The House on Ashen Street

The house at the very end of Ashen Street was older than the others; that much was obvious, even through the rain that came down sideways. Its narrow windows were clouded over by a mix of dust and dirt. The iron gate bent inwards slightly like a sinner at confession. The newer houses along the street were white, actually white. They had cheerful porches and bright vinyl doors. This house stood slightly too far back from the kerb, buried under a blanket of trees.

She hesitated before she pushed open the gate. The old-fashioned key, blackened with age, felt heavy in her pocket, like it was weighing her down. She’d told herself that this move would be a clean slate, a chance to start anew. The air here felt old, damp. The way a church smelled after years of no worshippers.

The door’s joints wailed in protest as she pushed it.

Inside,  the hall was wide and dim. It was lit by the tainted spill of daylight that dared to peek through the cracked window. Dust washed over everything;  it glistened under the torch on her phone. The air reeked of mildew, with something sour, like a cloth that had been left in dirty water for far too long.

Once, it had been the most majestic house in town. She estimated the house dated to mid-Victorian times. The grand staircase sat in the middle of the foyer, the banister curved and worn with age; paint cracked off and covered in cobwebs. The walls were papered in a faded yellow colour, the pattern of roses just about visible in the midst of its neglect.

A large chandelier hung above her, the brass skeleton missing several of its crystal organs.

Her footsteps echoed as she made her way up the stairs.

The rooms were empty, or so she thought. There was a weird feeling in the air, a sort of residue, a presence that was just out of her sight. The curtains clung tight to the windows as if they were dependent upon them for life. They were stiff with the dust they’d woven into their dress. In one of the smaller bedrooms, there was a cracked porcelain doll, one eye missing and the other chipped. In another bedroom, she found a singular child’s shoe; the laces were missing.

At the end of the corridor, she found the mirror.

It was twice her height, framed in a dark oak wood, vines carved intricately. The glass was smoky; it reflected only her outline. Even then, she had to squint to make it out.

She leaned slightly closer, and for a moment, she thought she saw something moving behind her. She turned around sharply, only to be met with nothing. No one. Just the hush of the house.

That night, she dreamed of the mirror. In her dream, she was standing before the mirror, but her reflection was clearer now. It was clearer than it ever had been in reality; each of her details was etched with a precise cruelty that exaggerated her details. The woman in the mirror was her, but it wasn’t. The eyes were darker, rounder. Her mouth was in a tight line, no trace of a smile.

When she awoke, her heart was pounding, and sweat trickled down the side of her temple. The room was cold, the sort of cold that breezed through the floorboards. She thought she could hear whispering, a faint sound. By the morning, she convinced herself she’d just been making things up.

＊＊＊

The days bled together.

She cleaned the house, repaired bits of wallpaper and did odd jobs around the house. She had turned the house into a project, a distraction.

The divorce had hollowed her out. Her old townhouse, flooded with city light and noise, had never felt like her own home. The house on Ashen Street, however, seemed to recognise her.

Housework should have felt satisfying, but the more she tried to fix it, the more the house resisted her. The lights flickered as if it were storming outside, the boiler coughed and choked itself to death, doors that she had closed drifted open again even when she’d been on the other side of the room.

One Sunday, while unpacking a few boxes in the kitchen, she noticed a bit of paper on the far wall bulging as if air was trapped underneath. When she pressed her fingers lightly against it, it gave out and crackled. She grabbed a knife and loosened the paper to discover a wooden panel. Under the wooden panel, there was an iron handle.

A door.

Its hinges groaned when she pulled on it, a breath of cold wafted out, smelling of damp. Stone steps led downward into darkness.

The cellar was larger than she’d anticipated. Low ceiling, brick-walled, divided by arches. Broken furniture was scattered everywhere. At the end, shrouded in dust and cobwebs, stood another mirror.

It was smaller than the one upstairs, but similar in shape. Its surface was speckled with cracks; it distorted her reflection into two uneven halves. For a while, she stood before it, then she thought she saw her reflection lift its hands up. Her breath caught in her chest, she found herself raising her own hand to see what her reflection did.

As she raised her left hand, her reflection’s left hand stayed limp by her side. She fled, taking the stairs two at a time, and stumbled a few times. At the top, she slammed the door shut.

After that, the house began to change.

Or maybe she changed.

＊＊＊

The silence in the house grew heavier, and the air became more dense. The shadows that crawled across the walls grew thicker. When she walked down the corridors,  she could hear another set of footsteps behind her, half a step behind, but there was never anyone there.

The mirrors scared her the most. They shifted subtly, reflecting the rooms at bizarre angles. Angles that didn’t seem to exist. She began avoiding them; she covered them in thick, white sheets.

At night, the walls started to whisper to her; they spoke her name as if only a room away from her. It was always gentle, coaxing. It was a warm voice, despite the coldness in the air that followed each call of her name.

She told herself she was tired. Isolated. She told herself that her mind was slowly losing itself as she was left alone with her thoughts for too long.

She couldn’t seem to brush off the feeling that someone else was moving through the house with her, just beyond her sight, beyond touch.

A week passed by, and one morning, she found something behind the upstairs mirror.

The sheet that she had draped carefully over it the week before had been adjusted, and there was now a faded piece of paper tucked between the oak frame and the yellowed wall. She tentatively reached for it, and she plucked it out with her fingers like a feather from a chicken.

It was a photograph.

