This Old House
[CLICK]
[FOOTSTEPS ON PAVEMENT WALK STEADILY, ACCOMPANIED BY BIRDS TWEETING]
ANNABELLE
Are you going to walk this slow the whole way?
MARTIN
Are you going to stay silent the whole way?
ANNABELLE
Perhaps… that’s because you didn’t seem to like what I had to say.
MARTIN
No, it’s because you weren’t really saying anything, were you? It was all just ominous foreshadowing again.
ANNABELLE
Perhaps I was just trying to make things feel… familiar?
MARTIN
Perhaps the whole ‘answer a question with a question’ thing is wearing a bit thin. Besides which it’s a bit late to play coy. You promised me an actual straight answer.
ANNABELLE
You’d have it a lot more quickly if you didn’t keep stopping.
MARTIN
Hey, this is your magic bubble. You’re the one making it so that we’re, like, actually walking, walking all the way to Oxford. So sorry I’ve got to sit down occasionally, like a human.
ANNABELLE
And the book breaks?
MARTIN
It’s not like you’re entertaining company.
ANNABELLE
And it’s nothing to do with the fact that any lost souls in our area also get a break from their torment? Hmmm?
MARTIN
…
So what if it does? Is that a problem?
ANNABELLE
Actually, I find it very reassuring.
MARTIN
Great, because I’m still going to need to rest. Some of these houses have actual beds, and I haven’t slept on a mattress since Sa–
[FOOTSTEPS SLOW, THEN STOP]
Hmm.
ANNABELLE
Problem?
MARTIN
Did he suffer?
ANNABELLE
Did who suffer?
MARTIN
Just… answer the question.
ANNABELLE
No.
I did it in his sleep.
He’d always been accommodating, so… I wanted to honour his wishes.
MARTIN
That’s a shame.
ANNABELLE
Is it?
MARTIN
I mean… he seemed nice. To us at least.
ANNABELLE
And what of his victims? The people whose lives he destroyed?
MARTIN
…
I can’t speak for them. I didn’t know them, did I?
ANNABELLE
No. You didn’t.
[FOOTSTEPS RESUME]
MARTIN
[Sighs] Is it much further?
ANNABELLE
Less so than last time you asked.
MARTIN
Could you just try answering a question properly? Just once?
ANNABELLE
…
We’re close now. Just a few more streets.
MARTIN
Thank you.
…
Oh. Uhh… Huh. Um…
ANNABELLE
Oh come on, Martin. You didn’t really expect him to find us before we got here, did you?
MARTIN
[Unconvincing] N… no…
ANNABELLE
We have a sizable lead, and the camera too, don’t forget. Besides, even if he did ‘ride to your rescue’, what then? Would you explain to him that you’re here of your own free will?
MARTIN
I mean, that’s a pretty generous way to describe being blackmailed.
ANNABELLE
Oh, it’s blackmail, is it? Offering you a way out of all this?
MARTIN
You said if I told John or waited then you’d leave, and I’d never know.
ANNABELLE
And you believed me, which was very gracious of you.
MARTIN
[Sputters slightly] I shouldn’t have.
ANNABELLE
Why not? I didn’t lie to you, I do have another option for you. One that means neither of you need to die or be consumed by any dark power.
MARTIN
Oh, but you can’t just tell me or John. Oh no, no, that would be far too straightforward.
ANNABELLE
I could.
[MARTIN SIGHS]
But it’s much better if you see it for yourselves. And he would not have come willingly. He needs to think he’s coming for you.
MARTIN
He can see literally everything. I’m sure he probably knows it already.
ANNABELLE
In a way, perhaps. But I guarantee that being here in person is something very different.
Come on.
MARTIN
Hey, is that – ? You told me not to bring a tape recorder.
ANNABELLE
No. I said we wouldn’t need one. We have plenty of tapes.
MARTIN
But then –
ANNABELLE
We’re here.
[FOOTSTEPS CEASE]
MARTIN
This is it?
ANNABELLE
Ah, I forget. You’ve never actually been here before, have you?
Well? What do you think?
MARTIN
It’s… I-I mean, it’s, um…
ANNABELLE
Just a house?
MARTIN
Well… well, yeah.
ANNABELLE
What were you expecting?
