The Guest Room, by Enzo Martinelli 🔮🖋👻

A First Step into the Gothic

Readers of this blog know me chiefly as a translator and critic — someone who lives, most days, inside other people’s sentences. But criticism is only one way of loving literature, and for a while now I’ve wanted to try the other way: writing it.

“The Guest Room” is the result — my first attempt at a gothic short story, a genre I’ve long admired from the outside, in Le Fanu, in the quieter corners of the English ghost story tradition, in that very particular suburban unease the British do so well. I set it in contemporary London, in a modest bed and breakfast where an ordinary arrangement — a lodger, a landlady, a few weeks’ stay — slowly reveals itself to be something else entirely.

I won’t say more; the story should do that. What I’ll say instead is that writing it taught me something criticism rarely does: how much restraint matters in this genre, how the real dread lives in what’s withheld rather than what’s shown. I hope you enjoy discovering it as much as I enjoyed discovering how to write it.

The Guest Room – gothic short story by Enzo Martinelli

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The Guest Room, by Enzo Martinelli

Alan Whitfield arrived at Ivy Court on a Friday afternoon in the last week of June, when the light over the suburb had gone thick and gold and the privet hedges along Farrant Road exhaled their green smell into the heat. It was the kind of London day that made even the semi-detached houses look kindly — bay windows catching the sun, a sprinkler ticking somewhere out of sight, a lawnmower’s drone rising and falling two gardens over. He had come up for six weeks of work, a contract nothing more interesting than auditing figures for a firm in Holborn, and had chosen the bed and breakfast off a website with three photographs and a description that used the word homely twice.

The house itself was tall and narrow, Victorian, with a wisteria gone slightly feral over the porch and a brass knocker shaped like a fox’s head, worn smooth at the nose from a century of hands. He lifted it and let it fall, and heard, after a moment, footsteps that seemed to take a long time to cross what could not have been a large hall.

Mrs. Edith Colquhoun opened the door in a floral housecoat and pearls, as though the two had always gone together. She was small and straight-backed, with white hair pinned in a manner that had gone out of fashion before Alan was born, and pale eyes that fixed on him with a warmth that was, if anything, slightly too immediate — the way a dog is warm to whoever happens to be nearest.

“Mr. Whitfield,” she said, not as a question. “Do come in out of the heat. The house likes to know who’s about, and it’s already had rather a restless morning wondering.”

He laughed, took it for the sort of thing old women said, and stepped into a hall smelling of beeswax and something sweeter underneath, like overripe fruit in a bowl not yet thrown out. There was a longcase clock against the stairs, and beyond it, through an open door, he glimpsed a sitting room with at least two more clocks visible, a carriage clock on the mantel and another, smaller, on a side table — and none, he would notice over the coming days, ever quite agreeing with the others, so that the house always seemed to be catching up with itself.

“I keep the clocks for company,” Mrs. Colquhoun said, following his glance. “One does, alone in a big house. Tea first, or would you like to see your room?”

He chose tea. She poured it from a pot patterned with cornflowers, in the front room, and talked easily about the neighbourhood, the buses, a greengrocer two streets over who still did proper stone fruit, and — glancingly, the way one mentions a fact so old it has stopped being interesting — her husband, dead now eleven years, who had built the shelves in the room Alan would be sleeping in. On the mantelpiece, among the mismatched clocks, stood a small silver-framed photograph of a young man in what might have been 1970s dress, unsmiling, standing rather stiffly in the same front garden Alan had just crossed.

“A relative?” Alan asked.

“A lodger,” Mrs. Colquhoun said. “Some years ago now. He liked the garden.”

She said it with such simple fondness that Alan thought nothing more of it, and when she showed him up to the room at the top of the first flight — a large room with a heavy wardrobe, faded rose wallpaper, a portrait of an unnamed Victorian gentleman above the fireplace, and thick curtains that let in the gold light in long soft bars — he thought only that it was a comfortable, old-fashioned sort of place, exactly what he’d wanted for six weeks of quiet work. He noticed, in passing, a door on the landing outside his room that Mrs. Colquhoun did not open or explain, and a curious little wooden cabinet built into the wall of his own room beside the fireplace, the kind of nook that might once have held a telephone extension, its small brass door hanging slightly ajar on a hinge gone loose. He did not think about it again that day.

“If you need anything,” Mrs. Colquhoun said from the doorway, “you need only call out. I hear everything in this house. It’s not large, whatever it looks like from the street.”

He slept well enough that first night, or thought he did, until some hour past midnight when he surfaced out of a shallow dream into the particular stillness of an unfamiliar room. The window was open a crack; the curtains breathed in and out. And under that, from somewhere below or perhaps through the wall — it was hard, half-asleep, to place it — came the sound of Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice.

