The House on the hill

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

The house stood on a hill. It was almost completely hidden from the eyes of any passer bys who might have glanced up the creek from the pathway cutting through the dense forest overlooking the hill.

I would have walked past it myself without the faintest idea of its existence, were it not for the fact that a strange wizened little old man I bumped into on the footpath pointed the building to me.

He appeared in front of me, so suddenly I nearly collided with him. But far from looking perturbed at our unexpected meeting the old man, who walked with a pronounced limp said: “You must be the man I have been asked to take up to the house.”

“What house?” I asked.

“Up there,” he said pointing upwards.

At first I couldn’t see anything past the huge leafy trees which abounded around the hill top. Then I caught a glimpse of a brief reflection of sunlight on a roof. I shifted my gaze a fraction and behold; there was an awesome building constructed out of solid rock sitting right on top of the hill.

“How amazing,” I said.

The old man grinned widely, nodded and pointing to a flight of steps hewn out of solid rock. “Please follow me,” he said.

It seemed inevitable that I should allow him to guide me up to the house on the hill.

The old man led the way up the hill, his calf muscles tightening with every step he took. Halfway up I was beginning to tire. My pace was slackening but I was determined to keep up with the old man. He was at least twice my age, but was trudging up the steps effortlessly like a mountain goat.

At last we got to the top.

I was at once struck by the size of the house. Not only was it a gigantic modern building, built to a high standard of structural magnificence; the landscape around it was amazing too. An expanse garden teeming with shrubs, flowers and water fountains stretched as far as the eye could see.

“Who lives in this house?” I asked.
“You should know that,” the old man replied eyeing me suspiciously. “My orders are only to bring you up here.”
“And who ordered you to bring me up here?” I asked.
“I cannot tell you that,” he said.

The mystery of the whole undertaking began to irk me. Why had I agreed to be taken up to the house by a complete stranger? And then I couldn’t recall the reason that had brought me to the spot where I had met the old man.

To my left was a large smooth rock. Someone had made incisions in the rock with a sharp instrument; a sort of wild scribble. I could make out the letters of the three words on the rock, but for some reason, I couldn’t decipher the meaning of the words. This puzzled me. Over and over again I tried to make sense of the three words spelt out so clearly but I couldn’t.

“I see that the burial chamber has caught your eye,” the old man said.
“Is that what it is?” I asked studying the rock in more detail.
“Yes, three generations of people who lived in this house are buried there,” the old man said.

“Why are you telling me that if I am not supposed to know who lives in this house now?” I shot back at him.

“I am telling you only what you are supposed to know about this house,” the old man replied nonchalantly. “You also need to know that there is only one more burial chamber left. When it is filled up, it will be time for me to close the house and move away from here.”

“I really don’t want to know that,” I said harshly. “In fact this whole thing has nothing to do with me. I want to leave now!”

“But that is not possible,” the old man said as a matter of fact. “You have to stay here for as long as is necessary!”

“Well, I am not staying one minute longer! I am leaving now!” I shouted at the old man.

He shrugged his shoulders again. “I don’t think you understand,” he said calmly.

I ignored him, turned and retraced my steps to the edge of the house where we had come up the rock staircase. To my surprise, the staircase was nowhere to be found. Indeed, the house and its huge garden seemed to be hanging in the air, with no visible means of support.

As I puzzled over this development a dense fog fell upon the house, all of a sudden. Slowly but surely the fog spread around the building and the garden so that everything became shrouded in an eerily white cloud. Sunlight disappeared completely. “What is going on here?” I asked. The chilly fog was biting deep into my skin and playing chess with my bones.

The old man shrugged his shoulders again! And as he did so, he seemed to shrink until he was barely three feet tall. Pointing to the door which now stood ajar the old man said: “I think you had better go in there. She is waiting for you.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Who is waiting for me?”
“Just go in, please,” the old man replied. I was getting used to his irritating habits.

Like a somnambulist driven by instinct, I stepped through the doorway and into a vast room lit by hundreds of little candles placed on the floor along the whole length and breadth of the room.

A young woman was sitting cross-legged on an Oriental rug at the centre of the room. Around her were lit candles arranged in the shape of a heart. She stared hard at me as I entered the room. The emptiness of the room, for there wasn’t a single piece of furniture around, lent a certain mystic to the woman’s quiet pose.

I estimated her age to be no more than thirty years. Her small oval shaped face seemed to glow under the reflection of candles around her. Yet her eyes were calm and reflected the deep contentedness of one who is in the habit of spending many hours in pure edification of the mind. Something about the woman told me I had met her before.

As I walked over to her she said: “What is the time now?”

“Ten minutes past two,” I replied after glancing at my watch.

She sighed deeply. “Then it is too late,” she said in a weary voice.

“Too late for what?” I asked, puzzled.

“I had been hoping you would arrive before two o’clock so that you could play me a beautiful tune and save my life,” she replied pointing at a guitar leaning against the wall opposite her.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Had you been expecting me?”

“What kind of question is that?” she fired back. “You know very well that I have been waiting for you to come around for many years. Anyway there is no point in talking about that now. My time to die has come.”

“You are not going to die,” I replied as I strolled to the guitar. I picked it up and examined it. It was a beautiful 12 string acoustic guitar made of well polished wood.

“What tune would you like me to play for you?”

She smiled and shook her head. “I would have liked you to play me, You said you loved me once,” she replied. “But it is too late now. It can’t be done because you came too late. That guitar doesn’t play after two o’clock.”

“Nonsense,” I replied with a chuckle, trying to cheer the woman up. Clearly something was bothering her. I strapped the guitar belt around my neck and prepared to play the song she had requested. But when I strummed the strings, not a tiny sound came out. As this was not an electric guitar, I was struck dumb.

