The House Remembers: Day 2
He was walking up to the porch of the house, but this time as he fumbled in his pocket for the keys the door opened to reveal an elderly gentleman in evening dress.
"Welcome," he said, "Allow me to conduct you to the ceremony."
"Ceremony?"
"Yes, indeed! They're all waiting for you, you know. Just follow me."
And taking him by the elbow he led Todd down the hallway. But the hallway was not as he remembered it: pale pink, bright and bare. This time it was dark and sombre, with what appeared to be framed religious prints lining the walls. And it was long: they walked down it for what seemed like hours, seeing no sign of the stairs to the upper floor nor the doors to left and right which should have led to the study and living room. But just as Todd was beginning to despair of ever reaching the end they finally got there.
Ahead of Todd was the door to the kitchen.
"Here we are," said the gentleman, gently nudging him forward, "Just go through. They'll be ready for you by now."
"Who the fuck are they?" he began, turning to the old man but he was gone. Todd felt no curiosity at this strange disappearance, but rather a mounting excitement; Destiny, he felt, was waiting for him on the other side of the door. He grasped the knob and turned and the door opened into...
... a vast, crowded, brightly-lit space. Tables thronged with diners in evening dress were scattered seemingly randomly about, while waiters moved in a seemingly haphazard fashion through the crowd, alighting here and there at the tables like anxious bees with silver trays. In the distance Todd could see a stage and someone he half-recognised - an actor perhaps? At any rate certainly a celebrity of some kind - was standing at a microphone.
"And here he is!" cried the man with the microphone, "Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big hand to the talented man behind the biggest selling rock album of the year - Todd Ravenhurst! Come up, Todd! Come and collect your award!"
Dazed, but beaming, graciously nodding to acknowledge the applause, Todd moved towards the stage and...
... woke up. There was a persistent ringing in his ears which, after a few moments, he identified as a telephone.
"Phone?" he thought bemusedly, "Where the fuck's the phone?"
Feeling distinctly cheated, Todd wrestled himself out from underneath the bedclothes and padded off, bleary-eyed, to locate the source of the intrusion. After some minutes of searching he tracked the racket to the hall table and, lifting aside the laptop which was still sitting there from the previous day, he picked up the receiver.
"Hlmmphh!" he said, his tongue appearing, temporarily at least, to occupy an area several times larger than his mouth.
"Davey-boy!" cried Big Al, unnervingly loud in his ear, "Just checking to see if everything's OK!"
"Shfline."
"Great! Great! Anything coming yet?"
Making a determined effort to force his tongue into something like its normal position and dimensions, Todd mumbled something about a few ideas, and immediately wished he hadn't.
"Great! Keep with it, Davey-boy! Just to help you orientate yourself it's 10 a.m., it's Sunday and you're in a shithole in the middle of nowhere! Go make yourself some coffee."
There was a click and Big Al's bellow was replaced by soothing white noise.
Todd dropped the receiver onto its cradle (both pink! What else?) and regarded it sourly for a moment or two. He had gained the impression from the ending to their brief conversation that Al suspected him of having smuggled some bottles into the van (of course he hadn't loaded it himself. What was the point in being rich if you couldn't hire people to perform that kind of tiresome work for you?). Al was a cynic, a confirmed believer in the doctrine of the impossibility of reforming anyone, and refused to believe that Todd hadn't touched a drop of hard liquor in ... uhmm ... well, ages. Coffee indeed! Actually, it probably wasn't that bad an idea - his head felt full of cobwebs - so he breathed a sigh and headed for the kitchen.
Approximately half an hour later, having breakfasted on microwaved croissants and strawberry jam and consumed a litre or so of coffee, Todd began to feel like a Rock God again. Admittedly an overweight, drug-raddled Rock God, but then that wasn't exactly untraditional: it certainly hadn't dented Jim Morrison's legendary status. Sitting at the kitchen table, inhaling fragrant steam from the coffee pot, he began to consider options for the day.
He supposed he ought to begin by completing his survey of the house. There was still the attic and cellar to investigate, and he flipped a coin to determine which of the two he would begin with. Attic! Piss. That meant he would have to climb the stairs rather than taking the easy route from the doorway in the kitchen that led to the cellar steps. On the other hand, if he left the coffee-pot on while he checked out the attic he could refresh himself before tackling the cellar.
Ten minutes later, having pulled down the folding ladder that led to the attic and coated his fingers with dusty (but still sticky) cobwebs while groping for the light switch, he stood in it. It was disappointingly empty. The only object of interest among the odds and ends of broken furniture, faded fabric and plastic sheeting was a large trunk, presumably containing the remnants of the late Edith Henderson's personal possessions.
