The estate agent had left me a message on my answering machine, confirming our appointment to view the house the next morning. I sent him a quick text saying I’d be there and added that I was looking forward to re-viewing the property at my leisure. I’d been searching for a place for a whole year and nothing had really fitted the bill. Either the location was wrong or the price was too high or the feeling of the house was off in some way – too stale, too grey, too isolated. I had a very good feeling about this one though. Finally my search was at an end. And at the age of 48 I felt ready to actually purchase a property. It seemed like such an acquisition might signal a change in my fortunes, a new start. You see, I’d been through a lot in the last two years. A lot of pain and loss. Life in close up, with no buffers.
I turned up outside the property at 9 am sharp, as instructed, and waited for the agent. It was a lovely spring morning and I could see the wisteria and dandelions outside the house in its front garden, transfigured in the sun. It all looked very idyllic. The house sat on an incline, in the suburbs of the city and its elevated position, plus the fact of being surrounded by lush trees and bushes, gave the whole place a slightly unreal, magical air. Anyway, there I was and while I waited for the agent I examined the facade of the building. It was really a beautiful house, painted in off-white. And in the driveway blackberry bushes were spreading across the width of the lawn and they moved lazily in the early morning breeze. I tried calling the estate agent but his phone was switched off. I wondered where he was. Probably the traffic. I hoped that he hadn’t forgotten as I had other appointments scheduled for later on – I had to see my accountant at ten thirty to work out some of the finer financial details if the exchange of keys was to go ahead and then I wanted to have a haircut in the centre of town with my barber of ten years – a master of his craft, and a thoroughly affable fellow who I trusted with all my secrets, gripes and complaints in life. The pictures I had seen of the house had really taken my breath away and I had kind of fallen in love. The front room was split into four sections and had a glorious bay window that looked out into the front garden. Then there was the kitchen which had a massive sink, a beautiful set of units in metallic blue and an adjacent dining room with a magnificent, scintillating chandelier. Dishwasher, food disposal unit, microwave, the works. The kitchen also had a “vaporizer” though the purpose of this was as yet unclear …
The estate agent finally materialised and muttered his apologies. He seemed very excited to see me, and he shook my hand rather violently. I was surprised to find him capable of such physical strength. Then he fished in his pocket for the keys and we went in. As we crossed the threshold some thing, some essence, or was it a scent? a perfume? flooded my cerebral cortex. I tried to grapple with it, tried to identify it. For a fleeting moment a long forgotten texture, a long forgotten atmosphere was recreated. I had the impression that if I could just articulate what it was that I was experiencing I might then be able to retrieve the memory that I felt sure lay beneath it, but already these shards of the past were falling away and in another moment, whatever it was that had so tantalised me was gone.
We were inside now and I savoured the beauty and elegance of the hallway. It was indeed a magnificent house. I felt sure that I would be happy here – it was an instinctive feeling, the knowledge that the place chimed with some part of my soul. I was smiling, filled with waves of spectacular benevolence and excitement. But then I was aware of a frown of disquiet creeping up on me, out of nowhere. I tried to shrug it off. As I walked onwards, further into the house, the estate agent at my side seemed to reduce in stature, it was as if he had become a dwarf. I glanced at him furtively, snatched a glance. He was babbling on about something, in a half coherent jumble of sounds, repeated dumb mantras about ground rent, insurance, green energy, garage space, taxes, square metres, council tax. I didn’t understand a word but he kept on talking, undeterred by what I felt sure was my utter disinterest in, even disdain for him, at that moment. It seemed to me then that the agent was a trifling man, a man whose life was defined by very narrow horizons, very small goals and ambitions. Maybe he dreamed of owning a Volvo, or of having his own electric bicycle. I wished he would stop rattling on in that almost programmed, robotic manner. Indeed it seemed to me that he was at that moment like some kind of robot, unable to have any kind of relationship with the world around him unless it was one of dumb literalism.