She was on the telephone. That much was clear from the rhythm of it: long pauses, then a few words, then a longer pause, the cadence of a woman listening as much as speaking. He caught only fragments, disconnected, as sleep kept trying to reclaim him.

“…yes, very warm for the time of year…”

A pause.

“…he seems a nice enough young man. Quiet. No trouble at all so far…”

Another pause, longer this time — long enough that Alan, drifting, wondered if the call had ended, or if she were simply listening to someone talk at length on the other end.

“…well, we shall see, shan’t we…”

He turned over, oddly comforted by the ordinariness of it — an old woman gossiping to a friend or a sister about her new lodger, the sort of small talk that must fill up her evenings — and let the sound carry him back down into sleep. It did not once occur to him, that first night, to wonder who might still be awake to receive a telephone call at that hour, or why the pauses in her side of the conversation ran so long, as though whoever she spoke to on the other end took an unusually long time to answer.

The next day unrolled in the pleasant, unremarkable way of early days in a new place. Alan went into town for the day, sat through introductions and login credentials and the particular disorientation of a new office, and came back in the long amber evening to find Mrs. Colquhoun deadheading roses at the front of the house, still in her pearls.

“You’ll want your supper,” she said, though he hadn’t mentioned it, and led him in to a small meal of cold ham and salad laid at the kitchen table, herself sitting opposite with only a cup of tea, watching him eat with the pleased, faintly proprietary look of someone feeding a large and satisfactory pet.

She talked more that evening than the first — about the house, about the neighbourhood’s slow changes, about lodgers she’d had “on and off” over the years, though when Alan asked how many, she considered the question as if it were more difficult than it should have been, and said only, “One or two. It isn’t a thing I count, really. They come, and they settle in, and then—” She stopped, and smiled, and did not finish the sentence.

“That young man in the photograph,” Alan said. “The one who liked the garden.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Colquhoun, and something in her face went soft and distant, the way faces do at a grief so old it has become a kind of comfort. “He does like it out there. The wisteria was his idea, you know. He planted it the first summer he — ” She caught herself, laughed a small dry laugh. “He planted it. Forgive me. One gets one’s tenses muddled, at my age. So much of it feels like now.”

She rose to clear his plate before he’d quite finished, brisk again, cheerful again, and said, as if in afterthought, “The arrangement will want settling soon, of course. These things always do, come the height of summer.” He asked what she meant, and she only patted his hand and said it was nothing he need trouble himself with, and that he should get his rest.

He thought about it, faintly, on the stairs — settling, and the odd slip into present tense, and the too-long pauses on the telephone the night before — but the day had been long, the ham had been good, and suburban houses, he told himself, were full of old women with old habits of speech that meant less than they seemed to. He went to bed early and slept without dreaming.

The second night, he woke to the voice again, and this time — perhaps because he had half expected it, perhaps because sleep had not yet fully claimed him — he lay still and listened properly.

It came, as before, through the wall or the floor, impossible to place exactly, Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice pitched low and conversational, pleasant even, the voice of a woman making small talk with an old and patient friend.

“…he’s settled in very well, I think. Hardly hear him at all…”

A pause. The house’s clocks, faintly, out of step with one another, marking two slightly different midnights somewhere below.

“…I know, I know — it is such an inconvenience, having someone in the house again, after we’d only just—” A pause, softer, almost apologetic. “But it can’t be helped. Not yet. A few more days.”

Alan lay rigid in the dark. There was nothing in the words themselves that ought to have frightened him — an old woman complaining, mildly, about the disruption of a paying guest, was hardly gothic material — and yet something in the tone caught at him: not the tone of a woman irritated by inconvenience, but of one placating something, soothing it, the way one might speak to a jealous animal, or a child made to wait.

He told himself, lying there, that she meant the extra washing-up, the extra laundry, the small frictions of having a stranger under one’s roof. He told himself this quite firmly, several times, and did not entirely believe it.

In the morning, driven by something he did not examine too closely, he went looking — on the pretext of finding an outlet for his phone charger — for the telephone. There was one in the hall, an old cream-coloured thing with a rotary dial, sitting on a lace mat beside the longcase clock. He lifted the receiver, meaning nothing by it, meaning only to satisfy some small itch of curiosity, and found no dial tone. Only a flat, dead silence, and, very faint beneath it, something that might have been distant static or might have been nothing at all, the kind of sound the ear invents when it is listening too hard.

He set it down carefully, told himself the line was simply out of order, and went to work with the sun already hot on the pavements, and did not mention it.