Todd didn't expect much from it, and on first inspection he was correct: old school exercise books, sheaves of dull business correspondence, an old tartan blanket, a bunch of withered roses, a broken china doll, a flattened teddy bear which had lost most of its stuffing, and some half-finished embroidery. But at the bottom he found a leather-bound photograph album. In gold lettering on the cover were the words 'The House Remembered' and it was filled with photographs of both the interior and exterior of the house, the earliest, judging by the yellowing of the photographs and the Edwardian clothing of the few people pictured, dating from the turn of the century, not long after the house had been built. Todd slammed the trunk shut and, tucking the album under his arm, made his way out of the attic.
Back in the kitchen, he flipped through the book while he sipped at a reviving coffee. There were nine decades worth of photographs in the thing although (doubtless, Todd thought, due to the less than photogenic appeal of the place) that didn't really amount to all that many. The final photograph was of Edith herself, dated a month or so before her death, and therefore about a year before Todd himself had bought the house. She was sitting on an old wicker chair (he vaguely remembered seeing it in the study before he'd buried the room in equipment) outside the front of the house, in the height of what passed for summer in these parts. A book lay open in her lap and she was squinting into the sun from beneath a large straw sombrero. The shadow of the photographer fell at her feet, an indistinct and amorphous blot on the ground. She was smiling happily, wisps of grey hair straying over her cheeks and forehead.
"And dead inside a month." thought Todd, "What happened to spoil it all, lady?"
Snapping the album shut, Todd noticed that he had misread the inscription on its cover: it didn't say 'The House Remembered' but 'The House Remembers'. Curious. Oh well, the cellar...
Concrete steps, rough-finished stone walls, a hint of mould. Not bad. Certainly more atmospheric than the rest of the house. Arriving at the bottom of the steps he peered myopically into the darkness (he was slightly short-sighted; his eyes were too sensitive to bear contact lenses for any length of time and he was far too conscious of his image to wear glasses). He dimly made out a pull-chain dangling by his left hand and tugged at it.
Half a dozen bare light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling flickered into luminescence. The floor of the cellar was comprised of bare stone flags, cracked in many places, with dark compacted earth showing through. Arranged around all three available walls, from ground level to shoulder-height, were wine-racks. Astonishingly, although there were a few empty spaces here and there, there appeared to be dozens - no hundreds - of full bottles of wine.
"Fuck me!" he thought, "Why did nobody cart all this stuff away?"
He went over to one of the racks and pulled out a bottle. It was dusty, the label was mostly illegible and, since what Todd knew about wine could have been written on a postage stamp with more than enough space left over for the Lord's Prayer, it wouldn't have meant anything to him even if he had been able to read it. Nevertheless, when he moved it in his hand, it burbled happily to itself and its weight said it was full.
"Oh wonderful," he thought, "here's me trying to give the stuff up and I'm living on top of an alkie's paradise!"
He returned the bottle to its niche, and retreated to the kitchen. The photograph album was where he'd left it on the kitchen table, but he couldn't be bothered to spend any more time with it. He guessed he'd better get down to trying to write something, but he had a dreary feeling it wasn't going to work.
***
His intuition really was becoming astoundingly accurate. Evening found him ensconced in a two-seater settee, the glass-topped coffee table in front of him aglow with candle-light, the floor covered in crumpled-up sheets of note-paper as he pecked disconsolately at the keyboard balanced awkwardly on his knee and. Apart from a mid-afternoon break for a microwaved moussaka (greasy, but palatable) he'd been making a paper mountain on the floor without actually managing to come up with a single viable musical or lyrical idea.
It was now ... well, he didn't wear a watch so he couldn't be sure, and the carriage clock on the mantle-piece hadn't been wound since the death of its former owner, but he guessed it was around midnight and he was so tired that the shadows in the corners of the room seemed to be continually on the verge of solidifying into something, endlessly shifting and forming half-shapes: he'd have to give it up for the night.
He stood up and reached for the light switch behind him and clicked it on. The shadows instantly retreated, but just for a moment he could've sworn that the densest patch of shadow, over on the window-ledge of the curtained window that led out into the garden, actually held its shape for a second or two, almost seeming to scurry away from the light.
With a sigh at the tricks that short-sightedness and fatigue can play on you, he left the living room, turned right down the corridor to the kitchen and picked up the photograph album, intending to have another look through it before he went to sleep. Book under one arm, he climbed the stairs to the upper floor, thinking that the pink glow from the landing light seemed now to have a yellowish tinge to it, and it seemed to flicker, almost like gas-light - perhaps he ought to wear glasses, he thought, at least when there was no-one around to see him in them.
