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The house didn’t like being lived in, at first.
It wasn’t something he’d noticed when he first got back; he couldn’t have stayed there when he was being hunted, and then he’d been too busy to even think of settling in, and then he just… hadn’t wanted to live there. It was, after all, his father’s house, not his. It just didn’t fit him, never mind the grief. And the more he learned about his father, what he had done, the more he started to resent every part of him. Including the house.
So it was a while before he realised the hostility wasn’t just coming from himself.
It struck him as strange, when he had a spare moment to think about it, that he was so unwilling to think of the house as a living, feeling thing. After all he had learned, and seen, and done, it felt almost petty to deny that what had been true of the town could be true of his house.
Still, it was only when he had no other excuse to avoid the place, and in fact had newfound incentive to live there (the kids deserved a real home, he told himself repeatedly), that he allowed himself to consider the idea that the house was avoiding him right back. But when it hit him, it seemed the only logical explanation.
With how often he’d started catching himself giving the building a wide berth, it was an effort of will to approach the front door, but he did it nonetheless, not letting his step falter as the façade loomed with particular enthusiasm.
He dismissed the impulse to try to loom back at it, reasoning with himself that that was probably not a contest he could win. Instead, he took Murky’s suggestion, and knocked politely.
The house didn’t respond, either visibly or audibly, even when he waited and knocked again, and the door was noticeably stiffer than he remembered when he decided to open it anyway. He left it propped ajar on the off-chance that it decided it didn’t want to open at all on his way back out, and hoped no more looters had their eyes set on his father’s property.
Inside, he was again hit with that familiar-unfamiliar feeling from when he’d first come back and stepped foot in the house for the first time in years; there was not a thing out of place that he could see, not a cupboard or a floorboard or a speck of dust, and yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness.
It might have been the silence that sat over the house, not merely a lack of noise but a tactile, church-like hush just shy of oppressive, that came from knowing that his father would never fill these hallways again. It might even have been that he knew he’d never think of his father the same way again, that the legacy he’d built was a character for the townspeople’s placation, rather than something that could be relied upon.
Or, it might have been much simpler. The house was the wrong shape. There was no other way of describing it.
These rooms that he’d taken for granted as a child, trusting that they were where they needed to be, seemed to an adult Artemy to have deliberately configured themselves to be as unnatural as possible. It wasn’t so much a cluster of rooms for living in as it was a single snaking hallway, a perpetual push for motion deeper in or further out, with shapeless, purposeless rooms added along the way as a minor concession towards habitability.
Worse, the attempt at efficiency laying out the hallway meant that it coiled in and over itself, flanked by many of the rooms, robbing the central path of natural light in an already darkly-furnished interior.
What usefulness the rooms had had during his childhood seemed to have bled away as it stopped being a family house, and started being a house only for guests and work. He could practically see his father’s growing obsession in the barrenness that lay between the front door and the innermost rooms that he used as a clinic, and finally, at the heart of it, that haunted, bloodstained bedroom.
So it was only now that it really hit Artemy that the house didn’t really hate him. Rather, it seemed wholly unaware of how to go about being a house.
That was, perhaps, a bigger job to deal with than he was willing or able to take on at the moment, but he was glad to have diagnosed the issue before he’d started doing anything to the house, much less moving in. He might, now, at least, be able to think of some first steps.
The obvious one was putting a real floor in the room that was currently open to the dirt (which, he realised, he would have had to do anyway, but he felt it was still important to know the context in which he would be doing it. A body is a single thing, after all, and a house is no different).
Unfortunately, that would take a while at the best of times, which these most certainly weren’t. He resigned himself to rationing that work out as the materials slowly became available (and affordable) and he figured out what to do with them, instead using his time in the house for smaller touch-ups: repairing wonky cabinet doors; moving furniture so it didn’t block off half of a room, or render other furniture unusable; and, of course, the long job of dusting and sweeping out the thin layer of dirt that had settled over everything.
He suspected that that particular task had been long in the making, though it was undoubtedly helped by the looters hiding in the floorless room, kicking up dust that should have been hidden beneath the floorboards.
It was after a few weeks of this, before he’d even really been able to make a start on the new floor, that he started to feel the house relax a little. Only a little; it still seemed loath to trust him. But the change was palpable.
The hall, while still winding and meandering, at once disorienting and restrictive, seemed to breathe out a little, becoming broader and less suffocating. It might have helped that the dusting helped give the wood back its shine, making everything feel a little brighter, but he felt credit should go where it was due. The house was definitely warming up to him.
