by Olivia White
***
"William, do you remember which box we packed the kettle in?"
"The one marked Kitchen three."
"Kerry, have you seen my reference books?"
"They're in a box in the nursery."
(Kerry had already taken to calling it the nursery. She'd also - unknown to William - started feeling sick in the mornings. And she'd bought a test. She hadn't taken it yet, but soon.)
"Do you remember when the shed's due to arrive?"
"Thursday. I've got Colin coming over to help set it up."
And so it played out, as 13 Winchester Lane slowly transformed from a hollow shell of a house into a home filled with warmth, and love, and William's books and Kerry's collection. Up in the attic, her collection, which she'd sit poring over lovingly, tweaking it, adding to it, arranging things just so. And, hidden away up there too, the pregnancy test, the two red lines clear as day. She'd booked a doctor's appointment because these things weren't always reliable of course. She also hadn't told William yet. Not yet. Not until she was sure. But he knew, Kerry thought. He'd been surprisingly non-resistant when it came to decorating the second bedroom as a nursery 'just in preparation'. Threw himself into the job, in fact. Yeah, he knew, Kerry was sure. It went unspoken between them, like a secret they shared but couldn't confirm.
And then she had her doctor's appointment, and it was all official, and they celebrated, and they told all their friends, and they celebrated too, because they knew just how long Kerry and William had been dreaming about starting a family. And when they found out they were due twins, well, what could be more perfect? If you're going to raise one baby, you might as well raise two. They added a second crib to the nursery, doubled down on everything, prepared for their lives to change. They sat up late into the nights discussing names, and whether they wanted to know the twins' genders before birth (they decided to keep it a surprise) and what they thought their children would grow up to be, and which of their friends had kids they could arrange play-dates with. They spent a lot of time on the phone to William's parents, who were overjoyed at the idea of having not one but two grandchildren. Kerry even brought herself to call her dad, with whom she barely spoke, and she heard a softness in the stern old man's voice, maybe a sign of a change in him yet to come. Then one day he visited, and there were tears and hugs and reconciliations, and he slept on the sofa in 13 Winchester Lane, and he only complained a little at how silent the house was at night, and how still and empty it felt. Like the house was waiting for something, he said. Maybe the patter of tiny feet, Kerry replied, then patted her blossoming tummy and felt a glow of motherly pride.
William got a promotion at the architect firm he worked at, and became a junior partner. The hours were longer, but the pay increase was a godsend. They would be able to provide for their children. For a while, Kerry had been toying with the idea of having to go back to work after the birth of her kids, something she'd promised herself she wouldn't do until they started school. With William's new job, it wasn't necessary.
The house was expectant. The soon-to-be-parents were expectant, and expecting. At night, the house on Winchester Lane waited, hollow and silent, dead air and dust motes dancing through its halls, until the night Kerry and William came home from the hospital, Charly held by mummy and Christopher held by daddy. That night, the house was alive with crying and burping and stumbling footsteps and bleary-eyed murmurings, and the crackle of the baby monitor. And the next night, and the next, and then on the fourth night, silence as the babies slept through the night. Brother and sister, in adjacent cribs, embracing the quiet of their uneventful abode.
On the twins' first birthday, a pipe burst in the kitchen and the whole room had to be renovated.
As the twins approached turning two, Kerry realized she'd spent very little time with her collection since the children were born. She was starting to feel exhausted, no longer like a real person. She was just A Mum, and that was her. It hit her suddenly one night, and from that moment on she felt like she was trapped in her own skin, which was slowly constricting, keeping her within the four walls surrounded by the babbling and jabbering of toddlers.
"It's perfectly normal," her doctor told her. "A lot of young mums go a bit stir-crazy after having kids. You need to take up a hobby."
"I have a hobby," Kerry replied, explaining her collection to the doctor. "The problem is, I don't have any time to engage in it."
The answer was simple. She came home, sat down with William, and they had a Serious Discussion. Three days a week, they would hire a nanny. It'd be good for Kerry to have her own life again, they decided, and good for Charly and Christopher to be around someone who wasn't their mum. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. They took out an advert in the local paper. References required. Must be good with children. The pay they offered was generous - William's work was becoming more and more lucrative, and they could certainly afford it.
