Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose 2024 – Highly Commended
The house was hidden from the street, so she almost missed the turn. The driveway was a thick tunnel of leaves, the switch from sunlight to shadow sudden, and then she was beyond, in the tree-lined clearing. After she parked the car, she sat behind the wheel, taking in the overgrown lawn, the cobwebs at the windows. Everything seemed smaller, dirtier, than when she’d last visited. It had been years, and time turned memory rosy, she supposed, though her memories of the house rattled in their setting. She wished her brother and sister had come with her, but she hadn’t wanted to push.
She sighed and got out of the car. Waded through the palimpsest of memory. The child version of herself, and her siblings: a red-headed boy just grown out of toddler-hood, a mud-streaked girl. Their parents, boring and adult with their afternoon naps and languid meals. How it all had changed.
Her family had spent nearly every summer of her childhood at the house. She remembered breakfast in the back garden, facing the estuary. Birdsong. At low tide, the sea retreating to expose swathes of mud that crawled with tiny crabs, and oyster catchers sticking their beaks between the rocks. Swimming against the current or floating to the mud flats at the end of the estuary. Evening skies like smears of pink and blue.
Alone, she went through the house opening windows, breathing in pine and dust and old books. The house was a time capsule of an earlier century, all shades of amber and saffron, the living room lined with bookshelves and decorated with faded rocking chairs, an out-of-tune piano in the corner.
She put her bags in the master bedroom. She had never slept there before – last time it was the room down the hall – but she did not want to think about that room now.
Once everything was unloaded, she slipped the key into her pocket and crossed the garden down to the beach. The tide was flowing in, but she could still walk to the village without getting her feet wet.
The village’s main attraction had been the aquarium, which they had visited with wonder, sticking their hands into the touch pools and pressing noses against the magnified glass to spy the seahorses and the octopus. However, the aquarium had burned down several years ago; her sister had called when it was in the paper, and they had both cried imagining the little wet bodies shrivelling under the flames. She avoided the hole where the aquarium had been and wandered to the wharf, where kids were jumping into the water.
Why hadn’t her siblings wanted to visit the house with her? Perhaps they didn’t remember as much as she did. Or perhaps it was because of what had happened. The event had become worn in her mind, and they were now entangled: the house and her family, and the summer everything changed.
*
The master bedroom faced the estuary. With the lights off, she could see the current coming back in, swift and silent. A tree scratched against the window, and she pulled the curtains shut, blocking out the flowing black water.
In the dark, the memory resurfaced. The first night of that last summer, 11 years old and big enough for her own room, she had heard a scritch like someone wanting to be let in. As she lay there, sweating in the dark, the closet door began to creak, creak. She switched on the light and checked the closet doors were still shut. They were immobile. Her heart pounded and she turned the light off. There was another creak, like a door opening from the inside. The closet led to the attic, and she had always feared that dark expanse, the secret room within the walls of the house, big enough for a body.
Alone in the house, she shuddered. She focused on the following morning, how she would sit in the garden with a strong coffee and watch the tide come in. But the house curled through her dreams, filled with extra rooms and elongated hallways and strange presences, and soon, memory and dream overlapped.
*
Being the oldest, she was trusted to look after the little ones. Dad was napping, Mum engrossed in a book in the living room, and her brother and sister were playing hide and seek, sprinting through the garden and the house. She’d been sick of them climbing over her, and Mum had said ‘please, just watch them for the afternoon’, and so she’d delegated herself as finder, and said she’d count to 100. When they ran to hide, she stopped counting and just sat on the swing, enjoying her freedom.
Mum had come into the garden later, asking where the little ones were. She shrugged. Said they were hiding. Then her sister had crawled out from behind the curtains in the living room, whining that she wasn’t playing the game properly. Mum asked where their younger brother was, but her sister didn’t know either They hunted for him, through the house and the garden, up the driveway. Mum woke Dad from his nap, and sent him up the beach, looking. The tide was rising, the water roaring. Mum ran up the street, and her sister searched the house again. She stayed in the garden, her stomach churning, because she knew she’d done a bad thing. A very very bad thing.
Mum came back. None of the neighbours had seen him. Dad was pacing the shore with a phone clutched to his ear. Her sister cried and she tried to comfort her, but there was a voice in her head snarling your fault, your fault. Neighbours were combing the beach, trawling their boats up the estuary towards the sea.
Shadows lengthened and still she sat in the back garden, her stomach wriggling like it was filled with snakes.
Trying to be brave, she called to her sister, ‘Come on, let’s look inside again.’
