October 6th – Emily Brontë – ‘And now the house dog stretched once more’ – Read it here.
I really liked this poem. I read it like a slow pan from the domestic scene at the hearth to the dinner table, with eerie music in the background.
Ah, a lovely cosy fire with a dog before it. The children are playing but they don’t seem comfortable being in the room anymore. The dinner table has a guest at it, with the mother and father. The guest is… creepy. There is something very wrong here.
I really enjoyed this one.
For this one, I thought about the mysterious visitor, and his ‘basilisk charm’. I thought I would share my take on otherworldly visitors and share a short scene from my story The Snow Child, which is available in full from my shop.
Alice crept down the stairs to her mother’s singing. She hadn’t sung a note since they had heard Jimmy was dead, not even in church. It should have been a relief, something nice, something familiar. Almost like it was all back to normal.
Instead, her mother’s song was brittle and off-key, notes sliding in and out of tune.
Alice’s eyes were sore and her head heavy – she had slept fitfully, waking at every creak of the cottage and every rustle against the window. She had the vague impression that she had woken to see a pale, ghostly white head behind the thin curtains, lit by the brilliant silver penny of the moon.
She was sure she had not dreamed the wet, bare footprints glinting in the moonlight as the curtains flapped back, or the icy breath that sent her spinning into nightmare after nightmare, but when she woke the floorboards were dry, and it was morning.
Her kitchen was the same, chairs and table in the middle, the clutter of jars and rolling pins and wooden spoons strewn over every floury surface, her mother doing a hundred things at once, and a fresh boiled egg on her plate with a slice of bread. The cast iron pots and pans were mostly missing from their hooks; all they could spare had been donated to the war effort.
She slid into her chair, making sure her egg and bread did not touch as she shuffled her chair forwards into position.
Her mother warbled her discordant song.
Alice focused on her egg, the hot brown shell cracking under the smart tap of her spoon, the tiny shards peeling away from the white membrane beneath.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something sitting in her brother’s chair.
It was staring at her.
Frightened tears blotted out the speckles of the eggshell. Her hand shook as she picked the shards away and scooped off the top. A sticky ribbon of yolk, stinking and bloody, dribbled onto the plate.
Alice sprang up.
Jimmy’s pocketknife bumped against her thigh. She thrust her hand into her pocket and squeezed it. The blade was stainless steel, folded into its simple wooden handle, and her fingers were trembling too much to click it open.
She couldn’t look at what was sitting in Jimmy’s place. She couldn’t look her mother in the eye, afraid of what she might see. She cast about for her school bag, dropping low so the table blocked her view and groping around on the floor.
It’s a dream, she told herself. A bad dream. And I’ll wake up soon.
The bag was against the table leg. Its leather was smooth under her hand, firm, dependable. She slid the strap over her shoulder and stood up, focused on the weight of it. She couldn’t raise her head.
Her mother stopped singing. “Alice, it’s time for school.”
Alice forced her lips into a brief, stretched smile, which people seemed to think was ‘sweet’, and dropped it immediately.
“She’s a funny little thing, our Alice,” her mother said, distant and dreamy.
Alice marched out of the house with her head down. Her stomach knotted and clenched.
Behind her, something followed, keeping its distance.
She could feel eyes on the back of her neck, and her scalp prickled.
The street was quiet. No curtains twitched back as she trudged to school, no sounds came from within the shut-up houses. Mrs Lankin usually washed the steps in the morning, but today there was no sign of her. Her milk bottles sweated outside the smart green door.
All she could hear was a strange clicking sound, like teeth chattering, and the slow, slithering steps of someone progressing down the street behind her, not attempting to catch her up.
Alice shivered, although it was a bright, sunny day, few clouds peppering the wide expanse of blue.
If this was a dream, it didn’t feel like one anymore.
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