I looked around me – the hallway, the reception room that it led to was magnificent and the early morning light flooded that space from all sides – the french windows and skylight in the ceiling were portals into this light universe and at every step of the way light literally gushed and drenched me in its criss-crossing rays. I had never seen such an abundance of light before within a domestic residence. It’s true that the vast, impeccably clean reception room and the abundance of windows and the silvery sheen of the ceiling and the serpentine elegance of the marble floor all combined to lend the place an intoxicating texture but it was the light itself that was quite unlike any other light – somehow it seemed to be of a different cast, literally as though a second, more powerful sun, a distant cousin to our own sun, had forged it. I felt as if I wanted to study the light under a magnifying glass and to dissect it, rip apart its molecules and enter into it. I felt as if one gram of that sunlight might have sustained me through an Alpine winter. I moved further in to the place, and listened for the sounds of approaching footsteps, though I knew that we were expected by no one; no host, landlord, or owner had arranged to meet us there. The house was extremely resonant and ambient. The acoustics of the place were miraculous. Maybe it was something to do with the wooden panelled doors or with the high beamed ceilings but I almost had the impression we were stepping into a concert hall. Strangely, inside that house, I felt as though existence, reality itself had been upgraded, as if a divine hand had reached into the nooks and cranies of existence and wiped away all grime and dust and now this was the result: a cleansed and high definition canvas of detail that blazed at me as surely as if the world was on fire. I was aware that the estate agent was no longer really interested in guiding me around the house. He just kept on talking. By now he resembled someone who has having some kind of seizure. He was talking unbelievably rapidly and statistics and observations kept pouring out of him. He was blabbering on about the parquet floor of the living room, the double glazing in the lounge, the mahogany dining table, the combination boiler, the air conditioning, the power shower with sixteen different jets in the en-suite bathroom… I followed little of it and I didn’t want to disturb him. I felt that to have done so would have been like disturbing a sleep walker and might have had fatal consequences. Anyway he seemed quite happy to rattle on in his little bubble so I gently took my leave of him and left him there in the hallway, a skeletal figure, rapidly diminishing as words cannibalistically claimed more and more of him.
As I pushed on, past the reception area, into another adjoining antechamber, then another one, smaller, as I pushed on, deeper and deeper into the house, it felt to me that the place was not so much a house as a vast metaphysical chamber of some sort, a giant soul laboratory. I didn’t even know what a soul laboratory was but I felt sure that I was in one. As I walked on I was watchful for any kind of predator or sign of something out of the ordinary but all was ordered, linear and tangible. I had the sense that the house was ruled by a very benevolent spirit, that its spirit was benign and placid. Or maybe that was just an illusion? A mistake? Perhaps the house had been the scene of terrible marital arguments and tensions. Perhaps accidents, crimes had taken place here ? How can we ever know the history of a place? Does its past leave any traces or are they erased as is the grime with the daily swipe of the brush and the broom? I was thinking about such things, suddenly keen to know the previous owners, to be privy to their own inner lives and thoughts and dreams. Didn’t their residence in some way reveal not only their domestic habits but also their souls? Were objects not merely receptacles, functional and pragmatic, but also transmitters of the soul? I lost myself in abstractions.
It was only now that I began to realise how enormous the house really was. It seemed to go on forever. Finally I made out, a long way off, a spiral staircase that was painted in black and white checks, like a chessboard. It looked very striking and regal. I strode over to it and began the ascent. The staircase wound round with tireless elegance and finally I reached the summit. As I emerged onto the landing I found myself in a long, uniform and narrow corridor. It stretched into utter darkness beyond the line of my vision. I was astonished by the contrast and the change from light to dark made spots of colour dance before my eyes and at first I felt as if I were blind. I stood there for a few moments, trying to collect myself and get used to the tenebrosity of the corridor. I scrambled around for the lightswitch but there didn’t appear to be one so I reached inside for my cell phone and switched on the torch light. Guided by this I began to walk down the corridor. It was extraordinary to think of the way the ground floor had been bathed in light, literally saturated, drenched in it, while here instead such darkness ruled. As I stood there I listened out for the sound of the estate agent’s voice. I could no longer hear him. It crossed my mind that perhaps some kind of misfortune had befallen him or maybe he had simply left the property and forgotten all about me. In any case I wasn’t too bothered and welcomed the chance to be free of him. The light of my phone was surprisingly weak and I wondered if this was anything to do with the fact that the battery was on the point of dying. I began to walk down the corridor. I realised that my eyes’ pupils had must have dilated in order to let in more light but then as I gingerly progressed I could see that in the high ceiling (which in that gloom I took to be wooden though I couldn’t have been sure) a small crack of light was discernible, almost as if a very fine army knife had sliced through the epidermis of the ceiling, so to speak, and now was letting in a dribble of light which very very slowly seeped out and started to diffuse itself along the ceiling like a damp patch from a leaking water pipe. I stood and watched, puzzled. What was the source of this other light? So different and cold and impersonal compared to the light generated by that “other” downstairs sunlight? That non-terrestial sunlight which was so ravishing and new and healing. This other light was so cold and sterile, like the light of an operating theatre, something between a flourescent sheen and a vascular abomination. I stood and watched and gradually the whole ceiling became enmeshed in it.