First came the phone call, and then the knock on the door, and Kerry was face to face with a young woman she recognized. Marissa Parker lived on Winchester Lane. Twenty one, long brown hair, olive skin, dark innocent eyes, a smile that could charm any toddler. Soft-spoken, gentle, beautiful. She already knew the children, and they laughed and smiled when they saw her. She was perfect.
Kerry waited to ask William, of course, but he was keen too, and the following Friday, Ms Marissa Parker started work.
Up in the attic, finally immersed in her collection after what seemed like forever, Kerry let her worries about the children float away, and began to relax. Downstairs, she could hear laughter and noise and happiness, and a sense of peace descended over her as she realized for once she wasn't in the middle of it, she wasn't the one on her feet charging about, entertaining the kids. She loved Charly and Christopher, of course she did, but twins were hard work, harder work than she'd expected, and with William's job keeping him away at all hours, the task fell to her to keep things ship-shape.
Not that the house itself was hard to maintain, of course. At times the place felt almost sterile; just a shell, empty and abandoned, in which she and her family had temporary set up house. She thought back to those days with Dick Wickens the realtor, and his nonsensical talk of ghosts, and wondered if maybe a bit of ghostly company now and then wouldn't be unwelcome.
Marissa was wonderful with the children. She helped Kerry organize their second birthday party, to which they invited other kids from the neighbourhood. It was a resounding success.
That night, after the twins had gone to bed, Kerry and William took the garbage out. On the lawn, they found a dying cat. The poor thing had been poisoned. Just the latest in a spate of pet murders around the area. The cat had no collar. William mercifully put it out of its misery and buried it in the back yard. They put up posters, but an owner never came forward.
Exactly a year later, on the twins' third birthday, William slipped in the garden, fell against the pond, and broke his arm. Marissa, bless her, kept the party going while Kerry rushed her husband to A&E. He got plastered up and came home a few hours later, cheerful as usual.
"The time off work will be nice, actually," William said to Kerry and Marissa as they sat at the kitchen table that night over a glass of wine.
"Since you'll be at home, maybe I can get out and about a bit more," Kerry said. She missed hanging out with her girlfriends, and despite his broken arm, William seemed more than capable of looking after the children, who by three years old had become pretty docile and easy to manage.
A week or so later, William developed a head cold and Marissa stayed late to help Kerry out. Standing on the back porch, having a cigarette (no smoking in the house had always been a rule, ever since Kerry picked up a pack six months ago - Marissa's fault, William said) and they got to chatting.
"What's your place like compared to ours then?" Kerry asked. She'd never visited Marissa at home, despite her living at number 8.
"Pretty similar," Marissa told her. "Only our attic is a storage
room, and you get up there with a ladder. Yours must've been converted."
Marissa lived at number 8 with her mother, and much younger sister.
"They're weird old houses though aren't they?" Marissa said. "All those creaks and groans in the night, the way they're built meaning natural light struggles to get through. It's strange. Creepy, I think."
Marissa smiled. If ever a house was the opposite of creepy, it was 13 Winchester Lane.
"You ever thought about going to university?" she asked.
"I intended to," Marissa said. "I was going to major in microbiology. But then..." - she glanced downwards - "things happened, and my plans had to be put on hold."
Silence. Kerry didn't want to press the issue.
"It's a shame," Marissa said finally. "I really, really want to get out of that house. Out of this street."
"We're very happy here," Kerry said, hoping she didn't sound defensive.
"This house does feel... different," Marissa replied. "But I don't know if I like that feeling any better."
Kerry was starting to feel a little frustrated, so she stubbed out her cigarette and went inside. The two women cleaned up a bit, and Marissa said goodnight and left.
A month later, Kerry returned home early from a trip into the city with her girlfriends, and found Marissa and William in bed together.
"You're not meant to be exerting yourself," she said impotently, staring at his cast. Then she collapsed back against the wall, sank to the floor and began sobbing.
