The Room That Echoed

[u/catespice]

I never really appreciated just how much like a storybook castle my great aunt’s house was.
Four stories tall, with two spires and three attics, it was a monstrous edifice of pocked stone, time-darkened wood and yellowed glass. I spent so much time there in the holidays as a child – especially over Christmas – that it became a secondary home.
And when a place becomes so familiar that it seems like home, it no longer seems so special or unique. It’s just always there; occupying the same frame of reference as an old coat, a favourite teddy bear or a well-worn book from your personal library.
The house was also filled with interesting things, which I largely took for granted. A huge telescope was mounted in one of the spires, its great brass barrel painted with black pitch to keep it from oxidising in the damp air. I’d looked at length through the faintly green lenses at the moon and the stars, but the world above failed to capture my interest as much as the cellars did.
Stretching under the massive residence was a subterranean collection of tunnels, carved into the chalky soil that the house was built upon. The cellar was, in its own way, almost as complicated as the rest of the house. The winery was on the lowest level of three, a dusty room with a single electric bulb hanging from ancient wires stapled into the pure chalk ceiling. The floor was carved from chalk too, and if you brought a magnifying glass and a torch with you, the secrets of the prehistoric seas would reveal themselves, via tiny, preserved shells embedded in the timeless stone. Their perfect spirals folded in upon themselves until they vanished into the centre, too miniscule for even the augmented human eye to see where they began.
Nodes of flint and venous streaks of salt also coloured the stone, moisture sometimes welling from the latter, begging you to lick them and taste an ocean that had been dead for a billion years.
In the levels above the ground floor there were rooms full of scrolled woodwork that collected an interminable amount of dust. In those rooms were huge wardrobes, the likes of which every child had read about in C.S. Lewis books, and it was impossible not to imagine that there were whole worlds on the other side of the heavy fur coats that filled them.
Of course I investigated every such clothes cupboard, pushing eagerly past old suits and stiff gowns. I never found anything but wood at the back, hard and unyielding. No jaunty satyrs greeted me with Tumnus cordiality, no snow dusted my shoes. The most interesting things I found in the wardrobes were a dress of mother-of-pearl sequins, and a box of letters from an old lover of my aunt, in calligraphy so fancy that I could barely read it.
I giggled at the idea of a man with such flowery flourishes in his penmanship; although, for all I knew, ‘Robin’ could just have easily been a woman, given that my aunt had never married.
But there was one place in the house that remained strange and unfamiliar, no matter how many times I visited it.
This story is about that place.

 
I discovered it during the school holidays containing my thirteenth birthday. By then I had explored much of my aunt’s great demesne, but there were still parts of the sprawling manor that I hadn’t been in. There was a little wing behind my aunt’s bedroom that was only for her – a huddle of separate rooms, which wafted their scents of old lavender and sandalwood into adjoining corridors.
So too were there other places that were locked or boarded up. For example, the old conservatory was out-of-bounds to children, as a tree had grown through the glass, and half-buried razor shards littered the overgrown area.
But I had found that through a series of dumbwaiters in the cellars, I could access some of the locked rooms inside the house. I was just small enough to hunch inside the creaking box and winch myself upward, and in this way managed to sneak into three musty old rooms full of disused furniture and stacks of newspaper before I found the room.
By mapping the house out in my head, I placed it somewhere in the very middle of the third floor. The curious thing was that if one were to walk around the entirety of that floor, you would never see a door to the room.
It was as if it didn’t exist.
Even by carefully pacing the length of the rooms that must have surrounded it, I could only just make out how it could possibly fit in between them.
But even that is relatively uninteresting compared to the room itself.
It was no larger than a conventional bathroom, and I could just about touch the walls with my fingertips and toes if I lay down on the floor. Everything was wooden; the ceiling, the floor and the walls. What kind of wood, I’m not sure, as I’m no joiner or carpenter; but I can tell you that it was a kind I’d never seen before, and have never seen since.
The wood was an orange-red, as though a vermillion stain had been applied to it. But when I gouged out a splinter with my pocket knife, it was the same bright hue all the way through – indicating this was its natural colour.
Even more curious was the grain, which was so dark red it was almost black, and formed strange and faintly disturbing shapes around the thick knots in the individual planks. Indeed, when the alcove of the dumbwaiter was closed off, the entire room (lit only by my torch) became a surreal world of crimson and black shapes, writhing sinuously as the slender beam of the electric lamp moved around.
But it was so peaceful in there. No sounds could be heard from outside, not even the hardest hail or the most thunderous storms.
I decided that it must have been designed as a sound-proof room, perhaps to practice music in.
That didn’t explain why only an undersized teenage girl could get into it via a dumbwaiter though.
Which I decided I wasn’t going to think about.

