This short story was originally published in audio form on Tales to Terrify. It was originally inspired by something I discovered in The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts by Owen Davies (2007). In the late 18th century, Britain experienced a population boom. More people meant more deaths. Coroners needed somewhere to store bodies before an inquest. Because these bodies weren’t buried in the traditional way soon after death, their ghosts remained earthbound until burial could take place. According to Davies, bookseller and memoir writer James Lackington reported a haunting in a London hospital. The authorities converted a ward in the lower part of the building into a dead house, “where a continual tapping on the windows was heard” (2007: 61). The nurses assumed the tapping must be the work of an unquiet spirit since the dead house was close by. After all, how else could they account for noises? The nurses refused to enter the haunted part of the building. This inspired the following story.
None of the other nurses will venture into the ground floor corridor of the east wing at night. Not for all the jewels in the Prince Regent’s storehouse, they say. Even Martin, the gruff old porter, avoids the corridor, although he claims it’s because the chill in that part of the building plays havoc with his joints. Everyone else says it has more to do with the conversion of a disused ward into a new morgue, which everyone calls the ‘dead-house’.
“But surely the dead-house is a good thing?” I used to ask. “It is good that we can determine the true cause of their death.” I thought of my own father, whose death under suspicious circumstances could have been investigated, and his murderers brought to account.
“Nonsense, girl. You can’t keep the dead from their burial and then be surprised when they walk abroad,” Matron would reply.
I don’t understand such ideas, and I would have thought a woman of usual good sense and intelligence such as Matron would have dismissed them herself But in my three months at the hospital, I have learned not to disagree with or question Matron. It is true, my only experience of the dreaded corridor has been during the day, when light floods the passage through the windows that line the outside wall, but that is beside the point. It is only a morgue, and a corridor. How bad can they really be by night?
In December, my first night shift arrives. At first, the work is no different to usual, as the patients do not respect the chiming clock. They wander the corridors or call for help at any time of the night or day. Yet at a quarter to midnight, Matron asks me to visit a patient in the east wing. There are different routes through the hospital, but this is my chance to see exactly what everyone is so afraid of and a sort of mad curiosity propels me. I half-run through the labyrinth of the ground floor until I reach the corridor that everyone else dreads.
As I turn the corner into the passage, I still can’t see why everyone so pointedly avoids this part of the hospital. Moonlight streams through the windows, casting shadows of the frames across the opposite wall. It is so peaceful – no one is here to moan or cry for help. Faint voices come from somewhere to my right, no doubt from beyond the wall, but I assume they belong to those working in the dead-house. No one ever speaks of the morticians, and I wonder what their opinion of this corridor is. They must surely know its reputation, yet they work there all the same. What are they like, spending so much of their time around the dead?
I am halfway along the corridor when a knock sounds behind me. I turn around, expecting to see one of the infirm patients struggling with a cane. This has happened before on many occasions, and I always tend to their needs and return them to their bed. Yet there is no one there. I shrug, and continue along the corridor. It runs the length of most of this wing, and it is longer than I remember it being during the day. It does not take this many steps at noon.
Another knock comes from behind me, and then another. I turn around again and still there is no one there. More knocks – it sounds as though someone raps on the wall. I am level with the doors to the dead-house, but the knocks do not come from inside. They are in the corridor – with me.
Unease grows in my chest, and I start walking again, this time a little faster than before. This time the knocks are harder and more insistent, and closer. They are following me along the corridor. I speed up, close to a brisk trot, and the knocks increase to match my pace. I half consider going back to the dead-house, thinking some human companionship may settle my nerves, but I do not want the morticians to think me simple or easily swayed by the folk tales of others.
I have a job to do, and I hurry towards the door at the end of the corridor. The knocks accompany me, and I resist all urges to look behind me. Surely there is nothing there, and if I had time to investigate, there would inevitably be a rational explanation. The world is a place of reason and science; this is merely a phenomenon of the latter. I must continue attending to my duties.
The door stands before me and I reach out to grasp the handle. Another knock sounds, this time from the other side of the door. I squeal, and stare at the knob, expecting to see it turn. I stand rooted to the spot for what feels like hours. There is a church across the fields on this side of the building, and its clock heralds midnight with a chiming bell. The witching hour is at hand. The sound, halfway between a chime and a knell, breaks the spell. Someone, or something, knocks on the door from the other side.