“I told you that guitar doesn’t play after 2pm,” the woman said.

I examined the guitar. It was perfectly normal. There really was no reason, so far as I could tell, why it couldn’t produce a sound. I strummed it once again, all to no avail. It was a dumb guitar, if ever there was such a thing!

“I think you had better leave now,” the woman said. “My ex will soon be here to give me something that will kill me. It would be better if he didn’t find you here.”

“Why would your ex want to do such a thing?” I asked.

“It is my fate to die that way,” the woman said. “It cannot be helped.”

“Do you want to die?”

“That is irrelevant,” she retorted dismissively. “It is my fate to die today. This is my appointed day. The empty burial chamber you saw outside is waiting for me.”

“Well, I won’t allow that!” I assured her. “Come with me.”

The woman shook her head. “It is strange that you should come to me at this late hour when I have spent half my life calling for you and trying to catch your attention in so many ways.”

I looked around the furniture less room in which this wholly unexpected drama was taking place. Whose house was it, anyway? Try as much as I did, I couldn’t think of anything to connect me with this house. Yet I knew as I know that the sun rises from the west and sets in the east, that I had somehow known that I would find this woman in there when I set off on my journey.

“Please go now,” the woman implored, jerking me out of my reverie. “There is nothing you can do for me now.”

“What is your name?” I asked.

“My name has always been the same,” she said smiling like a convalescent on her deathbed. “You of all people should know my name because you sang it in your songs and made me feel like the only woman who had ever been serenaded in the whole world. Oh why is life so tragic that you should mock me in this manner?”

“You have to believe me,” I pleaded. “I simply don’t know your name.” At the back of my mind I was going through all the songs I had ever written about women in love. Was it, Sophia the Sapphire; my hit number of a few years ago? Or could it have been So tender are her kisses? I had named the woman in that song; Faith. Was the woman seated before me called Faith?

I was about to ask her when the sound of footsteps behind me made me turn around. I found myself looking at a black man in dreadlocks. He was about thirty, over six feet in height, well built and reasonably handsome. Was he the boyfriend the woman had mentioned?

He was carrying a plastic bottle with a long thin hosepipe connected to its mouth. I wondered if he was planning to use that paraphernalia to end the woman’s life. Well, I wasn’t going to let him do that!

“So your Gringo has come to you at last, Sophia,” the man said ambling slowly into the room after slamming the door shut with his heel.

“Yes, but there is no point in talking about it now Sammy because he arrived after the deadline of two o’clock,” the woman said in a voice full of surrender.

“I know,” Sammy said calmly. “I saw him coming in.” Then turning to me, Sammy said: “Well, my dear friend you are too late to save Sophia now. We had an agreement that if you didn’t turn up before two o’clock on this day, I would help her take her life.”

“Look,” I said angling towards Sammy. “You seem to be a reasonable man. Why on earth would you want to kill this poor woman?”

Sammy shook his head. “He doesn’t get it, does he, Sophia? Haven’t you explained this whole business to him?”

“Please Sammy let’s not go into any great detail about this,” the woman pleaded. “I have accepted my fate. There is no need for him to be told anything. Just mix up the concoction and give it to me to drink.”

“What on earth is going on here?” I asked sharply.

Sammy bit his lips agitatedly and placed the plastic bottle on the floor. “You see Sophia. He wants to know. And I think he has a right to know, otherwise he will go away thinking that I am some kind of murderer. I think it’s better for him to know the whole truth before you drink the poison.”

“You are not going to make her drink any poison!” I snapped menacingly.

Sammy gaped at me as if I was crazy to even think that I could stop him.

“I am going to call the police right now,” I said pulling my mobile phone from my pocket.

Sammy laughed and clapped his hands. He appeared genuinely amused.

“Sammy please let’s get it over with!” Sophia screamed. “You can’t expect him to understand any of this.”

“Well I do understand actually!” I shouted. “This crazy man seems to think that he has a right to kill you because of some strange pact you made with him.”

Sammy sighed and stepped closer to me so that his face was only a foot or so away from mine. We were about the same height. I reckoned that if it came to a wrestling match or to blows, I had the measure of him. But I didn’t see the crazy eyes of a fiend when I looked deep into his eyes. Indeed, he had the calmest pair of eyes for a man contemplating murder.

Calmly, he placed his right hand on my shoulder and said: “Man, you and I have to talk. I know that Sophia would rather I didn’t explain things to you but I think I have a duty to make you understand that it is you who will ultimately be responsible for Sophia’s death even though I will administer the poison.”

“You are crazy!” I said flinging his hand off my shoulder.

“Please calm down,” Sammy said. “After the deed is done, your task will be to carry Sophia’s body and place it in the burial chamber you saw in the garden.”

That is when the inscription I had seen on the burial chamber came back to me! And as if by magic too, the scribbled words whose meaning I had battled in vain to understand came back effortlessly in my mind. The inscription had read: ‘Here lies Sophia who died of a broken heart due to unrequited love.’

I turned to Sophia and saw in her eyes the look of despair and surrender. I knew at once that it was her unrequited love for me that had led to the crazy pact she had made with Sammy.

Like a frenzied animal I turned around to confront Sammy. But I couldn’t see him, neither could I see Sophia when I turned to her again. The room was now in total darkness. Every single candle in the girdle foaming a heart had been snuffed out.

Then I heard a blood curdling sound to my right, a sound which told me that I was too late to save Sophia; that the thing I had feared most had happened within a few feet from where I stood. I had been unable to save her! END