Enzo Martinelli’s page on Amazon.com

By the third evening, a low, persistent unease had settled into him that he could not talk himself out of, however hard he tried across the length of a tedious office day. He noticed, walking back from the bus stop in the still-bright seven o’clock light, how the houses of Farrant Road all looked faintly stage-lit, too picturesque, hedges and roses and a child’s bicycle abandoned on a lawn, as though the whole street had been arranged to reassure him of something.

He ate supper with Mrs. Colquhoun in near silence; she seemed, that evening, distracted, glancing more than once towards the hall as though listening for something, and when he said good night on the landing she held his hand a moment longer than the occasion required and said, “You’ve been no trouble at all, Mr. Whitfield. I want you to know that. Whatever else — you’ve been no trouble.”

He lay awake deliberately that third night, telling himself he would simply listen, and if the telephone conversation began again he would go down and see, plainly, with his own eyes, an old woman talking to her sister in Surbiton or wherever it was, and be done with the whole foolish business.

It began later than before — past one, by the confused evidence of the clocks — and this time it did not come from below at all.

It came from the little wooden cabinet in the wall beside his own fireplace, the one with the loose brass door he had noticed and forgotten on his first afternoon.

He sat up. The voice was unmistakably Mrs. Colquhoun’s, and unmistakably close, close in a way that made no sense for a woman two floors down or even one floor down, close as if she stood just the other side of the plaster, her mouth nearly against it.

“…the room will be ready again soon,” she was saying, gently, reasonably, the voice of someone negotiating a small delay with an old and trusted patience. “I know. I know you’ve waited long enough. It won’t be much longer now. Everything tidied by morning, same as always.”

A pause — and in the pause, under the thick summer silence of the room, Alan thought he heard, or felt, a second thing beneath her voice: not words, nothing so clear as words, but a texture, a kind of pressure in the air like breath drawn very close to an ear, or like the static on the dead telephone line made audible at last.

“…yes,” said Mrs. Colquhoun, softer still, almost tender. “Yes. I promise.”

Alan did not go to investigate. He told himself, afterward — in the brief, rational moments before sleep finally overtook him, an exhaustion that felt less like rest than like being drawn under — that he would leave in the morning, first thing, invent some excuse about the office, and find a hotel near Holborn for the remainder of the contract. He lay listening to the clocks below disagreeing gently with one another, one striking two while another, fainter, seemed already to strike three, and felt the summer night’s warmth thicken around him like something poured, and felt, just before sleep took him entirely, a change in the air of the room — a coolness, brief and localised, as if someone had opened a door somewhere and let something patient step through it at last.

The milk float came up Farrant Road at half past six the next morning, and the birds were loud in the wisteria, and Mrs. Colquhoun, going up with a tray of tea she had not been asked to bring, found Mr. Whitfield in his bed, on his back, quite still, the covers barely disturbed, his face composed in an expression so peaceful that the doctor, called shortly after, would murmur something about it being a mercy, really, in his sleep, these things happen even to the young — and write, on the certificate, a phrase about the heart that satisfied everyone who needed satisfying, and explained nothing at all.

There was no mark on him. The little brass door on the wall cabinet was found, in the course of things, to be quite empty — no wire, no fitting, nothing behind the plaster to suggest it had ever held a telephone extension at all, only old dust and a smell, faint and sweetish, that the young constable noted and did not mention in his report because there was no box on the form for it.

Mrs. Colquhoun was, by every account, devastated — dabbed at her eyes, spoke movingly of what a quiet, no trouble at all young man he had been, and pressed tea on the officials with the same brisk, comforting hospitality she had shown Alan on his first afternoon. In the guestbook that sat on the hall table, beneath the longcase clock, someone — perhaps her, perhaps out of long habit — had already entered his name in a careful copperplate hand: A. Whitfield, June. No one troubled to look at the page before it, where an earlier name had been written and then, at some point, lightly crossed through with a single, unhurried line, nor at the page before that, where the same small, patient hand had done the same thing once again, and once again before that, going back further than the guestbook itself seemed old enough to allow.

That evening, with the house quiet again and the wisteria breathing its scent in through the open window, Mrs. Colquhoun sat in the front room among her disagreeing clocks and lifted the receiver of the old cream telephone, and dialled nothing at all, and after a moment began, in her warm and ordinary voice, to speak.

“There now,” she said, to the dead line, to the empty hall, to whatever waited patiently on the other side of the wall in the room upstairs. “The room’s ready for you again. It won’t be long now before the next one comes. Midsummer’s always a good time for it — they do love the garden.”

Outside, the suburb settled into its long golden evening exactly as it had every evening before, hedges and lawns and the distant, ordinary drone of someone’s mower, closing gently back over the house on Farrant Road like water over a stone.