An Exploration of the House

“It’s the greatest place,” Roman told me, sitting on the leather couch in my office. “Miles from everywhere, and it looks like something from a toy line. A victorian house, like a dollhouse. And there you can finally be away, like you’ve wanted.”

“It is what I sent you searching for,” I said, “but I want to investigate the place for myself. Just to be sure that it fits all my specifications. I need time to think, time both alone and with those that I call my close friends, so I can find a new toy, a new breakthrough that will keep Parisienne Toys from dissolution. The dinosaurs are not enough, and our generics aren’t quite as good as the other companies. We need something else, and above all, I need a place where I can withdraw into the fantasy world of childhood.”

“I, for one, don’t like it,” said Robert. “But Miss Gilda does: she poured over the photographs we took of the property, and kept coming back to one of a tire swing, over an old crick. What was it she called it? Arcadian. She said the whole thing seemed like something from one of those nostalgia books-- a perfect piece of the country.

“I still would like to inspect the whole place, first,” I said. I reached into my desk and pulled out my usual bottle of gin. I poured a glass for myself, as was my custom, and then offered a drink to each of my companions in turn. Roman never touched , at least in those days, but Robert gladly partook of my offerings. “So we shall go out to see it-- at once.”

I stood up with purpose, and we quickly strode through the office, down to the carpark, and out to my waiting car. Roman took the wheel, while Robert rode shotgun. I took up my place in the back, where I was sandwiched between the two women I claimed to love. On my right side, ever dependable, and still in the first romantic flashes of marriage, was my wife. On the left, her hand interweaving with mine, Miss Gilda. The whole time seemed golden. Even the light of the world, which had at turns before seemed both uplifting and depressing, seemed only like that light which you find a carefully selected winter day, which spreads the hope of spring throughout the land, and allows the touch of frost to press softly against lips which whisper the almost taboo words: “spring is coming again”. There is much of light, and much of darkness in this story-- so much that I must pause and consider the subjectivity of the movements of sun and shadow.

Why is it, then, that we consider the darkness to be the most horrifying of times? That the absence of light casts a pallor over the mood-- that not knowing what might be-- even five or ten feet ahead of us-- gives us such terror? Equally horrifying, in it’s own way, is the twisted morbidity of the light, which casts an equal shine on deeds both good and verboten. Are all deeds and massacres made at midnight? Or are they just as equally positioned sometime after sunup-- all the miserable things of the world go on in the light as they do in the darkness. Yet somehow the shadow, the very absence of seeing, makes our minds reach deeper into their very hidden recesses and fear more. I should far prefer to meet my demise in the daylight, or even dawn, with the sun behind me as metaphor than to meet some dark maker in the night and go not gentle, but unknown into whatever comes after these lives we live.

The roads before us into the country opened wide, and I could see that bucolic light shining down upon us. Yes, all the world then seemed profitable and useful, to rework the old phrase, and the gentle grazing of sheep on mile after mile of grassland, lush and verdant, assured me of the gentility and magical nature of the house to which we journeyed. At least, it appeared that way, even as we rolled past the great stone wall that separated the land that came parcel with the house from the gentle surrounding landscape. Yes, it was september, and the green was going gold again before falling away into the skeletal rot of winter. An old poem was playing over and over in my head as we watched the leaves blow down the long driveway to the house:

“Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.”

The little rhyme played over and over in my head. At first it seemed relieving, and then it became annoying: I could think of nothing else, even as we began to truly approach the grand house. The rhyme became singsong, and I imagined myself-- at a young age-- singing it somewhere in a nursery, rocking back and forth on a painted horse. Strange that I should have such a memory. Whatever I knew of the poem must have come much, much later than any scene of my childhood. And yet the horse, the rhyme, and the house all seemed to blend together in my mind until there it was: just before us-- the house.

It did not seem as it did in the pictures. It was not in such bad disrepair as to be unsalvageable, but it did lack the stately decorum that the images I had previously been shown seemed to require.

“We may have to fix it,” said Roman, “before we can truly move in.” The women and Robert nodded their agreement, and waited for me to say something.

Instead of answering, I leaned over Miss Gilda and opened the door. I waited a long moment for her to get out, and then I followed. I walked up the three flights of steps that made a kind of landing, and up to the front door, which was opened wide. It was a large door, inset into the house, the kind made of of many squares of small windows so that when you looked outside the whole of the landscape was divided into boxes.

“Do you suppose anyone is here?” asked my wife.

“Only one way to find out,” said Roman, as he called a hello down the long front hallway. But nothing and no one answered us. Only his echo came rushing back, and we pressed on, past the front hall and foyer, and properly into the house.

I have said the house was Victorian, and so it definitely appeared from the outside. It was tall, totaling about three stories, and containing a large dug-out basement as well. But there was a Spartan quality to the whole thing: before we moved it the halls all seemed empty, straightforward, as if just lying in wait to be lived in.

I think I must have been the first one down into that basement. Something in there, it still seems to me, called out and wanted me to go exploring. Though the place needed crews to come and improve the design and restore the feeling of a grand old house, it was a very soft and oily feeling in the basement that drew my attention initially. Some previous owner had left his experiments in gardening down there, and though they were dead, they had apparently at one time also overgrown the basement. I did indeed like the idea of the greenhouse basement, and vowed that if I should so restore the house I would indeed allow green thumbs to develop beneath it once more.

One plant, which I took to be a tomato, drew my interest, thought it was long dead. Some dark beauty in the plant called to me, and I dared to show it to each of my friends. Roman knew at once that this plant had been Belladonna, and I vowed that I should grow the same in my restoration of the house. It seemed to fit somehow with the place.