Cinder House

“Very good, Ella,” said her stepmother. “Perhaps you’ll be worth keeping around after all.”

Ella felt her second emotion.

How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? With the fire in its hearth and in the wide black stove. Ella felt anger with her kitchen fires and felt anger with the fifteen stairs, especially the seventh, and she felt anger with the yellow wallpaper that had been half stripped from the walls of her old bedroom and dangled there for weeks while Patrice was in an argument with the decorators. Ella’s stepmother was in no hurry to turn the emptied chamber into a new study. The house had rooms enough. Ella’s bedroom festered like the socket of a pulled tooth. She had been pulled. Violently.

How dare Patrice? How dare she stand there in this place she only owned through murder, and look upon Ella’s ghost and feel no shame—and see nothing but a servant?

The anger surged and whipped through Ella. An awakening. She snarled and launched herself at Patrice with her hands outstretched, meaning to fasten them around her stepmother’s neck.

The two of them, woman and girl-ghost, passed through one another. To Ella it felt like a bucket of steaming suds thrown across a floor.

Anger mixed with growing fear now, Ella raced on her ghost legs downstairs, and before she could stop herself had passed entirely through the maid-of-all-work, Jane—who didn’t look up, didn’t shiver at all. She kept on humming as she ran a damp rag down the side of the grandfather clock, ticklish in all the creases of the wood as she sought out the stubborn traces of dust.

Ella sneezed. Jane didn’t blink or mutter a blessing.

Patrice came down the stairs, watching Ella with wary interest.

It had never occurred to Ella before then to try to leave the house, any more than it occurred to a skeleton to pick itself up and leave its flesh behind. Now that fear—a strange salty ephemeral fear, the only thing that existed untethered from any piece of the house, a fear that was Ella’s alone—drove her to the front door. She took hold of the brass knob and wrenched the door open, dashed down the steps to the gate which opened onto the footpath and the busy street—

And stuck.

She tried again, with more force. No use.

The boundaries of her haunting closed around Ella like a skin sewn from simple knowledge: this fence, the walls shared with the smaller town houses on either side, the kitchen door where the deliveries came. The damp stone floor of the cellar. And the tip of the iron cockerel’s crest up where the weathervane swung in the summer wind at the highest point of the roof.

Ella stood staring out at the world beyond the house, at skirts and feathers and leaves and flags dancing in a breeze she could feel only with wrought black iron. She screamed for help, she screamed the name of Miss Filigree the milliner who walked within two feet of her, and nobody heard. She took hold of the gate and shook it violently, but her efforts out here on the boundary were weaker than they’d been on the teacup and the door. The gate merely wobbled and the hinges creaked. It drew some glances from passers-by.

“Goodness, what a wind we’re having,” said Patrice, from the top of the steps. “It blew our front door wide open. Yes—good day to you.”

And then, quiet with triumph—“Stop behaving like a child and come back inside at once, Ella.”

Ella obeyed.

Her stepsisters could see her too, but that was all. Anyone who could be said to own the house could perceive the house’s ghost. It wasn’t long before Patrice dismissed Jane; they had Ella, after all. Ella kept the house because the house kept her. Ella kept the house because it was unbearable not to.

“This mantel needs dusting.” Danica lifted a grey-smudged finger. “Look at the state of it.”

And while Ella had not been fully aware of the dust before that moment, the order drew her attention unstoppably. Dust on the grand mantel above the fireplace where they stood. Dust in a tiny layer in front of every book on every shelf in the room. It was worse than inhaling dust had been when she had lungs, because there was no way to cough it out. It was an itch that made her want to writhe, and with every moment she stood there without acting, it worsened.

Ella got to work. The feathery blob of the duster danced on its own in the gilt-edged mirror on the opposite wall.

And so it went. Any orders to improve the state of the house—fix that shutter, oil that hinge, sweep that floor, strip the old yellow wallpaper and paint the room afresh—could not be denied. Greta and Danica spent a week in gleeful competition, interrupting Ella with tasks half done to issue new commands of their own, yanking her between two pains until she sobbed and the house groaned around them.

Patrice put an irritable stop to it in the end—a servant, she said, was only useful if you let them work. But before she stepped in, she watched with her sharp brown eyes, filing Ella’s suffering away in a corner of herself. She’d never been the warm, compassionate stepmother Ella had once hoped for, though neither was she warm with her own daughters. Patrice was made of tough, cool cloth—the kind of pristine cloth, Ella’s father once said to a friend, that made one think of spilling things across it.

Not every order had to be obeyed. The house did not care overmuch if the pork and flour and lard and vegetables in the kitchen ever became a pie for dinner. Neither did it care if Greta trod on her dress and a ruffle needed mending. Ella heard those orders and felt nothing at all.

