The December Featured Writer is Jim Mountfield

You can email Jim at: ijschapelhill@googlemail.com

COMING HOME
by Jim Mountfield

I began to understand why my wife disliked our new house and why our son feared it. 

We drove up the half-mile of lane from the road, parked the car inside a wooden shed on the edge of the farmstead and hurried across to the house. On the doorstep, I rummaged in my coat for the key and my wife huddled beside me, while our son loitered on the frost-crusted ground between the house and the shed. He peered up at the sky, which was flecked with stars. I wondered if he was counting those stars, as a way of distracting himself from the thought of what might be waiting for him in the house.

It was probably an optical illusion caused by the starry sky that made the house seem different at night. Silhouetted against the stars, it looked huge and misshapen. Its roofs, ridges and chimneystacks seemed to bunch together at the top like bony growths on a monster’s skull.

I found the key and fumbled it into the lock. As I pushed open the door, my wife shouted back to our son, “Ivan, for the love of God, would you get over here before you freeze!” She stayed on the doorstep, waiting for him to join her, so I crossed the threshold of the house alone.

I entered a hallway. Traditionally, farmhouses here had been built with their main doors opening into their back yards and what I’d come through was the house’s secondary entrance. This meant the light-switch was at the hallway’s far end, next to the yard-door. 

I groped towards it. The house was dark but a glimmer of starlight followed me through the doorway. Another glimmer seemed to filter through an upstairs window, down the stairs at the hallway’s side and through the stairs’ balusters. 

I saw outlines in that ghostly light, outlines of things we’d brought from our previous home hundreds of miles away. From the wall below the stairs protruded some shelves that I’d made during a carpentry course, run by an ex-neighbor who was a retired joiner. I discerned on top of the shelves a brass carriage clock that our ex-neighbors had given us as a going-away present. On the opposite wall I saw a cabinet with a curved glass front that my wife’s parents had bought us for our wedding. And beyond the cabinet, on the wall, a faint gleam came off from a mirror with a wavy, gold-painted frame that’d once belonged to my parents. I grew melancholic thinking of our former neighbors and our parents, who were far away now. In the case of my parents, they were vastly far away—both were dead.

Then, as I advanced along the hallway towards the light-switch, my melancholia gave way to unease. The shelves seemed to occupy more of the wall than they should have. The cabinet seemed bigger, too, and stood in a slightly different position and had flat doors rather than curved ones.

I shivered within my coat. Why did it seem so cold here, even colder than it was outdoors? I felt disorientated. I’d walked into my house, but suddenly it was as though I was elsewhere. 

The starlight brightened as the temperature dropped. The balusters no longer stood at the stairs’ edges and, unimpeded; the light reached down and touched the walls of the hallway. On parts of those walls, objects glinted and glittered. Black things clustered, some long and ragged, others thick and hairy. Although my nose was numb with cold now, I noticed smells too—oily, moldy and perhaps rotten. 

I thought I heard footsteps. Frightened, I thought: This is not my house!

Something brushed past me in the hallway and I sprang back, my heart pounding in fright. I collided with the wall. The hallway flashed and filled with white light as a fluorescent tube on the ceiling came to life. 

My wife stood between me and the yard-door with her hand on the switch. “A month you’ve been here,” she complained. “You should know where this is by now.” Her tone softened. “Are you alright? You look spooked.”

I looked around. The old farmer who’d lived here before us hadn’t bothered to furnish the hallway with a carpet or wallpaper. The walls had been painted white, though now the paintwork was smeared with dirt, particularly around the yard-door where the farmer had hustled in and out with his muddy overalls, coats, wellingtons and sheepdogs. The shelves, clock, cabinet and mirror we’d put in the hallway scarcely dispelled its feeling of bareness, but at least our furniture stood in the correct places again and looked as they had before.

My son ventured past the door at the far end of the hallway. He tried not to look at me, but I saw his expression and understood it. It bore a simple message: I really don’t like it here.

With my son present, I had an uncomfortable feeling I was telling a lie in front of someone who knew I was lying. “I was spooked for a moment,” I said to my wife. “But don’t worry. Everything’s fine now.” 