Flopping onto the bed, he was once more asleep within seconds, the photograph album abandoned on the floor beside him.
"Welcome," he said, "Allow me to conduct you to the ceremony."
"Ceremony?"
"Yes, indeed! They're all waiting for you, you know. Just follow me."
And taking him by the elbow he led Todd down the hallway. But the hallway was not as he remembered it: pale pink, bright and bare. This time it was dark and sombre, with what appeared to be framed religious prints lining the walls. And it was long: they walked down it for what seemed like hours, seeing no sign of the stairs to the upper floor nor the doors to left and right which should have led to the study and living room. But just as Todd was beginning to despair of ever reaching the end they finally got there.
Ahead of Todd was the door to the kitchen.
"Here we are," said the gentleman, gently nudging him forward, "Just go through. They'll be ready for you by now."
"Who the fuck are they?" he began, turning to the old man but he was gone. Todd felt no curiosity at this strange disappearance, but rather a mounting excitement; Destiny, he felt, was waiting for him on the other side of the door. He grasped the knob and turned and the door opened into...
... a vast, crowded, brightly-lit space. Tables thronged with diners in evening dress were scattered seemingly randomly about, while waiters moved in a seemingly haphazard fashion through the crowd, alighting here and there at the tables like anxious bees with silver trays. In the distance Todd could see a stage and someone he half-recognised - an actor perhaps? At any rate certainly a celebrity of some kind - was standing at a microphone.
"And here he is!" cried the man with the microphone, "Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big hand to the talented man behind the biggest selling rock album of the year - Todd Ravenhurst! Come up, Todd! Come and collect your award!"
Dazed, but beaming, graciously nodding to acknowledge the applause, Todd moved towards the stage and...
... woke up. There was a persistent ringing in his ears which, after a few moments, he identified as a telephone.
"Phone?" he thought bemusedly, "Where the fuck's the phone?"
Feeling distinctly cheated, Todd wrestled himself out from underneath the bedclothes and padded off, bleary-eyed, to locate the source of the intrusion. After some minutes of searching he tracked the racket to the hall table and, lifting aside the laptop which was still sitting there from the previous day, he picked up the receiver.
"Hlmmphh!" he said, his tongue appearing, temporarily at least, to occupy an area several times larger than his mouth.
"Davey-boy!" cried Big Al, unnervingly loud in his ear, "Just checking to see if everything's OK!"
"Shfline."
"Great! Great! Anything coming yet?"
Making a determined effort to force his tongue into something like its normal position and dimensions, Todd mumbled something about a few ideas, and immediately wished he hadn't.
"Great! Keep with it, Davey-boy! Just to help you orientate yourself it's 10 a.m., it's Sunday and you're in a shithole in the middle of nowhere! Go make yourself some coffee."
There was a click and Big Al's bellow was replaced by soothing white noise.
Todd dropped the receiver onto its cradle (both pink! What else?) and regarded it sourly for a moment or two. He had gained the impression from the ending to their brief conversation that Al suspected him of having smuggled some bottles into the van (of course he hadn't loaded it himself. What was the point in being rich if you couldn't hire people to perform that kind of tiresome work for you?). Al was a cynic, a confirmed believer in the doctrine of the impossibility of reforming anyone, and refused to believe that Todd hadn't touched a drop of hard liquor in ... uhmm ... well, ages. Coffee indeed! Actually, it probably wasn't that bad an idea - his head felt full of cobwebs - so he breathed a sigh and headed for the kitchen.
Approximately half an hour later, having breakfasted on microwaved croissants and strawberry jam and consumed a litre or so of coffee, Todd began to feel like a Rock God again. Admittedly an overweight, drug-raddled Rock God, but then that wasn't exactly untraditional: it certainly hadn't dented Jim Morrison's legendary status. Sitting at the kitchen table, inhaling fragrant steam from the coffee pot, he began to consider options for the day.
He supposed he ought to begin by completing his survey of the house. There was still the attic and cellar to investigate, and he flipped a coin to determine which of the two he would begin with. Attic! Piss. That meant he would have to climb the stairs rather than taking the easy route from the doorway in the kitchen that led to the cellar steps. On the other hand, if he left the coffee-pot on while he checked out the attic he could refresh himself before tackling the cellar.
Ten minutes later, having pulled down the folding ladder that led to the attic and coated his fingers with dusty (but still sticky) cobwebs while groping for the light switch, he stood in it. It was disappointingly empty. The only object of interest among the odds and ends of broken furniture, faded fabric and plastic sheeting was a large trunk, presumably containing the remnants of the late Edith Henderson's personal possessions.
