The letter arrived on a Tuesday, damp at the corners as
though it had traveled through rain that no calendar remembered. Eleanor Voss
turned it over twice before she opened it, because the handwriting on the front
was her aunt’s, and her aunt had been dead for six years.
She read it three times standing in the hallway of her small
London flat, coat still buttoned, before she understood what it was asking of
her. Not a message from beyond, nothing so theatrical as that. The letter had
simply been held, sealed, by a solicitor’s office in the north for six years,
with instructions that it be sent to her only now, on the anniversary of a date
that meant nothing to Eleanor at all.
My dear girl, it began, in the spidery hand she
remembered from childhood birthday cards, if you are reading this, then the
house has come to you, and I am sorry for it. I tried to leave it to the
church, to a cousin, to anyone who might carry the weight better than you. None
of them would take it. So, it falls to you, as perhaps it always was meant to.
Do not sleep in the room at the end of the east corridor. Do not, under any
circumstance, open the window in that room, no matter what you hear outside it.
I loved you very much. Aunt Miriam.
There was no explanation beyond that. There rarely is, in
these matters.
Eleanor had not thought of Underholt in years. It was a
house she associated with two summers of her childhood, both of them strange in
the particular way that only a child’s memory can render strange, all long
shadows and unexplained silences among the adults. Her mother had stopped
sending her there after the second summer and had never said why, and Eleanor,
being twelve and then thirteen and then swept into the ordinary business of
growing up, had not thought to ask.
Now she was thirty-four, recently unemployed from a
publishing house that had folded under its own debts, and recently left by a
man named Thomas who had decided, with admirable honesty, that he did not love
her enough to stay. She had, in short, nothing pulling her toward London and
everything, she told herself, pulling her toward a house in the north that
apparently now belonged to her.
The solicitor, a dry man named Pemberton who conducted the
whole transaction as though embarrassed by it, met her at the station three
weeks later. He did not offer to drive her to the house himself. He arranged a
car, paid for out of the estate, and gave the driver instructions in a low
voice that Eleanor could not quite hear, though she caught the shape of unease
in it.
“It is a fine old house,” Pemberton said to her, in the
manner of a man reciting something he had decided in advance to say. “Structurally
sound. The staff left some years ago, I am afraid, so you will find it wants
airing.”
“Why did the staff leave?”
“Wages,” he said, too quickly, and looked at his pocket
watch though there was no train for another hour.
The drive took the better part of the afternoon, through
country that grew wilder and less kept the further they went, hedgerows giving
way to stone walls and then to nothing at all, only moor stretching flat and
colorless under a sky the shade of an old bruise. Eleanor watched it pass and
felt something she could not name settle into her chest, not quite dread, not
quite recognition, something with the texture of both.
Underholt appeared first as a smudge of grey against the
horizon and grew, as they approached, into a house that seemed to have been
built by someone arguing with themselves about its purpose. Three wings
sprawled from a central hall in three different centuries of stone, so that the
house looked less like a single building than like several houses that had
crawled toward one another for warmth and frozen mid movement. Ivy had taken
the west wing almost entirely. The east wing, by contrast, stood curiously bare,
its windows dark and clean in a way that unsettled Eleanor more than any amount
of decay would have.
The driver would not bring the car past the gate.
“I can walk from here,” Eleanor said, though she had not
meant to say it so quickly, as though some part of her wanted to release the
man from an obligation, he was too polite to name.
“Thank you, miss.” He did not meet her eyes. He had her bags
out of the car and was reversing down the long drive before she had finished
lifting the second case, and she stood alone on the gravel watching his
taillights shrink and vanish, and then there was only the house, and the wind
moving through grass that had not been cut in a very long time.
II
The inside of Underholt smelled of dust and something
beneath the dust, a mineral coldness that reminded Eleanor of standing in a
church crypt as a child, on a school trip she had otherwise forgotten. Sheets
covered most of the furniture in the front rooms, pale shapes crouched in the
gloom like a congregation waiting for a service that would never begin. She
found the kitchen, found it stocked with tinned food that could not have been
fresh, found the electricity working in fits, a lamp flickering to strength
only after several attempts.
She did not go near the east corridor that first night. She
told herself this was practicality, that she was tired from the journey, that
the west wing had a perfectly good bedroom already made up, the sheets clean,
as though someone had prepared it for her specifically, though there was no one
left to have done so. She told herself several things, lying in that bed
listening to the house settle around her with the particular creaks and sighs
of very old timber, and she believed none of them, not entirely, and slept
anyway, because the body has its own arguments that reason cannot always win.
