I don’t know why I feel that I must confess this thing to you. Perhaps it is because I do not know you, and you do not know me. You have no preconceptions about me. We have not spoken before, and it may be that we will never speak again. For now, we have nothing in common except words and silence.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about silence, about the spaces in my life. I am, I suppose, a contemplative man by nature. I can only write when there is quiet. Any sound, even music, is an unwelcome distraction, and I speak as one who loves music.
No, let me rephrase that. I speak as one who loved music. I cannot listen to it now, and the quiet that has taken its place brings me no peace. There is an edge to it, a constant threat of disruption. I keep waiting to hear those sounds again: the lifting of the piano lid, the notes rising from the vibration of the strings, the muffled echo of a false key being struck. I find myself waking in the darkest spell of the night just to listen, but there is only the threatening stillness.
It was not always this way.
Audrey and Jason died on August 25. It was a sunny day, so the last time I saw them alive Audrey was wearing a light yellow summer dress and Jason was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. The T-shirt was yellow too. Audrey was taking Jason to swimming class. I kissed Audrey good-bye and ruffled Jason’s hair, and she promised to bring back something for lunch. Audrey was thirty-five. Jason was eight, just one year older than his brother, David. They died because a truck driver swerved to avoid a fox while he was coming around a bend, only a mile or two from our home. It was a stupid thing to do but, looking back, almost understandable. He ran straight into their car, and they were killed instantly.
About a month ago, shortly after the second anniversary of their deaths, a job was offered to me. A council far to the north had received an unexpected boost to its arts funding, in that it had gone from having no arts funding to having a little. Fearing that even this small allowance might not materialize the following year if it were not used in this one, the wise burghers advertised for someone to teach their citizens the rudiments of creative writing, to speak at local schools, and to edit, in the course of the year, a volume of work reflecting the talents that the presence of a writer in the town would undoubtedly uncover and nurture. I applied for the post, and was duly accepted. I thought that it might help us. Every day, on his way to school, David had to pass the place where his mother and brother had died. I had to pass it too, whenever I was required to leave the house. I thought that taking a break from it all might be good for us both.
But it wasn’t, of course.
Our troubles began about two weeks after we arrived at the new house; or, rather, at the old house, for it was a little dilapidated. The cost of its rental was to be paid in addition to my salary, and a local man was engaged to take care of some basic refurbishments. It had been sourced for us by an estate agent back in the city, who assured us that it was a fine property at a price that would not exceed the council’s budget. The laborer, a man named Frank Harris, had already commenced his renovations before we arrived, but it was still a work-in-progress. It was built of gray stone on two levels, with a kitchen, living room, and small toilet downstairs, and three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. Most of the walls remained unpainted, and some of the floors were still sticky with varnish. We brought some furniture with us, but it looked lost and uncomfortable in this unfamiliar setting, like guests who had somehow wandered into the wrong party.
Yet, in the beginning, David seemed to enjoy the experience of moving to a new place. Children are so very adaptable in that way. He explored, made friends, decorated his room with paintings and posters, and climbed the great trees at the bottom of the garden. I, by contrast, was seized with a terrible loneliness, for I found that the absence of Audrey and Jason was exacerbated rather than reduced by the strangeness of my surroundings. I took to writing in the garden, in the hope that sunlight might dissipate my mood. It worked, sometimes.
I can remember clearly the first night that it occurred. I woke in darkness to hear the piano being played in the living room. It was one of only a few pieces left by the house’s previous owner, along with the great oak table in the kitchen and a pair of handsome mahogany bookshelves that occupied twin alcoves in the living room. I arose, my head fuzzy with sleep and the noise of the out-of-tune piano hammering at my nerves, and went downstairs to find David standing in the room alone. I thought that he might have been sleepwalking, but he was awake.
He was always awake when it happened.
