You know what’s it like when
you are in an old, empty house on your own, and it starts to creak. At
night. In the dark. Is it the house settling, contracting because
of the cooling temperature? Or is it something
else entirely?
I once owned a house like
that, though it wasn‘t particularly old.
The floorboards would creak in the main bedroom. Sitting downstairs, you would occasionally
hear them creak in sequence, and it sounded just like someone walking across
the room over your head. Who knows,
perhaps it was, the thought a bit unnerving when I was the only person in the
house, living person at any rate.
Similarly, Paul Kane has
built his story around the uncanniness of being alone in an old house when it
is making noises, the uncertainty over whether it’s mundane or caused by an intelligence
of unknown intent. Self-absorbed and
reluctant to make any emotional attachments, Ray Johnson does up old run-down
places and sells them at a profit. This
one’s a bit different though because it belonged to his estranged mum, now
passed away.
You might expect it to hold
memories for Ray, but it doesn’t, because he has disengaged himself from his
childhood. But as he goes through the
debris of a time for which he has no affection before putting it all in a skip,
he starts to think about his mother‘s life, one that he’d ignored since leaving
home, and the memories start to come back.
Looking at a family photograph, he wonders, as we so often fail to do
when looking at old pictures, who took it, who was the recorder of that moment.
Meanwhile the house seems to
have taken on a life of its own, and past and present collide dramatically as
the truth about Ray’s mother and his childhood are revealed to him, and he
finds out what those creaks actually mean, what – literally – lies beneath.
Ray tells us right at the
start that noisy houses are known as “creakers” in the trade, which means that
the phenomenon is not a rare one. When
you stand in an old house it is easy to wonder what stories it would have. Perhaps our housing stock trying to tell us
something, in a language we would rather not understand,
Kane’s short story is tautly
written, with an introduction by Sarah Pinborough. But I would not advise reading it alone, at
night, in a creaking house.
SPECTRAL PRESS VOLUME IX: 28pg A5 print booklet with
card covers, signed and numbered, 125 only – published March 2013.
Available from the publishers - Spectral
Press, 5 Serjeants Green, Neath Hill, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK14 6HA, UK for
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or cheque (made payable to ‘Simon Marshall-Jones’) to the address above.
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