Gloom
by George Aitch
He was broken and I wanted to fix him. We’d been seeing each other a
while, on and off, before the issue was laid out for me. I remembered
my first brush with depression. I had watched a toddler flung from a
drunk-driver car wreck and felt nothing. Boredom is not the normal
response to tragedy. After getting help, I’d recovered. It was the
empathy I’d won through this experience which made it easier to forgive
Ian for the way he behaved.
Not to forgive him for his low mood; there was nothing to forgive
there. How could I hold such a thing against him? However, depression
is airbrushed as this tragic ennui, a grey gothy filter towards
everything. They don’t tell you how self-centred and selfish it can
make a man. Maybe that was my trouble, I let him get away with too
much. I could have been more forceful but to see the desperation behind
his blank expression was enough to pack me into retreat. A glance like
that and I'd be happy to leave an evening on the sofa in front of the
TV.
In effect, I became his live-in carer. The dependence was very real. I
suppose as well it gave me a sense of purpose to look after Ian in that
way. We planned things carefully based on his therapist’s advice as not
to overwhelm him. Getting up in the morning and other basic functions
were broken down into a series of tasks: lift the covers, get out of
bed, walk to the bathroom, turn the shower on and so on. Being a
list-oriented person, I found this easy to do. Fitting these needs
around work was also easy; Ian struggled to leave the house or make a
decision without this forethought.
Our friends whispered that it had become parasitic, the relationship
between us. They respected that Ian needed someone to help him, just
that it should be someone other than his boyfriend. We withdrew further
into ourselves. Most nights were spent at home, just the two of us.
We’d cuddle up together and sometimes I might get a response hinting of
happiness. Those golden moments made it all worth it. Not all of the
time I spent with Ian was bad.
Festering in the house can’t have helped. It was an old build on the
outskirts of the city. Ian had rented there for about a year before his
problems started and the other tenant moved out. I didn’t like the idea
of him being alone there all the time by himself, so it wasn’t long
before I moved in.
It had been a nice place to live once. If it were properly cleaned and
renovated, it might still. This became my second project,
rehabilitating the house after Ian. The floors were grubby and the poor
heating gave us cold spots when we least expected it. At night, the
creaking floorboards of the settling attic and clanging rusty basement
pipes drove sleep away from us. At first, I was happy to chalk these
occurrences up to the antique nature of the property, or to put them
aside from our chaotic lives. When these crescendoed into stranger
things, it became harder to ignore.
It is easy, I’d suggest, to draw too much on a co-incidence. The human
mind is simple to trick. When hypnagogic hallucinations or sleep
paralysis occur close to a death of a loved one or moving into a new
house, we might cross the threshold and mentally label these a
haunting. Grief fools us into thinking the pitter patter of our
recently deceased dog’s footsteps on the landing are a visitation when
actually we’re longing for something which isn’t there. It is only
human to mark intention and significance to these odd parts of nature.
It’s what we do to comfort ourselves with the unknown. We’d call a
house haunted. Here is my story about my unknown. He was a haunted man.
The first issue was with Ian’s fridge. The stainless white cube was a
receptacle for all sorts of unidentifiable organic matter, a trawler
for everything past its sell by date. At the time, he wasn’t great at
feeding himself. I’d never been a fantastic cook, but I could scratch
out a few square meals. First thing I did when I moved in was to clear
it out spotless and stock it with greens, juices and other goodies.
‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ could have been etched on my mother’s tomb.
Not long after I’d done this and I’d notice that the salad leaves had
wilted, the milk had spoilt et cetera. Once or twice I chastised Ian
for leaving the door open and he’d sigh, resuming his favourite spot on
the couch. I was having to wipe away sludge from the crisper drawer
weekly at the height of this and it wasn’t just the fridge. Anything we
brought into the house faded – bread went stale, wine turned to
vinegar, tv remote batteries went dead and all of it much faster than
normal. Whenever I brought it up, Ian didn’t seem bothered.