Kerry didn't hire another nanny. None of the candidates seemed suitable, somehow. The kindly old lady looked like the type who'd go fishing through Kerry's purse when she wasn't looking. The matronly ex-schoolteacher clearly had very different political ideologies to the ones she wanted her kids raised around. The younger blonde girl dressed too provocatively. That was the shortest interview of all. In the end, Kerry simply decided she'd deal with the children herself, and if that meant giving up some of her free time, so be it. She wasn't particularly enjoying recreational time as it was.
On the night following the twins' fourth birthday, Kerry finally let William move back into their bedroom.
"I'm so, so sorry," William whispered in the darkness, repeating the words he'd been saying for the last however many months. "She meant nothing to me. I don't know why it happened. I don't know what came over me."
To Kerry, this somehow made things worse. But that day, as she'd watched her twins tearing open their presents with joy in their hearts, she'd decided to forgive William, and try to rebuild her happy family. She said nothing.
Later that night, a rotten tree in the garden toppled over and crushed the shed.
Some years passed without incident. Charly and Christopher went off to school, where they were said to be quiet, polite, and largely kept to themselves. Kerry took a job at a small coffee shop down the road - not for the money, but as something to do. She worked flexible hours, and always made sure she was there to see the kids off to school, and there when they came home. William became a senior partner at his architectural firm, and much to Kerry's relief she never found any further evidence of new infidelities.
When the coffee shop closed down due to pressure from the Starbucks nearby, Kerry decided to stay home once again, and devote herself to her collection.
The twins turned nine. They had a small party with their small number of friends. Their friends were strange kids; all slightly too quiet, all slightly too polite, all slightly sickly-looking. Kerry could recognise them as the outcasts, the weirdoes, the unusual ones. She wasn't sure how she felt about her children fitting into that role. That had been her, as a kid, and she'd been happy enough, and part of her was happy that her children were eschewing social norms while remaining seemingly well-balanced. But part of her... well, wouldn't it be nice to see them surrounded by friends, two of the most popular kids in the class? Who doesn't want that for their children?
William seemed to think nothing of it.
"Their friends are perfectly normal," he said. "One of them plays football!"
"He's the goalie." Kerry replied.
William shrugged. "Fair point."
A week after the twins' ninth birthday, Kerry went out shopping. When she came home, she paused outside 13 Winchester Lane and just stared at the house. Just stared. She couldn't quite understand why. The dirty brown brick, the abyssal bay windows, the little winking pane of glass up by the attic, everything was the same. But a pressure began to build up inside her head, throbbing, pushing, the house's crushing normality poking tendrils into her brain. A dull, numbing sensation of discontent.
"I want more than this," she whispered as she turned the key in the front door, but the voice that came out of her mouth sounded alien to her, as if she was speaking for someone - or something - else.
Kerry placed the groceries down on the kitchen counter and checked the clock. Two in the afternoon. The kids wouldn't be home for a couple of hours. She froze. The house didn't feel empty. A creak here, the rasp of a door hinge there, the sense of a heartbeat coming somewhere from deep within. Her mind flew back to that day she'd walked in on William and Marissa, their flesh intertwined, ugly expressions of orgasm painted across their faces. William's cast, stark white against Marissa's dark, naked flesh. That stupid, gormless look of shock when he turned and saw her sobbing on the floor.
Kerry felt a rage bubbling up inside her. She looked to a photo pinned on the fridge, of her and William and Charly and Christopher on holiday in Corfu, all tans and smiles and holding hands. She saw it, then. The love lost between them. That gulf, that chasm between her and William that had simply never been filled since he stuck his penis in the nanny. The floodgates broke, and she hated him. Maybe she always had. William and his sycophantic ways, his noncommittal nods, his devotion to his mother. The way he rarely spent time with the children, yet acted like father of the year to anyone within earshot. That prick. That cunt. William.
Kerry snatched a jar of mayonnaise out of the shopping bag and hurled it angrily to the floor. It shattered, all shiny and white, a sickening creamy smell filling the kitchen. She began to sob. Behind her, the front door clicked shut.
Kerry cleaned up and went to the attic. The door was open. It was never open. Had she left it unlocked? Or had William? It didn't matter, she figured. It was just habit these days. Kerry went upstairs to her collection.