In the morning, with grey light coming weak through curtains
she had not thought to draw properly, the fear of the previous night seemed
almost embarrassing. She rose and made tea from a tin that smelled faintly of
must and told herself that today she would simply explore the house as one
might explore any inheritance, with a notebook and a practical mind,
cataloguing what needed repair, what could be sold, what ought to be kept.
The house resisted cataloguing. Rooms she was certain she
had already counted seemed to recur under different light, at different times
of day, as though Underholt itself had not settled on a final shape. She found
a library with more books than she could have read in ten years, most of them
on subjects she did not recognize, alchemy and astronomy bound together as
though the two were sisters rather than strangers, and one shelf entirely of
ledgers, dated and handwritten, that she did not yet have the courage to open.
She found, too, a portrait gallery running the length of the
central hall, generations of Voss ancestors staring down with the particular
flatness that old portraiture gives to faces, so that they all seemed slightly
disappointed in something just behind the viewer’s shoulder. One portrait near
the end of the row had been turned to face the wall. She did not turn it back.
She noted this, in her practical notebook, with a small question mark beside
it, and moved on.
It was on the third day that she finally stood at the
entrance to the east corridor.
It was, by any objective measure, an unremarkable passage,
wood paneled, a strip of carpet worn thin down its center, three doors along
its length before it ended at a fourth. The air here was colder than in the
rest of the house, noticeably so, a difference she could feel against her bare
arms the moment she crossed the threshold from the central hall. She told
herself this was simply because the east wing received less sun. She told
herself several things that day, standing in that corridor.
The first two doors opened onto ordinary rooms, a disused
study, a bedroom stripped of its linens, both coated in the same undisturbed
dust as the rest of the house. The third door was locked, and she found no key
for it among the ring the solicitor had given her, and after some minutes of
trying she left it, deciding that whatever was inside it could wait for a day
when she felt less tired.
The fourth door, at the very end, she did not open. She
stood before it for what felt like a long time. It was an ordinary door. There
was nothing about its wood, its handle, its hinges, to suggest that it was
different from any other door in the house, and yet she found she could not
make herself reach for the handle, and after a while she turned and walked back
down the corridor rather more quickly than she had walked up it.
That night, for the first time, she heard the singing.
III
It came from outside, or seemed to, a thin high voice
carrying a melody that Eleanor did not recognize and yet felt, somehow, that
she should. It was not unpleasant. This was, perhaps, the worst part of it. Had
it been a wail, a scream, something her mind could file neatly under the
heading of horror, she might have been able to close the window she had left
cracked for air and gone back to sleep with the ordinary courage of a woman
alone in an old house. Instead, the voice was sweet, almost tender, a lullaby
cadence rising and falling somewhere beyond the glass, and something in Eleanor’s
chest ached toward it before her sense caught up with her instinct and told
her, quite plainly, to be afraid.
She rose and crossed to the window and looked out onto the
moor, silvered now under a moon she had not noticed rising, and saw no one. The
grass moved in the wind. Nothing else moved. The singing continued, close
enough that she felt it should have a source she could point to, and yet the
moor stretched empty in every direction she could see.
She realized, several minutes later, standing there with her
arms wrapped around herself against the cold, that the singing was not coming
from outside her window at all. It was coming from further down the house. From
the east corridor.
She did not go to investigate. She would like to record, for
whatever this record is worth, that she went to investigate, that she carried a
candle down that corridor with the steady nerve of a woman determined to face
her fears directly, but this would not be true. She closed her window. She got
back into bed. She lay very still with the blankets pulled to her chin,
listening to a voice singing a lullaby she almost recognized, coming from
behind a door at the end of a corridor that her aunt had warned her, in a
letter written and sealed six years before her death, never to open.
In the morning, she found Pemberton’s card among her things
and telephoned him from the one working line in the study, an old black
instrument that took nearly a minute to connect.
“The singing,” she said, without preamble, because she had
decided overnight that preamble would only give her the chance to lose her
nerve. “In the east wing. Do you know what it is?”
There was a silence on the line long enough that she thought
the connection had failed.
“Miss Voss,” Pemberton said finally, in the voice of a man
choosing each word as one might choose a stone to step on across a river. “I
would strongly advise you not to concern yourself with the east wing at all.
