Murmur

First posted May 2019.

The decaying mansion on top of the hill is not silent. It is not because of the groaning and cracking of old wood shifting with the earth beneath it, nor the whistling of wind through open doors and empty halls. From all outward appearances, and considering the facts of the case, the house should be dead, but still it breathes.

Perhaps ‘facts’ is a misleading word. ‘Facts’ would indicate that any legal documents regarding the house exist. ‘Facts’ would indicate verifiable evidence of the house’s builders, owners, or tenants. ‘Facts,’ per se, are unrelated to this house. Stories abound in the town below of the whos and whats and whys of the house on top of the hill: stories whispered by fireside, told jovially to a raucous crowd, or cautioned to children by their elders. No one knows anything more than stories: “I heard from my sister’s best friend’s boyfriend,” “My grandmother always said,” “This guy I met in a bar heard.” Every piece of information about the house is heard, never known.

What can be said about the house is that it is old. From certain angles the architecture is Victorian, and from others, Georgian or Tudor. It is neither particularly small nor particularly large. The wood of which it is built is dark; it moulders away, leaving large holes in the walls. The hinges and door latches are long-since rusted away, and the doors and shutters drift open and closed in the wind. There are no trees around it on top of the hill, yet somehow it seems always cast in shadow during the day. At night, it is alive.

There once was a girl in the town who loved to sing. Wherever she went, she took a melody with her, singing made-up words to made-up tunes as she skipped through the streets. Her love of music followed her all her life, until she grew old enough to leave the town to study opera. She spent years training and began to perform in opera houses all throughout the country, and then the world. Her renown brought her much attention of all sorts, but her only true love was music.

Despite many rebukes, one prospective suitor would not give up. He followed her from theatre to theatre, city to city. Every night he waited by the stage door to ask her once more to bestow favour on him, and every night she turned him away. He followed her, eventually, back to her hometown. She performed in her town’s theatre, and once again, the obsessed man waited for her at the stage door. Terrified that he had followed her home, she screamed and fled back into the theatre. The man’s rage consumed him. He chased her inside and caught her halfway across the stage, where he strangled her.

On clear nights, a beautiful voice can be heard singing opera in the house on top of the hill. The moon shines through the windows onto empty floors as the air fills with music. Some say it is the girl, returning to the safety and familiarity of her old home. Some say it is local children who, having heard the stories, break into the house and sing to alarm anyone who might hear.

Sometimes the music instead comes from an orchestra, playing waltzes long into the night. There is laughter, the clinking of glasses, the soft swish of skirts, and the click of heeled shoes. It is said to be a wedding party for the daughter of the man who built the house long ago. The stories agree that misfortune befell this family, but they differ as to how.

One story says the man’s beloved daughter married her brave soldier the night before war was declared (of course, no one could say which war). He left the very next day, and they never saw each other again. He was killed in battle, and when she received the news, she died of a broken heart. Their ghosts return night after night to their last moment of happiness: their wedding.

Another story says the man loathed his daughter’s fiancé. Both father and daughter were equally strong-willed; she refused to be dissuaded from her choice of husband, and he refused to grant approval for the wedding to take place. The father grew ill and died, and the daughter happily scheduled her wedding shortly thereafter. However, on the day of the wedding, her groom never appeared. Neither she nor the groom were ever seen again, but the wedding party continues until the happy couple arrives.

Or it is all nonsense, and the sound is the echo of loud music being played in the town below, and the lights in the windows mere tricks of the eye.

Once there was an actor—or rather, a young man who longed to be an actor. As much as he adored the stage, he caught the most inexplicable and consuming stage fright whenever he auditioned. No matter how often he practiced on his own, no matter how well he knew his lines, it was as if his jaw was wired shut the moment the spotlight blinded him.

Utterly embarrassed after another failed audition, he fled up to the long-abandoned house on top of the hill to continue his desperate attempts to improve in solitude. In the darkest, quietest hours of the night he repeated his monologue over and over, until it became a frantic prayer. In his delirium, he neglected to watch his step, and took a fatal fall from the upper story’s landing.

Theatre folk are a superstitious bunch, of course. No thespian in the town would ever go anywhere near the house on top of the hill after sundown. Yet some claim to hear a young man in the house repeatedly running lines at night.

All things are kept alive as long as someone still tells the story. Each remembrance is the beat of a heart, each naming is an intake of breath. The truth of a story is irrelevant; the subject of the story is sustained by the awareness of it, not by accurate accounts of history. Something always lives in a story, but it may not be what you expect. Care must be taken in the telling of a story; one never quite knows what danger lies in failing to let something die.