Page 2 of Cinder House

If asked on the morning of her death, Ella would have confidently claimed that of course she knew the house—every inch of it! She was born there, she grew up there.

Nowhere else had ever been her home.

She’d known almost nothing.

There was so much more to a house; and still so much less, once it had been learned in its entirety, than Ella would ever be satisfied with.

She knew now all the poky storage cupboards in empty servants’ quarters and the half-finished racks for wine in the cellars.

Never in life had she bothered to spend time in the attic full of broken chairs and boxes of old clothes.

She had never passed through the raw attic ceiling to spend time up on the roof with its tiles the colour of her hair, staring out over the town:

at clouds, at the occasional silhouette of a chimney sweep, or the specks of birds and bats against a flowing sunset river of orange and pink.

Most often it was late at night when Ella sat on the roof.

Ghosts didn’t need to sleep.

Once the kitchen was cleaned and any tasks left over from the day were completed, she had nothing to do.

For the first hour she would revel in the undemanding silence of the family sleeping.

Then she might dance, alone in front of a mirror that couldn’t see her, pretending she had a partner, and missing her father.

It had been one of her favourite things about him: if she watched him closely for the signs of the right mood, and asked in the right way, sometimes he’d smile and dance with her.

Or she might read a book from the collection in Danica’s room, or the library that had been her father’s study.

And then she would, again, have nothing but time.

At least on the roof the world opened up into miles of air, even if she couldn’t explore it.

She tried to pretend, like a much smaller child, that she could make an imaginary friend of the cockerel on the weathervane; but he was as much a part of Ella as the brick chimney-stack.

She couldn’t have any decent conversations with black iron that spoke only in creaks as it swung in the wind.

Conversation with a friendly face was what Ella thought she might dream of, if she were still able to dream.

After some time she discovered that with sheer boredom she could fade herself out of her girl-shape and further into the house, becoming only the sense of the breeze against the shutters or the scuttling of mice in the walls.

It was not sleep.

But it was the closest she could come.

It was from one of those fades that she woke up, one night, in a place she had never been before.

She did think it a dream at first.

How else could she have found somewhere unfamiliar, within the house she knew so well? A narrow space with a steeply slanted ceiling, perhaps two feet wide, dark and closed up.

She was, she realised slowly, in a boarded-up corner of the attic.

It would have been easy enough for her to move out of it again: up to the roof, down through the floor to her own former bedroom.

And she might have, if it weren’t for the skeleton.

What had once been a human woman lay on its side on a thrice-folded rug which was stained in unspeakable ways—as was the dress that encased the bones and a few dried strips that could no longer be called flesh.

The hair was faded and light, worn loose.

Around the dead neck was a gold chain with a tiny golden heart, and the corpse was strewn with sprays of withered, brittle lavender.

Ella waited to feel an urge to tidy up.

None came.

There was a finality to the undisturbed air that was close to tidiness, as if everything here was exactly as it should be.

Another of Ella’s imaginings, since she turned ghost, had been that the house would show its magic in other ways, too.

That a door might one day suddenly lead to another, larger world, somewhere she could explore without breaking the barrier-rules of her haunting.

No.

There was only this: a small crumb of possibility that there could still be new things to discover even in the prison of her afterlife.

Now that she was in it, this attic space became part of her.

Despite her gratitude for the novelty it was still unsettling, like discovering she had been growing an extra set of ears in the small of her back.

Ella dropped to her knees and reached out a tentative hand.

After all this time—how much time? She had no way to know, or even guess—the dead woman was a thing-of-the-house and not a person.

Ella could make firm contact with the rough knob of bone that had been a shoulder.

She looked again at the gold pendant and some thought or emotion tried to rise uneasily to the surface; and then sank away, as if weighed down by something heavier.

“Hello,”

she whispered.

And then louder.

“Hello? Will you—could you—wake up and talk to me?”

Silence from the bones.

If they’d gathered themselves and sat up, Ella might have screamed.

What she wanted was for another ghost to form itself from the rug, the walls, the cold dark, whatever fade it might have been not-really-sleeping in, and to reach out a hand that could grasp Ella’s own.

Nothing happened.

Still, Ella stayed in the attic until the sun rose and breathed morning onto the roof tiles—her prompt to begin the morning chores.

She thought of the skeleton often, after that, though she was careful not to let her thoughts gather too much weight.

She handled them as lightly as she handled the best glassware.

It was so obviously a secret.

Houses, with their great potential for hidden spaces, were naturally secretive.

If any part of the house’s own personality had merged with Ella’s, perhaps it was that.

* * *

“Hello? Delivery!”

The errand girl came through the kitchen door pulling the small wagon of groceries behind her.

As usual, she pushed her glasses up her nose in order to read the note set on the table next to a small purse.

Here is the list for next week.

Leave the receipts.

Thank you.

The girl was always polite enough to knock and call out before entering, but she was also incurious enough not to comment on the fact that there was never a cook working in the kitchen, nor even a maid to take the deliveries and transfer them to the icebox.

Today she contented herself with a glance through the doorway leading to the rest of the house.