“No,” she said. Exhilaration gusted up the largest of her chimneys. “Mend it yourself.”

Greta looked at her as one looked at a puppy who had stopped midway through a walk and was refusing to be tugged along. Ella’s younger stepsister had an uneasy amount of presence for a girl still a month off sixteen; it was something Ella had admired in her when they first met. The dress was a heap of taffeta and goldcloth in Greta’s arms, and her hundred-strokes hair was a paler gold again.

“What are you going to do? You can’t force me, and you can’t hit me,” said Ella. Greta would find another tedious chore to punish her with, no doubt, but it felt so good to deny Greta something she wanted. A heady squeeze of satisfaction that Ella felt with the casks and bottles in her cellars.

Greta’s prettiness squished into a snarl of annoyance. She marched across to the window-seat, dumping the dress onto the floor and snatching up her hairbrush from the dresser as she went.

She swung the silver-backed brush and smashed one of the tall, narrow windowpanes. She kept her eyes on Ella as she did it.

The shock was worse than the hurt at first. Then the pain bloomed, cold and hot both at once, and Ella swayed with it, groaning.

“Thought so,” said Greta. “I can’t hit you, but I can hit your home.”

“It’s your home, too.”

Swing, smash. Another stinging piece of destruction. Blood crept unnoticed down one of Greta’s wrists like a bracelet of scarlet thread. A drop fell to stain Greta’s linen skirt. Someone would have to wash that out.

“I can’t fix that.” Ella’s voice was scraping on twenty jagged tips of glass. “I’m a ghost, not a sorcerer. I can’t magic a window back together. Stepmother will have to send for a glazier, now, and you’ll be in trouble for it.”

She saw the answer in Greta’s smile before it was spoken.

“Why would I be in trouble? You broke the windows in a tantrum when I asked you to do this simple bit of mending.”

In life Ella had never been particularly stubborn. But a house was a strong and unmoving thing. She had roots and she had bricks, and she’d stood for years and would continue to do so. She could put up with a few smashed windows. The air that slid into this bedroom tonight would make Greta cold, not her. She would not spend her death as a drudge.

She hissed, “Mend your own damned dress.”

Greta blinked once. Still unheeding of the blood on her wrist, she stormed from the room. She was gone long enough for Ella to begin to savour the unfamiliar triumph. When Greta returned, the silver brush had been replaced in her hand by another object.

All three girls, when Ella was living, had spent a winter on the fashionable hobby of jigsaw puzzles: painting a scene onto a thin piece of board, then cutting it into fanciful shapes, to be pieced back together on long candlelit evenings.

The jigsaw itself was a small thing with a blade no wider than Ella’s smallest fingernail. Designed for delicate work.

A few specks of broken glass still glinted on the window-frame. Greta brushed them away with a fold of her skirt before she began. The frame was white-painted, a thin layer only above the wood beneath.

Greta took her time. The teeth of the saw scraped thoughtfully back and forth a few times before they took a proper bite. Her first cut was shallow, slow, flaying away a long sliver of tender wood.

Ella screamed outright. It was worse than the shock of the glass; it was far, far worse than the itch of dust. If she’d had a girl’s body and not a house she couldn’t imagine the same action could have hurt any more, not even with blood and nerves and all the things that made up a girl.

She took a few stumbling steps and made a grab for the saw, but physical objects preferred to be in the hands of the living. Ella’s fingers passed through Greta’s and the saw alike. Meanwhile the saw scraped inexorably back and forth in Ella’s window frame, and her scream turned to sobs as she hugged her own arms, vainly squeezing.

“Stop!” she gasped. “All right, stop, please stop.”

Greta finished the curve with a flourish, bringing the saw-teeth back up to that skin of paint. A long piece of wood came away in her hand. She held it up between her fingers until Ella, as the pain began to settle—as the house adjusted itself to this minor variation in its form—went and picked up the dress.

“So,” said Greta.

So. So the ghost of Ella now really was a maid-of-all-work: making meals, darning socks. She could brush and comb her stepsisters’ hair as long as they sat primly still, though she couldn’t plait it or dress it; hair was not an object while it grew from someone’s head. The rules for people remained the same. Ella could touch nobody and nobody could touch her.

Patrice was brusque and practical. Danica, who’d shown the most friendliness toward Ella in life, now treated her as a mobile piece of furniture. Sometimes she would watch Ella from the corners of her eyes, discomfort nestling like a smaller ghost in her expression. Then she would look back at her book: a door being deliberately closed. Ella had the sense that quiet, thoughtful Danica would have preferred a living maid and not a dead stepsister, no matter how much they saved on wages.

Greta, with her jigsaw, was creative.

