The police officer opens a kitchen cupboard and shines her torch over the sparse shelves. A can of soup. A little nest of crockery—a cup in a bowl, sitting on a side plate, on a dinner plate.
How strange, the young woman thinks, almost magical, the way a dented tin of peaches can reek of loneliness. On impulse she reaches for it. Ten, no, twelve years out of date.
Another cupboard is bare except for three torches upright in a row. Two are colourful plastic, like a child might get at Christmas, the other is substantial and rubber coated, the sort you might keep in your car. She sighs and sweeps a circle of light around the kitchen. Just the upstairs.
Halted, with the weight of one foot on the first step, she listens.
“To hell with this,” she says, and gratefully shuts the front door behind her.
This is the old Peters’ place.
Kids say it’s haunted. Realtors say it’s a challenging sale. Not that it’s derelict, having been bought and sold since Mr Peters’ time. It’s managed by a rental company now, who regret the decision.
Being empty at the moment, looking round isn’t a problem.
This front room is where teenagers sometimes hung out. There’s a way in through the cellar that kids seem to know about. One night, while they smoked cigarettes and drank beer and listened to Pet Sounds, all their flashlights went out. They never found the flashlights or the eight track.
Like everywhere else in the house, the stairs are uncarpeted. That was how Peters left it. Younger kids would dare one another to go up these creaking steps. They swear they could hear someone tut-tutting in their ear.
The empty bedroom at the back is where Mr Peters’ mother slept. A teenage couple came up here once to make out, but the girl soon left, because it felt like someone was watching them, she said. The boy stood at the top of the stairs, angry and frustrated, shouting after the girl. Then flinched when the bedroom door slammed behind him.
It’s how rumours of a haunting start.
Outsiders who rented the place always fled within the week, scared to come downstairs in the morning to find things rearranged again. Standing unoccupied, the landlord’s cheap furnishings would go missing. The rental company even paid for private security to park outside at night. They cut their losses when the CCTV camera vanished.
After his mother died, Mr Peters lived alone in the house, though his sister and family came to stay at Thanksgivings and just once at Christmas, the sister guilty because she hadn’t done more for her mother.
Mr Peters would wave goodbye from the door, smiling awkwardly, impatient to get back inside to clear up and put things straight again. After the brother-in-law got promoted, they moved to California and his sister only sent cards.
Driving away, his sister’s family couldn’t wait to tell each other how fussy he was. The kids would do impersonations and his sister would tell them off in a half-hearted way. She stared out her side window at the passing fields, guilty about feeling glad to leave.
Mr Peters thought he ran a tight ship: Monday was wash day; Wednesday for outdoor jobs, weather permitting; weekends, keeping watch.
The massive mahogany wardrobe and dresser in his mother’s room were still full of old lady cardigans and dresses and underwear. One day he bagged it all up. It was like letting go of a burden, and he wished he could be rid of the furniture too.
Standing in the middle of a completely bare room, he made a resolution:
Every day throw something away.
That was the winter of his books. Some from college, some classics he always meant to finish, and yards of science fiction paperbacks. He gave each one a chance, putting the good ones back on the shelf, otherwise tossing them into a thrift box. Perhaps his tastes had changed. Soon he was staring at full boxes and empty shelves. That was satisfying too.
He didn’t watch TV or use the phone, so they went. Then all those pointless ornaments. The more he got rid of, the easier it became. The far-away sound of a vase smashing into a thousand pieces. You don’t own things, they own you.
It was a two week struggle to empty the attic. He finally pulled the cord on the dangling bulb. It was cold as the Arctic up there and snow fluttered down from the dark. He closed the trapdoor on the distant wolfhowl and nailed it shut. He would never risk going up there again.
Like his mother, he kept cans of food and dried stuff for the end of the world, but most were out of date. After the big clear out, he never replaced them, still surprised to open cupboards and find the shelves bare, except for a security camera one time.
He kept a couple of plates, cups and so on, in case of breakages. He buried the rest, whole sets of floral china, in the woods.
Getting rid of the bed was hard, but so was the floor. Mr Peters smiled to himself at that.
