The House of Ashes

1: SARA
 
Sara Keane was kneeling on the kitchen floor not long after six thirty in the morning, scrubbing the flagstones, when the old woman hammered on the front door.
     The stains. The brownish-red stains that were so faint she couldn’t be sure they were there at all. Was this the third or fourth morning she had woken in the house? Time had become diaphanous, slipping by without her noticing. Days became weeks as she looked the other way, weeks turning to months before she knew they’d been lost to her.
     She had not slept since they moved in. Not real sleep, not the warm dark that brings light, but the dim hinterland where bitter memories surfaced to torment her. Each morning, the chattering of birds outside the window banished the last hope of sleep before dawn. Each morning, she came downstairs in the milky-blue early light, passing the stacks of unpacked boxes.
     The house had stood for more than a hundred and twenty years, so she was told. It rested behind a cluster of ash trees, taking its name from them: The Ashes, carved in one of the stone pillars at the gate. Her father-in-law, Francis—Francie, as he preferred—had found the house. Bought it for a song and gifted it to Sara and her husband Damien. A fire had left the place a shell, but it had been rebuilt. The original stone flooring remained intact, worn smooth by a century and more of footfall, dark and glossy like the skin of some ancient creature. It felt sinful to walk on it with bare feet, and all the better for it, the stone cooling her soles.
     The first morning, however many days ago that was, Sara had come down here at dawn and made coffee while Damien snored upstairs. She noticed the stains over by the alcove that used to be a fireplace. An Aga cooker had been fitted where a wood-burning stove had once been. The stone in front of it was mottled with a deep red, as if something had spilled there years before. Clean it, she had thought. Damien would not tolerate mess. She had fetched a surface-cleaning wipe from a packet by the sink and got down on her knees. The stains seemed to fade as she rubbed the stone, though no residue was apparent on the wipe when she was done. Still, they were gone, and she thought no more about them until the following morning, when Damien was eating toast at the island in the centre of the room. She saw the stains, returned, as morning light brightened the kitchen.
     “Look,” she had said, touching them with her bare toe, seeking a change in texture against her skin but finding none.
     “Hmm?” He did not look up from his phone, one thumb scrolling while he sucked melted butter from the other.
     “Those stains are back,” she said. “I cleaned them yesterday morning, and now they’ve come back.”
     “Yeah?” He took another bite of toast, a sip of coffee, kept his eyes on the phone.
     “Look,” she said, “here.”
     Damien huffed out an impatient breath and put his slice of toast on the plate, leaned over on his stool, tilting his head one way, then the other.
     “Here,” she said again, tapping the stain with her toe.
     “I don’t see it. It’s just the pattern of the stone, no?”
     Damien wore his good Hugo Boss jeans with a striped shirt tucked in at the waist, brown Grenson brogues, his Canali blazer on a hanger, suspended from a cupboard door. He was starting work today, the new in-house architect at his father’s property development firm.
     Things had come together quickly after what had happened back home—she still thought of it as back home—in Bath. She had been raised there in the West Country of England, had met Damien at the University of Bath, he a postgrad architecture student, she in her second year of studying for a social work degree. She never imagined, even after they married, that she would come to live in the place he never ever called Northern Ireland. Always the North, the North of Ireland, sometimes the Six Counties, but never Northern Ireland. As if to speak its name would shame him. She accepted his reasons, even if she never fully understood them. Not that it mattered, she had thought, because they would never move there, not to that place. But then things went bad, she had come so close to that most wretched sin, and they had decided to start over. Here, where he came from.
     And it all fell into place, just like that, as if some unknown god had been waiting for her to take the overdose, as if the job for Damien had been here all along, as if this house had been biding its time until their arrival.
      “It’s there, look,” Sara said.
     Damien pulled a sheet of kitchen paper from the roll on the island and wiped his hands clean before balling it up and leaving it by his plate. He reached for his jacket, slipped it on, and came to her side.
     Looking down, he said, “No, I don’t see it. It’s just the colour of the stone.”
      “No, it’s—”
      “It’s your imagination. I need to get going. You’ll get some stuff unpacked, won’t you? I don’t want Da to be tripping over boxes when he comes round. You don’t want the place to be a tip, do you?”
     Francie Keane was due to visit this week to see how the work on the house was coming along. The parts the electrician needed hadn’t turned up, and half the light switches remained uninstalled, clusters of wires snaking from the holes in the walls, ready to bite.
     Damien didn’t wait for a response, and Sara heard the front door close as she toed the stain. When the sound of his car had receded, she went to the sink, filled the plastic basin with warm water and washing-up liquid, and took the dish scrubbing brush from the windowsill. On her knees, she cleaned the floor, the deep red blotches fading into the smooth darkness of the stone.
     She knew they would come back.
     This morning, as the world lightened, she had listened to the birds for a while before finally giving up on sleep. Some of their calls had become familiar, and she wondered what kinds they might be. Maybe she would buy a book, some sort of guide to the different breeds. Another item on the list of things she would do one day, when she got around to it.