I’d heard him talking to himself as I descended, but he stopped as I reached the room, and so too did the piano music. Still, I caught snatches of his conversation as I descended, mainly “Yes” and “No,” as if somebody were asking him questions and he were giving out reluctant answers in return. He talked the way he talked to people he didn’t know very well, or of whom he was shy, or wary.
But the one-sided conversation wasn’t the strangest part of it. It was the piano playing that was so strange. You see, David never played the piano. It was Jason, his lost brother, who had played. David didn’t have a note in his head.
“David?” I said. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t reply for a moment and, had the room not been empty apart from we two, I would have said that someone had just warned him to say no more.
“I heard music,” he said.
“I heard it too,” I said. “Was that you playing?”
“No,” he said.
“Then who was it?”
He shook his head as he pushed past me and started back up the stairs to his bedroom. His brow was deeply furrowed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s nothing to do with me.”
The next morning I asked David, over breakfast, what he had seen when he was in the room. In the daylight, he seemed more willing to talk of what had occurred.
“A little boy,” David replied, after a time. “He has dark hair and blue eyes and he is older than me, but only a little. He talks to me.”
“You’ve seen him before?”
David nodded. “Once, at the back of the garden. He was hiding in the bushes. He asked me to join him. He said he knew a game we could play, but I wouldn’t go. Then last night I heard the piano, and I went down to see who was playing. I thought it was Jason. I forgot-”
He trailed off. I reached out to him and ruffled his hair.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Sometimes I forget too.”
But my hand was trembling as I touched his head.
David laid his spoon in his bowl of untouched cornflakes, and resumed his story.
“The boy was sitting at the piano. He asked me to come and sit with him. He wanted me to help him to finish a song. Then he said we could go away and play together. But I didn’t go to him.”
“Why, David?” I asked. “Why didn’t you go?”
“Because I’m afraid of him,” said David. “He looks like a boy, but he isn’t.”
“David,” I asked. “Does he look like Jason?”
David’s face froze as he looked at me.
“Jason’s dead,” he replied. “He died with Mum in the crash. I told you, I just forgot.”
“But you miss him?”
He nodded. “I miss him a lot, but the little boy isn’t Jason. He maybe looks like him sometimes, but he isn’t Jason. I wouldn’t be frightened of Jason.”
With that, he stood and placed his cereal bowl in the sink. I didn’t know what to say, or to think. David was not the kind of boy who made up stories, and he was a very bad liar. All I could guess was that he was enduring some kind of delayed reaction to his brother’s death. It was frightening enough, but nothing that we could not deal with. There were people we could talk to, experts who could be consulted. Everything would work out in the end.
David stayed at the sink for a time, then turned to me, as if he had decided something.
“Dad,” he said. “Mr. Harris says that something bad happened in this house. Is that true?”
“I don’t know, David,” I replied, and it was the truth. I had seen David talking to Frank Harris as he went about his work in the house. Sometimes he allowed David to help him with little tasks. He seemed like a nice man, and it was good for David to work with his hands, but now I began to have second thoughts about leaving my son alone with him.
“Mr. Harris says that you have to be careful with some places.” David continued. “He says they have long memories, that the stones hold those memories and sometimes, without meaning to, people can make them come alive again.”
I tried to keep the anger from my voice as I responded.
“Mr. Harris is employed as a handyman, David, not as a professional frightener. I’m going to have a talk with him.”
With that, David nodded unhappily, picked up his jacket and sports bag from the hallway, and walked down the garden path to wait for the bus. The local school, where David would begin studying in the autumn, was running summer events for children three days each week, and David had enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to play cricket and tennis in the sun.
I was about to join David when I saw another figure kneeling beside him, obviously talking to him, his face serious and concerned. He was an elderly man with silver hair, and there were paint stains on his blue overalls. It was Frank Harris, the handyman. He stood and patted David’s head gently, then waited with him until the bus pulled up and whisked David away.
I intercepted Harris as he opened the front door with the spare key. He looked a little confused as I began to speak.
