The Haunted House

Thinking back, I don’t remember the Haunted House ever having been anything other than haunted. By haunted, I mean that it fitted a child’s concept of what a haunted house might look like; tumbledown and forbidding, with an overgrown front garden that masked the house from the road and black, hollow windows that concealed secrets. The gateway yawned wide, rusty hinges the only clue that a gate once hung there. No-one ever went in or out, not even the postman. I suppose that, had we known it initially as a run-of-the-mill semi with a well kept lawn and a busy family, its subsequent descent into dereliction would have seemed in some sense correct and entirely within the fabric of our known world. It was precisely because it had always been derelict that it took on such an ominous aura.

We first noticed the Haunted House when, as kids of five we walked with our mums to school. Our route went past the Haunted House, and every day either David from next door or I would begin the build-up as we turned the corner onto Mill Lane.

“Here it comes, Janet! The Haunted House is coming! I wonder if the ghosts are hungry for children today!”

And every day, like clockwork, Janet would go running to her mum crying, and her mum would scold David irrespective of who had started it because he was hers, and she could, and my mum would echo the admonishment, with a stern look that suggested that the real reprimand would linger in the distance like a foreboding rain-cloud, ready to shower me when we got home. Then, David and I would run off giggling, concealing with our boyish bravado the fact that really, we were scared too, as scared as Janet.

Over the years, the Haunted House remained a constant in our lives. Never changing, always there. I suspect that nowadays, with property what it is in that area, some enterprising developer would have bought the house for a song and done it up; you just don’t see derelict houses in comfortable suburbs these days. But in the late seventies property in that part of Liverpool was cheap and so the Haunted House retained its mystery, the stubbornness of its decline cementing its reputation. As we got older, we grew out of teasing Janet, partly because she grew out of being scared by our taunting, and partly because of an implicit understanding that whatever we found fun at the age of five was by definition childish, and therefore beneath us, by the age of eight. And yet the aura around that house persisted, and we never lingered too close to it, our footsteps always quickening as we passed the disintegrating front wall with its cavernous gateway.

By the time we reached the age of ten we were walking ourselves to school. Still me, David and Janet, although the tables had turned somewhat because Janet had sussed our earlier teasing for what it was; a feeble mask over our own fear, and she exploited her knowledge relentlessly.

“Going in today, boys? I think the door’s open – you could just call hello to the ghosties…”

And we’d laugh, nervously, and skip on, as Janet cackled behind us, and made chicken noises.

And then, one day, we didn’t skip on. It was a June morning, we were eleven and almost at the end of our time at junior school. I’ve often tried to identify what was so different about that day. I think there were a number of factors at play. Being the oldest in the school had imbued us with a maturity that we had coveted throughout our time there. Being fourth years meant that we were grown up, the kings of the castle, worldly wise and scared of no-one. It was also the year that we started to look at girls in a new way, and I’m sure that I was keen to display my maturity to Janet in a way that would make her admire me, and perhaps even want to kiss me. Whatever the reason, on that warm June morning when Janet started her taunt, something was different.

Janet asked, “Going in today, boys?”

And I looked at her and replied, “Yeah, why not?”

And that was all it took.

Janet’s response wasn’t quite what I might have hoped for. She snorted with laughter, and said, “Oh, here they go, Batman and Nobend!” Even when I stepped through the gateway, backing my words with action, she was giggling. But when my hand rested on the front door knob, she went quiet.

In fact, at that moment, everything went quiet. There was a lull in the traffic, only ever very light, no sounds of children playing drifted from the park down the road, even the birds went quiet. It was as if, at that moment, the whole world held its breath. At eleven, I was old enough to know deep down that the house couldn’t be haunted, its ghosts as real as Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny, but it was one thing to postulate such metaphysical assertions from the roadside, quite another to convince yourself of them as you held that burnished brass doorknob in your hand and felt its utter coldness. I was so ridden with adrenaline, I could barely stand. My lungs were working in short, choppy rhythms and at every level, from that base, adrenaline-charged instinct to the higher levels of my common sense, my body was telling me to turn and run. And yet I knew that had I done so my companions, who would have followed me just as quickly and gratefully back onto the pavement, would have been more able than I to reassemble their mock bravado and would leave me in no doubt as to the utter chicken I had become. To turn now would be forever to fail. And so, against all instinct, and with the reluctant resolve of the choiceless, I pushed open the door.

The first thing I noticed as the door swung open was not the sights of the house, but the smells. The house was dark, and it would take our eyes a few seconds to accustom themselves. Our noses on the other hand were overwhelmed by the stench of the house. The musty smell of damp mould washed over us, carrying with it a host of secondary aromas, smells which, had I recognised them at the time, might have warned me not to go any further. But in those days I did not recognise the tang of stale tobacco, had never experienced the smell of a chronically unwashed person, and so I did not divine the presence of human life from these foreign scents.

Once inside the house, none of us had the first clue what we should do. With hindsight it might have been sensible to set ourselves a goal before entering; touch every door in the hallway then leg it! Bring out a trophy! But the goal had been simply to enter, and now, having entered, we let ourselves be driven by the moment.