She didn't even gasp. She didn't scream. She didn't react at all. She just stared. The shelves had collapsed. All of them. Her collection lay strewn - no, smashed, destroyed, obliterated - across the floor. Porcelain doll faces shattered, exploded, like the china children's' brains had burst. Tear-like spiderweb cracks criss-crossed the more intact dolls. Everything was destroyed. Her collection, the one she'd been cultivating since she was seven years old, decimated. They had insurance, William would say. She could hear it already. But these were not things that could be replaced. These were not dolls you could just stroll into a department store and buy. Some of them were over a hundred years old. Some of them were hand-made, picked up in other countries on vacation, or given as gifts by people long-dead.
It was an accident, William said later, when he eventually came home. One of the shelf moorings gave way, it hit another, then another, and eventually 'the whole caboodle just went splat'. Kerry could've hit him for wording it like that. 'The whole caboodle just went splat'. Would he say the same if Charly and Christopher plummeted from a third storey window? 'The whole caboodle just went splat' she pictured him saying, up there in front of the coffins at the funeral, giving his little sheepish shrug, and dabbing at the sweat on his brow with a handkerchief. 'Just went splat'.
Those shelves were secure, Kerry knew. I checked them so many goddamn times. But the alternative was a mystery. Who would've done it?
Kerry received her answer the next day when the school called her, asking why Charly and Christopher hadn't shown up for school.
Kerry said nothing.
It was Christmas time. The twins had turned twelve and started at secondary school. They were a bit more popular there, it seemed. The first parent-teacher meeting revealed to Kerry that her children were bright, questioning, and got on well with the other kids. Rather than reassuring her, this made her uneasy. She couldn't explain why, other than every time she thought of them playing with friends, she pictured her broken dolls, strewn across the attic floor, their faces in shards.
William didn't attend the parent-teacher meeting. He was working late that night.
For Christmas, William's parents came to stay. It was a slight squeeze. After the incident with the dolls, Kerry and William had converted the attic into the master bedroom, allowing Charly and Christopher to have their own rooms. They were too old to share, really. Now, they had to find somewhere for Bill and Mary O'Donague to sleep for around a week.
In the end, it was decided that Kerry and William would set up camp in the living room, amongst the Christmas tree and the decorations. They were both up early, anyway, and could pack up the camp beds before anyone else arose, keeping the house nice and neat. Charly and Christopher kept their own rooms, and Bill and Mary had the attic.
"It's very draughty up there isn't it?" Mary had said on the first night. This had followed the conversation where Kerry had to awkwardly explain away the two single beds in the master bedroom as her having difficulty sleeping next to William due to an eroding disc in her back. Partially true. Getting a double bed up the attic stairs had seemed impossible as well. All sorts of excuses had flown about. Kerry had long since come to terms with the fact that sharing a bed with William simply wasn't important to her any more, and that her husband felt the same.
"You never thought about upsizing then?" Bill said, in his usual jovial-yet-judgmental tone. "God knows you could afford to. Quite considerably, too."
Bill loved reminding Kerry of just how much money his son made.
"I love this place," Kerry lied. "I couldn't leave."
The truth was the house didn't feel ready to be left yet. It felt expectant, hollow still, like a story waiting for its conclusion. Leaving would, in some unexplainable way, deprive Kerry of the chance of closure. From what, she didn't know, and so she never voiced her thoughts on the matter. She simply lied and confessed her love for the house to whoever would listen.
Right then, it was her parents-in-law, Bill and Mary. They seemed to buy it.
"We could never give up our house either, dear," Mary said.
Sure, because you're mortgaged up to the eyeballs, Kerry thought. A mortgage, it's worth mentioning, that William had offered to help with on numerous occasions. His parents were altogether too proud. They would never admit when they needed a little help.
"Are the attic stairs okay for you?" Kerry asked. She knew all too well that the steep stairs could be a little awkward, especially when one was half-asleep.
"Absolutely fine, no problem," Mary said, pursing her lips slightly. "We're not quite that old and decrepit yet. Now then, where are our beautiful grandchildren?"
Charly and Christopher stood in the upper hallway, staring down at their grandmother. There was absolute, total silence. Charly's hand reached out and grabbed Christopher's, and then her mouth opened and she let out a blood-curdling, heart-wrenching scream.