*****

The family we had visited that night lived thirty miles north of us. They came from where we did. We hadn’t known them before, but a mutual friend, an ex-neighbor, had passed on their phone number and urged us to contact them after we’d moved house. Meanwhile, another old friend had suggested we contact another family, living forty miles to the west, whose roots were also in the same place as ours. And that family knew another family further away—fifty miles—who originated in our part of the world too. 

Gradually that autumn and winter, we built a network of friends who were simultaneously new and old. We visited those families on Sundays. We set off in the morning, arrived in time for lunch and spent the afternoon and early evening in conversation. Partly reminiscing, partly gossiping, our voices babbled as pleasantly and endlessly as brooks.

During the car-ride back, I realized my wife was asleep. Because I’d agreed to drive home, she’d drunk more of our hosts’ Chardonnay than I had. But then the sound of my voice seemed to wake her. She sat straight in the front passenger’s seat and peered through the windscreen.  “Oh,” she said. “It’s snowing.” 

Glazed by our headlights, snowflakes spiraled out of the dark road ahead.

“We’re lucky,” I said. “It started only minutes ago. I wouldn’t like to drive through forty miles of this.”

“They live,” said my wife, “too far away.”

“They’re nice people, though.”

She sighed. “They’re lovely people. Not like the ones you get around here. Here, they’re so surly, so lacking in social skills. I think they’re backward. Worse than that, sometimes—primitive.” She fell silent, as if she was trying to remember something important. “Ivan,” she said suddenly and twisted around in her seat. “Are you okay, son?”

Behind us Ivan huddled against one of the doors. “Yeah,” he said listlessly, while snowflakes flitted past the glass beside his head. I assumed he was thinking about tomorrow morning when he’d be back at school. He didn’t enjoy his new school. His new classmates made fun of him, especially of his accent.  

But then I realized he was more likely thinking ahead a few minutes, to our arrival at the house.

It was snowing more heavily when we emerged from the shed where we stored the car. It surprised me how distorted the house looked as the snow swirled past it. The snow was like a filter, warping and magnifying the house until it resembled a giant hunchback.

I went inside while my wife stopped in the doorway to brush off the snow. Ivan was the last one in as usual—he never entered the house until the light was switched on in the hallway. Alone, I fumbled along the hallway. I saw the outline of my shelves… 

I halted, certain that the object jutting from the wall below the stairs was not what I’d made during the carpentry course. 

It looked too big. I crouched before it, stretched my arms and couldn’t reach its ends. No, much too big. 

Meanwhile, gossamers of light descended from the stairs and I began to see into the shelves. Along the bottom I made out pairs of boots, which were huge, misshapen and furry, and objects I first thought were tennis rackets but then realized were snowshoes. Higher up were flasks, pots and jars, crudely shaped and made of clay or stone. I stood up again and examined the top of these imposter shelves. Our carriage clock had vanished and instead there was a messy clutter—candles, hooks, coils of twine, a pair of shears, a stone-headed hammer and a long glass cylinder standing on its end with a line running down its middle. 

I decided that last thing was some type of thermometer. At the very bottom of the line was a silvery glitter. Seeing that low glob of mercury, I became aware of how much colder it felt here than outside. But despite the cold, the hallway stank. 

Trembling, I turned around. I saw that my in-laws’ cabinet had also changed. It’d grown bigger too and inside the weak light glinted not on my wife’s collection of china and silverware but on shells, beads, smooth round stones, carvings, figurines. Things had been fashioned into the shapes of bears, wolves, crows, owls and fish. A few things had been fashioned into the shapes of heads. I squinted into the cabinet. Grotesque heads.

From far away, it seemed, I heard my wife call, “Ivan, please. Will you come in out of that snow?” 

Beyond the cabinet, black things clung to the walls again. I identified these as masses of heavy fur and expanses of ragged-edged hide. Elsewhere, the light gleamed on mounted knives, spears, axes. More sharp things hung further up the walls, though these were organic in nature—trophies consisting of horns, tusks and spiky antlers. I looked higher still and saw how items hung from the ceiling, too: a clump of bushy tails, a huge spear ending in a curved barb, and a maw of iron teeth that I recognized as an animal-trap.