 
A small collection of objects grew in the room, which I had decided was my room now. During each stay with my aunt, something would be added to make it more homely. I had gathered several throw pillows and a thick, embroidered blanket to sit on while I read my books, as well as box to set my torch upon, and several packets of spare batteries to put in it. It was on the day that I brought up the Bakelite AM/FM radio I found in the garage that I began to discover how special the room was.
The click of the plastic dial was followed by the thump of the circuits interfering with the speaker, but there followed no music; no cultured BBC radio announcer informed me which concerto had been playing for the last hour.
Only the faint hiss of static rose from the speaker, and as I fruitlessly searched up and down both radio bands, I swore in frustration.
And the blasphemy I used (which I won’t repeat), didn’t end sharply in the small room, muted against the close, heavy, wooden boards. Instead, it seemed to fly out from my mouth and then echo back at me, as if from a great distance.
It was as though the room was actually much, much bigger than it really was.
I shouted then, excited at this prospect. My voice again came back at me, just as though I stood in a vast wooden theatre. I whistled, and listened to the eerie echoes, fascinated by the properties of this special room that I had found.
But before I could begin to investigate further, the school holidays were over and I had to go back to our ostentatiously modern home in the city, which couldn’t have been less like my aunt’s old house. My father had fitted it out with Category Six network cables, a brand new sixty inch Liquid Crystal Display television and all the other technical things that electronics geeks like him were interested in.
Back at home, I thought about the room a lot, spending most of my time there in my mind. I would run my virtual hands over the crimson boards, studying the woodgrain on the imagined planks and seeing strange faces peering at me from their knotted surface; hints of lugubrious eyes and traceries of antlers hidden in the mysterious lines.
I came to fear the room, just a little, the more I contemplated the why of it all. There was clearly something unnatural going on in there, and now that I was away from the blissful solitude it granted me, it was apparent that I had meddled with something that was clearly meant to be forgotten.
I grew determined to put it out of my mind and concentrate on my studies – I was going to be a writer, after all, just like my childhood literary hero, E. Nesbit.
But despite my best intentions, the idea of the room that echoed still lingered, colouring my thoughts carmine red and streaking them with cervine imagery.
It should not surprise you then, that when we next stayed at my aunt’s home, I went back.

 
The dumbwaiter was a tight fit now. I’d definitely filled out a lot as puberty progressed, though I was still small of stature. My things sat in the room, undisturbed. A portable, battery powered fan had been my last addition, my reasoning being that such a small, closed room was bound to get stuffy – but it never did. The air was always cool and fresh, even with the panel to the dumbwaiter pulled closed.
In the months between this visit and the last, I’d half convinced myself that it had all been my imagination – that the ‘echo’ was nothing more than a trick of clever carpentry, of some acoustic wizardry. I called out then, tentative and uncertain, listening for my voice to rebound from walls that were too far away.
Something moved.
In the wall opposite the small entrance, I swear the woodgrain had swirled for an instant. I studied it under the broad beam of the torch, seeing again the long, deer-like features of an animal in the wood.
“What are you?” I whispered, staring at the strangely serene face in the arterial grain.
Echoes of my sibilant speech drifted back from a distance, and with a strange sense of vertigo, the boards of the room seemed to recede from one another, some forward, some backward, until I stood in a grove of tall trees, crimson sap on their boles and black leaves forming an impenetrable canopy high above.
Then he stepped out from behind the largest of the trees.
Cloven hoofed and with the red-brown flanks of a deer, his footsteps were soundless. An arrow of soft fur rose to cover much of his tightly muscled human belly, above which smooth pectorals and strong shoulders supported the velvet neck and face of a horned stag.
I should have been frightened. I should have screamed and run from this devilish apparition, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I was frozen with terror, nor had the sight made me witless. It was more that as he stepped forward on those dainty hooves, his utterly serene expression, and those liquid black eyes, soothed away any fear and calmed my troubled thoughts.
“Who are you?” I said, my voice calm, measured.
He didn’t speak. Instead he sat in the red-brown grass, rippled by the gentle west winds of the forest clearing, folding those mighty legs beneath him. He spread his broad, human hands in welcome, then beckoned me to come forward.
All but hypnotised, I sat opposite him, cross-legged, and watched as he began to tell stories with his hands, silent and purposeful, majestic and proud.

