I dream about this house a lot. On my last visit home, I learned that there are a few members of the family that dream about that house -- the same dream.
It always starts on the third floor. Someone is downstairs, and we are exploring secretly, trying to not make too much noise. On the third floor, there is a room, or a passage, or a door that we never saw before. It gives us access into some place up in the rafters, like an unfinished attic. There, we discover a way to get into another house. Often a house where it's daytime, when we left night behind. Or night, when we left day behind.
Quite a few members of the clan think the house is haunted.
It currently lies empty of people, but full of antiques and memories, on the smallest legal plot allowed in town. When it was built, it was a farmhouse, in the early 1800's, but over the years, generations have sold off acres of land, and now it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with an apartment building, its porches sagging, its tower tipped just a bit, carcasses of unwary pigeonsamong the littering of broken glass on the floor inside.
The downstairs is quite intact. I imagine the good china stands ready to serve formal tea again, though the silver surely needs polishing.
Once, for insurance reasons, my Aunt, the youngest daughter of the family, brought in an appraiser. He refused to set a number, as too much of what he found was unique, priceless. The small pantry, he said, contained about a quarter of a million dollars worth of antiques. At a guess.
The house is in the name of my grandmother -- that is, my brother's father's mother -- who left it when her husband died in 2000. It's a big house to be alone in. She has grown paranoid in the last few years, accepting the children's charity, but not trusting anyone to go into the house lest they steal from it.
She is not wealthy. She has sold nothing from the house -- and allows no one to fix it up, or move in to keep it up. If things remain unchanged, some day the house will fall down, fully packed, and anyone wanting a memory will have to be contented with a broken brick from the rubble pile it is becoming.
I fantasized about living in that house once, moving back and taking care of the place in exchange for living there rent-free. The second floor is mostly a self-contained apartment. The third floor is bedrooms and unassigned spaces storing generations of teenagers' castoffs. The round rooms at the base of the tower were always my favorite, though the top floor is rotting and open to the elements -- and the birds.
There is no attic.
To make matters worse, there is no will. The oldest child lives in Virginia and is fairly well-off. Everyone else is poor, at least by comparison. The oldest child does not share.
I wonder what will become of the house on High Street. I hope I will be allowed to visit it before it crumbles. See if I can find the named spirits I am told haunt the upper floors.
See, someone has died in every room of that house.
Nothing nefarious about that, the house is 200 years old and been filled through most of that time. It has a long history.
As much as I could use money, I mostly want the memories. Not to inheret them, but to go there, explore, capture them for myself.
Maybe, for all I know, I am the one grandkid she doesn't feel paranoid about. I haven't seen her since the funeral in 2000. Maybe she's waiting for me, for all I know.