Her favourite game when Ella lost her temper was to fetch a bag of lentils from the pantry and walk through the house flinging handfuls of them everywhere. The first time this happened Ella lost control of herself with sheer rage, her legs wavering, the image of her beginning to melt into the carpet. After a minute she solidified again, glaring, aching. If she were a better and more dangerous ghost, she’d be able to grind every lentil into dust and then grind her walls together too, bringing them close on tender flesh.

The fire gave a sideways lurch in the parlour grate and Greta’s smile widened. She tossed the empty bag to the ground and looked around, considering. The corners of her eyes spoke of fine serrated blades and there was smoke in the curl of her mouth. A shiver ran through the floorboards and up the walls.

Ella choked out, “I’m sorry I spoke back to you, Greta.”

“That’s better.” Greta nudged the bag with an embroidered house-slipper. “Go on, then. I can’t believe you’ve let the house get into this state. It’s embarrassing.”

Ella picked up the bag and began.

If asked on the morning of her death, Ella would have confidently claimed that of course she knew the house—every inch of it! She was born there, she grew up there. Nowhere else had ever been her home.

She’d known almost nothing. There was so much more to a house; and still so much less, once it had been learned in its entirety, than Ella would ever be satisfied with. She knew now all the poky storage cupboards in empty servants’ quarters and the half-finished racks for wine in the cellars. Never in life had she bothered to spend time in the attic full of broken chairs and boxes of old clothes. She had never passed through the raw attic ceiling to spend time up on the roof with its tiles the colour of her hair, staring out over the town: at clouds, at the occasional silhouette of a chimney sweep, or the specks of birds and bats against a flowing sunset river of orange and pink.

Most often it was late at night when Ella sat on the roof. Ghosts didn’t need to sleep. Once the kitchen was cleaned and any tasks left over from the day were completed, she had nothing to do.

For the first hour she would revel in the undemanding silence of the family sleeping. Then she might dance, alone in front of a mirror that couldn’t see her, pretending she had a partner, and missing her father. It had been one of her favourite things about him: if she watched him closely for the signs of the right mood, and asked in the right way, sometimes he’d smile and dance with her.

Or she might read a book from the collection in Danica’s room, or the library that had been her father’s study.

And then she would, again, have nothing but time.

At least on the roof the world opened up into miles of air, even if she couldn’t explore it. She tried to pretend, like a much smaller child, that she could make an imaginary friend of the cockerel on the weathervane; but he was as much a part of Ella as the brick chimney-stack. She couldn’t have any decent conversations with black iron that spoke only in creaks as it swung in the wind. Conversation with a friendly face was what Ella thought she might dream of, if she were still able to dream.

After some time she discovered that with sheer boredom she could fade herself out of her girl-shape and further into the house, becoming only the sense of the breeze against the shutters or the scuttling of mice in the walls. It was not sleep. But it was the closest she could come.

It was from one of those fades that she woke up, one night, in a place she had never been before.

She did think it a dream at first. How else could she have found somewhere unfamiliar, within the house she knew so well? A narrow space with a steeply slanted ceiling, perhaps two feet wide, dark and closed up.

She was, she realised slowly, in a boarded-up corner of the attic. It would have been easy enough for her to move out of it again: up to the roof, down through the floor to her own former bedroom.

And she might have, if it weren’t for the skeleton.

What had once been a human woman lay on its side on a thrice-folded rug which was stained in unspeakable ways—as was the dress that encased the bones and a few dried strips that could no longer be called flesh. The hair was faded and light, worn loose. Around the dead neck was a gold chain with a tiny golden heart, and the corpse was strewn with sprays of withered, brittle lavender.

Ella waited to feel an urge to tidy up. None came. There was a finality to the undisturbed air that was close to tidiness, as if everything here was exactly as it should be.

Another of Ella’s imaginings, since she turned ghost, had been that the house would show its magic in other ways, too. That a door might one day suddenly lead to another, larger world, somewhere she could explore without breaking the barrier-rules of her haunting.

No. There was only this: a small crumb of possibility that there could still be new things to discover even in the prison of her afterlife.

Now that she was in it, this attic space became part of her. Despite her gratitude for the novelty it was still unsettling, like discovering she had been growing an extra set of ears in the small of her back.

Ella dropped to her knees and reached out a tentative hand. After all this time—how much time? She had no way to know, or even guess—the dead woman was a thing-of-the-house and not a person. Ella could make firm contact with the rough knob of bone that had been a shoulder. She looked again at the gold pendant and some thought or emotion tried to rise uneasily to the surface; and then sank away, as if weighed down by something heavier.

“Hello,” she whispered. And then louder, “Hello? Will you—could you—wake up and talk to me?”

Silence from the bones. If they’d gathered themselves and sat up, Ella might have screamed. What she wanted was for another ghost to form itself from the rug, the walls, the cold dark, whatever fade it might have been not-really-sleeping in, and to reach out a hand that could grasp Ella’s own.