Through Ella, where she stood.

“There’s no one else home at the moment,”

Ella said.

“It’s just me.”

She might have gone on to say, How was the market? Does the cheesemonger still wear that absurd red hat, and wave it cursing at the stray cats when they get too close? Were the dancers from the ballet there to advertise the new season? Did they take hands with little girls in the crowd, and spin them until they giggled? Describe it to me.

Every detail.

Tell me your name. Please.

But there was something distinctly horrible about speaking aloud and not being heard.

So Ella held her tongue.

The girl unpacked parcels of meat and dairy and vegetables.

Ella came and perched on the edge of the huge kitchen table and watched her.

This delivery was a highlight of Ella’s week.

Just as Ella could be hungry with her eaves and the plaster between her tiles, and she could be angry with all the fires of her candelabras and hearths—so too could she yearn for any of the young, vividly alive strangers who crossed her threshold, especially if they returned on a regular basis, and she did it with all the longing of her windowpanes.

Ella had been just starting to wake up in her body when she was killed.

She’d found herself stumbling over her words in front of prettier girls, and had lain in bed and touched herself, first shyly then frantically, at the thought of bare muscled boy-backs swimming in the river in summer.

As she was now, ghost and house, now that she sometimes found herself wishing in miserable frustration that Patrice or Greta really could hit her, if only for the brief contact of human skin against skin—now, how did she want the people she wanted?

However she could.

Ella thought about what she could do next time, if she dared.

A note inviting the girl to sit down for a while and have a cup of tea.

Arrows in chalk luring her deeper and farther into the house, until the street air in her lungs had been entirely replaced by Ella’s air.

With her poor eyesight this girl might take a firm grip on the stair banister.

It would fit in her palm, be squeezed by her fingers.

She imagined more.

That sensible bun of dark hair unpinned, dimpled legs stepping free of plain skirt and petticoat, the girl walking naked and unafraid through all of Ella’s rooms.

Her bare feet buried in the most expensive rugs, rubbing up heat, until she was driven to cool herself by stretching out on the bare wood of the dining room floor.

Ella shuddered.

Two of the ladles rattled on their hooks and the errand girl jumped at the noise.

She quickly unpacked the rest of the groceries, exchanged a handful of small coins for the purse and shopping list, and hurried to let herself out.

“Thank you,”

said Ella.

“Please stay longer next time.”

The back door swung closed.

And so it went.

Visitors to the house had no claim on it and so no eyes and ears for its ghost.

Beyond the hunger for touch, which left Ella feeling like a pumpkin being idly hollowed of flesh with a sharp metal scoop, there was the hunger for conversation with someone who did not despise her, and whom she did not despise in return.

The hate she had for Patrice and Danica and Greta was a nurtured, flowering thing.

She wished down to her skirting boards that they weren’t there at all; that one of these days they would leave for a shopping expedition or a dinner with Patrice’s investing partners and simply never come back.

One day, unexpectedly, Ella had her wish.

Patrice announced they were going on a month-long visit to some cousins, and bundled her daughters into a hired coach along with parcels of gifts carefully chosen to impress.

And then they were gone.

It was wonderful for five whole shimmering days.

But all the deliveries were held, as there was nobody to cook for and no orders coming in from the shops.

The front gate did not click open to announce callers.

There were no knocks on the kitchen door, even though Ella left it invitingly unlocked.

When Ella vindictively snipped one of Danica’s coral-and-ebony necklaces and let the beads go clattering across the floor—half for the noise and half to give herself something to do when the urge rose to gather them all up again—she sensed it for the first time: the downhill road between a house with a ghost and a true haunted house.

A house was made to have people in it.

It wanted them there, even if it hated them.

Without inhabitants she was only walls around an increasing, echoing wrongness.

She was poised at the beginning of the road.

By the end it would tighten her into knots, and then into something else entirely, something all of her shied away from sensing.

Ella looked down at her lavender dress and thought firm real thoughts.

She was a girl, she was Ella, she was not just the potential for horror.

She ran up through the house instead of floating through ceilings, trying to remember how footfalls felt to the feet and not to the carpeted stairs.

Finally she found herself in front of the flimsy board-wall in the attic.

There she had no choice but to pass through, so that she could slide down and sit with the skeleton, who was a dead thing but was not iron, nor wood, nor mouse nor cockroach nor moth.

It was very quiet.

Ella missed her heartbeat.

Perhaps the skeleton missed hers, too.

Again she wondered why it was she who’d turned ghost and not this woman; if the woman had died here or died somewhere else first; if she had been a ghost, and if so how she’d managed to stop.

Ella wanted to shake her awake so they could be trapped together, so she could have someone to share things with who might understand.

She let herself fade a little so that her mismatched ghost feet in her neat pretty house-shoes could sink through and overlap the dusty leather shoes on the bones.

To let an object exist in the same space as her was the closest thing Ella had to intimacy.

She stayed there.

After a long, long time a key rattled in the front door and Greta’s voice—complaining, already—rang out dimly and Ella tumbled back to her normal existence, so relieved that it almost felt, for a while, like not being lonely at all.