“I’m afraid that I have to talk to you about a serious matter, Mr. Harris,” I said. “It’s these stories you’ve been telling David about the house. You know, he’s been having nightmares, and you may be the cause of them.”
Mr. Harris laid down his paint tin. He regarded me evenly.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Markham. I never meant to give your son bad dreams.”
“He says you told him that something bad had happened here in the past.”
“All I told your son was that he should be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Just that, well, older houses have histories, some good, some bad. And as new people enter them, and bring new life into them, the history of the house is altered and modified. That way, bad histories can slowly, over time, become good histories. It’s the way of things. But the house where you now live hasn’t experienced that kind of change. It hasn’t had time.”
Now it was my turn to look confused. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“The people who found this property for you didn’t check on its history,” said Harris. “It was just in the right area at the right price, and the local agent was so happy to rent it he didn’t see any point in spoiling a good deal by opening his mouth. Nobody from around these parts would ever have considered renting or buying this house, or even recommending it to a nonlocal. In fact, I was the only person who would agree to work on it. It’s not a good house in which to be raising a child, Mr. Markham. It’s not good to allow a child to live its life in a house where another child had its life ended.”
I leaned back against the wall. I welcomed its support.
“A child died in the house?”
“A child was killed in the house,” he corrected me. “Thirty years ago this November. A man named Victor Parks lived here, and he murdered a child in his bedroom. The police caught him trying to bury the remains down by the river.”
“Lord,” I said. “I didn’t know. I’ve never even heard of Victor Parks.”
“Nobody told you, Mr. Markham, so you couldn’t have known,” continued Harris. “By the time you’d rented the house, it was already too late. As for Parks, he’s dead. He had a heart attack in his cell on the very night he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Maybe the thought of an existence spent trapped in a small cell, far away from what was familiar to him, was too much for him to bear.”
Something changed in his voice. It tightened, as if fighting off some unwanted emotion.
“He was an unusual man, Victor Parks,” he said. “He worked as a verger in the church, and helped train the local football teams. In many ways, he was a model citizen. People respected him. They trusted him with their children.”
He paused, and those old eyes were filled with a remembered grief. What he said next caused my hands to tense involuntarily.
“He also gave lessons, Mr. Markham. He taught piano to the children.”
I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to hear this. It was foolishness. Harris had told David this story, and David had picked up on some details of it to create a fantasy that mixed up his dead brother and the victim of this Victor Parks.
I tried to salvage some semblance of sense from all of this, to return us to reality.
“All of this may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that these stories are obviously troubling David. Last night I found him in the sitting room. He thought there was a little boy at the piano, and that the boy spoke to him.”
Harris bent down to pick up his paint tin once again. I was about to tell him not to bother, that his services were no longer needed, when he spoke again.
“Mr. Markham,” he said, as he straightened. “I didn’t tell David what happened in this house. He doesn’t know anything about Victor Parks or what was done here. If he’s heard something about it, then it was told to him by someone else. David says he sees a little boy, and you think that he believes that it’s the child who was killed, but Parks didn’t kill a boy. He killed a little girl. Whatever your son is seeing, Mr. Markham, figment of his imagination or not, it isn’t the girl Parks murdered.”
I stood aside to let him pass, and the next question came so unexpectedly that I thought for a moment that an unseen third person had asked it.
“What was her name, Mr. Harris? What was the name of the girl who died here?”
But even as the words left my lips, I already seemed to know part of the answer, and I understood at last why it was that he had agreed to do the work on this house.
“Lucy,” he replied. “Her name was Lucy Harris.”
I did not ask Frank Harris to leave. I could not, not after what he had told me. I could not even imagine what it must be like for him to work in the place in which his daughter had lost her life. What brought him back here, day after day? Why would he torment himself in this way?
