Spooky Muse

I’m a writer but I’ve got to admit, I haven’t been writing as much as I should be. I can’t decide if its apathy or lethargy, but as the pandemic rolls on, and with working full time from home, and raising kids, and all of that TV that needs watching, its hard sometimes just to keep my feet off of the poof and the cork in the bottle. Whatever the problem might be, its absolutely not lack of inspiration. Like most writers I have a collection of high quality note books and journals stuffed from margin to edge, cover to cover, with million dollar ideas. I’m absolutely not short of ideas.

I don’t know what it is but the French have a phrase for it, that thing that we can’t describe or explain, je ne sais pas ce que c’est. I don’t know what it is that is stopping me writing. It could be Writers Block, I’ve had writers block many times before, but this different. Writers Block is what stops me writing when I’m sat at my desk with pen or keys and world enough and time, but this is different, I haven’t even wanted to sit at my desk and write. Insane as it sounds, its true. My desk is the comfiest place in the house. I have a big chair with cushions perfectly moulded to my arse. I have an ergonomically arranged keyboard, not an ergonomic keyboard, I might add, just one that I have placed on my desk in an ergonomic fashion. I am also positioned next to the heater, not that I can afford to have it on, being a writer and stuff.

By now, you’ll be wondering what I’m going on about, whether there is a point to this article. Well there is, because the literary doldrums have broken and I’m back on the keyboard. The Muse, Writer’s Santa as they call it down our way, has paid me a visit and I couldn’t be happier.

I like to think of myself as a ghost story writer, but writing ghost stories doesn’t come easy to me. To take an idea and craft it in such a way as to compel your reader to fear what words will unfurl but to read on nonetheless is a gift I don’t feel I possess, and so I have to work at it, and with Christmas just behind us, I’ve been exposed to many of the greats all over again, and some of the not so greats. Netflix has added ghost stories to its offering and I’ve been working my way through them. I quite enjoyed Ripper Untold, a view not shared by many reviewers, but I thought it captured the period quite well, except for the anachronisms.

I stopped after the first three anachronisms, but screw top wine, electric lamp, and halogen light bulbs in Victoria’s London is enough to take me right out of the story. And the less said about An English Haunting the better, with its 1960s setting and wine cellar of Aldi wines and barcode labels. But these production issues are their’s and not mine, my problem was my muse, and at last it came.

I recently had the house to myself for a few nights while the wife had surgery. When I say ‘to myself’ I mean with the kids, and the floppy eared bunny that eats doors, and all of the creepy crawly things that live in the former outbuilding that we call the bathroom. By house I mean our hundred and fifty odd year old terrace, with its winding creaky staircases, sloping floors, draughty outbuildings and the dank dank cellar. When a loved one goes in for surgery, one can’t help but be faced with our mortality and our frailty, and when left to ones own devices in a creepy old house, one can’t help but think of those hundred and fifty years and all of the lives that have been and went within these walls.

The first night that I was alone I could not settle until I had heard back from hospital that all had gone well, and it was after half past eight when they did. By that time the boys, most unusually, had gone to bed and were asleep, so I poured a glass of wine and enjoyed a few episodes of Shed and Buried, and, while listening to the sounds of the house settle for the night, I imagined what stories the house might give me.

The house is old, and predates things like indoor plumbing, so the bathroom isn’t upstairs, its in a converted outbuilding, and when it rains it leaks. We have a well developed list of repairs to complete.

Being in an outbuilding isn’t ideal after a few drinks, and midnight trips to the bathroom, after a bottle of wine, through the creaky narrow stairs, across the dark kitchen, and out in to the porch, gave me some inspiration I can use.

To get to the bathroom, you have to exit the house, entering the unlit porch that has been built to enclose the otherwise outside bathroom, and that porch has a door with a glass window. Sometimes, when the light is right, when the house is dark and the neighbour’s security lamp is on, there is a shape on that glass window, the shape of a figure silhouetted by the light outside.

This figure is a trick of the light, but it always gives me pause when I see it in the corner of my eye as I’m about to enter the bathroom, and I thought to myself, what if on one of those occasions I dismissed this shadow standing at the door as a trick of the light, it wasn’t a trick of the light. What if the shadowy figure was actually there? What if the door was unlocked? Its easy to be complacent in a sleepy little town such as ours. An unknown figures stands at the door and stares in through the glass and I just walk right by them and get in the shower. Not really my style of story, the physical threat of a live intruder, I’m more toward the other worldly supernatural horror, not least because ghosts don’t need a key.