Nothing happened. Still, Ella stayed in the attic until the sun rose and breathed morning onto the roof tiles—her prompt to begin the morning chores.

She thought of the skeleton often, after that, though she was careful not to let her thoughts gather too much weight. She handled them as lightly as she handled the best glassware. It was so obviously a secret. Houses, with their great potential for hidden spaces, were naturally secretive.

If any part of the house’s own personality had merged with Ella’s, perhaps it was that.

“Hello? Delivery!”

The errand girl came through the kitchen door pulling the small wagon of groceries behind her. As usual, she pushed her glasses up her nose in order to read the note set on the table next to a small purse.

Here is the list for next week. Leave the receipts. Thank you.

The girl was always polite enough to knock and call out before entering, but she was also incurious enough not to comment on the fact that there was never a cook working in the kitchen, nor even a maid to take the deliveries and transfer them to the icebox. Today she contented herself with a glance through the doorway leading to the rest of the house. Through Ella, where she stood.

“There’s no one else home at the moment,” Ella said. “It’s just me.”

She might have gone on to say, How was the market? Does the cheesemonger still wear that absurd red hat, and wave it cursing at the stray cats when they get too close? Were the dancers from the ballet there to advertise the new season? Did they take hands with little girls in the crowd, and spin them until they giggled? Describe it to me. Every detail.

Tell me your name. Please.

But there was something distinctly horrible about speaking aloud and not being heard. So Ella held her tongue.

The girl unpacked parcels of meat and dairy and vegetables. Ella came and perched on the edge of the huge kitchen table and watched her.

This delivery was a highlight of Ella’s week. Just as Ella could be hungry with her eaves and the plaster between her tiles, and she could be angry with all the fires of her candelabras and hearths—so too could she yearn for any of the young, vividly alive strangers who crossed her threshold, especially if they returned on a regular basis, and she did it with all the longing of her windowpanes.

Ella had been just starting to wake up in her body when she was killed. She’d found herself stumbling over her words in front of prettier girls, and had lain in bed and touched herself, first shyly then frantically, at the thought of bare muscled boy-backs swimming in the river in summer.

As she was now, ghost and house, now that she sometimes found herself wishing in miserable frustration that Patrice or Greta really could hit her, if only for the brief contact of human skin against skin—now, how did she want the people she wanted?

However she could.

Ella thought about what she could do next time, if she dared. A note inviting the girl to sit down for a while and have a cup of tea. Arrows in chalk luring her deeper and farther into the house, until the street air in her lungs had been entirely replaced by Ella’s air. With her poor eyesight this girl might take a firm grip on the stair banister. It would fit in her palm, be squeezed by her fingers.

She imagined more. That sensible bun of dark hair unpinned, dimpled legs stepping free of plain skirt and petticoat, the girl walking naked and unafraid through all of Ella’s rooms. Her bare feet buried in the most expensive rugs, rubbing up heat, until she was driven to cool herself by stretching out on the bare wood of the dining room floor.

Ella shuddered. Two of the ladles rattled on their hooks and the errand girl jumped at the noise. She quickly unpacked the rest of the groceries, exchanged a handful of small coins for the purse and shopping list, and hurried to let herself out.

“Thank you,” said Ella. “Please stay longer next time.”

The back door swung closed.

And so it went. Visitors to the house had no claim on it and so no eyes and ears for its ghost. Beyond the hunger for touch, which left Ella feeling like a pumpkin being idly hollowed of flesh with a sharp metal scoop, there was the hunger for conversation with someone who did not despise her, and whom she did not despise in return. The hate she had for Patrice and Danica and Greta was a nurtured, flowering thing. She wished down to her skirting boards that they weren’t there at all; that one of these days they would leave for a shopping expedition or a dinner with Patrice’s investing partners and simply never come back.

One day, unexpectedly, Ella had her wish. Patrice announced they were going on a month-long visit to some cousins, and bundled her daughters into a hired coach along with parcels of gifts carefully chosen to impress. And then they were gone.

It was wonderful for five whole shimmering days.

But all the deliveries were held, as there was nobody to cook for and no orders coming in from the shops. The front gate did not click open to announce callers. There were no knocks on the kitchen door, even though Ella left it invitingly unlocked.

When Ella vindictively snipped one of Danica’s coral-and-ebony necklaces and let the beads go clattering across the floor—half for the noise and half to give herself something to do when the urge rose to gather them all up again—she sensed it for the first time: the downhill road between a house with a ghost and a true haunted house.

A house was made to have people in it. It wanted them there, even if it hated them. Without inhabitants she was only walls around an increasing, echoing wrongness. She was poised at the beginning of the road. By the end it would tighten her into knots, and then into something else entirely, something all of her shied away from sensing.