The Manor

The house is gnarled and almost organic. Less like it was constructed, and more like it was grown, fitfully and against its will. Inside, its walls are variously a sick white and a salmon pink. Outside, it varies. Its canted roofs are terracotta, it has exposed bricks and painted ones, but the fourth (and top) storey, smaller than every other floor of the building looks not only like the afterthought it was, but also has walls of the same salmon pink used inside - like the building was partly twisted inside-out.

It’s by the ocean, built half into a hill, so that the bottom storey and a half is, depending on the side of the house you’re on, either windowless & underground or steeped in the shadow of the rest of the structure. Winding brick paths wrap around the building, descending at a dangerous angle into the lower levels of the property’s gardens. A cement pond with a long-dormant fountain is so overgrown with pond-weeds and algae that its entire surface is green, like the undergrowth below the canopy of a forest. If you run your fingers through the surface, you get to the grimy water which perhaps once housed koi or some other aesthetically appealing fish.

Further to one side is the skeleton of a tennis court, long overgrown such that you avoid walking through it as there might be snakes in the tall grass. Its bounds are shown by the metal poles which are all that remains of the fence and gates. To one side lies the rusted and rotten remains of an old lawn roller - the sort you might have seen in a background shot of some British costume drama your mother liked to watch.

You can just about hear the ocean. You can smell the salt and rotting seaweed from the rock pools nearby, but it’s on a side exposed to the harbour, not the ocean proper, so the waves lap gently rather than aggressively, most of the time, all but lost to the sound of the trees nearby swaying in the breeze.

The bottom storey is the one half buried in ground. Its windows feel small, though for the time this place was built it was probably the largest set of windows possible. A huge dining room dominates the eastern wing, with a custom oak dining table shaped like a huge rectangle. Seats are on the outside, so nobody is at the head of the table, and everyone can see each other.

You’ve never eaten in that room, though that’s not because you wouldn’t be allowed to - merely because nobody has eaten in the room while you’re there. There’s an emptiness to that room; its sparse furnishings and photos of people long-dead on the walls would give it that feeling regardless, but its lack of use somehow makes it more empty, as if half the furniture is gone because the ghosts in the photographs are using them.

The storey above is ‘ground’ floor, for what little that has meaning - but it is the one which is only a few steps of height from the round the house technically exists on. This is the room where the stumbling construction of the building truly becomes apparent. At two points on this floor there’s a single step, carpeted over and easy to miss if you’re inspecting the old awnings and failing to notice that you’re about to trip onto your face.

It’s also home to the building’s heart; at least in the way your mind sees it. It ticks, at all hours, constantly in the dim shade of the hallway or the dark of night. It’s a grandfather clock, positioned right near one of the random steps separating the two parts of the storey. You learn, quickly enough, that when you can hear the building’s heart ticking too loudly you should check your footing to avoid making too much noise by falling.

Because that’s what matters. This place is a silent one, by internal law. This floor, and the one above it, are dotted with rooms, doors all closed, where people live out the last years of their lives in quiet seclusion. You think of it almost like a mausoleum for people who are still alive. If you catch one of its residents going from their room to a bathroom or perhaps the tea room, they will give you a smile and leave you be.

The floor above is slightly smaller, accessed by one of the main stairways, the biggest and least twisted in the building. During ‘quiet time’ (which is every hour of the day in practice but in theory limited to most of the afternoon) you know to avoid the steps you’ve learned creak too loud and may get you in trouble. What if you wake up one of the residents?

To the east side, set down two very trippable steps, is a small room with large windows of a different style to the rest of the building, positioned almost like it’s hanging off the building. That’s the tea room. It was a grand idea, no doubt, to have a room with such large windows to sit and take tea and cheap biscuits at the same time every day, but instead of a sunroom, its position surrounded by tall trees makes it as much in shade as the rest of the building. You spend hours there, nonetheless, as of all the rooms with their uncomfortable chairs, it’s one of the only ones with cushions on the seating.

Downstairs again, taking the windier and more precarious steps on the west side of the building. Down on the bottom floor, you’re on the east wing this time, in the part of the house whose only windows are tall, horizontal and well above your head-height. They let in a little light, but for the most part being in this part of the house means using the round, heavy-set light switches constantly. They make a satisfying ‘clack’, which you appreciate because it’s the only acceptable noise in this building; you can’t get in trouble if you’re just flicking a light switch.

Store rooms and a walk-in larder are there, and one of your two favourite rooms - the kitchen. There’s more than one kitchen, of course, but this one is the big one. You think of it as impressive beyond words, even if its appliances would have been out of date in the 1930s and its original kettle sits beside a cheap but modern Kmart one. You wonder which residents use which kettles.

