Dan Coxon is an award-winning editor and writer. His non-fiction anthology Writing the Uncanny (co-edited with Richard V. Hirst) won the British Fantasy Award for Best Non-Fiction 2022, while his short story collection Only the Broken Remain (Black Shuck Books) was shortlisted for two British Fantasy Awards in 2021 (Best Collection, Best Newcomer). In 2018 his anthology This Dreaming Isle was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards and the British Fantasy Awards. His latest non-fiction book, Writing the Future, was published by Dead Ink Books in September 2023.
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Standing in the porch she swears she can feel the building leaning, a camber to its moss-shrouded bricks that doesn’t quite follow the lie of the land. The bay windows at the front of the cottage lean the other way, doubling the effect. She feels slightly queasy. Her fingers find the key in her handbag and she slides it into the lock. She traces the cast-iron numbers screwed into the oak door – ‘10’ – then she turns it, feels the rusted tumblers fall into place and settle once again.
“Hello? Alan?”
She knows he’s here somewhere, his Volvo is sitting on the drive, shaming her scraped, rusted Cortina, but there’s no answer. The cottage squats in silence. For a moment she imagines something has happened to him, some horrific accident, but with an effort she pushes the thought away. It’s a technique the therapist taught her – the third one, the goatee man – this visualisation of rejecting a fear, taking it in her hands and thrusting it away from her. Sometimes it works; other times, the fear is stronger than the visualisation.
“Alan? Are you there? Hello?”
The floorboards overhead let out a creak and she half expects him to come thumping down the stairs, grinning as always, full of life. Only more silence follows. Then a shout from the kitchen at the far end of the corridor.
“I’m down here, Sis. Come give me a hand, will you? Damned tap’s leaking.”
She staggers as she walks down the corridor, seasick on dry land, and she reaches out a hand to steady herself. The wallpaper is cool and slightly damp beneath her fingertips. Without thinking she wipes her fingers on her cardigan.
He's standing at the sink, the tap dismantled on the work surface beside him, doing something with a spanner. A toolbox sits open on the other side of the room, under the boiler.
“Grab me a wrench, will you? That’s the one… no, that one… yes. Thanks, Sis. I’ll get this fixed for you then leave you to it. The movers have dumped your boxes in the front two rooms, for whatever reason. You’ll find them easy enough. You get down here alright?”
When she doesn’t answer he looks up at her, his receding hairline glowing in the sunlight from the window.
“You okay?”
“Does the cottage seem straight to you?” She doesn’t know why she says it, it just comes out. This happens sometimes, when she isn’t paying attention. She tells herself to get a tighter grip. “I mean, it isn’t leaning is it? It felt like it was leaning, when I was outside, and I’ve read about subsidence online. Clay shrinkage. There’s a crack I thought I saw…”
Alan lets the spanner fall with a clatter into the sink and he takes her hand in his, leads her over to a wooden chair. It wobbles as she sits. Now that it’s nestled within his, she feels her own hand shaking.
“We got all the surveys done, remember? All and then some. The place is solid, it’s stood for close to three hundred years. It’s just different is all. You’re not in the city now, Sis. Just give it a bit of time. It’s bound to feel strange.”
She knows he’s right. Of course he is. Good old dependable Alan; not at all like his younger sister.
“You just sit there. I’ll fix you a cup of tea, as soon as I can find the box with the kettle in. It’ll all be fine, you’ll see.”
*
She doesn’t have to start work at once. The mortgage payments are half what she was paying back in the city and her accounts are looking healthier than they have in months. The therapist had suggested it might be good for her, though, and she has clients waiting. Some tweaks to a website, a batch job for a startup in Leeds. It’s better than sitting and worrying about the cottage, she knows that. An active mind is a healthy mind.
Once her laptop is unpacked she sets up a workspace on the kitchen table, makes a pot of tea, opens a packet of HobNobs. It’s a comfort to settle back into the dev work again, to lose herself in the lines of code, the binary world that she prefers. There’s an order to it – when programs go wrong, they obey rules, they follow reason. There’s an explanation for everything.
