Tell Me I'm Worthless(41)

“It’s fucking ridiculous.”

Alice was trying to focus on the boiling pasta in front of her, but she was failing completely.

“You know how many homeless people there are in this city?”

Hannah shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Alice didn’t give an answer to her own question, she just kept ranting.

“And there’s buildings just sitting there, hoarded by fucking property developers. You know that house out on Station Road, the one that has its back to the woods?”

Of course she knew it. She hadn’t grown up in the city, she’d only moved here for university, but even then it had become part of the city’s lore for her. The shadowy rectangle of old stone which even the local teenagers feared. They had a game, apparently. They liked to see how close they could get before they had to turn back. There were no genuine stories of ghosts, or murders, or the sort of bloody tales that keep places like that abandoned and let them drop into the realm of popular myth, but it still occupied the space of a place where those things had occurred. The house. The House.

“So what?” asked Ila.

“You ever been there?”

The pasta was nearly boiling over, but it wasn’t even done. Alice turned down the hob as much as she could. They were in Ila’s flat, which sucked, but it had a kitchen big enough for the three of them to fit into.

“I’ve walked up to the door. Got as far as putting my hand on it. But I didn’t go in.”

“Why?”

“It’s haunted” she said. “I don’t believe in ghosts but still, fuck, that place felt so… wrong.”

Alice did believe in ghosts, but she let herself get worked up about this.

“Is it, or is that what they want you to think?”

“Who?”

“The people that own it. See, if it didn’t have a reputation, it would be harder for them to keep. People would break in there to squat. There’d be pressure to turn it into public housing. But as it is, no, they can’t do that, because it’s haunted, because it’s cursed. I guarantee you, the origin of all those stories is the property developers who are waiting it out.”

Ila wasn’t convinced. “But I felt it.”

“You’d been told you should feel it, so you did.”

“I’m surprised,” said Hannah. “You told me you’ve seen ghosts before.”

“I believe in ghosts.” Alice strained the pasta, which steamed up, the hot water vapour curling in the air. “I don’t believe in haunted houses.”

There’s a difference between a ghost story and a haunted house story. This feels so basic, but also so hard to articulate. A ghost story is about the thing that it tells you it is about: a ghost, an ephemeral thing from beyond the grave, trying to contact the living. A haunted house story is about more than that. It is about structure, architecture, and history. Like Jamaica Inn, a haunted house that isn’t haunted at all, but people said it was to cover up the truth of the matter. There aren’t any ghosts in the House. And yet it continues to be haunted despite this fact.

So it was Alice’s idea to go into the house, all three of them, together, as one last hurrah, one last thing to cement their friendship before she left for Bristol, before Ila went to Edinburgh, before Hannah went back home. Hannah asked if Brandon could join them, but she knew that Alice would say no, it had to be just them. Ila was reluctant at first. She alone had been to the House before and knew how it felt. But Alice convinced her. They didn’t think she heard, but Hannah knew that Alice promised to fuck her in there, amongst the spiderwebs and the dust and the rotting wood, and that had been enough. The thrill of breaking and entering, the joy of making a political statement by doing so. They didn’t take sleeping bags with them, but Hannah had a thermos in her rucksack filled with hot chocolate. The plan wasn’t to sleep. They would simply go in, explore, and then settle in a room together. At some point, Hannah guessed, they would vanish off, leaving her alone in the dark, before returning, hot and sweaty and unable to say what they had been doing.





It was the end of summer when they went. Hannah didn’t tell her boyfriend what they were doing, because she knew he would tell her to stop, and he would be right to. It was unsafe. A deeply stupid, dangerous idea. All sorts of things could happen; the cops could come, there could be some kind of accident. These old buildings have signs outside saying that they’re unsafe for a reason. But she went anyway, because she loved her friends, and she knew she would regret not going in the future.

They got the bus out halfway down Station Road, and then left it at a stop that nobody ever uses. The bus driver nodded at them, a little confused, but who is he to question what people do? The moon was up that night, a slim bright wound in the black sky hanging between the tower block and the House. They couldn’t see the House yet. Not even with the lights from the tower block and from the moon. Its invisibility felt curious, and conspicuous. Alice already had her torch out, and, between the streetlights, it carved a path for them to follow in white light along the grassy bank of the roadside. Hannah walked a little behind the others. They always forgot that her being shorter meant that she couldn’t keep up with them, one stride of theirs felt like it took two of hers. It was fucking annoying, in all honesty. Inconsiderate. She always ended up being the odd one out, the third wheel, even if they insisted they were only friends or whatever.