I went on walking. Time seemed to dilate and expand in strange ways. As I walked I began to be aware that the house was not really of this world. It’s difficult to explain but it had become clear to me that the house must have existed, so to speak, on the cusp of two worlds. Our own, the terrestial, earthy world, and another, unknowable, indeterminate world wherein the rules, the dimensions of space were different. It occurred to me that perhaps this new world I was now becoming aware of, being channeled into, was like a kind of crucible in which the shards and remains of another world – my own existence perhaps – had been collected and fused. It was as if my mind, its molten core, my own life, had shattered into residue and this house was now collecting that residue and reconstructing something tangible from it, giving it plastic corporeality. I can’t say how I knew all this but I did. And as I went on I had the feeling that I was journeying into my own self. The journey seemed to be without end; I had a sense that I would never arrive at whatever my destination might have been, that I was doomed always to embark in a series of recurring departures, but never to arrive, that actual arrival would always remain out of reach. As I walked on uncertainly in that infernal light I flashed on different scenes from my life and my childhood: then they spun around like clothes within a tumble dryer and the utter strangeness of it all hit me, as if for the first time. I could make no sense of anything. At that moment it all seemed utterly disconnected. I felt as if I was adrift on a vast sea without end, like a marooned sailor. And that sea was my life.
Uncanny sounds struck my ears. In the distance a metallic clawing, a sound like that of scaffolding being dismantled and steel tubes banging roughly against one another. Then a clatter of plates, they shattered and were then suddenly still. A murmuring, a child, was it? A new born baby? The house lurched and breathed and contracted. I had the feeling that it was growing, mutating into something else, becoming ever greater, perhaps even becoming a sentient being that possessed consciousness. As the peramaters of the place extended I wondered if my presence might, in some way, have been offensive to the house, perhaps I was offending it by not employing the right etiquette, or not observing the right protocol. Maybe I didn’t really belong in the house, maybe I was an intruder trespassing on its inner sanctum, perforating its inner skin. And yet at the same time I felt the house was mine, that it did in some way represent me, that I and the house were bound by some elemental law of nature. Maybe all that was required was for me to alter some subtle thing about me, perhaps my posture or my bearing or the rhythm of my walk and everything would be fixed, everything would slip into place and this tension, this dissonance would be resolved magically. It seemed then to me that I had travelled for hours in this one direction and that I would never ever be able to reverse my direction and find my way out of that new world, or rather that new dimension. At once exhaustion hit me and I felt my face and head drop.

I was standing directly opposite one of the doors. At that moment my cell phone’s battery died and the light went out at once. There was, however, enough infernal light in the hallway for me to be able to get my bearings and see things. Even though this new light was so vile I was in a sense grateful for it and I reached for the door knob and slowly turned it. I peered inside. I was at once aware of a sensation of heaviness in my shoulders and neck, as though I had just carried a ton of bricks up the stairs, or as though gravity had suddenly and inexplicably become greater so that it was now skewering me to the floorboards. I grew instantly fatigued and a little dizzy. Inside, the room was illuminated by perhaps two dozen candles and the room was swathed in swaying, undulating shadows – the effect was extraordinary and beautiful. None of this candlelight however reached the corridor and the room seemed to be its own self-contained, autonomous universe. A young woman – she must have been a nurse – was seated beside an enormous bed and her back was turned to me; she was not aware of me. I might have been a ghost in fact for all that my presence impinged on hers. But even though I couldn’t see her face or eyes I was aware of a tremendous gentleness emanating from her, an attenuated tenderness. She sat beside the bed, inside which an inert figure rested, supine, exhausted. It was a woman, an old woman, she must have been close to ninety years old and the candlelight illuminated her face. Her eyes were closed in sleep. Her face was wrinkled and worn; you could see that the suffering and worry and toil of a lifetime had left their insignia all about her skin and the contours of her face; and yet despite her exhaustion and fragility an ethereal beauty could not help but leap out of her blasted features, a kind of refined beauty which was like the chiselled form of a statue after the artist has removed all that was not the entity he sought to release from a block of amorphous and inert marble. The old lady was moving closer and closer towards death, you could feel it, and her limbs were exceedingly frail and emaciated, like the twigs of an autumnal tree. Then the nurse got to her feet and very gently caressed the old lady’s hair and forehead. The delicacy and grace of this moved me. I felt again the weight of my shoulders and my body sink deeper and deeper downwards. I very carefully closed the door and moved on down the corridor.
