Our Dear House

For three weeks the children had the smothering dream before I did, as well.

The dream, as the twins described it, was of being pressed into a narrow room by a number of dark figures until their shapes were one, a breathless, pulsing shadow, flat against the wall.

Nightly this vision came, provoking both boys to scream out, wheezing like asthmatics on the crest of waking from it. They refused to sleep, would knock, begging to come into the room I shared with my husband, or else sat up in wordless protest in their beds till morning came, and so began the cycle again.

All causes were considered: that they were pretending, that one boy had originally experienced the nightmare and influenced the other, that their diet or school life had triggered it, none of which proved our answer.

We had the twins sleep apart in other rooms, attempted medication and the aid of child psychologists, again without effect.

Yet when, at last, I raised the possibility of the dream being of supernatural origin to my husband he would not have it.

John’s mother, an Irish Catholic, had promised to leave him some sign of the afterlife once she’d left for it, but when at sixty she’d died of some cancer no such message came, and Ryan had rid himself of any and all such beliefs in the ire of heartbreak.

“Ghosts,” he scoffed, as though we were not both teetering at the brink of despair over the mystery of dreams. “For God’s sake, Joanna.”

I didn’t think it so outlandish a suggestion, myself, having grown up in a house in which the ghosts of two childhood cats had frequently darted across rooms or the ends of beds in the night.

When I’d moved out to live alone I’d wept to leave that gentle haunting behind, but that which held my current abode in its sway seemed to me a thing of decided malice.

The house was a terraced Victorian building much given to damp and the sounds of boards and pipes settling at odd hours of the night. Even before the twins had begun with their dreaming I’d regretted its purchase, being that we spent more of our savings on repairs in that first year than we could afford as a young family, both adults self employed.

Now I felt that the house meant to throttle us in other ways than the financial.The boys were developing flu-like symptoms through their exhaustion, and so missed days on end of schooling.

Though Ryan still would not agree with me on the cause he consented at last to drive the twins to my sister’s house where they’d live for a month, an experiment of sorts whose results quickly fell in my favour.

Neither child reported a single dream across that initial week in their new residence, and the coughing fits—which had thieved Ryan and I of as much rest as our offspring—had abruptly ended. Free of the congestive atmosphere of our narrow house they thrived.

I—left behind—did not.

It was on the first night my children were away that I had the smothering dream.

I was already unsettled by the quiet of the house, the noise of dripping rainwater from some old bit of gutter beyond my bedroom window that was frequently loud enough to sound like knocking on the glass.

Ryan was snappish and irritable, as he’d been with relentless commitment since the start of it all. He banged about the furniture, played the television at an unnecessary volume, and muttered under his breath until I could have swung for him in my agitation, which wasn’t in my character.

It was only that within that hoary elder of a house I felt alone, and yet at the same time compressed by all that was my duty to the point that I regretted it all—marriage, childbearing, abandoning my parents for independence—as all mothers do at such inevitable hours of tension in their lives.

I sat up in bed, listening dejectedly to my husband’s restless turning and the fist of gutter water at the window pane.

I listened, and then I slept, if that odd state that took me then could be called sleep at all.

I found myself in a room with neither doors nor windows, only planes of white wall against which stood the outlines of people, though people they were not.

Their bodies were made up of some strange, dark filaments, quivering faintly on an impossible breeze, and though they had no faces and made no sound I felt from them an unmistakable hostility towards me. They wanted me away from them, out of that place, though there was no conceivable way I could go.

Without walking or moving in any noticeable fashion the figures nevertheless approached, consuming the space between me and them with a speed that frightened me.

As is common to dreams I could neither fight nor protest, only helplessly observe as they crushed me between their number, pressing up against my face their grasping fronds until I breathed them in.

I recall the terror of thinking I’d die that way, a slow and unrelenting agony in the wood of their gathered mass.

At this I gasped awake, half-convinced that I still felt those quivering lengths strangle my lungs in their black reach.

The coverlet’s weight lay thick on my chest, lending to the sensation; I threw it off and brushed at myself with both hands as though dislodging a spider from the bed.

Shaken, I got up and thrust on my dressing gown, jolting at the motion of every innocent shadow around me.

