#8 of 100: A Trip Down Memory Lane
When Ilona decides to revisit her childhood home, she brings a spool of red thread so she doesn't get lost in the memories.
The offering today is closer to a stream of consciousness than a story, and perhaps a little too personal.
Ilona’s inheritance included the house on Dunlop Road. Eight years of messy memories had been crammed in there, and after a decade of avoiding the place she was ready to sort through them.
The house took a deep breath in as she approached, swelling into the space of its neighbours and rendering them tiny in comparison. Although it was keen to make its presence known, it chose to obscure its insides with net curtains.
Determined not to get lost in its labyrinthian folds, Ilona had come prepared. She tied the end of a spool of red thread to a lamppost outside, knowing its influence could never stretch that far. Once the knot was secure, she stepped inside.
The hallway was not quite as she remembered it. The hallway she knew had static, dull blue wallpaper, but here the blue walls shimmered and stirred like the surface of the sea. Muddy footprints had appeared on the carpet and squelched round the corner to the dining room, but she wouldn’t let herself be swayed by the house’s manipulations. She already had a plan for how to move through.
First up was the living room, but despite wriggling the doorknob this way and that, it wouldn’t budge. The sleeve of a coat on the rack by the door gestured to her with a commanding come hither motion. Uncomfortable with the way the house was already taking control of the situation, Ilona considered leaving. She could hire someone else to deal with the house, or better yet, ignore it for the rest of her life and leave it to some sucker in her will.
Still, she thought, things of value were locked in here. With gritted teeth, she approached the coat.
It was avocado green, water-proof, and far too big for her. Once she was close enough it reached out its sleeves and patted her on the face, as if to ensure she was someone it recognised and not an intruder. Once the patting was complete, the living room door squeaked open.
Three white marble statues sat on the sofa, arms around one another and grins exquisitely chiselled onto the faces. The brown sofa emitted a constant low groan at the weight of them. She knelt down in front of the figures and then recognised the scene: it was a replica of a polaroid taken from when she was five, the same frozen moment captured in another medium. She remembered once reading that ancient statues had been painted, but time had eroded the colourful details until all last generations were left with was the rock itself, ever further from the reality it was meant to reflect.
The cracking TV sat in the corner, and its cables slithered and hissed behind it. She didn’t want to venture too close in case one of them was venomous, but she managed to open one of the cabinet doors. Inside sat rows of VHSs, some with labels like “Cinderella” and “An American Tail”, others with “Some animal wizard thing” and “I think the bubbles were magical?” None of them seemed worth retaining, but the house had kept them nonetheless.
Beside the second sofa was what looked like a child-sized mouse hole, not quite big enough for her adult self to climb through, though she still tried. It was a hiding place, she remembered, but what was she hiding from.
As she crouched down and stared at the hidden nook, the living room door slammed shut and her thread fell limp beside her. She jumped up and wrenched the door open. Thankfully, the house hadn’t locked her in, but it had severed the thread. She tied the two ends together, and decided to investigate the next room.
Her father’s study came next. The lighting in it was all wrong - a spotlight highlighted a blank space of wall, and a floor light illuminated the underside of the desk. The house was trying to show her the wrong things.
Despite this, she couldn’t help but spot the fax machine. It sat on the large table that dominated the room, and spat out hundreds and hundreds of documents that littered the floor. As she moved towards it, one letter was vomited out so violently it hit an ornate mirror and shattered it. The broken bits of glass made the floorboards bleed, and its lifeblood stained the documents. The pieces of paper started fighting each other, aiming for murder by a thousand cuts. Ilona closed the door to leave them to it.
The downstairs bathroom door was closed, but a cannonball had blasted through it some time before, leaving a hole wide enough for Ilona to peer through. The projectile had struck the toilet, which sat quivering and overflowing with tears. Ilona considered offering it comfort, but feared the rest of the house would close itself to her if she did so, so she left the poor thing sobbing to itself.
As she moved away, her thread snagged on the splinters of the door and snapped again. Again, Ilona tied the two ends together so she would still find her way out.
There were more doors than there had been when she lived there, leading to more living rooms, more studies, more bathrooms. She couldn’t help but peek into all of them, starting to doubt the ones she had initially seen were the true form of the rooms. Another lounge had a vicious TV remote that snapped its jaws at her, while another study had a piano, its gentle, self-playing music providing a completely different atmosphere. Rooms led to other rooms without needing to go back to the hallway, but she soon got frustrated at not finding the other rooms she expected.
Finally, she came across a dining room. Figures made of smoke drifted around her, house-made replicas of extended family, friends, acquaintances, the police. None of them paid any attention to her, but the long price tags on every piece of furniture all gave her a friendly wave.