It showed a woman standing in the same hallway that she was now in; the photo seemed decades old. The wallpaper was the same, slightly brighter. The mirror was clean, and the woman’s face was pale and solemn.

It was familiar.

Too familiar.

She turned the photograph over in her hand; there was a smudged, inky sentence on the back.

For when you forget.

＊＊＊

She spent the next week searching the archives.

Old city archives showed the house had moved through several generations. Most of them were widowed women. The last recorded owner before her was a lady named Evelyn.

Evelyn had disappeared from the house in the 1940s. Her case had gone cold, she’d never been located.

She stared at the newspaper clipping in her hand. The photo of Evelyn looked exactly like her.

That night, she dreamed of the mirror again. Her reflection, or Evelyn, maybe, stood in the centre, smiling ever so slightly. She reached out to touch the glass, but it rippled like the pond in the garden.

＊＊＊

When she woke in the morning, there was a handprint on the mirror.

The whispers in the wall grew louder after that.

They came through the walls most times, but occasionally, the darkened mirror started hissing too. She couldn’t decipher the words. One night, she stood in the corridor, staring at the mirror, and she finally heard the words clearly.

Come home.

She moved backwards quickly, knocking over a large vase in the corridor. The lights flickered on and off a few times, and she thought she saw movement behind the mirror. Her reflection seemed to move with a will of its own.

She ran to her room and locked the door.

When she managed to fall asleep several hours later, she dreamt that she was underground. She was surrounded by wet bricks and darkness. A woman’s voice rippled around her head.

We forget so we can return.

The next morning, the cellar door was open.

There was a chill that rose from it; it was unbearable. It was metallic, damp. It smelled of earth and the wet bricks that she’d dreamt about the night before.

She tried to shut the door, but the hinges refused to move. When she pushed her weight against the door in an attempt to close it, she thought she heard breathing.

＊＊＊

She left the house.

She got in her car and drove aimlessly until the sun bloodied the sky. Her hands trembled; they were white as she grasped the wheel. She didn’t know where she wanted to go; her mind felt foggy. She felt like she was trapped in a dream-like state. She didn’t know if she was truly in her car or not.

The road seemed longer as she finally turned her car around and drove back to Ashe Street. The trees seemed fuller, and the blood-red sky had faded as life had been sucked out of the day.

As she pulled into the drive, there was a silhouette in the upstairs window.

It was her own figure, standing still, statue-like. It stared right at her.

Then, it raised its hand.

The gesture felt more like a warning than a greeting.

After that, the house seemed to have grown possessive. Each sound it made, from the groan of the floorboards to the water that dripped agonisingly slowly from the tap. Every sound sounded like it was breathing, like it was watching her.

＊＊＊

From time to time, she caught flickers of movement in the corners of the mirror and in the corridors. She saw figures in her peripheral vision that disappeared as soon as she turned.

Once, while washing her hands, she looked up and she saw her reflection smiling manically at her; her own mouth was frozen in a tight line.

She took the mirror down and threw it from the window, watching as it shattered against the gravel. The shards scattered across the ground, she looked down to make sure it had broken, and in the dozens of tiny shards scattered on her driveway, she saw the woman smiling back at her in every single one.

All of these women had her eyes.

＊＊＊

Sleep was no longer possible. At some point, she stopped counting the days that passed, the curtains remained drawn over the large windows, and the air got mustier.

She braved wandering around the corridors at night; she would mutter to herself to drown out the whispers that hid behind the yellow wallpaper. She would feel a strange warmth by the mirrors before her blood ran cold again; it was as if someone was standing behind the mirror, waiting.

One night, she spoke to the empty room.

“What do you want?”

The reply came from within the walls.

To remember.

＊＊＊

When the knocking started, she barely even flinched.

It came from under the kitchen tiles; it was slow and steady, like a small headache. It was as if the floor had its own heartbeat.

She counted the knocks.

One…Two…Three..Four…Five…Six…

Six knocks every time.

＊＊＊

After two weeks, the sound stopped.

She thought she was free. She thought that she finally had peace.

Then the footprints appeared.

They were wet, slightly muddy. She could see the marks where each toe had touched the ground. They trailed from the cellar door up to the mirror upstairs.

They ended in front of the mirror.

Her reflection stared back at her, its feet bare in contrast to her feet, which were hidden away in slippers.

She felt something inside her break.

She began to talk to her reflection; she pleaded with it. Occasionally, it answered her, not with words, but with looks. Mimicry. A tilt of the head, a wide smile, eyes devoid of emotion.

Sometimes, the reflection would move a second slower than her own movements. Sometimes it moved without her moving first.

Sometimes, it didn’t move at all.

＊＊＊

When the police found her diary, the final page read:

There’s a door in the mirror. I was meant to go through it; I had to go through it. She’s waiting there. Or, maybe it’s me waiting. Perhaps it was always me waiting.

＊＊＊

The house was silent.

The front door was unlocked.

Inside, all the furniture was overturned and damaged. Chair legs were lodged behind the sofa, underneath the mantelpiece. There was no sight of her.

In the basement, they found an old photograph lying face down in the dirt.

On the back, in smeared ink:

For when you forget.

When they turned it over, it showed a woman standing in the upstairs corridor. The same corridor, the same mirror.

But the woman’s face was slightly different.

Newer.

And in the reflection behind her, another figure was beginning to form.

 Lola is a poet/writer/60s music enthusiast from North Wales