I. The Forbidden Counsel
Smithy’s father had often whispered, in tones I dismissed then as rustic superstition, that the earth itself teems with hidden moralities that trees are not mere timber, but living conduits of forces benign or baleful, depending on the angle of the sun. Most dreadful of all, he spoke of houses how their stones drink the memories of their occupants, how the walls retain impressions of sorrow and malignancy.
“Mark me, boy,” he said, “trees are never wholly innocent. In the warmth of the sun they whisper kindly, but in the shade they brood and plot.” He paused, his tobacco-stained fingers trembling, and added: “And houses too aye, houses! they are not mute stones but creatures of character. Some are beneficent, others baleful, the ruins most of all, for they are neither of the living nor the dead, but lie in that hateful interval wherein corruption breeds. “Beware the ruins,” he said. “For they are not dead, but dreaming.”
But youth, in its arrogance, delights in transgression.
II. The Ascent to the Ruin
In the fevered summer of 1958, we forced entry into that structure known to all Greenwich boys as Bleak House. Its name was a jest, yet there clung to it an aura which no mockery could dissipate.
The iron sheeting barring its window resisted with a screeching violence, as though it clung to the ruin out of some primal fear of what lay within. When at last we prised it loose, a breath of air issued forth stagnant, moist, and heavy, as if the building itself exhaled in long suppressed relief.
The interior was at once a void and a presence. Shafts of light, knifing through a rent in the ceiling, illuminated dust that swirled in grotesque imitation of planets circling a hidden star. The smell of mould and rot clung oppressively, and the walls themselves seemed to glisten with a perspiration not wholly natural.
The war had torn at the house in 1940, but it had not killed it. Rather, it had left it wounded, festering. A billboard gaudy, leering concealed it from casual passersby, as if some unseen authority knew it must be masked from human eyes.
We thought ourselves bold intruders. In truth, we were supplicants answering a summons.
III. The Pigeons and the Door
The dining room door resisted with a tenacity that was almost wilful. We pressed, strained, sweated, until Eggy, with a boy’s bravado, delivered it a savage kick.
The effect was catastrophic.
From the shadows erupted a whirlwind of pigeons, their bodies striking the walls in blind panic, their wings raising a din like the beating of innumerable drums. Their feathers descended upon us like ash, and their cries piercing, uncanny still ring in my ears.
Above us, half-visible in the dimness, a door swayed upon broken hinges. From its back hung a pair of overalls, pendulous, grotesquely stuffed with grass and nests, as though a human form had been displaced and repurposed for some unnatural parody of life.
I tell you I felt watched, as if the ruin had eyes, innumerable and unblinking, hidden in the plaster.
IV. The Books and the Revelation
We came then upon a cabinet of books.
How shall I describe them? Their bindings sweated decay, their pages were bloated, yet within they pulsed with images that seemed more vivid than life. One showed natives with grotesque lip
plates, their gaze too direct, as though the page were but a veil behind which some patient watcher lurked. Another depicted primeval beasts, their eyes glimmering with intellect unspeakable. Still another displayed fossils etched in spirals that obeyed no sane geometry, hinting at cycles and symmetries not meant for human comprehension.
We each stole a relic. Smithy, a manual on rowing boats. Eggy, a botanical compendium. Myself, an album of Christmas cards. Theirs seemed harmless. Mine I knew not why was dreadful. Its angels, pale and stiff, grinned with sepulchral malice, its Santas leered with the leer of the charnel house. And even now, I believe the thing watched me from its pages.
V. The Later Discoveries
We returned to Bleak House as addicts to their draught. The ruin compelled us.
Each time we found more photographs of gaunt and hollow eyed ancestors, trunks filled with shoes for a single foot, as though their owners had marched into realms that mocked the symmetry of mankind, boxes of portraits that faded as we beheld them, leaving only smears of shadow on glass.
The very timbers of the house seemed to vibrate faintly, like the plucked string of some invisible instrument. The silence was not absence but latency, as though the structure were listening, waiting.I do not know what forces we trespassed upon. I only know the ruin pulsed with an intelligence not its own.
VI. The Erasure and the Persistence
Time, which devours all, gnawed at Bleak House. Other children scavenged, vagrants plundered, rain and frost chewed its bones. At last it was obliterated, its ground paved over, and upon its grave was built a row of faceless terraced houses identical as the teeth of a skull.
And yet when, years later, I stood upon that pavement, I felt the same oppression. The house was gone, but the thing was not.
I now perceive that Bleak House was no mere dwelling, nor even ruin, but a veil stretched across a fissure in reality. The bomb of 1940 had not destroyed it, but had opened it. And through that rift something vast, patient, and immeasurable had looked upon us.
Even now, it looks.
In my dreams the dust swirls in radiant shafts, galaxies in miniature, spiralling in forms not known to Euclid or Newton. A voice whispers from their orbit, low and inexorable, tolling the name again and again:
Bleak House.
And when at last I wake, it is not silence that greets me, but the sound of wings.
Anon
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