He had worried that it would be resistant to his moving furniture, that it would make it too heavy to move, or somehow move it back when he wasn’t looking. He had also, distantly, worried that if the house had been offended, it might have decided to flex its not inconsiderable size to somehow retaliate against him. He had very deliberately not leant much thought to that possibility, considering that the job had to be done one way or another. But he was glad the issue never came up.
Even so, he decided to wait another little while before bringing any new furniture into the house. Better not to tempt anything.
When he did, he was glad for the wider hallways. It was a small difference, and the task still involved a lot of banging into walls and nearly dropping things on his foot, but all the same, when Lara insisted on donating him a couch as a house-warming gift and helped him carry it in, the house was distinctly friendlier about the intrusion than it might have been.
Fortunately, the front door was the only one they had to carry it through, as the alcove round the corner from the entrance had widened along with the hallway, and he had a mind to turn it into an open-plan living room.
So it was with slight ulterior motive that he insisted that Lara sit with him on his new acquisition and catch up for the rest of the afternoon. He wished he could offer her a cup of coffee for her troubles, but he had seen no trace of a stove in what he remembered as the kitchen. He wasn’t even sure where the fireplace had hidden itself, and would have refused to use it at this stage anyway.
(He wondered if it might be tucked away in the room that was currently boarded up, in which case he would assume that the house agreed with his assessment and didn’t want anything to do with open flames for the time being.)
The other obvious option was wine, or some other alcohol, but it was far too early in the day for that, and he’d much rather have more guests over for something like that. Also, he’d been through the house from top to bottom and hadn’t found anything resembling a dedicated booze cabinet, and suspected that there was nowhere he could reasonably put one, either, that Sticky wouldn’t decide to get into just for the thrill of it.
So all he could offer her was water, for now, but she accepted readily, and he thought perhaps the important thing was that they were sharing it anyway. That, he decided, was what made this a living room.
The following morning, he came back to find the living room windows had broadened so that they no longer threw thin patches of light onto the floor directly in front of them, instead providing a diffuse glow to the room. It seemed the house liked having guests; as he’d hoped, entertaining someone who wasn’t going to stay daunted it a lot less than someone it knew wanted to live in it.
He decided to take that as the house giving him its blessing when it came to both guests and windows, and took it upon himself to uncover the windows that his father had, for some reason, decided to board up or, in the kitchen’s case, put a lot of boxes and cabinets in front of.
He also, while he was at it, removed the boards from the door upstairs, which, if he remembered correctly, would have been the door to his and his brother’s old bedroom.
The house took to this with great enthusiasm, responding by shuffling the waist-high cupboards in the kitchen to the newly-made free space under the window, and in their old place, bequeathing a gas stove and work counter, along with a small sink on the outside wall.
He was almost certain that this house could not bring furniture into being at will, and surmised that the house had, at some point, confiscated the stove and sink, for what he could only assume was lack of use. Who knows where it had kept them in the interim. He decided not to think too hard about that either.
That left the floorless room as the only glaring problem left on the ground floor. He couldn’t make that go any faster, but he could perhaps figure out what that room was going to be once it was, in fact, a room.
Here was the rub: he had good reason to move both the clinic and the dining room downstairs, not least to separate them from each other (with a wall if nothing else), but only currently had space for one room to move into. He supposed he could try to wall it off into two rooms, but the clinic in particular needed as large a room as he could offer; even if he only had two beds, separating them as much as possible would be both more hygienic and better for his patients’ privacy.
He realised with a sinking feeling that he had just talked himself into using that room as the clinic, and therefore still had nowhere to put the dining room. He mollified himself, however, with the knowledge that the floorless room was still largely floorless, and so was in no fit state to become anything, which meant neither room could move yet.
This also meant, crucially, that the destination of the dining room was a problem for Future Artemy.
The years, and in particular his time back in the town, had taught him to put a lot of faith in Future Artemy, no matter how insane the proposal seemed in any given situation. There was just no use attempting to do what he couldn’t currently do, and so putting faith in Future Artemy usually actually amounted to putting faith in the universe to provide some neat solution that would slot several outstanding problems into a single join.
So, in preparation for making things as easy for Future Artemy as he could, it came time to do the unpleasant task of deconstructing the clinic, which, considering its minimalist décor of two (2) beds and one (1) too-short privacy screen, mostly meant stripping the beds and washing the sheets. Who knew when it had last been done.
He decided to use gloves and a face mask. Just in case.
