When I was very young my family moved into a vast Victorian town house that used to be a hotel many years before. It was in total disrepair.
In my child’s mind it was vast and wild. Paint pealed off every skirting board, The hedge in the front has devolved into a thick forest, and the floor boards were ripping up in whole rooms with only beams to walk across.
By any metric, it was a large house for a small family like mine. Five full floors slowly and painstakingly being reclaimed. Walls being broken through, the weeds and the vines being ripped down and snapped up. That was my childhood.
I remember being scared a lot in that house. Some of that was the violence of my family. Being the younger of two brothers in a family of four, between brotherly fights and the between “punishments” my drunk parents would give out, there were plenty of reasons to hide.
It was more than that though. The worst of my imagination found it’s home in that house too. I imagined what could be in that space beneath the floorboards or in those rooms that were too dangerous for children to be in.
I‘m laying here trying to remember the geography of the place as it was and I cant. This houses life as a hotel left it with this narrow corridors and inexplicable rooms in the internal part of the house connection the guest rooms on the exterior. I remember getting lost when we first moved in and being found crying in the dark of the maze that was the second floor. We had forgotten to turn on the circuits.
Even what the power was on, the bulbs were so weak, they barely lit the ground beneath. Walking to the bathroom in the night and looking around in the centre, seeing only blackness on either end terrified me. I always felt that when my eyes would finally adjust that I would see someone looking back at me from the darkness.
More than once I thought I saw faces peering through the windows, running away when I saw them. I don’t know where I got the idea but it felt natural to me that there’d be someone down below the floor board in the ripped up rooms hiding in the thick black shadows.
As my brother and I got older, we used to push each other to explore the house. Hide and seek, it, that sort of thing. We’d hide in the basement, this vast cavernous space with whole rooms down there formed by the foundations above. Gaps between like frames and bricked up windows to the exterior.
We’d hide in the darkness and try to find each other by sound and touch. I was almost delirious with fear. The chills in my spine throbbed like a tooth ache, I could almost sense his presence in the darkness by the feeling on the back of my neck. In the cool darkness, I could even feel the warmth of his breath.
Waiting would be easy enough. You’d go down first, the lights on. You’d find a place under the work top or behind some old boxes and you’d curl and wait. Then the light would go off and the other would come, quietly and carefully down the stairs. You’d hear them, silently as possible feeling their way through the darkness for any trace of you. I’d go into a trance. Something like a mouse going still as the fox sniffs through the grass. Then it would get close and you’d feel the hand coming near you, touching carefully, patting at the cardboard or brick on either side until GRAB. I’ve got you.
It was harder to be the searcher. All in the dark, all in silence, on all fours, I’d hear a muted breath, somewhere between fear and excitement and I’d change my path toward him and extend my hand out until just about I’d feel his foot and I’d grab hard.
We became good at the game. An alternative to fighting to prove who was stronger when it came down to it. Something we played in secret when our parents were out knowing they’d get angry at us.
Truth be told, we the sense of danger left us. We became too accustom to the darkness down there, too attune to sensing the other. We could almost walk standing up, still slowly of course, towards the other, right there in the darkness and through our hands out and - who is this? I felt the large warm body of a man in my arms in a thick dusty jacket. I jumped back and called out.
“Jaime, Jaime, where are you?”
Nothing.
“Jaime, I‘m not joking“ I could feel my voice shaking.
“I’m here.” He called out from behind me. “What’s wrong.”
We both ran up the stairs, I could almost feel the swipe of finger tips against my back. I turned to the darkness and saw the light disappear into nothingness.
We turned on the light as went back down. Surprisingly enough for my brother, he didn’t make fun of me. Down in the second room the stairs there was a coat rack with an old tweed jacket hanging on it. I went up to it and put my arms around it and felt the slender wooden beams through the jacket as I squeezed.
“No, It was nothing like that.”