MARTIN
I don’t know, like… something a bit more dramatic, I guess.
ANNABELLE
We’ll see what we can do.
[FOOTSTEPS, THEN CREAKING AS ANNABELLE OPENS THE DOOR]
[Dramatically] Step into my parlour.
MARTIN
Hmmm.
Fine.
[FOOTSTEPS AS MARTIN FOLLOWS, CHANGING FROM PAVEMENT TO WOOD]
[DOOR CLOSES BEHIND HIM]
ANNABELLE
Do take a seat.
[MARTIN PUTS DOWN BAG, TAKES A SEAT]
MARTIN
[Warily] So… What now?
ANNABELLE
I’ve written you a statement. I would like for you to read it.
[PAPER RUSTLING, THEN FOOTSTEPS]
MARTIN
And if I don’t?
ANNABELLE
Then we sit here in silence until the Archivist arrives. But I would suggest you do read it. I believe you’ll find it… illuminating.
[A LONG PAUSE BEFORE MARTIN SIGHS HEAVILY]
MARTIN
Screw it. Fine.
Fine.
MARTIN (STATEMENT)
[THROUGHOUT THERE IS THE OCCASIONAL RUSTLING OF PAPER AND CREAK OF WOOD]
Once there was a house, a building that, for all it might have looked like those around it, was not the same.
Stop, no.
It didn’t start with the house. It was here long before any might have thought of it as a home.
Once, there was a patch of land, not quite as firm in this reality as that which surrounded it.
Stop, no.
It’s not about the land. Mud and soil has no part in what is there.
Once, there was a point in space that did not quite obey all those petty rules that decide what can be allowed to happen in a world.
Stop, no.
It’s not a point in space. The Earth spins and hurtles through the darkness, but it still carries it along.
Let us simply say that once there was a place. A place where the universe had… cracked.
None of us remember what had caused the crack, not even those things beyond time who might measure a generation in the echoes of their screams. It has been there as long as they have, if not longer. It’s not a large crack, and to walk by it, even through it, you’d never pause to notice. Perhaps the air around it is slightly thinner, lights slightly dimmer… In the summer there may be the slightest chill. In the winter a warmth that is almost unsettling. The fungus that grows in the damp there is somehow more vibrant in its whiteness, while flowers remain duller than those that neighbour them. But these changes are slight, and none have dwelt on them long enough to call the place cursed. Indeed, few have ever thought much of it at all. Perhaps there are many such places across the Earth. Perhaps it is unique. Certainly, no-one has known either way.
The first to build a home upon that spot was named Eowa. He was a Saxon, and a coward, who had fled the field against the Mercian king, and sought to find his peace there. His squalid little hut was far removed from those of his once-kinsmen. Nonetheless, there he lived and worked, and tried hopelessly to forget the stench of blood and rot, and the feel of a seax knife in the wound he carried to the end of his life. Did his terror call to him with the drumbeat voice of carnage? Did it sing to him with the squirming melody of decay? Could any have told you the difference?
It is strange. That a name, a face, a taste of fear should linger through the centuries, and yet I cannot be sure which of them it was that ate so well. Some fears are eternal, but within them lie a hundred titles, whispered in the secret places of every era of every corner of our world. Who can say if any of them are true?
Whichever it might have been, they knew Eowa’s terrors well. Until he was no longer there. Until he awoke in a place that was a place but… somewhere else. Somewhere the Mercians had pushed further, had taken more. For all his dread of a violent death, his end was quick and clean. And none of his kinsmen ever knew his fate. His hut, left unattended, quickly fell to disrepair, then to collapse. No-one used the wood; the grain was warped.
[BIRDS TWITTER FAINTLY]
Many lived in that spot across the following years. Some in peace, some in misery, a few in strangled fear. But none tied their sorrows to the land or the dwelling they might have erected upon it. The village slowly grew, and became a more populous town though not ever a remarkable one. That said, perhaps, sometimes, in the quiet, those who tried to make it their home might have felt a whisper, an echo of some other place, some place not quite their own. But it never disturbed their sleep.