For efficiency’s sake, he took the opportunity to wash the sheets in his and his brother’s old bedroom at the same time; while it made it more cumbersome to take all the laundry over to Lara’s, because he also had found no trace of a washbasin or a clothesline in the house (maybe it was hiding all the necessities in the attic?), it would at least use up less water to do all his laundry in one fell swoop.
It was while he was in the somewhat meditative state of the repeated scrubbing of the sheets that he wondered what he was going to do about his father’s old room. He didn’t think he could bring himself to use it as a bedroom, or to ask either of the kids to do so. And besides, it was far too small a room to comfortably live in (or at least it would be once he added necessary things like wardrobes and bedside tables). As it was you could barely move in there, even if the room hadn’t been so nakedly haunted.
And in terms of the furnishings, he wasn’t sure any of it was usable. The bed itself was in good shape, but he’d never be able to get the bloodstain out of the sheets completely, not after it had been dry for so long. And the desk and the walls just looked like they belonged to a room a man had wasted away in.
But he refused to board up the room. Painful memories were valuable memories, and he wouldn’t do that to the house. Besides, they could use the space. He just needed to figure out what for.
He noted with both interest and satisfaction that the house responded to the arrival of the clean sheets by, he assumed, once again relaxing; the coiled-up hallway was now an open, empty space from which the dividing wall had receded. It was as if the house had held all its tension in that knot-like hallway, and was finally allowing itself to slouch a little.
Of course he was glad the house was becoming less closed-off (literally, he supposed), but his interest was also piqued in wondering whether this newly created alcove would fit the dining table from upstairs. Measurements would need to be taken, and it would be a task to get the thing down the stairs, considering how wide it was relative to the stairs.
But he thought that an open-plan dining room would be a nice match for his open-plan living room, while also having the added benefit of being closer to the kitchen so that, perhaps, they could have a hot meal that actually stayed hot on the way to the table (along with not having to be carried through a room full of sick people, which could generally be considered a good thing).
So, when he asked Lara around to help him move the table, he decided that perhaps the house was ready to be introduced to the kids, and took them along with him.
It took some persuading to get Sticky to stop offering to help carry the table, but once it was in place (and then adjusted to be actually parallel to the walls) and had all its chairs, the four of them spent a wonderful afternoon. He was thrilled to be able to offer Lara her coffee this time, though it came out a little weak considering how out of practice he’d gotten with brewing himself, and she mercifully made no comment or even allusion to the seamless movements of the walls.
Murky and Sticky got to look around the upstairs at their leisure, which they had rarely been allowed to do when Isidor showed them in. They also, he realised, would probably never have been in the previously boarded-up room, which must have made it look quite intimidating from the outside.
He was proud, then, to be able to show it to them in its newly cleaned state, with fresh sheets and only the most persistent, sweep-resistant dust, and see them react with only slightly constrained excitement. He didn’t offer it to them explicitly just yet – considering how much more work needed to be done before they could move in, it seemed a little mean to bring it up so early – but he hoped that when he talked about how he had used this room growing up, they could infer his intent.
That, by his reckoning, just about completed the ground floor of the house (barring the floorless room, which now had the very distinct beginnings of a floor, and definite plans for when it was completed), and fixed many of the oddities of the upper floor. All that remained, then, was to decide what should go in the now vacant rooms where the dining room and clinic had been, as well as his father’s old bedroom.
Which, unfortunately, made it as good a time as any to begin the task of cleaning out his father’s room. Even besides the bedsheet, which he had decided he’d at least make an attempt to wash (for sanitary reasons, if nothing else), the rest of the room should probably be washed and disinfected just in case. Even with the plague neutralised, who knew how long he’d been here after he’d died.
He knew with reasonable certainty at this point that the house would not enjoy being disinfected – as necessary as it was, both for the residents’ and the house’s health, the treatment would be rough on the hardwood floors – but he hoped that if he promised to oil the wood and repaint the walls afterwards, the house would understand he meant no harm.
He had absolutely no certainty that the house could understand words, though, so, while he had told the house his intentions, he also decided to bring said pampering tools with him before he started moving furniture out of his father’s old room.
The house did seem to broadly understand his intent, and he suspected it knew that it had been wounded in that room, and grudgingly accepted the help, though it still visibly sulked while it was happening; the windows, which had widened considerably since he started working on the house, retracted with a suddenness that evoked sucking on a lemon.
He tried to provide soothing commentary as he worked, reasoning that, even if it didn’t understand his words, it could probably still hear him.
It was after he’d let the disinfectant set in overnight, and after giving the room its due massage, that he, regrettably, had to start on the furniture, which was still shoved, fairly haphazardly, in the next room over, the otherwise empty ex-dining room.
