Witch in a Haunting House

The house, now empty, holds its hill in wait. Its garden rises too unevenly – a broken mower lies there, rusting well – and shaggy grass obscures the earthen scalp. A pathway reaches down, parting the weeds, and from the pavement points to the eager door. It’s red. The walls are white. Their paint-pores drip with rain.

Sometimes a car or person passes by, and from the house’s highest windows, silent, a darkness peeks between the draperies.

As if the hall were built after the rooms, it writhes around them, shedding wallpaper. The house breathes in a gale which rushes cold right through the hall and up the stairs, throws the doors wide open, slams them shut. Wood moans and swells with moisture. Rot pervades. A grandfather clock, impatient, turns and fiddles. At last, the minute hand meets twelve, and Gong! Again, it strikes itself triumphantly—again, again, again. The doors all dance.

Outside there comes a breeze, and the gate opens.

*****

The witch works at a pharmacy on the other side of the city. Presently she stands outside, leaning against her broom as rain seeps through her cloak.

‘It was raining,’ she practices, ‘and that’s why I’m late back.’ Maybe she could lounge on a café sofa and wait for clear skies. ‘Won’t you believe me?’

Her broomstick tugs her to the road. A witch’s broom is, first and foremost, a broom, which is meant to sweep houses and hence needs a house to sweep. The witch sighs as she mounts it, and it lifts her above the pavement, above the street, above the city. Wind buffets her tired eyes. She leans towards the supermarket.

Later, strained shopping bags in hand, the witch glides to the house’s open gate. The broom slinks after her into the house and props itself against the wall. The door shuts. In the centre of the hall is a cylindrical pillar which continues up through three floors and a loft – the witch reckons it’s the spine of the house. She squeezes herself and her bags around the precarious thing, afraid to budge it.

In the back garden, she sings the weeds a spell:

‘Bugloss brought by midnight dog

‘Groundsel caught on moving fog

‘Strangling couch grass, burning hogweed

‘Vomit, wither, cramp, and nosebleed

‘Shrivel, yellow, shrink, regress

‘Thistle, chickweed, bittercress

‘Buried balsam, grasping goosegrass

‘Each of you who seeks to trespass

‘Even save me, fate is certain:

‘Death takes all who near this garden’

The weeds bow and die, and there is nothing in the garden but weeds. She gathers them up and tries the back door. It’s bloated and won’t open. Still, she knows it’ll let up soon; a haunted house is, first and foremost, a house, which is meant to be lived in and hence needs someone to live in it.

After a cold half hour the door relents, but in the centre of the kitchen, the broom lies collapsed. She rushes over but the wood is sodden and breaks in her hands.

‘What do you want from me?’ she demands of the kitchen. ‘Do you want me gone or do you want me stranded here?’

She slams a cauldron on the stove. She mixes in chopped vegetables and raw chicken, struggles with a can opener, throws in the weeds, adds a dead rat found under the fridge, recites spells, improvises them. How will she get to work tomorrow without a broom? God – look at the clock. She won’t have time for demoulding tonight. She’ll have to get up early. At last she finishes the potion – a whole cauldron’s worth – and pours it down the disposal unit. The kitchen shakes as it slurps it up. For dinner, the witch has spaghetti and pesto.

Each stair is just too tall, too long, too angled. The witch ascends them all, distrustful, slow, and passes far too many open doors: an office, desk too low to write upon; a bathroom, taps too stiff and water brown; a library, its shelves too high to reach; a nursery, too dim and desolate for even plants to grow. Only the bedroom fits her, pillows soft, duvet cocooned around her.

The house enfolds her while she sleeps.

*****

Pain like a cracked skull when she wakes up. An alarm makes it worse. Slept wrong, maybe? She’s tired and wants to sleep away the ache. Vomit spasming up her throat. The toilet – get up, cold, down the hall, toilet – too far. Could she hold it? A fraction of a thought comes to her – carbon monoxide again. She stands and light drains from the room, she passes out, wakes up again. Pain like a cracked skull. Take two, can’t lie here. Bare footed and half blind she stumbles down the hall downstairs stands before the boiler. She stands before the boiler. She recalls a spell, then throws up into the disposal unit. The kitchen shakes.

Outside in her pyjamas, realising how much she needs the house’s meagre warmth, the witch catches her breath. She tries to think through her splintered head. If she goes to the hospital, what’s she meant to do about work? She should be leaving now. She hasn’t even demoulded. 

She marches back in and up to the top floor, smelling it before she sees it. It’s like a family of foxes lies decomposing on the landing. Grey mould creeps down the stairs, and from the top, every centimetre of every wall through every door is black with veins and liver spots. She steps under the skylight and tries not to breathe in as she casts:

‘Leprous face retreat! Appraise

‘How my lyrics set ablaze

‘Tissue bone and skin. Regard

‘Cancerous growths gone sterile ’n charred—’

Even before first spark, the mould is retreating behind the paint. One patch resists, and so the witch goes on:

‘Corpses only fuel the flames,

‘Blood absorbed by smoke. Observe—’

She whittles away at the patch, but certain lines are resolute, lines forming a pattern. Humans are good at recognising faces. Rotten lips mouth something, and the witch is shocked to silence.

The previous resident – she’s still alive, here within the walls. The house trapped her. But then, if she never died, who haunts the witch?

A house is meant to be lived in and hence needs someone to live in it.

The moment she realises, she runs. Mould squeezes back through the paint and chases down the stairs after her, blackening the carpet and snatching for her foot. She leaps, sprawls across the landing. The walls close and bend inwards, but she runs low and reaches the ground floor, the door – it’s jammed. She looks around to see that her broomstick is still broken and the windows have disappeared.

The witch breathes in, closes her eyes, and speaks a magic word. There is an axe in her hand.

She swings it into the spine, and the house flinches. Another strike and the mould retreats in surrender. She doesn’t stop until a shaft of wood falls to the carpet. The bent walls of the house threaten to snap. From her old broom, she snatches the twigs and the string, and wraps them around the fresh shaft. She mounts the new broom and takes off upstairs. Support beams lean and spray splinters; hinges break letting doors crash to the ground.

The house makes no attempt to grab her as she ascends, and despite herself, she wonders whether she could nurse it back to health. But she reminds herself the house is not haunted: its evil predates any death there. So she bursts through the skylight and floats above the house, waiting for it to collapse. It does not.

The morning cold creeps under her pyjamas, and her broom doesn’t know where to go. She needs a new house.