That first night that I was home alone was unsettled and I got very little sleep, but I did get some, and I know this because of the dreams. Do the departed visit us in our dreams? I’ve heard it said before, but its impossible to know for sure, but during times of high stress, I often dream of my sister and this night was no exception. It was a silly dream, we were both roaming the streets and high rise flats of Sheffield looking for a disreputable man that could obtain a certain part for our car. A silly dream, with unrealistic locations and implausible acts, but I awoke feeling somewhat soothed and in no doubt that it was a dream, unlike the next one.

As I lay in bed trying to get back to sleep, I heard sounds from outside the bedroom, as if someone was creeping through the house. Although we haven’t been here long, enough time has elapsed for me to become familiar with all of the sounds of the house, of which there are many. Often, I am kept awake by a long slow creaking just outside the bedroom door, but I know this to be the door to the attic room. If it is left slightly ajar it will move in the draught from the roof window, creaking loudly as is rocks ever so slightly, and it will do this all night if you let it. But this new sound was different, it was like someone sneaking through the house, most likely just one of the kids going to the toilet or for a glass of milk, which was fine, they didn’t need to be sneaky about it so I decided to get out of bed and talk to them.

Immediately to the left of my bedroom is the narrow stair case to the attic behind that creaky door. I was expecting to find one of the boys on that staircase. My ears were telling me that there was someone on those stairs, but when I pulled open the door, the stairs were empty and the light was off, so the sound must have been coming from somewhere else, but before I could check I heard a new sound, voices.

Hushed voices, but it wasn’t the children, these were adult voices, with American accents. Someone was on a device and watching YouTube. I won’t name them because I’m not sure that I can, but there was a child sat on the bottom step of the stairs on the ground floor. Not the comfiest place to sit, nor the most well hidden. I was cross that they were up at this time, but I could understand why they would have difficulty sleeping, so I called them up gently and told them to turn off the device. They did so without a fuss, and once they were at the top of the stairs I gave them a kiss and sent them on to their room in the attic. I should have taken the device off of them, but I decided it was better to trust them. Before I got back in to bed myself I made another trip to bathroom and noted that shadow on the porch door was gone, and the neighbour’s security lamp that casts it must have been off.

The next morning I mentioned the midnight videos, but neither of them would admit to it. ‘We can’t use our Switches at night, you’ve set a timer, remember’ they said in unison. They were right. I was wise to their late night games and videos and had used the parental settings on the Nintendo Switches to lock them out after 7:30pm. I had no choice but to believe them. It must have been a dream, but it was so real. Dreams usually occur in dreamy places, like the unrealistic representation of Sheffield of my previous dream. Alright, the dream city is real enough at the time, but not afterwards. If the child on the stairs was a dream it all felt very real. The layout of the house was exact, right down to the boxes at the foot of the bed that need to be stepped over because they haven’t yet found a permanent spot at the this new house. I’ve never had a dream that real before, and I remember every detail. Every detail except the child’s face, the face is blank to me now.

And if indeed it was a dream, which it most likely was, why was there a bum mark in the dust? The stairs should be swept at least once a week, but the two minute job has been low on the priorities of late so needed doing. If I had dreamed the child on the stairs, why was there the impression in the dust of a small bottom? We soon established that it wasn’t any bottom that was present in the house. The oldest was too tall to comfortably sit on the lowest step, and the youngest was too particular to sit on a step that needed to be swept.

I have to accept that this was just a very real dream, and the imprinted bottom would have some other explanation, though not necessarily supernatural, fascinated as I am with ghosts and spooky matters, I can’t say that I actually believe in them. I know that the house is old and creaky, and the light does strange things. Since I’ve been aware of the figure I have started to see other outlines in the corner of my eye, but I know these are tricks of the light. The patch of light on my bedroom wall that grows intensely, and then darts across the room and out of the window is nothing more than the headlights of a passing car cast through the lead pattern on the window glass. The strange arc of light in the porch roof is just the moonlight scattered by the glass. My office door that opens itself at random just needs a new catch, and the figure standing in the door way is just my imagination, like that time I watched the movie Ring and imagined the creature Sadoko stood at the foot of my bed and could then no longer picture the bed without her, the imagination is a powerful thing.

So I got to wondering, for my story, what if these things, these spirits that haunt our dreams and dance at the periphery of our vision, what if they need to be let in? What if, in calling for my muse I have opened the door both to and from my imagination, and what if that door cannot be closed? No. When it comes to ideas for spooky stories, I have inspiration wherever I turn my eye.