She loses three hours to the website job, the teapot stone cold by the time she finishes. She’s almost unaware of where she is until she logs out and turns off. Then she stares around the room, takes in its low ceiling, the stained oak of the window frames. It’s almost dark outside, the light thick and brown. Her eyes find a crack in the corner of the room, follow it across the ceiling – no thicker than a thread, but a crack nonetheless. What was it Alan had said? The surveys were fine, all fine. No reason to worry. Push it away.
It’s as she clears the biscuit crumbs from the tabletop that she hears it. A bang, but muffled, like a car door outside, or a cupboard slamming shut elsewhere in the house. She stops, rooted. Silence now. Only her own breath, the thudding of her heart. She waits a minute or more before she calls out.
“Alan? Hello?”
There’s no one there. Nobody answers. He wouldn’t be here, of course – he has something with the kids tonight, a parents’ evening, some such responsibility. Still, she waits another minute. There’s a creaking somewhere, like feet moving softly over boards. It stops, then starts again, the cottage shifting in its sleep.
“Hello?”
She stands at the table until the light fails, then she flicks the switch and sets about making her supper.
*
“I heard something, I swear I did. I’m not imagining this. There’s either someone here, or something moving in the house, or the house itself… I don’t know. But there were sounds, yesterday and today. I don’t know what to do.”
She can hear his sigh at the other end of the line. When he speaks it’s in his slow, gentle voice, the one he always uses to talk her back from the edge.
“We’ve been through this, Sis. There’s no one there. It’s just an old place, remember? Buildings shift a little in their old age, make all sorts of noises. It’s just the cottage settling.”
“But you said it was fine. The surveys—”
“The surveys are all good, the noises are perfectly natural. It’s just old. Listen, do you need me to come over? Shelley’s at work still, but once she gets back she can have the boys. I could be there, maybe eightish?”
She stares at the wall. She knows he’s been so kind already, so helpful, but she can hear that patience starting to fray. When she made the decision to move out of the city, to relocate to the country, twenty miles from her brother, it was with the understanding that he could help her if she needed him. If things started to unravel again. But she knows that there will come a point when he stops answering the phone.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. You’re right, I’m probably imagining things. Blood sugar’s probably low. I’ll make dinner, put some music on, maybe unpack some more boxes.”
“You know I’m here if you need me? It’s just a strange place. Somewhere new. You’ll get used to it. The house isn’t moving, there isn’t anyone there. Until I turned up no one had set foot in it for months. You should have seen the dust bunnies I rounded up. Just give it time.”
She wants to ask him about that, too. Not the dust, but the fact it was empty. There had been a woman in the cottage before, middle-aged, single. It was the estate agent who gave them all the details, his mouth running and running as if the more words he said, the more tightly it sealed the deal. Her uncle was selling the place because she’d disappeared. Done a runner, they thought; half her clothes gone, the house left abandoned. Something about irregularities at the bank where she worked. The estate agent had made a joke about her sunning herself on the Costa Brava. She wasn’t sure how the uncle had been given power of attorney, but he had, and it meant there was no chain, an easy sale. Sitting in her flat in Islington, four thin walls packed tight about her, it had all made sense.
She doesn’t ask him, though. She knows he will only sigh again, start wondering if he should be calling the men in white coats. It’s unlike him not have asked her about the pills.
“Thanks Alan,” she says, keeping her voice as level as she can. “I’m just nervous I guess. Give Shelley my love.”
After she hangs up she tips the contents of her pill bottle out onto the kitchen table, a Morse code of little dots and dashes. She singles one out, pushes it around with her finger, then snatches at it and swallows it dry. She sits for a while and listens to the floorboards groaning overhead, and tries not to imagine a woman’s feet pacing up and down.
*
That night she hears a baby crying, the noise waking her from a restless sleep. It seems a part of her dream at first, but then she’s awake and it’s real, the wailing cries rising in pitch as if it’s in pain. Her first thought is that it’s the woman’s baby, but there has never been any mention of a child. And the woman isn’t here, she reminds herself. There is nobody here.
The closest house is almost a mile away but the cries continue, until she convinces herself that someone has left a baby outside her door, an infant in a cardboard box, abandoned, scared. She never queries why someone would do this, whose child it is – she simply accepts it as fact. Bustling into her dressing gown she runs downstairs, turns the key in the lock and tugs at the door. It sticks in the frame for a moment and she has to pull even harder, the wood eventually coming unstuck without warning, the door banging against the wall.