I came to the next door. I opened it. The light of a small shaded table lamp. A young man and a young girl was seated next to one another on a bed and the man’s face was turned downwards – as though he were studying the floor. The boy’s lips were moving very softly but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. It was obvious from his features that he was suffering, in pain and I had the impression that perhaps the girl had just told him that she no longer loved him. Then she very tenderly placed her arm around his shoulder, seeking to comfort him. He turned to meet her eyes and moved his face in closer to hers. They exchanged some words but again I couldn’t hear anything. He moved in closer to kiss her but she withdrew. Then it seemed very clear to me as I watched that this was the last time that the boy and the girl would ever see each other. It was somehow frightful. Terrible. Then the girl suddenly got to her feet, she was murmuring some words, but I couldn’t hear what she said. She walked over to the curtains and closed them and the room was plunged into darkness. Then she lit a candle and the boy sank down into a foetal position on the floor. The candle’s light grew more and more intense until it began to swell and grow and palpitate. In its all encompassing glare the boy and the girl receded and I forgot that they were there. I was held by the light – it seemed to be hypnotising me into submission. With an effort I finally reached over and closed the door.
I walked away. I was exhausted. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go on. But as I trudged along the corridor I became taken over by an insatiable curiosity – were all the doors filled with such heart-rending scenes? A chamber of dreams, a chamber of emotions that hadn’t been born yet, that hadn’t even been named yet? The house was some kind of menagerie, or mad uterus. The corridor was by now yellow with this infernal light and it was everywhere. The only way I can describe it is by saying it was as if a giant vat of ink had been upended over the corridor and now that ink was seeping slowly into everything, the wall, the ceiling, the door frames, the doors, the carpet. And that ink was the light. But a bruised and unwell kind of light. At last I stood before the last door. I opened it slowly.
Inside a little boy stood at a small wooden desk with an ink well. He was scribbling and drawing circles, totally immersed; he wore a little school cap and he had shorts on. Next to him, beside his feet a saatchel rested, his school saatchel it must have been, and it was made of leather. The saatchel looked familiar to me. Hasn’t I once had such a saatchel myself? The little boy looked aside for a moment, as though he’d heard a sound and wanted to identity it – was the little boy aware of me I wondered? Then his eyes came to meet mine and I could see, all of a sudden, that the little boy was me, as a child, that I was staring into my younger self, my self as I had been forty years ago. The little boy watched me. At first he seemed a little wary, but then his features relaxed and he said, in a very small, careful voice, “Would you like to play? Shall we draw together?” I smiled at him. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I didn’t really know what to say. Several different answers came to my mind but eventually I just murmured, “I don’t really know how to draw. But thank you. Thank you very much.” The boy smiled again, unbothered, and resumed his sketching at the desk. I closed the door very quietly. I wondered what time it was. And whether I’d ever be able to find my way out of there. As I stumbled along the weird corridor I could see that leaves were springing up out of the floorboards so that in a very little while the corridor resembled a greenhouse stuffed with plants and greenary and vegetation. I stumbled down the staircase but it was no longer really intact and I had to avoid some holes that had appeared in the place of stairs. As I tumbled down I happened to glance sideways and something caught my eye, as though I had snagged my coat on a hook and I was stopped short by it. A stripped, skeletal weeping willow; its graceful undulations in the wind had signalled themselves to me. When I glanced back at it again a moment later its branches were heavy with leaves, forming a lime-green epidermis all around it. Winter and summer had apparently just succeeded one another in the blinking of an eye. Time seemed then as protean and intangible as a soap bubble. Time followed its own vertiginous trajectory, until it plummeted and dipped out of sight. And then, in a flash, decades had dissolved, sucked down into an ellipsis.
The house was alive now with guttural noises and was murmuring and breathing and sighing and exhaling, it was shuddering inwards and outwards with ashmatic irregularity. Some kind of force, some kind of neurosis held it in its grip. I wanted to help the house, heal it somehow, but it was convulsed in cosmic agony. I didn’t know how to set it free, I didn’t know how to balance its darkness and light, its destructions and creations. As I made my way down the spiral staircase at each turn I felt my throat compacted in dryness and silence. Then at last I was at the end of the staircase and I stood there, shaking for a moment or two. The house didn’t seem to want to let me go, it was sweating and salivating and I could see that the floor and the walls were oleaginous with unknown secretions. In a little while I knew that these would reach me and I would be enmeshed in them, thrashing around like a just born caterpillar. I had to reach the front door before it was too late. Then I had an impression that I was wading through honey, that I was being held back. I watched to see if my shoes had had contact with the strange liquids but they were dry. I pushed on as fast as I could but it was all so exhausting, so disfigured. As I moved I could see in the distance the reception room begin to materialise and the light that reached me from the outside gave me a spurt of strength and energy, even as the walls and floor transmogrified into sponginess and porous contagion. By virtue of some freak continuity that had been allowed to prevail (despite the general atrophying going on all around) the estate agent was still there, far off, in the distance, exactly where I had left him, still babbling on happily. With a couple of more strides, a few more, maybe a dozen, maybe none at all, I made it to him, prised him away from his nucleus of animated decay, and we both staggered out into the emancipated day.