I wanted to ask him, but I did not. In a way, I think that I understood. It was the same instinct that made me find excuses to drive past the spot where Audrey and Jason had died. It was a means of maintaining some kind of contact with what they once were, as if some part of them remained there and would find a way to reach out to me.
Or perhaps I hoped that someday I would drive by and see them, however briefly, caught between living and dying, before they faded away forever.
For a time, David had no more bad dreams, and there were no more nocturnal wanderings. Frank Harris finished most of his work on the house and departed temporarily, but not before he tried to speak to me once again of his concerns for David. I brushed them away. It was over. The trouble had passed, and David was himself once more, helped by warm days spent playing with other children in green fields, far from the house in which a little girl had died. I taught my classes, and my own writing progressed. Soon David would commence school, and the normal rhythms of our new life would be established at last.
But the night before school began, David came to me and woke me to listen to the sound of the piano.
“It’s him,” he whispered.
I could see his tears glistening, even in the darkness.
“He wants me to follow him into the dark place, but I don’t want to go. I’m going to tell him to go away. I’m going to tell him to go away forever.”
With that, he turned and ran from the room. I jumped from my bed and followed him, calling to him to stop, but he was already racing down the stairs. Before my foot even hit the first step, he had entered the living room, following the sound of the piano, and seconds later I heard his voice raised.
“Go away! You have to leave me alone. I won’t go with you. You don’t belong here!”
And a second voice answered. It said: “This is my place, and you’ll do as I tell you to do.”
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a boy seated on the piano stool. David was right: he looked somewhat like Jason, as though someone had been given a fleeting description of my lost son and had constructed an imperfect imitation on that basis. But all of the good in Jason, all of the brightness, was gone from this being. Instead, there was only the shell of a boy who might once have been mine, and something dark moved inside it. He wore the same yellow T-shirt and shorts that Jason had been wearing on the day he died, except they didn’t fit quite right. They looked too tight, and there was dirt and blood on them.
And the voice wasn’t a child’s voice. It spoke in a man’s tone, deep and threatening. It sounded obscene, coming out of this small figure. It said: “Play with me, David. Come, sit beside me. Help me finish my song, then I’ll show you my special place, my dark place. Do as I tell you, now. Come to me and we can play together forever.”
I stepped into the room, and the child looked at me. As it did so, it changed, as if by distracting it I had somehow broken its concentration. It was no longer a boy. It was no longer anything human. It was old and stooped and decayed, with a balding skull and pinched white skin. The shreds of a dark suit hung on what was left of its body and its eyes were black and lusting. It raised its fingers to its lips and licked the tips.
“This is my place,” it said. “The children come to me. Suffer the children that come unto me…”
I grabbed David and pushed him behind me, back into the hallway. I could hear him crying.
The thing smiled at me, and it touched itself as it did so, and I knew what I had to do.
There was a sledgehammer in the hallway. Harris had left it there, along with other tools that he planned to take away at a later time. I reached for the sledgehammer, my eyes never leaving the thing on the piano stool. It was already fading away when I took the first swing, and I saw the hammer pass through it as it hit the piano. I struck at the wood and ivory, again and again and again, screaming and howling as I did so. I kept swinging the hammer until most of the piano lay in pieces on the ground. Then I took the remains outside and, in the darkness, I set them alight. David helped me. We stood side by side and we watched it turn to ash and blackened wood.
And I thought, at one point, that I saw a figure writhing in the flames, a man in a dark suit slowly burning in the night air, until at last he was dispersed by the wind.
Now it is I who have the nightmares, and I who lie awake listening in the dead of night. I hate the silence, but more than that I fear what may disturb it. In my dreams I see a thing in a ragged suit luring children into dark places, and I hear the sound of nocturnes playing. I call to the children. I try to stop them. Sometimes Frank Harris is with me, for we share these dreams together, and we try to warn the little ones. Mostly they listen to us, but sometimes the music plays, and a little boy invites them to play a game.
And they follow him into the darkness.