There’s a flash of russet as a pair of foxes bolt away, their fur a copper blur in the light from the porch. There is no box, no baby. She stands and stares at the dark, half expecting something – someone – to step out of it. Behind her the house moans like a ship settling against the storm.
As she closes the door she runs her fingers over the cool metal of the numbers again, the one and the zero. That is how life should be, in her head: binary; on or off; real or not. Something is or it isn’t. There are no shades of grey. Life should be like one of her programs, obeying rules that she can learn, its problems fixed with a new line of code. She knows that isn’t the case, but only because she has been told so time and time again by her therapists, her brother. In her heart it still feels true.
It takes her almost three hours to fall back to sleep. When the sun is starting to blush on the horizon she swings her legs over the side of the mattress, twists the cap from the pill bottle. She isn’t sure how many she tumbles into her hand, how many little zeros. Ten, perhaps. Maybe more. They’re tough to swallow all together, and she crunches them between her teeth, their powder dry and bitter.
At the point where she is tumbling into unconsciousness she thinks she feels the cottage shift beneath her, a beast settling its bulk. In her sleep she grips the sheets to keep from falling out.
*
When she wakes it is almost lunchtime and she’s starving. Her stomach grumbles as she pulls her clothes on, and she thinks she hears the cottage murmur a growl in response, sharing her hunger. Staggering down the stairs they feel uneven and she almost trips.
The front door is wide open. She’s certain she closed it last night. Didn’t she? It can’t have swung open by itself, the door is too tight in the frame. There’s a scattering of leaves on the hall floor, though, so it must have been open for a while. She pushes it closed, the wood shrieking against the frame as she leans her weight against it. This time she waits to hear the latch click.
“Alan?”
The hole in her stomach has become something else now. She worries she might be sick. It’s more than just emptiness; more like a whirlpool inside her, sucking everything down. Her head is fuzzy, and she braces herself against the wall.
The corridor looks wrong, the angles skewed as if it hasn’t quite been put together right and the walls don’t meet the floor, the ceiling pressing down towards her. There’s a creaking like she hasn’t heard before, louder and deeper, something rending in the foundations, and then the right-hand wall slides away beneath her hand. One moment it’s there, the next it isn’t. It’s fallen back and to the side, opening a black doorway where once there was brick and mortar, the wallpaper shredded, fluttering in a musty breeze blowing in from who knows where. She blinks and stares, a scream drying up and withering in her throat.
Now she is sick, the paltry contents of her stomach erupting from between her lips, spattering onto the floor. She tries to calm her breathing, pull some air into her dusty lungs. Her skin feels clammy and tight. Somewhere nearby there is the sound of footsteps, quiet but firm on bare floorboards, and without warning five cold fingers interlace with hers. The hand leads her towards the black doorway and, after a moment’s pause, she follows without looking back.
*
Alan drops by the cottage after work, Shelley having begrudgingly agreed to pick the boys up from rugby. He hasn’t heard from his sister in almost three weeks. It’s been worrying him for at least half that time, but he’s been reluctant to insert himself into her life, to take on the burden. Shelley has told him enough times that he’s too soft on her, that she needs to learn to look after herself. But he knows his sister’s not well, and he has to check, so he incurs her scorn and makes the drive out to the cottage all the same.
The grass at the front is almost knee-high, he notes as he pulls into the drive, but that’s no surprise. She never was that great at looking after herself. It looks like foxes have been at it on the lawn, the grass flattened in rough circles, what appears to be a lamb bone chewed and discarded to one side. He makes a mental note to have a word with her about weighing down the bin lids.
The door is closed but the latch isn’t on, and it opens easily beneath his touch. There are leaves strewn across the hall floor. The air smells stale, blocked up drains and sour milk, and for the first time he’s truly worried.
“Sis? You there? Anyone home?”
The house creaks but otherwise there is silence. As he steps back outside and starts thumbing the buttons on his mobile, he notices that the number one is missing from the front door. The zero hangs there alone, an open mouth caught in a silent scream.
(C) Dan Coxon 2021