They searched the house, checking all the cupboards and corners until they reached the end bedroom. The haunted room, the one she’d refused to sleep in since she’d heard scraping at the window. The closet door was cracked. Her sister opened it before she could beg her not to, and they gazed up at the attic entrance. Even just looking at the dark pit of it was wrong.
She noticed some of the boxes looked pushed around, an old jumper fallen to the floor.
‘Maybe he tried to climb up there and got stuck?’ her sister suggested.
She knew what she had to do. Eyeing the shelves and feeling sick, she began to climb. There was no response, but maybe he was afraid. Maybe it was really dusty up there, or a possum had got him, or –
At the top, she paused, her hands tingling as she stared into the crawl space.
‘Is anyone there?’
There was a snuffle, like an animal. Startled, she fell backwards onto the floor. From the attic, there was a knock, then thud, thud, like bones being dragged over wood. She and her sister screamed as a pair of grubby hands appeared. Her sister scrambled up the shelves and helped pull him out of the attic. He was rumpled and tear-stained, and he started bawling as soon as he saw them.
‘What were you doing up there?’ she cried.
‘I got stuck,’ he wailed. ‘It was really dark!’
Their parents were so relieved they barely admonished him for scaring them. But she wondered why he hadn’t come down earlier, when they were calling for him. Why had he stayed silent in the attic for so long?
Later that night, she’d lain awake as their parents argued in whispers.
‘That careless girl,’ Dad said. ‘You shouldn’t have let her watch them, she’s not old enough.’
‘For god’s sake, Kevin, it was your own damn fault for needing your precious nap. This summer can’t be over fast enough. I’m exhausted.’
And Dad responded, ‘Can’t we quit the pretence? This clearly isn’t working anymore.’
She felt her stomach drop like a foot slipping through floorboards.
Later, when her parents announced the divorce, she knew her carelessness had been the final deciding factor. And that was the last time they visited the summer house as a family.
*
The dream unspooled. She lay in bed long past waking, before getting up to lock the end bedroom from the outside. Then she returned to the back of the house, where the water was golden in the sunlight. The tide was coming in.
She sent a photo of the garden to her brother and his wife, and wrote: There’s plenty of room, if you want to come down for the weekend. Her sister-in-law called, gushing down the phone about how she’d love to get out of the city.
When her brother grudgingly came on the call, she demanded that he convince their sister to visit, too – it wouldn’t be right if only the two of them were there. After several phone calls and the transfer of money for petrol, her sister was convinced, too.
Her sister showed up a day early in a beat-up blue sedan, girlfriend in tow.
‘We were bored,’ she said. ‘Thought we might just chill round the beach for a bit.’
Instead of taking the spare room, which was still locked, the two of them pitched a tent on the back lawn so that they could sleep under the stars.
The house rejoiced at full occupancy. It gave happy little creaks as the sun set. The girls filled the dinner table with candles, and they ate under an amber glow, laughing and exchanging old stories.
‘We should make this a tradition,’ her sister-in-law said, still flushed with the thrill of being considered family.
But she shook her head.
‘Why not?’ her brother asked. ‘It’s so peaceful here.’
‘I should’ve said…’ She hated that she had to break the news to them. ‘The house has been sold. It’s too much work to maintain. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but I wanted one last, perfect week here.’
She could tell they were upset, but then her sister, pouting, said, ‘Let’s give it a proper send off, then.’
Instead of slinking off to their respective corners, they took their wine into the living room and sank into sagging couches. As the night progressed, they lapsed into laughter and teasing, and it felt like old times, just kids left unsupervised.
She told them about the haunted room, the afternoon her brother disappeared. He was confused; he barely remembered it.
‘I was so scared,’ she admitted. ‘I thought it was my fault.’
‘Nah, you were just a kid. Anyway, we made it through unscathed.’ He shook away the tension like a dog leaping out of water and began playing the old piano.
‘Oh god, it’s so out of tune!’ she protested, laughing.
‘Come dance with me!’ Her sister pulled her up, and soon they were spinning in circles.
Carpet slid under socked feet; open windows reflected blurred figures back at them.
*
When sunrise peeked over the horizon, they ran into the estuary, squealing. She shivered in the current, resisting its pull.
The house kept its dark corners. The spare room remained locked. But the haunting relaxed, then disintegrated with the sunrise.
Madeline McGovern is a publishing professional, writer and illustrator from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a co-founding editor of the online literary journal circular. Her work will appear in forthcoming publications in Reverie and The Circus Collective.