Then the table groaned. Wooden hands thrusted out of it, offering her plates of moussaka, bowls of olives, platters of fresh pain au chocolats. Jagged glasses of red wine were swirled in her direction, shards glittering on the surface. A melted bowl of gold rose up and solidified itself into a candle holder, a lit candle materialising atop it. Something rattled in a cabinet behind her: a little jewellery box, the fripperies discarded and replaced with all the tiny wax fingerprints she had stored there as a child. She pressed her fingers into one of them: it matched hers perfectly, even though she knew her fingers must have grown over the years.
The dining room held no bloodied corpse or screaming food, but every angle of the room felt off. The corners weren’t ninety degrees and the floors and walls weren’t entirely flat. Furniture kept shifting out of the corner of her eye. Keen to move on, she marched towards the kitchen.
Her thread stopped her. Somehow she had already come to the end of the spool, even though she didn’t think she had walked far. She couldn’t stop now, she thought, so she took off her shirt and cut it into thin shreds with a sharp knife that had appeared on the dining room table. The house was keen for her to explore more.
Once she had tied the strips together, she waltzed into the kitchen. As soon as she entered, she yelped and leapt back. A thin needle had jammed itself through her shoe and into her foot. She looked down at the kitchen tiles and saw it was riddled with needles, each of them so thin she could barely see them. There was no safe path through the room unless she cleared the way.
So she did so. She had lost track of time and lost a sense of the outside world and her adult responsibilities, so she knelt down and removed every last pin.
As soon as she did so, the fridge door miaowed like a cat in pain and spat out a birthday cake that splattered onto the kitchen floor. The rest of the room suddenly seemed as pristine as a showroom, the filth of the chocolate cake marring the perfect image. She knew the house hadn’t raged against her, but she still felt duty-bound to clean it up and maintain the image it clearly wanted.
Later she moved to other dining rooms, to other kitchens. Her spool ran out again, but she tore apart her socks and then her jeans to keep her investigations going. In one dining room wine or blood dripped down the wall, the house flickering between the two choices. In another kitchen, every drawer burst open with chocolate that batted against her closed mouth.
Finally, Ilona found the stairs. She had torn apart all her clothes to get this far, standing naked in the house. The house had seen her naked before,it already knew all her curves and all the marks it had inflicted on her. There was, she hoped, some true form of each room that she might discover: the one true study, the one true dining room. Perhaps higher floors would be closer to the truth.
The entire building shuddered with her every footfall on the stairs, and a deep rumbling noise stirred all around her.
Halfway up the stairs, the tied shreds of her knickers came to an end. Desperate to still explore the house, to not just find any bedroom but the one true bedroom, she plucked out the hairs on her head and tied them to the end of her makeshift string. If she just ventured a little further, she would find what she was looking for, she told herself.
She found her sister’s room first. She recognised it from the expensive clothes that oozed through the tiny gap at the bottom of the door. Inside it was like a jungle, humid and strange smelling, with clothes hanging from the ceiling like vines. It was far vaster than Ilona remembered, stretching the length of a football pitch. She didn’t want to miss anything, so she poked around all the drawers and thumbed her way through books with titles like “Clever Russian Novels” and “Thick Postmodern Masterpiece”. Everything was slightly damp and smelled of teenage sweat. Sometimes Ilona stepped on something strange and moved her foot to find some shed skin.
Another door, another bedroom of her sister’s. This one was clean and full of light, but had a floor to ceiling glass cabinet containing a bee larger than she was. It suckled at a dispenser of sugar water, and Ilona edged around to find another room.
Her thread ran out again. She stared at her naked body, trying to work out what else she could use to still find her way home. She had used every piece of clothing and every hair on her head.
A door sighed open. While still clinging onto her taut chain of hair, clothes and thread, Ilona could only see a small sliver of the room beyond, but knew that it was her bedroom. A variation of her bedroom, at least. The radio inside played familiar music she couldn’t quite name.
She dropped her thread. She would only be in there a moment, she thought. She couldn’t possibly lose her way.
Beautiful prose and an excellent sense of creeping horror. I wouldn't refer to it as a stream of consciousness, it has a consistent plot structure and carries the reader from a zone of comfort, into the unknown, to the quest objective before ending with a cliffhanger.
Wonderfully solid piece, it has aspects of the original Theseus and the Minotaur legend (where it wasn't a maze, the palace was just huge and confused), Narnia and The Spiderwick Chronicles.
I really enjoyed the personality of the house, it made me wonder how and why it was created? Was it supernatural born from the strong emotions of past inhabitants (like Murder House or The Magic Cottage) or was it built that was with defences (Castle Greyskull) or as a nursing house that went wrong and became over zealous or confused about its duties (Mrs Butters in Supernatural).
I did think the plucking of the hair was a bit much as it would require braiding to be of use and as a bald man I treasure my few remaining curlies. But it also showed that the moment that happened she was lost and no longer had perspective or control.
As you can see from the long comment, I want more!
- Where did it come from?
- What happened to the sister?
- Why did Ilona leave?
- What is she looking for that she is willing to risk everything to find?