The Closed Door - Second Draft

“There’s a ghost in this house.”
He saw the cords in her neck rise and she gripped her mug of green tea tighter but she didn’t look round, wouldn’t acknowledge him. He wanted to say more but felt stifled by her silence, exiled by her refusal to accept the horror of the presence that filled their home and had done every night since... The air was dry with central heating left on all day, but it was still spiked with a bone aching cold which aged them both, withered from the inside out. When they moved or spoke they stirred the air and the pall fell on them like snowflakes which slip through layers of scarves and jumpers to hit the back of your neck. It was impossible to insulate against those shards of ice in the atmosphere.
Last year had been so different; New Year’s Eve and the house had been filled with the relaxed chatter and laughter of friends. He remembers kissing her as distant bells chimed midnight, her chestnut hair shining in the twinkling fairy lights. She’d tasted of champagne, filling his senses with the sweet vanilla of her perfume and the happiness they’d believed was cemented into the bricks of their home. They’d flung the front door wide and led their friends into the street to greet their future, whooping at the stars and holding hands to share the distant fireworks. They’d smiled their own secret smile as they looked back at the open front door, the light and warmth radiating from the foundations.
This year no one came; no one invited them anywhere these days and they barred their door – themselves - against the festivities. He’d tried to usher in some happiness at first. He bought presents, wrapped them in shining paper and bright ribbon with the promise of treasure but she let them fall from her hands with a sigh. He flattened the back seat of his car to bring back a Christmas tree big enough to fill the spaces, thinking that the aroma of fresh pine would bring some life back into the house. Instead the needles dropped unscented and the lights which last year had crowned her radiance looked like cheap mockery. This ghost ate all his small gestures towards future contentment, it popped and hissed like damp logs in a fireplace while they chewed dry-mouthed on meals which turned to dust.
“I said –“ He tried again.
“I know what you said,” she replied, but still wouldn’t turn to look at him. She’d been gripping her mug for the last half an hour and her tea must be cold but still she wouldn’t let it go. He had read somewhere once that if a woman is holding anything - even something small like a mug - and she falls down the stairs, she won’t let go of it to break her fall because her instincts tell her she could be holding a baby. He can’t remember how they know, these researchers. Something about men and women having different patterns of injury, that’s how it started. Now all he remembers is that men and women can carry different scars for the same misfortune. And different symptoms for the same sickness, he thinks, unable to maintain the silence she guards so jealously.
“I think you’re being stupid, I mean, it’s not as if it’s been –“
Fury overtook him, and he stood.
“As if what? As if it’s not been that long? Don’t pretend this is okay. You won’t talk about it. You refuse to move house and all this, all this... death seeps into our walls and, and into our souls.” Slamming his whiskey glass on the table – unlike her, he wasn’t afraid of the oblivion alcohol could provide – he stalked across the hallway and up the stairs to stand by the locked door. From his pocket he pulled out the key he’d been carrying for three months, and now he realised all along he’d been counting the weeks, the days, the hours since he closed it. Tonight he returned the key to the lock.
“Simon no, it’s...” From the top of the stairs he saw her move to stand and then sink heavily back onto the sofa, defeated.
He noticed then how much had been taken from her. On that first night she hadn’t spoken at all, and even after he put the lock on the door in an attempt to put a stop to the madness, she could only ever manage scraps of a sentence. So often she trailed off as it – this ghoul, this horror - took her breath away. An insidious ghost with a stealthy grip on her heart like an unexpected love affair tears them into separate tatters. From his vantage point at the top of the stairs he sees all the things he’s missed and he sits on the top step like a child waiting for admittance, listening to the riddle and whisper of grown up secrets.
It started with the smallest things. As they sat together on warm August evenings, lights dimmed and the house grew darker, filled with shadows and shapes. The change was so small he had thought it was just the change of the season or his imagination picking up the noises of the house settling at night. It was an alarm clock ringing in an empty room or a discarded sweet wrapper unfurling untouched on a table; eerie but not a cause for concern. He changed bulbs, checked fuses, cleaned lampshades and windows. None of it brought the light back. When he tried to talk about it with her, offering solutions like desperate gifts, he’d see the shadows darken her once clear green eyes and knew she could not stop it and would not help. He once moved all the furniture to banish the dark corners where the shadows grew, but everything was moved back.
He can’t remember when he locked the room, or what had at last prompted him to do it. Was it because she always turned her face to it when she walked past? Was it the hours he knew she spent in there when he was at work - when she was meant to be - her perfume lingering like an eager witness, telling tales on her muted hours. Or perhaps it was when he saw it start to creep through the house room by room, nesting in corners like a family of breeding spiders. That face, open mouthed and grinning as a shadow from behind a lamp shade, dark spots reflected on the flat screen TV that was rarely switched off anymore, though even more rarely watched. From where he sits now, it’s hard to know what he was thinking then; all he has is the remembrance of a forlorn hope that closing the door on this room would make it stop.