The house. A steep staircase to the left, a hallway to the right. Three doorways, no doors. The walls papered with a style that reminded me of my grandparents’ house, although their paper was clean and still fully adhered to the walls, and unlike my grandparents’ wall, this one had a large dirty brown stain running down the corner between the front wall and the right wall, thickest at the ceiling and drawing to a spotted point a couple of feet from the floor; a stain that smelled bad, and looked almost alive.

Stepping forwards I felt something crunch underfoot; a small chunk of plaster that appeared to have come from a sizable dent in the wall at knee height, as if a dog might have chewed it out, only to find it unpalatable.

The mixture of emotions at that moment are hard to describe. On one hand, relief; this was only a house, with doors and walls and wallpaper. On the other hand, deep unease; wallpaper is supposed to be stuck firmly to the walls, doorways are supposed to have doors. We had been presented with a paradox – a familiar setting with familiar objects, none of which were quite how we knew them to be. This was not how I imagined it. There were no bats, no bodily shapes draped in white muslin, no invisible hands slamming doors. This was not the Haunted House at Blackpool, it was the Haunted House on Mill Lane, and it confounded all our expectations in a way that made it infinitely more frightening.

I crept forwards, heading for the kitchen. I could see some light breaking through a filthy window and more than anything it was light that I craved. I was dimly aware of the others splitting up behind me, footsteps heading into the other two downstairs rooms although, thankfully, no-one was venturing up the stairs.

The kitchen was dank and smelly. A fridge lay open but the light was out and there was something green in the bottom. Along the far wall of the kitchen, rubbish was stacked in a pile that oozed a liquidity suggestive of compost heaps. The stench that wafted from that little landfill was stomach-churning, I could barely stand it. But at the same time I couldn’t leave. My eyes were drawn by the chaotic noise of the kitchen work top; cigarette packets with portions torn out, remains of candles that had been stuck to the surface with wax and then eventually burned down to puddles, and needles. Lots of needles. Syringes, too. I had seen enough TV to recognise these, although on TV the syringes were always clean and perfect, filled with some clear, colourless liquid and wielded by doctors in starched white coats. I had always associated needles and syringes with clinical cleanliness. But these needles were bent and rusty, grimy and black with dried blood. The syringes too were stained with dry blood, patterned across the insides of the barrels like tide marks in a milk glass.

I stepped forwards to take a closer look, my curiosity outweighing my nervousness for the first time since we had entered the house.

And then, from the front room, Janet screamed, and it was like the bubble had burst. My curiosity vanished and I was suddenly just scared, more scared than I had ever been in my life. For a moment I was rooted to the spot. The fear gripped me and squeezed me so hard that my heart felt as though it was struggling to beat. Only afterwards, once it was all over, did I realise that I had wet myself.

I turned and ran. Back through the doorway into the hall, and from there into the front room, where Janet was still screaming. But she was just standing there, on her own; no monster had attacked her, no vampire had pulled her into his coffin. I ran in, and she leapt at me, clung to me, and then she pointed.

When we entered the house the front room had been dark, I was pretty sure of that. I remember heading for the kitchen because it was the only place where I could see light. But now the front room was light. Janet, it turned out, had gone over to the window and opened the heavy velvet curtains. When she turned around, she saw what I now saw, it was right behind her, between her and the open door pretty much; no wonder it freaked her out.

What we saw was a young woman, just a normal person, not a vampire or a headless horseman. She was sitting in an armchair, facing the window, perfectly motionless, and white as a sheet. Her head was lolled back, and her eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling. A pair of tights was wrapped loosely around her left arm, just above the elbow. There was a syringe protruding from her lower arm, with the plunger pressed all the way in. Her right arm was slumped across her lap, and it was a mess. It looked as though something had been chewing it - maybe the dog that chewed the plaster from the wall in the hallway. Whatever the cause, there was a large, ragged wound in her arm, and in that wound, a squirming, thriving community of small, white maggots.

All of that, I took in in an instant. Janet had stopped screaming when she saw me, now she was just hiding her face in my shoulder and shaking like a leaf. I grabbed her hand, and together we ran for the front door. We found David out on the street, white and crying. He had bolted when he heard Janet scream, then was too scared to come back in. He looked truly ashamed of himself, but I think all three of us were just glad to be together and alive, and back in the real world. We ran to the bottom of Mill Lane as fast as we could, and it was only as we rounded the corner and saw other people out walking, and cars and a bus, that we felt truly safe.

We never talked about that day again, to each other or to anyone else, and we never walked to school down Mill Lane again. We just acted as if it had never happened; Janet made it clear that she never wanted to talk about it, and David and I didn’t have any desire to relive it either. And yet, I often wished I could talk to Janet about it, because I want to know whether she saw what I saw as we fled the front room. I’d like to know, because as the years have passed I’ve found myself doubting whether I saw it myself. Maybe one day I’ll ask her; one day, when I judge it appropriate, I’ll get Janet on her own and I’ll ask her if she looked at the woman as we ran from the room, and if like me, she saw her blink.