     Sara wore a light cardigan over her pyjamas when she tiptoed downstairs, always soft in her step so as not to wake Damien. He didn’t like being woken early, and he would be sullen and irritable for the rest of the day if she disturbed him. Half-a-dozen boxes remained in the hall, filled with books and DVDs and CDs, waiting for the joiner to shelve out the alcoves around the fireplace in the living room. None of them were hers. The hall’s chill was deepened by the darkness there with no switches yet fitted for the lights.
     In the kitchen, Sara filled the kettle and flicked it on. When it had boiled, she warmed the cafetière—Damien insisted that it be warmed first—then spooned in the coffee grounds. As she allowed it to stand, she gazed out of the window over the sink, towards the front of the property. She watched the ash trees, looking for the birds she’d been listening to these last few mornings. Brown earth stretched away from either side of the driveway, dotted by green shoots of new grass, freshly seeded a few weeks ago. The early autumn’s first fallen leaves drifted and gathered in the sheltered spots. A river lay beyond the trees and the lane, down a steep bank. Perhaps she would go for a walk along there later; she had intended to yesterday but somehow the hours had gotten away from her, as was their habit.
     The warm and earthy smell of coffee reminded her it would be ready now. As she went back to the island where the cafetière waited, she glanced at the floor in front of the Aga and stopped.
     Those stains, returned. Of course they had.
     She got down on her hands and knees, scratched at the largest one with the nail of her forefinger. The nail was bitten blunt, but she thought she might be able to scratch some of the stain away. She rubbed the tip of her finger against her thumb, looking for residue, even a speck of some crumbling matter. There was nothing.
     Sara cursed and got to her feet. She went to the door at the opposite side of the kitchen, the one that opened onto a staircase leading down into the dark. Inside, she found the light switch, one of the few that had been fitted. The space below illuminated. She held the railing as she stepped down, ducking beneath the low ceiling.
     She did not like this room, finding it oppressive, the darkness of its corners unleavened no matter how many ceiling lights were installed. Not many houses here had basements, Damien had explained, due to the high water table. But this house had one, dug out decades ago and reinforced with wooden beams, reaching under the hall and part way beneath the living room. His father’s tradesmen had modernised the basement, put in waterproof membranes, a new floor, and walls all freshly plastered, ready for painting. It had been plumbed and ventilated and fitted with a washer and dryer, along with shelves for cleaning items. She fetched a mop and bucket from one of the dim corners, and a stout brush from a shelf, along with a bottle of floor detergent.
     As she climbed the stairs, Sara did not look back, feeling that she might see someone return her gaze. An irrational thought, but Damien said she was given to those.
     In the kitchen, she half filled the bucket with hot water, along with a generous splash of the detergent. She brought the bucket to the space in front of the Aga, and once again got to her knees. Sara soaked the bristles of the brush and sloshed water onto the stained floor. She worked the brush hard into the stone, the detergent foaming. Her temples and jaw ached, and she realised how hard she had been grinding her teeth together.
     After a few minutes of scrubbing, she wiped the suds away with her hand, showing clean stone, no stains left. Gone, finally.
     “Thank—”
     Before the second word could form in her mouth, a thunderous hammering boomed through the house, causing her to cry out. She remained on her knees for a moment, her mind scrambling to make sense of the noise, what it was, where it had come from.
     Again, the rattling, booming thunder. Again, she startled.
     Damien. Don’t wake Damien.
     As that thought flitted through her head, she realized it was the new front door. Someone banging hard on the PVC. She looked to the window over the sink. The sky still bluish grey, barely dawn. A pealing fear sounded in her. No one knocked on doors at dawn unless they brought terrible news. Sara got to her feet and went to the sink, leaned over it, peered through the window.
     There, an elderly woman, impossibly small.
     She wore a nightdress, a dressing gown pulled loosely over it, one foot bare, the other with a slipper half on. The woman’s eyes darted here and there, across the front of the house, window to window. Her face twisted with fright and confusion. It occurred to Sara that she should go to the door and open it, ask this woman what she was doing here, help her.
     Don’t wake Damien, she thought, the words pushing to the front of her mind.
     As she remained frozen in place, staring, the old woman noticed her. The woman stepped towards the window, limping. Only inches between their faces now, separated by glass, the old woman’s eyes wild and piercing. Her mouth moved, and Sara heard her voice, weak and wavering, but she could not discern her words.
     The old woman formed her right hand into a fist and hammered on the windowpane, wrenching Sara from her paralysis. Sara stepped back, retreating from the woman’s stare. The woman pounded on the glass once more.
     Help her, Sara thought. For God’s sake, help her.
     Finally, she moved, went to the hall and the front door. She pulled the lever handle, but it remained solidly in place. Locked, she remembered, and she ran back to the kitchen, to the bowl on the island, and grabbed the keys. Returning to the hall, she unlocked the door and opened it. The old woman was already there, pushing, pushing, stronger than Sara could have imagined, her voice rising as she forced her way inside, past Sara and into the hall. A trail of bloody footprints followed her. The insane idea to get the mop from the kitchen and clean the floor flashed in Sara’s mind.
     The woman turned in a circle, her burning gaze moving from floor to wall to doorway to Sara, her voice a panicked shriek.
     “Who are you?” the woman asked. “Why are you in my house?”