a return to the house of death (2)

Their friends relished the morbidity of the house, the kitchen’s ancient wood-effect units scarred with blu-tak, the rich almost sweet stench of raw meat that seemed trapped in the rooms, the grotty basement space that opened at the foot of the stairs from which the stained red carpet hung like loose jeans into just a small bare brick tunnel that stretched barely back into the depths of the cavity. They commented upon the impressive dimensions of the rooms and on the double fronted aspect but they found it difficult to distinguish these positives from what they termed the pervasive grimness of the house’s essential character. It felt, they said, wrong. Although not one of them had experienced any phenomena that might be considered supernatural in origin or design during their short time in the house, it felt, they said, as though the property were, must be, haunted in some way, at least as the term might be understood by a group of – as they were – educated, young, rational free-thinkers, which is to say not really understood at all. It was something about the energy, said one of the free thinkers. The vibes, said another. I just get the feeling, said a third, that something terrible has happened here.

The couple shrugged off these claims as horseshit, the ramblings of the very thick or damaged, thought that their friends were teasing them in some way for taking their first feeble steps onto the property ladder, and despite the bad and coincidental luck that had befallen the cats so soon after their move, they had no other reason to assume anything unusual was at work, and did not believe in “energy” or “vibes” anyway, and in truth despised it when their friends talked in such ambiguous and nonsensical ways. All houses felt strange when one first moved into them, they had said. it’s to be expected. We just need to put our stamp on it – decorating, personal effects, new kitchen units, whatnot. This is our home now and we would appreciate it if you could all at least try, they said, to be happy for us. Their friends relented eventually and the “vibes”, or things like it, were mentioned less frequently over time. They would still on occasion make simple horror sound effects at various points throughout evenings, or whistle a variety of the most memorable horror themes – Carpenter, Romero, Friedkin, Deodato, et al. – from the last half century or so with the kind of ironic, intertextually entwined, academic-deconstruction-of-the-defiantly-"pop"-cultural relish they had devoted the better part of their degrees to perfecting, both habits that struck the couple as almost unbearably irritating.

Gradually though the house did come together, the bay windows in the two main reception rooms flooding the house with the natural light the couple found so essential to good mental order and productivity, the yellow glass that filled the two panels of the back door casting a precious hue upon the carpet at their feet. When they pulled the carpets up – hallway, living room – they revealed what appeared to be immense blood stains sunk clean through the shag of the carpet, the coarse fabric backing and the mid-range underlay and into the wooden floorboards beneath. The stains seemed very old and sanded off easily with a hired tool, and they treated the wood and painted it white and it looked quite charming and the rooms so, so light, and the smell of meat seemed soon to dissipate as through their gradual colonisation of design choices the house really became theirs.