The tables, he could fortunately give a fairly similar treatment to the floors, though it took much less of his day to do so.
The bed, however, seemed to taunt him. He found (when he couldn’t work on anything else to avoid it) that the bloodstain had seeped underneath the top sheet, sticking it to the bottom sheet and drying them together. Even when he gently teased them apart and washed them to the best of his ability, as predicted, the stains were stubborn.
On the plus side, the stain on the bottom sheet was much smaller and not obviously hand-shaped, and the washing changed the colour enough that it would probably be usable. If he was lucky, everyday wear might gradually rub it away, or at least discolour the rest of the sheet so it didn’t stand out as much.
The top sheet, though… he was sure it would be wasteful not to use it. Certainly, it was perfectly safe to, at this point. It just didn’t feel right to ask anyone to sleep under such a violent epitaph. He knew he couldn’t do it.
It felt right, in a way, that something in that room should be kept as a memorial. That some part of it couldn’t be made whole again, after what this town had been through as a result, both of the murder and of his father’s actions. Painful memories were valuable memories, for more reasons than one.
So, when the sheet was dry, he folded it carefully, with the handprint on top, and stored it safely away in the dresser he had decided he’d use for his own room.
With that done, he brought Sticky and Murky over for another visit, this time to properly break in the kitchen with a breakfast. He made a mental note that he’d need to bring in a little table for the kitchen, since he thought it’d be a cosier place to have breakfast once they lived here, but for now they took it to the dining table, since it was only down the hall.
At their request, he even let them see the progress on the room with the partial floor, and his father’s old room, though he insisted they stay at the threshold. They peered in with interest, taking in the bones of the under-floor support and the smell of the newly treated wood, and he could see Sticky in particular itching to jump down and walk among the little pillars in the dirt. Always the inquiring mind.
But they both respected his wishes, and he noted that the doors locked themselves behind him when they were done with those rooms, and sent a silent “thank you” to the house.
The house, for its part, while perhaps nervous at first, took to the kids well. It had, of course, learned by this point that it liked having guests, but there was a vivacity in the hallways that wasn’t always present for Artemy on his own; it seemed to like having someone to nurture.
So he wasn’t at all surprised when the three of them came back to the landing to find that his old bedroom door had become two doors, the room having neatly partitioned itself down the middle, with another door connecting the rooms. He smiled inwardly; it was almost like the house was trying to persuade the kids to move in, though he supposed it had no way of knowing for certain that they intended to do just that.
It was during this little tour that he could view his handiwork from an outside perspective, for the first time being able to see it as if he were a guest, and he couldn’t help but be a little proud, and a little sad. Proud, because the house was blossoming, and clearly loved being what it was now. Sad, because it had been how it was for at least 30 years, and there was something a little funerial about knowing it’d never quite be that house ever again.
On the plus side, this new perspective gave him some new ideas about what do to with the remaining rooms. The old dining room would mostly retain its old purpose, and become a family room for the kids to relax in. The old clinic, if he also disinfected that floor and could persuade the house to wall it off from the family room, could make for his own bedroom.
His father’s bedroom had cleaned up much nicer than he’d expected; the floor had a new richness to it and the bloodstains had come up well, and the windows had once again broadened out, letting in thick bands of light between the curtains. It looked deceptively new, almost like it had had no history at all, though the little scuffs from where the furniture legs had rubbed against the floors helped with that a little.
He wondered if the room would be best suited as a guest room. After all, he still thought it was a little too small for someone to live in permanently, and he suspected that someone less close to his father might not even notice the slight remaining haunt. After all, it wouldn’t be them he was haunting.
It was after several more visits to the house with the kids that the three of them discovered a new door off the kitchen, tucked into the far corner, looking unobtrusive and innocent. So it was with raised eyebrows that he opened it, to find the unmistakable (but tragically empty) shelves of a pantry.
It was a little cramped, and he was sure it would look even more cramped once it was actually being used as a storage space. And, he thought, maybe this would be a good room to use to dry herbs, if he could find appropriately-sized hooks he could affix to the ceiling.
That would definitely make it look more cramped, but the good kind of cramped that felt lived-in, rather than the empty, oppressive walls he had first come back to.
The last addition (he hoped, at least) was the fireplace. That came after they’d moved in, although only just, and he still had never figured out where it had been hidden before. It certainly took up some of the open space he’d gotten used to in the ground floor, which he had quite liked. But he knew what a sign of trust this was from the house, and he knew what it was offering them in return.
Warmth, of course. Warmth, and love.
