Cinder House

by Freya Marske

By the time of the funeral, the ghost that had been Ella had only just got the hang of consciousness; appearance would be beyond her for some weeks yet. She was too much the house to be Ella as well. Some unpeeling was yet to happen. Her awareness drifted from floorboard to windowpane to candlesticks to the wide pottery platter with its red border and its painted pattern of pears and rosemary, which Ella’s great-aunt had given to Ella’s parents on their wedding day.

The first real emotion of Ella’s afterlife was urgency. It took hold of her and moved her before she could think. The teacup was solid when she touched it; or else Ella became exactly as solid as the teacup needed her to be, for exactly as long as was needed to scoop up the pieces and set them on a table. She could feel the rug beneath her knees. It was not like feeling-a-rug had been when she was living. She was the rug. She was the wet tassels at its edge and the soiled woollen pattern, and that urgency would be a knot within her until they were set right.

Ella felt her second emotion. How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? With the fire in its hearth and in the wide black stove. Ella felt anger with her kitchen fires and felt anger with the fifteen stairs, especially the seventh, and she felt anger with the yellow wallpaper that had been half stripped from the walls of her old bedroom and dangled there for weeks while Patrice was in an argument with the decorators. Ella’s stepmother was in no hurry to turn the emptied chamber into a new study. The house had rooms enough. Ella’s bedroom festered like the socket of a pulled tooth. She had been pulled. Violently.

It had never occurred to Ella before then to try to leave the house, any more than it occurred to a skeleton to pick itself up and leave its flesh behind.

The boundaries of her haunting closed around Ella like a skin sewn from simple knowledge: this fence, the walls shared with the smaller town houses on either side, the kitchen door where the deliveries came. The damp stone floor of the cellar. And the tip of the iron cockerel’s crest up where the weathervane swung in the summer wind at the highest point of the roof.

Ella kept the house because the house kept her. Ella kept the house because it was unbearable not to.

In life Ella had never been particularly stubborn. But a house was a strong and unmoving thing. She had roots and she had bricks, and she’d stood for years and would continue to do so. She could put up with a few smashed windows.

So the ghost of Ella now really was a maid-of-all-work: making meals, darning socks. She could brush and comb her stepsisters’ hair as long as they sat primly still, though she couldn’t plait it or dress it; hair was not an object while it grew from someone’s head. The rules for people remained the same. Ella could touch nobody and nobody could touch her.

Most often it was late at night when Ella sat on the roof. Ghosts didn’t need to sleep. Once the kitchen was cleaned and any tasks left over from the day were completed, she had nothing to do.

At least on the roof the world opened up into miles of air, even if she couldn’t explore it. She tried to pretend, like a much smaller child, that she could make an imaginary friend of the cockerel on the weathervane; but he was as much a part of Ella as the brick chimney-stack. She couldn’t have any decent conversations with black iron that spoke only in creaks as it swung in the wind. Conversation with a friendly face was what Ella thought she might dream of, if she were still able to dream.

Ella dropped to her knees and reached out a tentative hand. After all this time—how much time? She had no way to know, or even guess—the dead woman was a thing-of-the-house and not a person. Ella could make firm contact with the rough knob of bone that had been a shoulder.

She thought of the skeleton often, after that, though she was careful not to let her thoughts gather too much weight. She handled them as lightly as she handled the best glassware. It was so obviously a secret. Houses, with their great potential for hidden spaces, were naturally secretive. If any part of the house’s own personality had merged with Ella’s, perhaps it was that.

Just as Ella could be hungry with her eaves and the plaster between her tiles, and she could be angry with all the fires of her candelabras and hearths—so too could she yearn for any of the young, vividly alive strangers who crossed her threshold, especially if they returned on a regular basis, and she did it with all the longing of her windowpanes.

Beyond the hunger for touch, which left Ella feeling like a pumpkin being idly hollowed of flesh with a sharp metal scoop, there was the hunger for conversation with someone who did not despise her, and whom she did not despise in return.

A house was made to have people in it. It wanted them there, even if it hated them. Without inhabitants she was only walls around an increasing, echoing wrongness.

To let an object exist in the same space as her was the closest thing Ella had to intimacy.

Ella, who couldn’t be married off, grew older, too. At least in appearance. She didn’t know if this was normal for a ghost, if it was part and parcel of being a house—which, after all, gathered rust and peeled paint and cracks in its wood like any aging thing—or if it was driven by her own vague sense that she should be older. She was pleased. She had never wanted to be sixteen forever.

So Ella existed, if not lived, and let words expand her world when no amount of magic seemed likely to do so. And for a while that was enough. No. Not enough. But something.

She didn’t have a heart to beat but she remembered how it felt, the sudden thud like a brass doorknocker, and the memory was almost the feeling itself.

The city was different to how she remembered it: taller buildings, altered shopfronts, a grander sense of sprawl. It was hard to tell if the change was truly in the place, or in her. Or if the streetlamps were playing tricks with arching shadows.

There was an unpleasant emptiness to it all, a sense that the magic was only allowing this because its gaze was sleepily averted. At any moment she could dissolve. The house, left behind, was still holding her leash.

She had reached the outskirts of town and was still going when the elastic feeling took hold of her again, and in the next moment Ella found herself sprawled on the seventh step of her main staircase, the walls of the house firm around her once more and the grandfather clock shivering with the death throes of midnight’s last strike.