“We need to get a new fridge” I’d say.
“‘We’ Declan?”
“Well, I can do it. I’ll have someone come over and check it out, or I could drive it into town after my shift.”
“It’s fine. Leave it alone. I don’t mind.”
“It’s no trouble for me, there’s a shop around the corner from the hospital.”
“Could you stop picking and interfering for one goddamn second.”
I left that alone, I didn’t want an argument. He stooped in the
doorframe and scowled at me like a truculent teenager, then shuffled
back to the front room. I heard the daytime chat show volume being
turned up to max.
I ignored most of these strange rules of the house as it seemed for
another month before something happened which triggered me to the sense
of unease I felt emanating from the walls. My job meant that I often
had to work night shifts, which wasn’t bad in itself as I was still
young then. After the last one in a run of nocturnal hours, I tried to
stay up as late as I could to reset my sleep cycle. On that morning, it
was a rare occasion when Ian had left the house to visit the therapist
we agreed was a good idea. I’m not sure he entered into this
wholeheartedly, more to get me off his back about it. It was a step in
the right direction, so I encouraged these appointments gently.
I was sat on the porch outside in the sunshine, smoking a cigarette.
The smoking was a habit I’d picked up then. I knew it was bad, but
those little five minute breaks were an excuse to escape from
everything. The garden was a heap – I didn’t have the spirit for yard
work. Overgrown weeds and accumulated rubbish were strewn everywhere.
The house was too cold to stay in, even at that time of year, so I
hunched myself on the wooden steps and watched the world go by.
A low key sense of dread pool on the spot where I was sat. It was like
a miasma seeping up through the floorboards which took hold of me. All
birdsong stopped Up ahead, the bushes rustled and a white cat leapt
through the brush. It looked like an ordinary white cat, padding
through across the grass and paying no attention to me. I froze,
staring at it.
The longer I watched the cat, the deeper terror I felt. Goosebumps rose
on my arms and I started to sense a migraine coming on. The cat stopped
in the centre of the lawn to lick itself, then proceeded to scuttle
behind a waterbutt and out of view. I didn’t feel comfortable until it
had left. The tension evaporated as soon as it disappeared. I gasped,
realising that a pressure on my chest had been lifted away.
Though it resembled and acted like any other cat, the feeling I had was
that I was actually looking at something else much more horrible and my
mind substituted it for a deer to avoid having to deal with whatever
dreadful thing I saw. It was like I’d had an unnatural experience,
something my brain couldn’t process. I staggered back inside and took a
nap, sleeping fitfully until I heard Ian’s car rolling in the gravel
driveway out front. I didn’t mention the cat. I didn’t need to put that
on him.
After that, I twigged that something was strange about the house. I
started paying attention to the smallest things going wrong. Hanging
pictures slipping from their nails, missing objects, late night creaks
and shuffles. I held these inside me, not telling my boyfriend as not
to cause him panic. Already I was walking on eggshells whenever we
spoke, in my head I could imagine dismissive conversations where I
tried to bring any of it up. Instead I made mental lists to try and
gauge the character of what I now thought of as a haunting.
One afternoon, I was tidying upstairs when I heard a series of loud
bangs from the kitchen. Knowing better, I still ran to that room at the
back of the house. All of the drawers and cupboards were open, some
still swinging on their hinges. Worse, our collection of kitchen knives
were scattered across the table. Some of their blades were embedded in
the wood. That hair raising dread crept up my back again. I found Ian
snoozing in our bedroom. I shook him awake.
“What’s wrong with you?” I yelled, tears prickling the edges of my
vision, “Why did you do that? You scared me and it isn’t funny!”
Half asleep still, he peered at me from under the covers. He shuffled awake and rubbed the sleep away.
“What are you talking about?”
“All that crap in the kitchen. It’s twisted.” Self-righteous, I stomped
from the room but he followed. Back downstairs, the cupboards had
closed themselves though the knives were still lodged in the table. Ian
didn’t seem phased. He went back to bed and slept for the rest of the
day.