Most dreams I tended to forget almost immediately upon waking; this one clung to me like some filthy sediment, giving the impression that those trespassers of sleep remained in that room with me, unseen.

“Where are you going?” asked Ryan, raising his head to squint at me through the dark.

“Downstairs,” I said, unsteadily. “There’s no way I’m sleeping again tonight. May as well finish off some work, or something.”

Ryan rubbed his eyes with the heel of one hand, moodily unsympathetic.

“What are you saying, woman? It’s three in the morning.”

I paused, wary to speak of what had occurred when I knew his scepticism so well.

“The dream,” I said, at last. “I’ve just had it.”

Groaning, Ryan stuffed his head back into the crook of his arm.

“The whole house has gone mad, then.”

“The house, maybe,” I snapped, snatching the pillows from my side of the mattress. “Not me, and not the kids.”

All night I lay awake, the living room thrown into caustic light by every lamp and overhead bulb I could find.

Having experienced the dream first-hand my opinion of it being the result of a haunting had changed, and would develop as the days went on into a new and far more nebulous belief.

As with the twins, I quickly learned that neither medication nor resting in other quarters than my own prevented the approach of the images that ensnared me upon the instant of closing my eyes.

When I was able to return to sleep—an infrequent success—I found that the dreams would repeat in a dread cycle until the morning broke in its stark mercy.

Yet in time even this reprieve lessened in its power, and I came to understand why my boys, being otherwise happy, untroubled children, had turned so rapidly hysterical.

Even the hours in which daylight should have made foolish any supernatural thought soon crawled with them to the extent I that feared even to blink lest sleep came over me.

For eleven nights I endured it all, flattened hopelessly by the dreams of that rustling crowd that never, even in proximity, gained definition. I found that my dark visitors lacked enough human resemblance or personality for me to continue thinking of them as ghosts.

Moreover, in researching the property I found that the only deaths there in a hundred years had been three elderly people and a child to cot death, whom I doubted vicious enough to torment me and my kin with such vehemence.

Unable to name or aptly describe the phenomenon I believed that, in some sense, the house itself had grown to hate us, though for what reason I couldn’t guess.

Over the years since it had been built that residence must have known noise and impositions innumerable from previous families and their strident offspring; we were surely no better nor worse than they had been, unless we’d committed some crime that I was as yet unaware of.

Perhaps it was that the house had aged into its resentment like an old dog harassed by its child master until it bites. Certainly I felt wounded, so sick with voluntary insomnia and the lasting sensation of bodies upon me that, like the twins, I coughed endlessly and seemingly without cause.

One afternoon I telephoned my sister’s house to hear my children’s voices, and to raise a solution to our shared issue I hadn’t, till then, put forth aloud.

“Hi, Thomas,” I said. “Hello, Elliot. I hope you’ve been good.”

“Yes!” cried Elliot, brightly.

“No he hasn’t,” said Thomas. “He keeps stealing money in Monopoly. Auntie Liz won’t let us play anymore.”

“You’re the thief. I saw it. And you cheat on every other game as well.”

I smiled weakly, struck by the realisation that I missed their endless bickering, a miracle of sorts.

“Don’t fight,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something. How would you feel if we moved house somewhere nice?”

The boys piped up at once in eager delight.

“Yeah! When? Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I need to talk to Dad first.”

At this a rare quiet fell between the twins.

“I bet he’ll say no,” said Thomas, decidedly. “He says we made everything up.”

“Yes, well. Daddy hasn’t had the dream yet. He doesn’t know what it’s like.”

This puzzle above everything I’d fussed over incessantly since the beginning of the house’s siege on our sleep confounded me.

Each night my husband lay easily, untouched by the shades or by the hostile air that followed their arrival. I couldn’t think why the house had spared him, what we had done of which he himself was innocent.

“Maybe he’ll never have the dream,” said Elliot, drawing me back from my thoughts. “Maybe he’ll make us live there forever.”

“No,” I said, firmly. “Daddy can’t make us stay anywhere we don’t want to.”

It was the first time in my marriage I’d considered leaving Ryan in earnest. Arguments were not unusual between us—his dry, sarcastic humour, once amusing, had in adulthood begun to grate—but our disputes had reached an unpleasant note his better qualities no longer outshone.