So what does it mean, for a place to be haunted? A place can be haunted by someone, some poor soul whose bones lie restless in the shallow soil. It can be haunted by something, some crime or atrocity that indelibly marked itself upon the soul of a spot. But can it be haunted by somewhere? An echo of worlds that are not our own, alien pasts that draw to unknown presents, leaking through the smallest, narrowest crack at the very edge of existence?
The closest anyone ever came to knowing was a man named Geoffrey Neckam, a scholar from the University. He bought the house that then sat there from a bow-legged milliner whose name he never bothered to learn, seeking some peace and removal from his more raucous colleagues. He was a man of God, of course, but also a keen master of natural philosophy, a study he put to use when he first felt the oddities that pervaded his new home – the strange draughts that shifted his candle flame, the gentle murmur that almost sounded like voices. Once he even found a new room, though he very wisely did not enter it.
His investigations were crude, of course, convinced as he was that it was some working of his God; an unseen passage to a heavenly sphere, perhaps, or, as he more often feared, an infernal one. That said, his observations were surprisingly astute, and his rubric of belief closer to the truth than you might imagine. But Geoffrey Neckam had neither the words to talk of dimensions, nor a mind able to meaningfully conceive of worlds beyond the one within which he lived, and its requisite afterlives of course. And so, as a result all his mediations and his intellect ultimately lead him nowhere.
They were not, however, entirely in vain. Because, you see, Geoffrey Neckam lived in fear. There was a reason he chose to live apart from his peers, why he cooked his own paltry meals in privacy, and avoided academic meetings. He was certain that his scholastic rivals were somehow plotting against him, weaving intricate schemes to ruin his reputation and cost him his position, even take his life. It was this obsession that first brought him to the attention of Mother-of-Puppets, the Great Spider, and how we became aware of what this place was. What it might mean.
Eventually, the long-awaited knife in the dark did indeed find its way into the belly of Geoffrey Neckam. But by then his only meaningful work was done, and another, altogether grander plan, was now in motion.
It was no easy task, keeping the place close through the ages, working all the while to weaken that crack, luring in the servants of other powers, and so in the resulting clash, pressing ever harder against the edges of our reality.
For a while it belonged to a sculptor of puppets, who made his strings from the tendons of those he felt did not appreciate his art, and he would dance them around in a mocking effigy. He was, in time, slain by a crusading hunter of the Reformation, who would let no heresy go unanswered. He was bisected with his own wood saw.
Once there lived there a writer of anonymous letters, who could not have told you where his secrets came from, only that he knew the darkest desires of many souls, and had the wit to use them to their best effect. He was deemed a civil war traitor and buried alive deep beneath the house in which he had drawn his schemes by a man whose teeth were always stained with mud.
So many schemers and spiders and full-throated monsters. Twisting manipulators and furtive liars. Each meeting a violent, grotesque end; each widening the crack just a little. Until finally, a man named Raymond Fielding, a smiling pillar of the community who fostered children into food for his grotesque arachnid god, was murdered by flame, immolated by the Chosen of the Ravening Burn. The house of the time was destroyed along with him, reduced to ashes, and with that the crack finally became… a gap. A hole around which time, dimension and reality began to bend, shudder and leak.
An opening into, we believe, other worlds than this tired old thing.
It was not wide enough to allow true passage, not yet, save for the odd accident. But it was wide enough for what we now intended…
[MARTIN EXHALES]
MARTIN
Okay.
So.
A crack in reality?
ANNABELLE
Oh, it’s so much more than a crack now. It’s an aching hole, a gaping wound in the very fabric of our world.
MARTIN
And a gateway to other dimensions.
ANNABELLE
Not quite yet.
[MARTIN EXHALES SLOWLY AS HE PROCESSES]
MARTIN
Oooooookay.
ANNABELLE
Dramatic enough for you?
MARTIN
So this is what you wanted me to see?
…
Annabelle?
ANNABELLE
[Wistful] It’s a real shame, you know. I was so looking forward to filling you with spiders.
MARTIN
E– Wh– Excuse me?
ANNABELLE
They would have hollowed you out, and worn you like a cheery jumper!
MARTIN
Uh, right. But, since you’re telling me I can assume you’re not going to now, right?
ANNABELLE
That’s the thing about webs. People get so caught up on how intricate they are, how perfectly constructed. They never consider how flexible they can be. The sort of storm they need to weather. You can’t be precious about a single strand.