Years later, you’d understand that this room has different colours and no effort to beautify it unlike the smaller kitchens upstairs because this is the kitchen to be used by The Help. As originally designed, this part of the house was for servants. They wouldn’t live in the house, either - three bland brick buildings dot the edge of the property on the west side, one for the groundskeeper and the rest for the other servants. You’d hear the buildings referred to as the ‘cottages’, but to you they’re too ugly for such a name. A cottage, in your head, is the kind of cute building you see on TV, nestled by beds of flowers, not the ugly brick buildings that sit against the fence line here, as if they’re cowering in fear from the mansion they’re built to serve.

Also on the lower floor by the master kitchen is an airwell - an open part of the building to let what little salty air and scattered light. The only windows on this side of the building that aren’t above head height lead into this dank space. You’re told never to go in there. Even if you could find a way to get to the ratty wooden door you can see on one side of the shaft, the brick floor below has so much moss and slime on it due to the way moisture collects that you probably couldn’t stand on it without slipping, anyway.

Then there’s the chapel. In the full interior of the lowest floor, underground and with not a single window is a room with no wall, simply a metal gate that remains locked at all times. Pews of the sort you’ve seen a million times before in every random church you’ve had the misfortune of entering, and at the front is a small altar. You don’t know anything about religion, really, and years later you will learn it’s a Catholic-adjacent denomination that operates this chapel. It has a musty scent, like lethargic mothballs and dropped mints of the sort your grandfather ate, and it only gets worse the one time you’re allowed in there, for a ceremony.

You may not be able to go into the chapel, but at least you can see into it due to the strange wrought iron frames that block access rather than a traditional door and wall. On the second floor, above you almost directly right now, are rooms you not only will never be allowed in, but also never shown. They’re the rooms your parents vanish into for hours, for some kind of meetings that you never fully understand. Meetings that mean you have no choice but to quietly pad the hallways of the old mansion, trying not to wake up the residents by tripping over random steps.

Finally, there’s the fourth storey. Showing further proof the building was constructed less from a plan and more a serious of fitfully-conceived ideas, each had while the preceding floor was already half way through its creation, to get to this floor takes no less than three different stairwells. Each one curves tighter and ascends steeper.

This part of the house, the one with the salmon-pink outside walls, is just one room, and to your child’s frame it seems one and a half times taller than the other floors below. It probably isn’t; just a trick of the narrowness of the space, but that’s how it sits in your mind.

This is the library. Every exposed space on each wall has shelves on it, every space filled with books. An old wooden chair sits at one side, giving a view of the harbour. An old dusty pair of binoculars in a cheap case that seems to be made of the same thing as your mother’s guitar case covers them, but when nobody else is around (which is almost always) you sneak it out and look through the musty old glass at the ships on the harbour.

Then, sometimes, you explore the books. You’re allowed to borrow books, like everyone else, and sometimes do. Less because any of the books on comparative religion or the occult interest you, but because the books are almost always so old they have that beautiful texture that hardbacks have after 75 years or more of existence. That and you get to sign your name in the register. To borrow a book, unlike your school library, you don’t get a card and nothing gets stamped. You simply find an empty line on a huge old hardback book, grab the twine-attached pencil and scrawl the book’s name, the date, and your name on an empty row.

You probably spend as much time reading that register of people who have borrowed books from the strange library as you do actually looking at the contents of any books intended for borrowing. The first page shows the oldest dates - earlier in the century, some before even your grandfather was born - but you still flip through, hoping to find some aberrant line. A joke, or perhaps a date out of place.

The strangest thing about the library is that it doesn’t creak like the rest of the house. The further down into the bowels you get, it’s like the mansion is so old that it breathes, once every half hour or so, to let some of the musty air from its lungs out. But in the library, the small room jutting out from the top of the building, everything seems still. Nothing moves. Like even the ghosts are afraid to come up here.

This isn’t fiction. This is, in a sense, where I grew up. Not literally; I never lived in that mansion. But when my parents came back from overseas to have their first child, we stayed in one of the servant’s cottages against the west wall. And for the next 13 or 14 years of my life, wherever we went, from rental place to rental place until we finally owned a house a good hour’s drive north of the old mansion, the mansion was the only consistent thing in my life. Wherever I moved to, that old house that seemed to breathe on every floor but the top one is the place that I grew up in.

Each visit, it seemed to shrink. I grew, as it stayed the same. The same smells, the same rooms I was or wasn’t able to enter. But the ceiling got closer. The small winding staircases got less intimidating. The content of the books in the strange library became intelligible. By the end, it was less that the occult books scared me, and more that I had no interest in what some 19th century dilettante or patrician thought about life after death.

I don’t remember the last time I visited the place. It must have been when I was old enough to no longer need to go with my parents, as I could take care of myself and even my younger siblings. I wish I could remember that last time. I even wish I could go back. But perhaps it’s best I never do. It can remain the towering, fitfully constructed mansion by the harbour, with the strange library where I spent so many hours avoiding the ghosts below.