Your aunt was very particular on this point, and she was, in my experience, not
a woman given to particularity without cause.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
He would say nothing further, and after some minutes of
pressing him, all gently, all without result, Eleanor thanked him and hung up
the receiver and sat for a long while in the study, looking at the dust motes
turning in the weak light, thinking about the portrait turned to the wall and
the locked door in the east corridor and the lullaby that had reached inside
her chest and pulled at something she could not name.
She decided, sometime that afternoon, sitting with a cup of
tea gone cold beside her, that she would find the key.
IV
The ledgers in the library, it turned out, were not accounts
at all, or not only accounts. They were a kind of family record, kept by
successive generations of Voss women, it seemed, since the handwriting changed
every dozen or so pages in a way that suggested new authors rather than a
single long life. Eleanor spent the better part of two days working through
them, her practical notebook abandoned in favor of a growing unease that she
could not yet organize into anything as clean as fear.
The house, it emerged from these pages, had a history of
daughters who did not thrive. This was the phrase used, again and again, across
at least four generations, in hands both careful and hurried: did not
thrive. One entry, dated some ninety years earlier, described a girl named
Constance Voss who had been moved into the east wing after the death of her
mother, and who had, over the course of a single winter, stopped eating,
stopped speaking, and finally, in the words of the ledger, gone into the
window and did not come back the same.
Eleanor read this line four times before she understood that
it was not a metaphor.
Further back, further still, the pattern repeated with a
horrible consistency, a daughter of the house, always a daughter, moved to the
east wing in a moment of grief or illness or simply because the house had
decided, in whatever way a house decides things, that it was her turn, and
always the same slow unraveling, the singing that the ledgers described other
family members hearing from beyond her door, and always the ending recorded in
the same careful, horrified understatement. Did not come back the same.
One ledger, older than the rest, its ink faded to the color of weak tea, used a
different phrase entirely, one that made Eleanor’s hands go cold as she read
it. The house asked for her, and she was given.
She found, near the back of the oldest ledger, a single
loose page tucked between its final leaves, written in a hand she now
recognized, with a jolt that felt almost physical, as her aunt Miriam’s.
I do not know what it is, the page read, only that
it wants a woman of the blood, alone, grieving, unmoored enough that the
singing sounds like comfort rather than warning. It has taken my sister. It
very nearly took me; in the year I will not write about even here. I have done
what I can to close the door against it, though I do not know if a door can
hold what waits behind it forever. If you are reading this, whoever you are,
however many years stand between us, I beg you: leave the house standing empty.
Let it starve.
Eleanor sat with this page in her lap for a long time.
Outside, the light was failing, the particular fast dusk of the north in
autumn, and she was aware, in a way she had not quite let herself be aware of
until this moment, that she fit the description on the page with an accuracy
that felt less like coincidence than like design. A woman of the blood. Alone.
Grieving, in her own quiet unglamorous way, over a job and a man and a life
that had not turned out as she had planned. Unmoored.
She thought of the singing, and how it had ached toward
something in her chest, and she understood, with the cold clarity that
sometimes arrives only at the worst possible moment, that whatever waited in
that room had already begun its work on her, three nights ago, and that she had
felt it as tenderness rather than as the trap it was.
She resolved, sitting there in the dying light with her aunt’s
warning in her hands, that she would leave in the morning. She would close up
the house, or better, burn it, and go back to London, and never again think of
daughters who did not thrive.
That night, the singing came again, and this time it did not
simply reach for her from behind a locked door. This time, when she woke to it,
she found herself already standing in the east corridor, her bare feet cold
against the worn carpet, one hand raised and resting against the wood of the
door at the very end, though she had no memory of rising, no memory of walking
the length of the house in the dark to arrive at this precise and terrible
place.
V
She did not open the door. This much she was able to manage,
some last reserve of will surfacing through whatever fog had carried her there,
and she stumbled back from it, back down the corridor, back to her room, where
she sat awake until dawn with every lamp lit and her aunt’s letter clutched in
her hand like a talisman that might or might not still hold its power after six
years sealed in a solicitor’s drawer.
In the grey light of morning, she packed her bags with hands
that would not quite stop shaking. She had decided, in the small hours, that
Pemberton’s advice had been correct after all, that whatever inheritance this
was, it was not one worth the keeping, and that she would rather live the rest
of her life poorer and unhoused than spend one more night within reach of that
corridor.