Todd didn't expect much from it, and on first inspection he was correct: old school exercise books, sheaves of dull business correspondence, an old tartan blanket, a bunch of withered roses, a broken china doll, a flattened teddy bear which had lost most of its stuffing, and some half-finished embroidery. But at the bottom he found a leather-bound photograph album. In gold lettering on the cover were the words 'The House Remembered' and it was filled with photographs of both the interior and exterior of the house, the earliest, judging by the yellowing of the photographs and the Edwardian clothing of the few people pictured, dating from the turn of the century, not long after the house had been built. Todd slammed the trunk shut and, tucking the album under his arm, made his way out of the attic.
Back in the kitchen, he flipped through the book while he sipped at a reviving coffee. There were nine decades worth of photographs in the thing although (doubtless, Todd thought, due to the less than photogenic appeal of the place) that didn't really amount to all that many. The final photograph was of Edith herself, dated a month or so before her death, and therefore about a year before Todd himself had bought the house. She was sitting on an old wicker chair (he vaguely remembered seeing it in the study before he'd buried the room in equipment) outside the front of the house, in the height of what passed for summer in these parts. A book lay open in her lap and she was squinting into the sun from beneath a large straw sombrero. The shadow of the photographer fell at her feet, an indistinct and amorphous blot on the ground. She was smiling happily, wisps of grey hair straying over her cheeks and forehead.
"And dead inside a month." thought Todd, "What happened to spoil it all, lady?"
Snapping the album shut, Todd noticed that he had misread the inscription on its cover: it didn't say 'The House Remembered' but 'The House Remembers'. Curious. Oh well, the cellar...
Concrete steps, rough-finished stone walls, a hint of mould. Not bad. Certainly more atmospheric than the rest of the house. Arriving at the bottom of the steps he peered myopically into the darkness (he was slightly short-sighted; his eyes were too sensitive to bear contact lenses for any length of time and he was far too conscious of his image to wear glasses). He dimly made out a pull-chain dangling by his left hand and tugged at it.
Half a dozen bare light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling flickered into luminescence. The floor of the cellar was comprised of bare stone flags, cracked in many places, with dark compacted earth showing through. Arranged around all three available walls, from ground level to shoulder-height, were wine-racks. Astonishingly, although there were a few empty spaces here and there, there appeared to be dozens - no hundreds - of full bottles of wine.
"Fuck me!" he thought, "Why did nobody cart all this stuff away?"
He went over to one of the racks and pulled out a bottle. It was dusty, the label was mostly illegible and, since what Todd knew about wine could have been written on a postage stamp with more than enough space left over for the Lord's Prayer, it wouldn't have meant anything to him even if he had been able to read it. Nevertheless, when he moved it in his hand, it burbled happily to itself and its weight said it was full.
"Oh wonderful," he thought, "here's me trying to give the stuff up and I'm living on top of an alkie's paradise!"
He returned the bottle to its niche, and retreated to the kitchen. The photograph album was where he'd left it on the kitchen table, but he couldn't be bothered to spend any more time with it. He guessed he'd better get down to trying to write something, but he had a dreary feeling it wasn't going to work.
***
His intuition really was becoming astoundingly accurate. Evening found him ensconced in a two-seater settee, the glass-topped coffee table in front of him aglow with candle-light, the floor covered in crumpled-up sheets of note-paper as he pecked disconsolately at the keyboard balanced awkwardly on his knee and. Apart from a mid-afternoon break for a microwaved moussaka (greasy, but palatable) he'd been making a paper mountain on the floor without actually managing to come up with a single viable musical or lyrical idea.
It was now ... well, he didn't wear a watch so he couldn't be sure, and the carriage clock on the mantle-piece hadn't been wound since the death of its former owner, but he guessed it was around midnight and he was so tired that the shadows in the corners of the room seemed to be continually on the verge of solidifying into something, endlessly shifting and forming half-shapes: he'd have to give it up for the night.
He stood up and reached for the light switch behind him and clicked it on. The shadows instantly retreated, but just for a moment he could've sworn that the densest patch of shadow, over on the window-ledge of the curtained window that led out into the garden, actually held its shape for a second or two, almost seeming to scurry away from the light.
With a sigh at the tricks that short-sightedness and fatigue can play on you, he left the living room, turned right down the corridor to the kitchen and picked up the photograph album, intending to have another look through it before he went to sleep. Book under one arm, he climbed the stairs to the upper floor, thinking that the pink glow from the landing light seemed now to have a yellowish tinge to it, and it seemed to flicker, almost like gas-light - perhaps he ought to wear glasses, he thought, at least when there was no-one around to see him in them.
Flopping onto the bed, he was once more asleep within seconds, the photograph album abandoned on the floor beside him.
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