Where Ian was spending most of his time asleep, I was suffering from
the worst insomnia of my life. When I did manage to dream, it was
disturbed with vaguely remembered nightmares. It sucks to feel unsafe
in your own home primal fear of vulnerability while you sleep. Having a
partner in the bed helped that for me at first. Though I had the
growing sense that Ian acknowledged that he was living in bad situation
but wasn’t prepared to do anything about it.
The final straw came late one night. Though I’d become used to sleeping
badly and waking up to bumps in the night, voices were a first. It was
just the two of us in the house, it had always only been the two of us.
I awoke with a start and lay beside Ian’s sleeping form. I shuffled
into his warmth and tried to nod off. But then I heard a woman speaking
from somewhere downstairs.
“Piteous.”
Its voice was a vile whisper, just audible over the silence. I started,
you have no idea how badly I wanted it to be someone breaking in. In
the pit of my stomach I knew that it wasn’t. Straining my ears, I could
hear whatever it was spewing insults at us from somewhere in the house.
I rolled over and threw the covers back.
“Don’t. I deserve this.” Ian wasn’t asleep.
“Who is it?” I whispered.
“Leave it alone. You’ll regret it.” He turned his face away from me and pulled the duvet over his head.
In the darkness, the voice kept whispering ‘disgusting’ and ‘awful’
mixed with jibes and threats. I threw a dressing gown on and slunk into
my slippers. Seizing all of the courage I was given, I peeled back the
door. The landing was still. Only that woman’s voice criticising us
pierced the silence. I snuck down the stairs, avoiding the steps I knew
creaked. At the bottom, the stream of insults was louder. I kept
turning my head, expecting to see an apparition. Tiptoeing around the
house, I checked that the television and radio were switched off. There
was nothing but the whispers, no-one else around.
The only place I hadn’t looked was in the basement. Of course it would
be in the basement. Without me touching it, the door swung open. The
voice grew louder still. It changed, she began revealing things about
me, secrets I’d never told anyone. Those awful things you’ve done which
keep you awake at night. I peered around the doorframe and into the
cellar.
At the bottom, I expected to see a face. Whatever it was could see me
now – commenting on my appearance, how loathsome I was. There was
nothing at the bottom but a black shape, like a cloud. That same sense
of my hackles rising came about me just like that white cat in the
garden. The dread rooted me to the floor. Though the black cloud had no
features, I knew it was looking at me. All the while the voice
continued, almost shouting now.
I stood at that spot, unable to move until the dark form began to climb
the shapes. As it moved towards me, the primal fear spurred me to
action. That was enough. Yelling at Ian, I slammed the door and leapt
across the room. Still only in my pyjamas, I grabbed my shoes and keys
and fled out into the yard. It was dark, though not as dark as in there.
Wrenching the car door open, I pulled out of the driveway. There was an
awful second when I knew I should have waited for Ian. I felt a
terrible tug at my breast. But my fear surged over it. I put the car in
gear and drove to a diner in the next town. The rest of the nigh was
eased away looing up cute cat pictures on my phone and drinking super
strong coffee.
In the morning, I moved out. I returned armed with cardboard boxes. I
checked in on Ian, typically he didn’t want to talk about last night.
With all my stuff in my trunk, I moved in with a friend before I found
another apartment. I didn’t see Ian for a year, we bumped into each
other at a bar. He seemed happier, better dressed. He’d long since
moved out of that house by then. We didn’t talk about the voice coming
from the basement. The house went up for sale and changed hands
quickly. I try not to think about it.
THE END
© 2020 George Aitch
Bio: George Aitch is a writer from Blackheath, London. You may
find his work in places such as Storgy, Litro, Bunbury Magazine and The
Crazy Oik among others. His essay ‘What Do You Do When It All Goes
Wrong’ was recently shortlisted by Ascona.
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