It was as she was carrying her second case down the main
stairs that she heard the voice again, not singing now, but speaking, close
behind her left shoulder, so close she felt breath that should not have been
there stir against her ear.
Eleanor.
She dropped the case. She did not scream, though she would
later wonder why not, whether some animal part of her understood that screaming
would only invite further attention. She turned, and there was no one on the
stair behind her, only the dust turning slow in the pale light from the high
window, and yet she had the overwhelming sense, standing there with her heart
slamming against her ribs, that something had turned with her, that whatever
had spoken her name was not behind her at all anymore but had simply,
impossibly, moved to stand facing her, an arm’s length away, in a space that
her eyes insisted was empty.
You read the books, the voice said, and there was
something almost pleading in it now, the sweetness of the lullaby curdled into
something more urgent. You know what I am. Please. It has been so long since
anyone came who understood.
“What are you,” Eleanor said, and was surprised to find her
voice steady, or steady enough.
I do not remember, the voice said, and for a moment
it sounded, absurdly, achingly, like a young woman rather than whatever horror
the ledgers had described. I remember being Constance. I remember being
before Constance, too, someone else, further back, and before her, further
still. I think I am all of them now. I think the house keeps us together, in
the room, so that we do not have to be so alone in it.
Eleanor found that her fear had not left her, but that
something else had arrived alongside it, something that felt uncomfortably like
pity, and she understood, with the particular horror of recognizing a trap that
works precisely because it is not a lie, that this was exactly how the thing
intended to catch her. Not through malice. Through company. Through the offer
of an ending to loneliness that Eleanor, if she were honest with the cold
accounting part of herself, had spent the last several months aching for in
ways she had not admitted even to Thomas as he left.
“I’m leaving,” she said, and made herself say it aloud, as
much for her own benefit as for whatever listened. “I am not going to be given
to a house.”
You will be back, the voice said, without anger, with
something closer to sorrow. They always think they will not be. But the
world out there is cold too, Eleanor, and it does not sing to you, and
eventually the silence of it brings them back to a door that at least remembers
their name.
Eleanor picked up her fallen case with hands that had begun,
again, to shake, and walked the rest of the way down the stairs, and out
through the front door, and down the long gravel drive, past the gate where the
car would not come, and kept walking until she reached the road, and then the
village, three miles distant, where she took a room above a public house and
did not sleep, and in the morning caught the first train south.
VI
She did not burn the house. She told herself this was
practicality, that arson carried consequences a woman in her position could not
afford, but she suspected, lying awake in her small London flat some weeks
later, that the truth was closer to what the voice on the stair had told her.
She had not been able to bring herself to destroy the one place that had,
however monstrously, however dishonestly, offered her the sensation of being
wanted.
She wrote to Pemberton and instructed him to seal the house
entirely, to bar every window and door and to arrange, at whatever cost, for it
never to be sold, never to be occupied, never to pass to another daughter of
the family, should any such daughter exist in years to come. He wrote back with
unusual promptness, agreeing to the arrangement without a single question,
which told Eleanor more than any explanation could have.
She still, on certain nights, when the flat is very quiet
and the ordinary loneliness of her life presses close enough that she can feel
its shape, thinks she hears something singing, thin and sweet, from a great
distance. She has never been certain whether this is memory or something more
persistent reaching for her across the miles. She keeps her windows shut
regardless, in every season, and if her neighbors find this odd, they have
never said so.
She has begun, recently, to write down what she remembers of
the ledgers, of the house, of the voice on the stair, not because she expects
anyone to believe her, but because she has come to understand something of what
drove her aunt to leave a warning sealed for six years rather than simply
burning the knowledge and saying nothing at all. Some things want to be known,
even when the knowing brings no comfort. Some warnings are less for the person
who receives them than for the ones who will come after, standing at the edge
of their own grief, listening to a house that has learned, across generations,
exactly what a lonely woman most wants to hear.
If you should ever inherit a house, you do not remember, and
find within it a corridor colder than the rest, and a door at the end of it
that no key seems to fit, Eleanor would tell you this, if she could. The
singing will sound like the truest kindness you have ever been offered. It will
know your name before you have given it. And whatever waits behind that door
does not want to hurt you, not exactly, not in the way you might fear.
It only wants you to stop being alone in the particular way
that made you vulnerable to it in the first place, and it does not care, in the
end, what shape that company finally takes, or whether you come back from it
the same.