I noticed a mirror—not the mirror, not my parents’ mirror. This one had no frame and rested on the wall like a patch of leaking water that the cold had turned to ice. I peered into it and saw my head in silhouette. Before I could make out my features, something flurried along the lower edge of the glass…a figure running past behind me. I turned in time to see a small form duck around onto the bottom of the staircase. Then I heard feet go pattering up to the floor above. 

Ivan, I thought. I didn’t want my son entering the depths of this alien house. I scrambled after him up the stairs. They felt hard underfoot, as if they were made of stone rather than wood, and when I grasped sideways, I couldn’t find any balusters or banister. 

In my house, a dozen stairs up was a square of floor with two further staircases climbing from its left and right. Though the furnishings in this house were grotesquely different, it seemed similar in layout and the two higher staircases were present too. 

I glimpsed the figure swerve up the right-hand staircase. Yes, it was the same size as Ivan; it had to be him. I reached the floor and went rightwards up those next stairs too. And suddenly it occurred to me that, though there was a window above those stairs, the sky tonight was smothered in snow-clouds. The faint light by which I’d made out the things in the hallway and the little figure I was pursuing couldn’t be moonlight or starlight.

I looked to the landing above and saw that the light emanated from a lantern. Holding it was a figure, taller than Ivan; the size of an adult, but it didn’t seem human. I gawped up at its face. The face’s lower part seemed as long and thin as a blade, yet its upper part looked flattened, with hardly any forehead and with hair growing almost immediately above its eyes. The eyes were sunk so deep in their sockets they resembled glistening residues at the bottoms of two dried-up wells. It skin and hair were snow-white, but the face was also streaked with black lines because it surface was monstrously rutted, like tree-bark.

I was overcome by panic. I couldn’t bring myself to rescue my son. I turned and bolted the other way.

Something smashed against my forehead and I fell flat on my back while the fluorescent tube came alive on the ceiling above the hallway and stairs. I screamed.

My wife came running. Even while she helped me sit up and wiped the blood from my face, and got me to hold a handkerchief against my gashed head, I managed to stop myself babbling about meeting a phantom. Instead, I cried, “Where’s Ivan?”

“He’s right there, by the front door,” she reassured me.

My eyes focused and I saw that the stairs had balusters again. Through them, down in the hallway, I could see the china dishes and silver table-sets inside the cabinet. There were no furs or hunting weapons on the walls, only smudges of dirt and the mirror within the whorls of its gold-painted frame. 

The farmhouse had two sections, one higher than the other. These were joined where the stairs climbed from the hallway. That was what I bashed my head upon.

I concocted a story. “I thought I heard something. I thought for a moment there was a burglar prowling up here.”

“And you decided to act the macho man? You went tearing upstairs?” She inspected the timber brace and added: “Are you sure you brained yourself on this? Someone didn’t clobber you, did they?” From the floor-square she peered up the right-hand staircase.  Despite the fluorescent glare coming from the hallway, the landing above was dark. 

“Don’t worry,” I sighed. “I was the only one up here, acting like a bloody idiot. There was nobody else.” Not now, anyway, I thought.

I noticed my son at the bottom of the stairs. His expression was fearful and his arm was hooked around the bottom stair-post, like he was clutching it for support. I wondered who the small figure I’d seen dash up the stairs had really been.

The next morning, a doctor came and examined me while I sat in a chair in the living room and my wife looked on. As he bent over me, I noted how sharp his chin was and how low his forehead was. These features seemed common among people in the district. 

The doctor did no more than say, “No serious damage that I can find,” and put a new dressing on the injury. At least his visit gave him the opportunity to see what changes the house had undergone since our predecessor’s days. He turned around, taking in the scuffed walls and exposed floorboards of the living room. We’d installed pictures, ornaments and rugs to make it look more hospitable, but still the room felt almost as bleak as the hallway. 

“Old Hector,” said the doctor, “wasn’t what you’d call house-proud, was he? You can’t find this place very comfortable.”

“We have renovation plans,” I explained. “Big plans.”

The doctor walked to the living-room window. It should’ve given a view of the valley, of the wide flat fields covering its floor and the high but rounded hills forming its sides. Thousands of years ago, I’d heard, the landscape had been scoured and sculpted this way by Ice Age glaciers. Unfortunately, the view had been blocked when the farmer, old Hector, had erected the wooden shed we used for storing the car. 

