs. 

She stood, clutching onto the mantlepiece as the tree lay just meters away from her, and stared at the great, gaping hole in the roof and the bricks that had not yet finished toppling inwards onto the carpet. She stared upwards into the night, at the trees outside which danced to nature’s furious tune and onwards into the night sky where swollen thunderheads hurried along as if in escape of some horrible thing.

She stepped towards the tree trunk, brushing past the sharded branches which threatened to stab holes in her body should she slip atop its bark. With her remaining strength, she mantled atop the trunk, and teetered along to the edge of the great stone chasm which has erupted upon this house, planted her hands on the stone of the wall, and lurched forward into the night.