I run back along the corridor before the decision is completely made, and I reach the dead-house. Even if they think me a simpleton for asking, I am determined to question the morticians on their understanding of the knocks in this corridor. Their knowledge of science is so much more advanced than mine, after all. They investigate the secrets of life and death, and there is little they do not know.
Knocking pursues me along the corridor, and a second set of raps begins at the other end of the corridor, rushing toward me until I am caught between the sounds outside the morgue. I open the door and slip inside before my nerves can fail me.
I confess that I have never set foot inside a morgue before. How could I have done so, when this is my first nursing post in a city hospital, and the dead-house is a new invention? Yet even with my lack of experience, I know I am not where I want to be. This is not the dead-house – and I realise with a chill that I may not be in the hospital anymore.
A vaulted room lies before me, the green bloom of moss clinging to grey stone. Its ribbed ceiling and smell of age reminds me of the crypt of St Anne’s, the small parish church where I played with my sisters as a child. We cared little for the rotting coffins. There are no caskets here, just bare walls and no windows. Unlit torches hang in wall brackets, and flickering shadows dance across the deeply pitted floor. I cannot see any source of illumination, or indeed anything to cast the shades that wheel and turn.
“Hello?” I call a greeting though I know that there are no morticians here. I just want to hear a human voice, even if it is my own.
I turn back to the doors, and I fall backwards in fright as a young man now stands between me and the way out of this place. He wears a fine frock coat of deep grey velvet that reminds me of smoke in a breeze, and a top hat of a black so deep it hurts my eyes to look at it. Spectacles rest on his nose, their round black lenses obscuring his eyes. I estimate he is perhaps twenty-five, and his broad smile provokes an unsettling combination of pleasure and dread in my stomach.
“Excuse me, sir, I must return to the hospital.”
“Must you indeed? And why is that, my dear lady?” The young man bows deeply, though I cannot help thinking he is insulting me somehow.
“Matron will wonder where I am.”
“She sent you on an errand?” The young man moves away from the door, and I cannot help following his progress further into the strange room.
“She did.”
“Then I wonder at your venturing in here, if you’re otherwise occupied.”
I scowl at him. He has a point, but I cannot tell him about the knocking. I don’t even know who he is.
“If you don’t mind me asking, who are you, and what are you doing in the dead-house?” I know I’m not in the dead-house but it seems the only question to ask.
“Who am I? Well who are any of us, really? Which of us gives our true name, and who among us allows others to know the real us?” He laughs, amused by his own wit, although I cannot understand what he is getting at.
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind me, my dear lady. In answer to your second question, I am not in your dead-house. No, indeed you are in mine.”
The shock must register upon my face because he swoops forward, and takes hold of my hands. He peers into my eyes as if appraising me for illness. His fingers are like ice in my grasp, yet I cannot pull myself free. He repulses and enchants me at the same time – if it were not an inappropriate reference, I would compare him to the operations that I have seen the surgeons perform. There is a grim beauty to their grisly machinations from which I cannot avert my gaze.
“Your dead-house, sir?”
“Indeed, dear! Come, let me show you around.”
Before I can protest, he leads me further into the vaulted room, which turns out to be a corridor. A distinct chill hangs in the air, and I am left with the impression that we are somewhere below ground.
“What is this place?”
“I told you. It is my dead-house.”
“But we are the only ones here.” I am yet to hear or see anyone besides ourselves.
“Ha! How little you know, my dear lady.” The young man will not be pressed further, and skips ahead, his fingers still entwined with mine. Our speed gives the impression of flight along the corridor, yet my mind rails against the assumption. How could we move faster than a run without breaking into a swift pace?
“I wish to know where I am!” I try to pull my hand free, and do my best to dig in my heels. I manage neither, but the young man stops all the same.
“I apologise, little one. You do not like this space?”
I frown, and without warning, he places his hand over my eyes. His skin is like ice, yet it also smells cold, damp with the cloying scent of the grave.
A second later, he removes his hand, and the vaulted corridor has gone. It is replaced with a vast meadow, tall wildflowers casting explosions of colour against the grass. A breeze ruffles their heads, though I feel nothing on my skin. Clouds scud across the blue sky that arcs above us, though something feels wrong. No bird song fills the air, and the sun’s rays bear no warmth. It is as though I am walking in a painting, beautiful yet unreal. I expect to run my hands through the flowers and smear the colours.
“Are we still in your dead-house?”
“Indeed we are. Inside, or outside, it’s all the same to me. Space is space, after all.” The young man waves his hand around, gesturing to the meadow which stretches as far as I can see, as if this somehow answers my question.