Realizing there was nothing to see, the doctor turned back from the window. “You bought the house. What about Hector’s ground, though?”

“It was sold off separately, some of it to Mr. Hamilton who lives up on the hill; some to Mr. Lang on the other side of the river.”

“So the old farm was broken up.” The doctor looked at me, a hint of accusation in his sunken eyes. “That’s a pity.”

I shuddered. I wouldn’t say his face was similar to the face of the figure brandishing the lantern.  But I might almost have thought they shared the same ancestors.

*****

The weekend before Christmas, more snow fell. When I was outside and raised my eyes to the farmhouse’s upper walls, roofs and chimneys, the mantle of snow on them did disturbing things. It made the surfaces look shrunken, the edges contorted, so that the house as a whole seemed malformed. At the same time, its bulk seemed to loom larger than it should’ve done. I couldn’t help thinking once again: This isn’t my house anymore. 

If it wasn’t mine, then whose was it? 

The Sunday of that weekend, one of the émigré families we were friends with invited us to their home. This was the family living fifty miles away and because of the distance it was late when we returned. My wife insisted on driving, officially because my forehead still sported a red groove made by an edge of the roof-brace. Unofficially, I suspected, it was because she no longer trusted my sanity during those Sunday jaunts. She’d seen me go from being spooked to chasing non-existent burglars and cracking my head open.

It was just as well she didn’t know what I was really thinking about. 

During the drive, my son huddled in his usual place, beside one of the back doors. Watching him in the rear-view window, I wondered again what I’d actually seen go running upstairs. 

The scene should’ve been Christmassy as when we got home and pulled into our driveway. Blanketed in snow and awash with moonlight, the fields formed a shining white plain and the hills resembled domes of glinting white crystal. But it didn’t feel so. Nothing suggested to me that in a few nights’ time Santa Claus would be scooting about the sky, making his yearly deliveries.  We passed a grove of trees that’d acquired snowy hoods. The snow made them stooped and crooked and they seemed to lurk by the roadside like vultures.

Not my house? This didn’t seem like my world now.

In the shed, while my wife and son clambered out of the car, I went to a corner where some tools were propped against the wall and lifted a shovel, one with a pointed steel blade that I used for breaking ice from in front of the house. Then I went outside. 

The snow-shrouded farmhouse seemed more alien than ever. Not just its outline—even the windows looked different now, strangely long and deep, like clefts in the stonework. Suddenly one of the top-floor windows flickered as a light passed behind it. It was the window above the second flight of stairs, where I’d seen the figure with the lantern.

My wife emerged from the shed. “Stay there,” I said. I held the shovel against my far side, where she couldn’t see it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just stay there a moment. There’s something I want to check.”

Still shielding the shovel from her, I went to the house and unlocked the door. Then I raised the shovel before me like a club and entered the hallway.

As on the other evenings, it was dark initially but then faint rays of light came slanting down from the stairs. The hallway felt colder than outside. I moved forward, picking out details I hadn’t seen previously…an empty box-shaped cage dangling from the ceiling, a mounted weapon that resembled a crossbow, a cloak made of feathers hanging among the furs and hides. 

Suddenly the shovel-blade struck something as I went by the shelves. The cylindrical thermometer clattered over, rolled off onto the floor and shattered. I froze and for a few moments the house was silent. Then I became aware of a series of soft rhythmical beats, like the ticking of a clock. I was hearing footsteps coming down the stairs. 

The light brightened. A lantern was descending with the maker of the footsteps. I shrank against a wall and crept along it to the bottom of the stairs, past the fetid-smelling furs and hides. I saw a figure step off the lowest stair and turn towards the hallway. It held the lantern level with its face, the flame inside producing a greasy smell that was different from but as unpleasant as that coming from the garments beside me. 

I sprang out from the wall and into the lantern-light, just in front of the figure, and swung the shovel back behind my head. “Stop! Who are you? What are you doing here? What is here?” 

