Please read: The House

Excerpt:

The halls are dark and dusty, the only light, pale, shining through the once magnificent mauve curtains, now shredded shrouds like cobwebs hanging over the wall of cool glass which once glowed brightly in the night when the house was in use. The house was an affront to modernity: built before pluming or electricity, it was left to rot; better houses standing in happier places were refurbished. The house and grounds were owned by someone; a family held the property or something; no one really knew.

As a child I would go there. There was a place in the wall where the crumbling mortar, having given way to the constant buffeting of a stream—I had thrown a cork in this little current, and walking along its banks dreamed myself a pirate—receded so that a small child might, if he were of a mind to, and not minding the dampness, crawl under the wall after dislodging a rusty mesh. My cork had gone on ahead of me.

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