MARTIN
R-Right, yeah, but a-a-again, because you didn’t really answer me, um, filling me with spiders isn’t a strand of your web now, right? Um. I-I just want us to be, heh, absolutely clear on this.
A-Annabelle?
ANNABELLE
…
No.
[MARTIN IS RELIEVED]
Not anymore.
MARTIN
R-R-Right, thanks. Sorry. S-S-Sorry to interrupt, just, just checking.
ANNABELLE
It’s such a shame. There was a time when I was certain you had what it takes to join us.
MARTIN
What? Because I like spiders? Well, used to.
ANNABELLE
Because you always managed to get what you wanted through smiles and shrugs and stammerings that weren’t nearly as awkward as they seemed.
[SMALL SOUND OF MARTIN’S CONCESSION TO THE POINT]
MARTIN
Point taken.
ANNABELLE
But I didn’t foresee how deep you would fall into The Lonely. Or how far the Archivist would go to get you back. It made things… awkward.
MARTIN
Why are you telling me all this?
ANNABELLE
[Strained] Because… explaining things, giving answers, like this… it’s not what I am. It’s difficult, against my nature.
And I’m trying to practice.
MARTIN
Why?
ANNABELLE
Why do you think?
[MARTIN GROANS]
Sorry.
MARTIN
Okay, let’s try a different question. What was your plan?
ANNABELLE
I was going to snatch you away. Lure you both into this web, and then take you. Drive him to despair, so that when you returned to him, bulging, and talking in a thousand tiny voices, it would drive him to a final push.
MARTIN
And now?
ANNABELLE
[Sighs] Your bond is too complicated. I couldn’t drive that kind of rift between you now. I’ve considered every angle, examined every cause and effect, and have finally come to the conclusion that I… [sighs] I need to tell you the truth, to explain things.
MARTIN
[Frustrated] Yeah, but why?
ANNABELLE
Because if I do… you’ll do as I ask.
MARTIN
Oh, will we?
ANNABELLE
Yes.
[ANNABELLE TAKES A DEEP BREATH AND A FEW PACES]
He’s nearly here.
MARTIN
John?
ANNABELLE
Let’s make the setting a little more… appropriate, shall we?
MARTIN
Hey, just… ah, hah, p-put the camera down, okay?
ANNABELLE
You said you wanted something more “dramatic”, right?
MARTIN
Wh-What? No, no, no, wait, wait, wait. Wait… wait –
[ANNABELLE CHUCKLES, THEN HEFTS THE CAMERA INTO THE GROUND]
[GLASS SHATTERS AS HARSH STATIC CRACKLES AND CRACKS AND TWISTS THE SCENE… WIND WHIPS AROUND AS THEY STAND ON AN IMPOSSIBLE WEB STRETCHED ACROSS A GAPING CHASM]
MARTIN
[Distorted] Ooooh shit…
That’s a long way down
ANNABELLE
Further than you can possibly imagine.
[MARTIN QUIVERS AUDIBLY]
[STICKY SOUNDS SLAP WETLY AS ANNABELLE SLINGS WEB]
MARTIN
Oi! W-What’re you – ? Urgh! Urgh. What i–? What – ? What is this?
ANNABELLE
What do you think? It’s for your safety. So you don’t do anything… unpredictable. I’d hate for you to fall.
[WIND CONTINUES AS THUNDEROUS RUMBLES AND BUZZING INSECTS INTRUDE AUDITORILY]
MARTIN
When John gets here, he is going to kill you.
[MARTIN CONTINUES TO EXPRESS HIS DISGUST AT THE SILKEN RESTRAINTS]
ANNABELLE
As long as he listens to me first, it won’t matter.
[CLICK]
ARCHIVIST ON TAPE
So just listen –
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Listen, Martin, you should know –
[CLICK]
[CLICK]
Now, listen to me, Martin, li-listen –
[CLICK]
MARTIN
Wait. Wait…
The tapes…
ANNABELLE
A fine material to spin a web with, don’t you think?
MARTIN
What? All this time, through all of this, it, it was just you spying on us?
ANNABELLE
Oh Martin. You have no idea who’s listening, do you?