She cried with the whole house. Water wept from taps and speckled the basins. Windows shuddered in their frames and every floor shook with tremors as floorboards pressed at their seams.

Ella didn’t know why it was midnight, only that there was a palpable finality to that last strike of the clock, as constricting and possessive and immutable as the physical boundaries of Ella’s haunting. The house might doze and allow Ella to roam, but it did not want her gone.

Ghosts are spirits of physical space. You need your house, Miss Ella. Or something like it.”

“I was an odd little girl. My father always told me so. And I’d been looking forward to being an odd young woman, except now I’m a haunting. I’m a ghost and a house and there’s no room for anything else. Of all the things I lost when I died, perhaps it’s silly I mourn that, but … I do. I hate that my oddness got chosen for me.”

I feel flattened. On some days I would commit outright murder for the ability to touch your velvet cloth and know what it feels like, or remember how apple pastries taste. I can look older but I can’t change. Something’s always going to be missing and I’ll never, ever get it back.

“Don’t worry, my dear. There’s always room to c...

Anticipation became a feeling Ella had with the mail slot of her front door. The brass learned to ache. There was pleasure in the slide of letters through it. There was even pleasure in the acute pain of leaving another task interrupted so that Ella could be first, always, to pick up and sort through the letters, famished for the sight of those yellow stamps.

Any long-standing human custom could become a law that bent human magic around itself. So house-magic, ghostly or otherwise, had a tendency to end or reset itself at these transitional hours: noon, or midnight, depending on where one found oneself.

Scholar Mazamire’s own theory was that a ghost was how a building held a grudge, because it was not human enough to do it on its own.

Ella hadn’t truly risked anything since her death; opportunities for risk had not been given to her. Nor opportunities for dancing with someone, or a whole host of someones, whose eyes would see her and whose hands would not pass through hers.

“Will this—will it let me stay out longer than midnight?” Quaint made a face. “Only some rules can be coaxed into bending.”

She was not her bones. She would never inhabit them again.

She stepped into the shoes, one and then the other. It was not slow. It happened in the time it would have taken her to gasp with lungs. Ella felt the shoes grip on to feet—on to flesh, on to skin—and felt that odd heaviness snake upward, like lightning running backward, to enclose all of her. And then Ella was a girl and not a ghost.

She’d spent so long trapped in the colours of her father’s house and in her father’s favourite dress. And now this: something more wondrous than she’d ever have thought of or chosen for herself. She had become small. Now she was an explosion. And she had somewhere to be.

Ella was having to work hard not to dawdle and simply drink in her surroundings: the paintings on the walls, the illuminated marble underfoot. A pang of envy went through her. She was still ghost enough to wonder what it would be like to haunt a place like this.

Ella, whose cheeks were small hearths of embarrassment, also experienced a hot squeeze in her core which she took at first for anger, and then for fear. And then recognised all at once as the hunger of polished floors—no, of skin—for skin itself. Skin in eager exchange.

You can’t keep this, Ella told herself, as a white jelly coated in sugar and nutmeg slowly dissolved in her mouth. This will all go away again. Which sounded a lot like: So take it all, now.

Jule thought for a while before speaking. He had a comfort with silence that Ella wanted to relax into. If he were a house, he too might be a haunted one.

His gaze rose from the ground and returned to Ella’s eyes: the first tentative look he’d worn yet, half shame and half hope. It was a look that belonged to the boy at the ballet, as if the aloofness and the coronet were as much a disguise as that old coat and woollen cap. Someone who usually wanted to be seen less, to pass unnoticed, but who in his most secret heart wanted exactly what Ella wanted after her years of invisibility: to be looked on, and seen truly, by someone kind who would stay.

The shoes sat neatly beside her, their mirrors reflecting only what was around them, and not Ella at all. Ella who was once again in her lavender dress, and once again the ghost of patiently waiting empty rooms.

She was not patient. She was exhilarated and grieving and her emotions flung themselves through a house which felt, for the first time, wholly inadequate to feel those things, even though there was so much substance to feel them with. Some feelings really were for flesh alone.

She glimpsed the beginning of a slope even more dangerous than that between ghost and haunting: that having tasted the life that came with the shoes, she would do anything for more.

Ella had spent her life and her death under the same roof as monsters. She knew what was worth fearing and what wasn’t. She refused to lean back a single inch.

Her mother had left them when Ella was three: young enough that half of what Ella remembered was what she’d been told. The memories her father had pressed into her, carefully, like a potter working with clay on the verge of drying.

Jule’s limbs made achingly perfect shapes, held for the perfect amount of time; he was quick and precise or he was slow and boneless; he was dancing the way the thunderstorm had felt against Ella’s roof—he was thunder and lightning and the throat-closing beauty of charcoal clouds; he was the echoing din of water and the way the bottom fell out of the air. He was something far too fine and hot to be touched and yet touching him was the only possible response.

she was still a ghost and not a person, and so there was no real danger, only the awareness of lust, and love, washing over her without demand. Wanting without compulsion.

It didn’t matter that Ella was dead or that somewhere a clock was ticking down the minutes. They danced and so they existed perfectly in the present, sweeping the grass and the air aside like so much dust, in circles that both lasted forever and ended too soon;

His hands bracketed her waist and Ella felt like a jewel. A mirror to his joy and to his building black-eyed look of unmagical need.