In the lantern’s light, I saw its face close up. Again I noticed that tapering chin, brow-less skull and white rutted skin. Now I also saw how tufts of hair sprouted randomly from the face, out of warty growths around its lips and at the sides of its jaw. The lantern-light gave the eyes, deep in their sockets, a slimy, yellowy gleam. For all its hideousness, though, there was a faint delicacy about the face’s shape that suggested it was…female. 

“You don’t belong in this house!” I yelled and swung the shovel forward. But its blade stalled directly above me, caught in something suspended from the ceiling. Then it gave way and crashed down on top of me.

I let go of the shovel as I found myself enveloped in something heavy and shapeless, flapping around my head and arms. I struggled against it and realized my fingers were poking through a ropy mesh. I’d dislodged a net that’d been rolled up and fastened to the ceiling, and I wrestled it off me. 

The lantern-light had vanished and everything was dark again, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if the figure was still in the hallway with me or not.

But then a hand scrabbled onto my shoulder.

I grabbed down, somehow found the shovel, then spun around and drove the shovel-blade forward. I heard a crunch as cartilage and bone split before the blade and I felt wet flecks land on my face—those flecks gave me my first sensation of warmth since entering the hallway—and the figure fell to the floor. 

There was a piercing scream as something else entered into the hallway. I saw another figure, a smaller one, come rushing through the gloom towards me. I thrust out the shovel and the small screaming figure ran into the blade. The steel met it below the chin and above the meeting-point of its collarbones, something ripped and more liquid warmth, a spray this time, hit my face. The scream became a gurgle and the figure fell onto the floor too. For the next half-minute I heard it thrash and kick there.

I fell against the wall again. This time my head banged against the icy surface of the mirror and I looked into it. As my eyes adjusted to the dark and I began to make out what was there, I felt I was seeing my reflection in a fairground mirror because the shape of my face was wrong. It’d become long and narrow, blunt at the top and sharp at the bottom. I saw how white my skin was, and I started screaming too.

It wasn’t until my wife and son came and wrestled me away from the mirror that I stopped screaming. It took them a long time to calm me, to the point where I could see that there were no bodies on the floor, and the hallway was as it should be, and my reflection—when I dared to look into the mirror again—was the reflection of a normal man.

*****

I didn’t dare to enter the hallway again until the next morning. By then, my wife and son had tidied away the shovel and fishing net but, while I stood between the hanging furs and mounted hunting trophies, I spotted something still lying on the floor, a fragment of the thermometer I’d knocked over. 

I bent down and lifted it and for a moment my face was level with the top of the shelves, where the thermometer had stood surrounded by candles, hooks, twine and tools. I knew something else had once stood there, a brass carriage clock.

Outside, I heard the wind blow around the walls, carrying snow down from the glacier and carrying too the distant, mournful howls of wolves. And I thought again: This is not my house! 

Suddenly, the clock was back in front of me. It ticked softly, seemingly oblivious to the dried-red streak that ran across its face like a scar.

On the floor below me lay two bodies, one small and the other larger, a child and an adult. I realized I stood in a dark pool that’d formed between them. For a moment I convulsed with disgust and horror.

I knew that I killed my family with the shovel the night before. I killed the family that lived in the other house. It was the house that lived deep inside my soul.

I turned from the shelves to the familiar surroundings of bare, scuffed walls.

I managed to stop myself from screaming. I turned around to see my wife watching me from the foot of the stairs, her eyes suspicious as they glistened deep in their sockets. She held Ivan’s hand, and my son wouldn’t look at me. I managed to nod to them, signaling that I was okay, and turned away.

Then, out of their sight, I placed a hand against my face. I felt a pointed jaw, cavernous eye sockets, creviced skin, and strange protrusions of lumps and hair.

This was not my house. But I knew it was better now to stay in this house than return to the other one.

Jim Mountfield was born in Northern Ireland, got most of his education in Scotland and now lives in Sri Lanka. He has had stories and articles published, under various pen names, in the Belfast Telegraph, Bite Me, the Eildon Tree, Groundswell, Gutter, Hungur, Legend, Roadworks, Sorcerous Signals and others. He has also authored two non-fiction books about Scottish football, has contributed to travel guidebooks in the Fodors and Footprints series, and blogs HERE