It was three of us now against him and his denial. He would have to fold and agree to abandon the house, or else lose us all; this I told myself on the morning I returned to it from the refuge of a friend’s apartment, where I’d not dreamt at all.

Even the outer shell of the residence unsettled me now, long, narrow, and dark as a needle blackened by a flame. I couldn’t think why we’d chosen to live there to begin with, nor how we’d ever been at ease there.

Unlocking the front door, I entered the living room and jumped sharply at the hunched outline of a figure in the nearest armchair.

“Christ,” I said. “You’re up early.”

My husband was the type to lie in till noon, indulging in the perks of a self-employed existence with the glee of getting away with some underhand scheme.

Now, at 8am, he sat up, unshaven and ruddy eyed, clinging to a mug of black coffee with red-knuckled hands.

He looked very young, I thought, like an uncertain child awoken by thunder.

“You’re not coming down with something, are you?” I asked, sitting on the arm of Ryan’s chair to kiss his damp temple. “You’re warm.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” he muttered.

“Missed me, did you?”

“Well, obviously, but it’s not that. I was having these dreams all night.”

I straightened in surprise.

“The smothering dream?”

Ryan shook his head.

“About my mother. First time since she died, you know. She was screaming at me to rip up all the carpets in the house. Strip the wallpaper, as well. Not like she was angry with me for leaving the job for so long, but… a fearful scream. Stupid, I know—”

“No,” I said, pressing back my disappointment with effort. “I don’t think it’s stupid.”

“Well, it is. But I woke up sweating, even so. Couldn’t tell you what it was that had me in that state. Maybe it was the look in her eyes. I only ever saw it once, when she was dying. I try not to think about it. My Mammy, scared of death…”

Setting all my resentment aside I pulled Ryan into a hug. He crumbled in my grip, shivering with emotion I hadn’t seen in him since we were young.

I couldn’t bring myself to suggest the move, knowing the moment to do so had passed.

“So,” I said, at length. “Are you going to do it, then?”

“Going to what?” asked Ryan, sounding dazed.

“Strip the walls and carpet, like your Mum said.”

Laughing shortly, Ryan rubbed at his eye sockets with calloused fingertips.

“I might, you know. It’s about time, anyway.”

“I’m on board. I’ve always hated that carpet. I mean, brown? Vile. Probably not been redone since the nineties.”

For two days Ryan worked on the house, shedding the horror of his dream through that labour. I was out for much of it at my own employment, or else visiting the boys, still boarding happily with their aunt.

Whenever I returned I’d find Ryan still grimly scraping at the walls or cutting up lengths of carpet to be disposed, and found myself not wanting to look, as though he were disembowelling the cantankerous house like an animal.

My dreams those nights were the worst they’d ever been, long, protracted hours in the trap of strange figures upon me.

Ryan likewise seemed unsettled, getting up often in the night with some mumbled excuse, seeming to feel if not to witness in slumber the change in the house.

On the morning of the third day he started on the bedrooms, and being that it was a weekend I pitched in to help, thinking that redecorating would at least make selling the property rather easier.

While chipping away at the wallpaper I began to notice thick patches of black mould underneath, so much of it that I turned to Ryan in alarm.

“Jesus! It’s everywhere! We’ve been sleeping in this. No wonder we’ve all been ill. We can’t live here. It needs sorting out.”

Ryan grunted, occupied with rolling back a sheathe of carpet like a giant’s tongue to reveal another configuration of mould underneath.

I wiped my hands on my jeans and stood back from the work we’d done, wishing I’d thought to wear a mask to fend off the spores. The house was uninhabitable, must have been for half a year, a jail of crawling death.

As I looked I began to discern patterns in the mould, and felt myself grow faint in the eddy of fear.

“Ryan,” I said. “Oh my God. I can’t believe it. Haven’t you noticed?”

“What is it now?” he asked, but still he came to stand beside me, his gaze panning from the boards under the ripped-up dog ear of carpet to the naked walls, stained with the clingers of disease.

Slowly I saw in Ryan’s face an astonishment, then the grudging development of belief as he glimpsed what I and the boys had tried, without success, to make him see.

The black mould had formed the shapes of many bodies crushed together in mangled unity, as in our dreams.