“My dead-house, that is, the dead-house I was looking for, is a busy place. Morticians work to ascertain why people have died, if it is not immediately obvious. There are always cadavers, and I feel sure there must be equipment, and there are the morticians themselves…” I do not end my sentence, sure that he knows what I would like to ask.
“You want to know why I call this place my dead-house, when it so little resembles your own.” The previous good humour drains from his expression, and his face is sketched in sharp, hard lines. For the first time I am glad I cannot see his eyes behind his impenetrable spectacles. I don’t imagine I would like what I might find there.
“Exactly. You’re clearly very proud of your dead-house, and it is very impressive. I just wanted you to help me to understand it better.”
I sincerely hope my flattery sounds genuine, and he must detect a note of real curiosity in it, for he laughs, and softness returns to his face. He is both handsome in his looks and repulsive in his very air of ‘wrong-ness’, yet there is something addictive about his laugh, as though it could chase away melancholy and conjure genies.
“I am a mortician, of sorts. A mortician, and a musician. I too investigate the dead, and I lead them on such a merry dance!” He demonstrates a little jig, but his grin reminds me of the macabre woodcuts that my particularly morbid aunt would always bring out whenever I paid a visit. There is something of the goblin about him.
“I asked this earlier and you didn’t answer my question, but I think I’ve been exceptionally patient, particularly when I have no idea where I am and why I’m not in the hospital any more. Exactly who are you?” I narrow my eyes and peer at him, as if this may strip away his façade and allow me to see who, or what, he really is. Many of my fellow nurses would have fainted clean away by now, but I fancy myself to be of hardier stock. Besides, this jaunt through a world that cannot possibly be real is still preferable to scrubbing bed pans.
“I go by many names, my dearest one. In fact, I have so many I cannot even remember which one was the first. But all you need worry yourself with at present is that you are in my dead-house, and I am the closest I think you will get to encountering a mortician.”
He turns and skips away from me, the wildflowers bowing to provide him with a clear path. They spring back up behind him, leaving me to push my way through. They leave no pollen or fallen petals on my skirts, and I conclude that if I were to sniff one, I would smell nothing. I pinch the head from what I believe to be a poppy and slip it into my pocket, determined to examine it more closely when I return to the hospital. That is, if I return to the hospital.
“If this is a dead-house, then where are the dead?” I call after him, hoping that he can hear me above the abysmal tune he has begun whistle.
“They are all around you, my love.” He calls over his shoulder to me, and pauses to allow me to catch up.
“I cannot see anything.”
The young man frowns again, and places his hand over my eyes. This time I reach up, and my fingers fasten around his own, but the sensation is too unpleasant, and I let out a small whimper. The young man chuckles, and removes his hand, disentangling himself from my grasp. He appears as repulsed by my touch as I am by his.
The meadow is replaced by a lofty ballroom, its walls lined with mirrors. Candles nestle within the chandeliers, crystal droplets reflecting tiny flames as if the ceiling were crawling with fireflies. We are not alone – the ballroom is filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women, all wearing elegant frock coats or magnificent dresses. The women wear their powdered wigs sculpted into fantastic forms, while the men wear more subtle wigs of delicate curls. I recognise this sort of garb from an earlier decade – these people look magnificent but they are ever so slightly out of date. They all wear masks, and their dead eyes peer towards me.
“Do not pretend that this is also your dead-house.” I cannot stop myself from admonishing the young man, now dressed in a black frock coat, tri-corner hat and breeches. His spectacles have been replaced by a mask, yet I still cannot see his eyes.
“But of course it is. And you wanted to see the dead – here they are. Well, some of them. I couldn’t possibly fit all of them in here.”
The young man snaps his fingers and somewhere within the room a string quartet bursts into life. The crush of people surrounding me loses interest and I find myself among dancing couples too intent on intricate footwork to notice a young woman in a nurse’s uniform. I dip and dodge to weave through the dancers to pursue the young man. I am tired of his finery and the scenes to which he would have me bear witness – I wish to return to work.
I find him standing beside a grand fireplace, in conversation with a young woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late wife of the hospital’s patron. I tell him that I wish to leave.
“Leave? But you only just got here, my lovely one.” He pours syrup onto his words but I am resolute.
“I am very grateful for the time you have spent with me, and I have seen some fascinating things, but I really should be getting back to work.”
He looks at me, long and hard, and I can see a raised eyebrow above his mask. He taps his chin with a gloved finger, and I know he has already resolved himself to allow me to leave – he merely wishes to prolong the suspense.