Kerry charged upstairs. It was four in the morning on Christmas day. There lay Mary, neck bent at the most unnatural angle, her nightgown riding unceremoniously up over her knees, revealing purple varicose veins and leathery old-woman skin. Mary let out a little gasp, and attempted to raise her hand.
"Don't try and move," Kerry said breathlessly. Her heart was beating fast, faster. She could feel panic setting in. Above, Bill's footsteps could be heard.
"What's going on down there then?" his sleep-deprived voice muttered.
"Charly, Chris, for god's sake someone call an ambulance," Kerry yelled, and that was the cue which woke up William down in the living room.
The hospital on Christmas day was cold, sterile, and draped in pathetic and depressing decorations. A spindly, miserable Christmas tree sat in one corner of the waiting room, baubles glinting in the overhead fluorescent lights. Kerry held Christopher's hand on one side, and Charly's on the other. They were both sniffling. Their touches were clammy, and slightly repulsive to Kerry. As she stared at the Christmas morning TV broadcasts, she wondered if she'd forgotten how to love her children. Bill sat apart from them, near the water dispenser, looking pale and sickly. William paced back and forth around the waiting room. Every now and then a doctor would pass through, and William would scowl at them, angry that they weren't there for updates on his mother.
Finally, a soft-spoken French doctor showed up.
"Mrs. O'Donague has taken a nasty fall," she said. "A very, very nasty fall."
We know that, Kerry thought. We saw her neck.
"Her neck is broken," the doctor said. "And her spine and her hip. And her wrist, but that'll heal.
"We don't think there's much chance she'll ever walk again," the doctor said.
Over by the window, Bill collapsed in his chair. Age lines etched themselves into his face.
"So what does this mean?" William asked.
"Your mother was still very, very lucky," the doctor said. "We believe, with therapy, she'll eventually recover the use of both her arms."
Mary O'Donague eventually recovered the use of her left arm. She and Bill moved into assisted living, funded by William. They finally accepted his offer of financial support. The family visited from time to time, until when the twins had turned sixteen, Mary died of complications resulting from her long-term injuries. A few months later, Bill joined her in the ground.
Back home at 13 Winchester Lane, the house seemed cosier somehow. Warmer, more welcoming.
For Kerry's birthday that year, the twins clubbed together and bought her a china doll. It was the first doll she'd received since the destruction of her collection. She hugged her children, and thanked them, then later when they were off at school she went out into the garden and took a hammer to the doll's stupid china face. She buried it in the vegetable garden, the patch of land on which the shed had once stood.
A couple of hours later, Kerry went to the store and found an identical doll. She bought it, and felt different about it somehow. Like it was more acceptable. She placed the doll on her bedside table.
Six months later, in a clumsy and unexpected attempt at lovemaking, William would knock the doll to the floor, shattering it. Kerry would not replace it.
When the twins were seventeen, at college, Kerry walked in on her daughter Charly topless in bed with a boy she'd never seen before. After turfing the boy out (house rules have to be expected), Kerry stood alone in the kitchen with Charly.
"Please can we keep this between us?" Charly begged. There were tears in her eyes.
Kerry shrugged. She hadn't even considered telling William about it.
"I know you must be disappointed in me Mum," Charly said.
Kerry was surprised to discover she didn't really care. What her daughter got up to was her own business. But the house rules had to be upheld. Not that she could remember who'd set the no boyfriends/girlfriends rule. She didn't recall setting it herself, and was absolutely certain it wouldn't have been William.
The next year, when an eighteen year old Christopher got his girlfriend pregnant, William had to find out. It was his credit card paying for the abortion, after all.
"I'm just not ready to have a baby," Christopher's girlfriend, whose name was Marissa of all names, said gravely as they all sat at the kitchen table.
"I'm just not ready for the responsibility," she said. "I want to go to university, and maybe do a Masters degree after that, and then we'll think about settling down and starting a family, won't we Chris?"
She leaned in and pecked Kerry's son on the cheek. Christopher nodded, looking sad.