Nothing made it stop.
He put lights blazing in every room to banish the horrors, shivering through sleepless nights and the long wait until morning while she would sit wide eyed, enchanted. He’d go to work exhausted but still desperate to leave, eyes hot with insomnia and jaw wired tight. She would linger in bed, tell him she was working from home but he knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t anything he could talk about; not to the people at work or people they knew, which is all friends had become. How could he say, amidst jokes and conversation on the latest petrol prices and holiday plans; “My house is haunted.” Or articulate his most complete and sweat-drenched fear amongst the gossip of affairs and debated lunch venues; “I am losing my wife to a ghost.” Though he thinks these things often, these are not words to be spoken aloud. They are not words anyone can say in the real world, where ghosts can only walk through stories, not the bricks and mortar of a home, the blood and beat of a heart.
He thinks back again to last year. He’d drunk too much that night and she’d laughed at his groaning hangover the next day.
“Behold the great husband and protector,” she laughed as she drew the curtains and he shrank under the duvet, away from the light that in this moment he cannot believe he ever hid from, “My greatest love and happiness, this wondrous life I chose.” She used to be so full of words, always had the right thing to say to coax him from a hangover or flatter her way out of his bad moods. Later that day he’d been shored up by bacon sandwiches and was watching a film when she said,
“It was a wonderful party, love. And I meant what I said this morning. You are my greatest love and happiness. Even today,” she added laughing, “All I want is here with you.” She’d leaned back on the sofa to better take in the room and put her feet on his lap. And he has to concede that it’s still true that all she wants is here in this house but she sits upright, stoic and straight backed to cut him out of the picture. There’s no room for him now that she has been seduced by the kiss and whisper of the dark shadows. The black horrors that creak through the house make him want to scream and yet to her they sound like a lullaby.
He sits at the top of the stairs, turning the key over in his hands and remembers when he first locked it. It was the first time she’d left the house in a month, reluctant and resigned to heartbreak like a new mother leaving an infant at a crèche. Fitting the lock he’d been an intruder, afraid to look around or stir up the cloud of shadows he knew lived inside. Now he wonders how he ever thought this silhouette of grief could be kept out with a wooden door or controlled by holding the key. When she came home and saw what he’d done, she had spoken to him for the first time in weeks and his heart soared unchecked at the rare acknowledgement even as his mind registered her sentiment.
“I will try to forgive you for this because you don’t know what you’re doing. I will try.” That night she never moved from her sentry at the locked door and the shadows crept past her while she murmured her own soft music. She never mentioned it again and rarely spoke of anything at all, robbing him of any chance of victory. Every time she walked past she would touch the door and smile that same secret smile share and he would know that he wasn’t yet forgiven. Perhaps she was no longer trying.
And with that thought all his carefully held defiance shatters and he stands, gripping the key in his hand.
“You win. I’ll open the door. You can have your ghost; you can sit here in darkness and silence. Keep your horrors if you must have them. I can’t keep… keep locking doors and turning on lights.”
She appears at the bottom of the stairs and looks up at him.
“It’s not about the door. You know that. Open or closed, it’s in us – it’s in me – and I know what you think but this… this is a form of love too, and I can’t just stop.”
“Love? This isn’t love. It’s sickness, it’s hysteria. I can’t...” and for once it is his breath that is stolen with the realisation of what he has to say. The seductive dark shadows have her, and she will not protest, wherever they take her. She wants this black dead world, and she does not want him intruding in it with his man made locks and lights.
“I can’t be the husband and protector. I can’t stay here, can’t fight this. I know you’re right and it doesn’t matter now. It’s polluted our house – our home - and you invited it in.” He cannot dilute the accusation as he stands in front of the door, looking back at her.
“You invited it in.”
As he opens the door, fireworks explode through the blinds bathing his face in a sour green light and she sees him as a ghost in a room that spoke of new life. They hold their breath in the eternal second it takes him to turn on the redundant light and she stands at the bottom of the stairs watching him as he wrenches himself from the room, racing down the stairs and pushing past her to open the front door and run into the street. In the distance he hears a neighbour’s television as Big Ben chimes midnight, and he wails at the stars in bitter parody of last year’s joy. His heart screams with words he cannot say, not because they sound like fiction but because they are scars stitched raw on his black-beaten soul.
“My son. My beautiful, new born son.”
Wordless he turns back to the front door and knows she is inside. The hope creeps in that she’s waiting for him to return but she is still winded by the glimpse of the empty cot at the top of the stairs. She cowers oblivious and alone behind the open front door but at last she wept.