(poems From Haunted Houses) Ardival Poem by Janice Windle

[ This is a poem about another house that my parents rented in Scotland, in the early 1960's. It was in Dunbar Street, Lossiemouth and it's probably still there.]


A dark house, a fusty, maroon, mahogany place,
shadowy cupboards, unexplained angles, creaking boards.
The back stairs twisting up from the scullery
where you might think to meet
a frightened tweeny maid, scared
by the invasion of her attic territory, as living children
scramble, whispering and giggling in a game of Sardines,
intent on squeezing into the cubby hole where she
would hang her cap and apron
after her day of scrubbing and dusting.

Open a door and you’re met by the brazen glare
of a cobra - you hear its hiss
in the creak of the hinge -
balancing on its raised hood
a table-top of gold Benares ware.
The claw-footed furniture squats, comfortable
in the corners by the leaded windows,
sinister to our unfamiliar eyes.

The dining room is haunted by the spectres
of long-dead clairvoyants, holding séances
where the death-watch worms
knock and rustle behind the panels
and the dark cavities of the ceiling hold
skeins of cobwebs strung out like ectoplasm
as the dead are raised in memory by the dead.

At the turn of the main stairs the silent roar of a tiger
pinned to the wall like the story of its death
in a raconteur’s repertoire.
It’s a two-dimensional menace now, except for
the head with bared teeth that you know gleam
in the moonlight that floods through the leaded light
as, fearfully, you tread downstairs to get
a glass of water. On the path back up, as in a bad dream,
you dare not meet those glassy eyes. You stare down,
will yourself to rationality, fight the panic, keep your head,
for you are, after all,
the oldest.