He emptied out the house like a pumpkin. He kept the kitchen table and a chair. There was just one armchair in the front room. What else did a man need? he asked and was answered by the echo of bare walls.
Sometimes throwing things away was like picking at a scab. He could feel his life making him guilty and obsessive at the same time. He wandered from empty room to empty room, looking for items to no longer want. What have we done to deserve this? the things complained.
In time, even valuables lost their shine—a box of ivory dominoes from his childhood, that fossil ammonite, a photograph of him and a girl. Sometimes he woke triumphant with the knowledge that a precious thing could no longer resist him. He filed his mother’s gold wedding ring down to glittering dust and poured it out on a window ledge for the wind to have.
An old pair of binoculars that belonged to his father held out the longest.
Once he dreamed his sister’s grown-up children were poking round the house after he died. He’d no idea what they looked like now, but their expressions hardened at the stuff left behind for their inconvenience. They’d have to go through all this junk in case anything important was overlooked.
He apologised, even though he was supposed to be dead.
He started sorting through old diaries, letters and photographs. Not an easy thing to do, this severing connection with the past. He upended drawers over the trash. Shoeboxes full of utility bills and youthful poems made a fine bonfire, the soft consummation of paper snowing words of ash around the neighbourhood.
Perhaps that was why Mrs Court started dropping in.
Her mother had been friends with his mother, she said, though Mr Peters had no recollection. She’d moved back home after Mr Court died. Lung cancer, she mouthed.
Mr Peters recalled a shy girl with braces who lived next door. Surely she had not become this woman with her fountain of chatter.
“Well, I can’t stand here talking,” she would repeat.
She brought him leftover sugary desserts, because she knew men on their own couldn’t be bothered making them. Then returned to collect the bowl. Soon she was in his kitchen, setting casseroles on the table.
“I’ve got some spare curtains,” she said, looking around. “They brighten a place up.”
She gave him a brown ceramic hen for his eggs, because she had two, and when he didn’t answer the door, she shaded her eyes at his windows and waved.
“Mrs Peters always had such nice things,” she would say, disappointment rather than disapproval in her voice.
She often found him in his back yard, digging over a vegetable patch. It was good for a man to have a hobby, she said. Mr Court didn’t have hobbies, unless you counted smoking. Still, she missed having someone to talk to.
“Doesn’t need to be that deep for vegetables,” she told him, looking into the hole. Also, he should mind his back, because he wasn’t getting any younger.
When he filled in the hole, the ceramic chicken went in as well. He planted potatoes, beans and squash, though he could never bring himself to eat any of it.
Eventually a policewoman knocked at his door. Mr Peters cupped his ear and admitted he knew Mrs Court.
“But you’ve got the wrong house. She lives next door.”
Gazing round his empty rooms, then back at him, the young officer put her notebook away.
“She told me a hobby was a good thing. Come and look at my vegetable plot.”
Bathrooms like this, with old fashioned white porcelain, can look stark. The full-length mirror was embedded in the tiles, which is why it was still here when so much else had gone. Mr Peters was getting out of the bath when he noticed his reflection had a pot belly and a wizened penis in a nest of grey hair. With distaste he saw how veined and scrawny his legs had become.
All his efforts were pointless if this body betrayed him.
He ate the same frugal meal each day, and could be seen running at night, with a pained rictus and a curious, economical gait. He grew baggy and wrinkled as his singlet and shorts.
There wasn’t much left to lose now. He didn’t abandon the house, a possession which might have seemed a burden to some, but he reasoned everyone lived somewhere, even if it was the wilderness, or in the woods like Thoreau, or wandering city streets gibbering madness.
His flesh was melting away. His bones were easy to see now, and they would be next. Teeth are the hardest things to dispose of, but any that come loose can be secretly hammered into a tree.
It seemed Mr Peters hardly cast a shadow anymore. Puzzled, he shaded the sun with his hand and was still dazzled. He noted with approval that the world would soon have no claim on him. He was well on the way to becoming his own ghost.
The police officer came back in daylight with someone from social services.
They went from room to room, tensing at the thought of a body, but there was nothing, not upstairs, not in the cellar. Two old people, neighbours, vanishing like that, must mean something, she thought, though the investigation eventually languished.