A Haunted House || Virginia Woolf
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room
to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, mak-
ing sure–a ghostly couple.
“Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!”
“It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered.
“Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.”
But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it;
they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page
or two. “Now they’ve found it,’ one would be certain, stopping the
pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise
and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open,
only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the
threshing machine sounding from the farm. “What did I come in
here for? What did I want to fi nd?” My hands were empty. “Per-
haps its upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down
again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the
grass.
But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could
ever see them. The windowpanes refl ected apples, refl ected roses;
all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing
room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after,
if the door was opened, spread about the fl oor, hung upon the
walls, pendant from the ceiling–what? My hands were empty.
The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells
of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe,
safe” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the
room...” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?
A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But
the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fi ne, so
rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always
burned behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between
us, coming to the woman fi rst, hundreds of years ago, leaving
the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He
left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the
Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the
Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. ‘The
Treasure yours.”
The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way
and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the
beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns
stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows,
whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.