“There is one who would speak with you first.”
“If it’s all the same with you, I’d like to go back to work. Matron will string me up for this as it is.”
“Then what will a few more moments cost?”
He moves away in his jaunty way, and I follow him. I do not see that I particularly have a choice in the matter – he has no intention of sending me on my way until he has had his fun. A woman dancing beneath the largest of the chandeliers drops her fan, and whirls away before I can stop her. I stoop and pick it up, adding it to the flower in my pocket. Surely these will be proof of my absence – and something to investigate once my shift has ended.
The young man stops so abruptly that I walk into him, and the weight of his glare almost crushes me. He swiftly recollects himself and stands aside, so that I may see this mysterious person who wishes to speak with me.
It is my father. Unlike the others, tall and elegant in their eternity, my father’s skin is mottled, his eyes watery and blank, and the scent of the grave clings to his tattered burial suit. He looks at me, but there is no spark of recognition, no exclamation of joy. He merely stares. Revulsion sends shudders through me, and my stomach heaves.
It is too much for my mind. I have been able to comprehend the ceaseless corridor, the painted meadow, and the grand ballroom as being figments of an imagination – not necessarily mine, but clearly someone’s – but this is beyond my ken. All of the questions I had about my father’s death are swallowed by confusion and sadness. Grief and despair collide, and tears spring to my eyes. Without speaking a word, I turn and flee, plunging across the room as fast as I can go. The dancers part for me, allowing me past. I dare not look at them, fearing that they will have taken on the same appearance as my father. The illusion has cracked, and I no longer want to see.
I reach the double doors at the far end of the room. They are the same as the doors that lead into the dead-house in the hospital. I grasp the handle and turn, but the door does not give. I rattle the knob, and release a string of profanities that might curl the toes of the most seaworthy sailor. I glance in the mirror, and see the dancers continuing their macabre dance. Their reflections remain glorious.
The young man appears at my side, no longer in his finery, but clad once more in the outfit he wore when first we met. The ballroom disappears, replaced by the vaulted room in which I first encountered him.
“You were not pleased to see your father.”
“Would you have been, to see a loved one so decrepit?”
“I have never had parents, so I couldn’t possibly imagine. I assume you want to leave now.”
I glare at him with all of the hatred and anger that I can muster, but he merely laughs off my abhorrence and leans against the door frame.
“Why can I not open the door?”
“This door only opens one way. You may enter through it, but you cannot leave. Except on one very special occasion.”
“And what’s that? Halloween?” I spit at his feet, convinced he is as possessed by morbid superstition as the idiots that I work with.
“Not at all. You heard the knocking, but you did not ask the right question before you came in here.”
“And what question is that?”
“Oh you’ve heard it a thousand times, I expect. Knock knock –”
“Who’s there?” I mumble my reply, astonished that I have been outwitted by a tedious joke.
“Indeed.” The young man makes a show of removing a silver pocket watch from his waistcoat, and checking the time. I fear he will grow bored with me before I can find out how to leave this place.
“Am I dead?”
“Not really, no. You’re not alive, but you’re not dead.”
“I don’t understand. I’m getting so tired of your riddles and half-truths!” Anger clenches my hand into a fist, and I slam the door behind me. The pain blossoms and the tears that earlier filled my eyes finally spill free. The young man looks alarmed and hands me a handkerchief. An elaborate skull is embroidered upon one corner. I dab at my eyes, grateful that at least my tears are real, but the motif does not reassure me.
“The dead-house of which you speak is an in-between place. The dead are not truly dead until they are buried, but nor are they alive. My dead-house operates along the same lines, and the boundary is not so permanent. My door swings both ways, as it were.” He rests a hand upon my shoulder but I am too upset to recoil. His touch is oddly comforting, even if his presence continues to unsettle me.
“It does? So how do I get back?”
“Keep knocking. When someone asks the right question, you can go.”
With that, he is gone. He takes with him the vaulted room, and leaves me sitting on a beach. The doors remain, halfway between the sea and the sand dunes, and I rest against them, enjoying their solidity. The sky is a washed-out grey, full of the promise of an evening storm, and twisted driftwood is scattered across the sand. I recognise the beach, having played on it every afternoon during my childhood. No wind lifts my hair, and the air does not smell of salt, but I’m sure I shall be happy enough here.
I remain seated for a little while longer, lost in my memories, until I remember what the young man said. I pull myself up and stand at the door. I make a fist, and knock. Once, twice, three times…as many times as it takes to get an answer.
