The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

I didn’t do it in a spirit of vandalism. I wasn’t a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it—or rather, as if the admiration itself, which I suspected a more ordinary child would not have felt, entitled me to it.

But Hundreds Hall had been made and maintained, I thought, by the very people they were laughing at now. After two hundred years, those people had begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards.

Do you remember what I told you about this house, when I showed you round it? It’s greedy. It gobbles up all our time and energy. It’ll gobble up yours, if you let it.’

You’re from pirate stock, aren’t you? You don’t think you’d have been invited along tonight, otherwise! Mother’s too embarrassed to let any of our real friends see us as we are now. Hadn’t you figured that out yet?’

‘Can’t people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they’re doing them?’

At night I would lie in my bed, weary but wakeful, thinking of Caroline lying in hers. My mind would go softly across the darkened miles between us, to slip like a poacher through the Hundreds gate and along the overgrown drive, to nudge open the swollen front door, to inch across the chequered marble; and then to go creeping, creeping towards her, up the still and silent stairs.

She said the house knows all our weaknesses and is testing them, one by one. Roddie’s weakness was the house itself, you see. Mine—well, perhaps mine was Gyp. But Mother’s weakness is Susan.

Mother’s very good, you know, at hiding her real feelings. All that generation are; especially the women.

The book says, with some sorts of people, when they’re unhappy or troubled, or they want something badly—Sometimes they don’t even know it’s happening. Something . . . breaks away from them.

Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a—a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop—to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde.

She said, if we couldn’t do that, if we couldn’t be better and braver than ordinary people, then what was the point of us?