So Kerry and William paid for the abortion of the little sac of flesh that would've
become their grandchild. Sometimes, Kerry would awake in the early hours of the morning, listen to William snoring fitfully in the bed next to her, and think about what their grandchild would've grown up to be. But when she pictured the child, all she could see was a broken porcelain doll, its pieces shattered across the bare floor of an empty room in 13 Winchester Lane.
The twins went away to university, and their calls became infrequent, and their visits became more infrequent still, and Kerry began to forget what it had been like to raise children in the first place. William was away most of the time running the company, and all Kerry had left was the house on Winchester Lane. The walls engulfed her, held her close and whispered to her. We nearly have what we want, it said. It is nearly done. Kerry didn't understand a word of it.
The twins graduated, and moved away permanently, and William had a massive heart attack one Saturday afternoon while mowing the lawn. Kerry found him there, his face pressed into the grass cuttings, sleeping like a baby. She watched him for a while, then called an ambulance.
Of course, that was it for William's career. No more stress, no more high cholesterol diet, and way more exercise. He took up hiking and fishing. Kerry never felt like joining him. Most of the time, however, William just got under her feet as she tried to take care of the house. But in turn, the house took care of her. Memories seeped from its peeling wallpaper, etched in every footprint left on the stairs. Every now and then, Kerry would find a piece of broken porcelain tucked into a crack or stuck under a carpet. Still, after all those years, the shards remained and the house gave them back.
It was Christmas, and the whole family were together. Christopher and his wife, Charly, Kerry and William. On Christmas day, Kerry slaved over the hot stove, alone, preparing a roast dinner. The turkey was fat and succulent. The sprouts were green and perfect. The cauliflower was cooked to perfection. And the gravy, gosh, the gravy, dark brown and tasty and laced with the best rat poison money could buy. Kerry felt the walls of the house sigh. Finally, now, after so long, this house had become a home.
They sat down and Christopher's wife, a devout Christian, said grace. Kerry's shaking hand reached for the gravy boat, then withdrew, waiting for the rest of the family to dish up. She was looking forward to having an extra large portion herself.
"I'm so glad we could all be together here, at the end," William said, standing up. When he removed the handgun from the waistband of his trousers, Kerry couldn't help but let out a harsh, single laugh.
"I thought I was the one," she whispered, and the house's pipes creaked and sighed, and a rafter banged in the wind, and snow fell on the garden, and bang, bang, bang, bang, a pause as he placed the pistol in his mouth, a final shot. Five bodies, slumped face down into their plates of turkey, Christmas carols playing faintly on the CD player in the other room.
The door to 13 Winchester Lane opened gingerly. The realtor stepped inside, followed by the young couple.
"Now this place," said Dick Wickens Jnr, "this place has personality."
"Is that a fancy way of saying rising damp?" the young man asked.
Wickens Jnr gave a thin smile. "No. How do the words murder-suicide sound to you?"
The young woman cooed.
"The house went without tragedy for so long," Wickens Jnr said. "Just bricks and mortar. But you, my dears, you'll be buying a slice of Britain's bloody history."
"There is a real atmosphere here, isn't there?" the young woman said to her boyfriend, and shivered.
"You ever hear of the O'Donagues?" Wickens Jnr asked. "Murder over roast turkey. The Christmas Shootings. It was in all the papers. Nobody knows why he did it. They lived a pretty normal life. I guess sometimes people just snap, y'know? Those kind of things always leave the most lasting impressions on a house."
"Oh goddamn, that's this place?" the young man asked.
Wickens Jnr nodded, barely able to suppress his smug smile.
"Sure is," he said. He'd hooked them. He could tell.
From upstairs came the faint, ethereal sound of shattering porcelain and a low, pitiful wail.
"And there she is, right on cue," Wickens Jnr said, already leafing through his paperwork to find the contract.
Ashton Raze is the pen name of a writer who works in prose fiction and video games. At Owl Cave, Ashton has released the video games Sepulchre and Richard & Alice, with The Charnel House Trilogy out in early 2015. Alongside that, the author has created a number of interactive fiction titles, and released a novel Bright Lights & Glass Houses, all available now.
You can see Ashton's work at https://www.ashtonraze.com