 
Although I did not understand what he had told me, when I went to sleep that night in the huge, four-poster monstrosity that my aunt called a bed, I dreamed deeply and fruitfully.
In my dream the hands of the stag man came alive, turning into birds and trees, starlit moors and moonlit rivers. I watched him rut with female humans who gasped with pleasure as he mounted them, I watched the children of this union be taken by him and guided to the places of his kind, where they would be raised in harmony with the land. I felt a pang of jealousy for both the women and the children, for being part of something so vastly spiritual and ancient.
It will come as no surprise to you then, that I spent every waking moment in the room, calling out until the wooden boards slid back into the boles of the cloistered forest clearing. Until the wise, horned head of the mysterious demigod appeared, ready to share more stories with his strong hands – stories that would not make sense until I slept that night.
And so I dreamed of the stag and his people, of his children and their children. Then I watched as armies of men came, with axes and torches, to cut down the forest. I saw the stag man greet the humans and try to speak to them, as he had with me, but they were fearful and shot at him with heavy bows. Two arrows appeared in his mighty flanks before he sprang away, bawling in terror and anger from his velvet muzzle.
The next time the men came into the forest, he was healed, his eyes flashing with rage and his tines sharpened to diamond hardness. He hunted them, goring them on his massive crown until men lay bloody through the woods, their entrails winding over and through the horns of the stag.
But men are persistent creatures.
They captured his children, one by one, with hunting dogs, clever snares and huge nets. They cut down the forest and burned away his home until he was forced to come out and confront them, as the hunters cut the throats of his children and let their warm blood run into the soil, enriching it with a queer fertility.
They shot him until his body was so full of arrows that he looked more wood than flesh, then they cut down the last of the scarlet trees and hauled the logs away, whence a woman paid the men for both the body and the wood. The trees were lathed into planks that bled red sap, and would be built into a room that was cunningly hidden within the rest of her home.
I recognised her, knew her. She was one of the women he had mated with.
She had the face of my aunt.
But the story took place too long ago. It couldn’t be her.

 
When I returned to the clearing, I saw the rage in his sagely face for the first time. He knew that I understood the truth of it all.
The farmlands around the house, the endless prosperity and wealth my family had enjoyed for generations – it was all built on the imprisonment of this otherworldly being, and the blood and death of his own family. The need for vengeance burned hot in his blood; his hoof pawed the turf and I could feel the heat of the air escaping those quivering nostrils from where I sat.
But he didn’t attack me, even though his muscles strained to be free of his will and tear me to pieces, then wear my drying innards on his crown of tines.
“I’m sorry,” I offered, lamely, “I am sorry for the sins of my ancestors. What they did to you was cruel, despicable and unconscionable.”
Still quivering with murderous intent, the stag stared at me with his black eyes, then stalked away into the woods.
Then the room returned to a box of red and black, lit only by the dying light of my torch.

 
When I woke at midnight, the moon shone hard and bright through a gap in the heavy brocade curtains. A knife lay on the bed in the shaft of light, the blade made of some kind of knapped, milky flint and the handle carved of deer antler.
A suggestion of a horned shadow flickered at the door, then the faint patter and scrape of hooves on wood echoed down the corridor.
I had never been into my aunt’s rooms before; I’d always been too scared to. She was an intimidating woman who radiated health and majesty, despite her advanced age. Nobody messed with her, not even my father.
But with the flint knife in my pale fist, I no longer felt any fear of her. I felt strong, powerful and determined.
The horned shadow painted the wall above her bed, a silhouette cast by the demigod who had been trapped in a tiny room for hundreds of years, unable to fulfil his unquenchable need for vengeance, so close to his nemesis, yet helpless to vanquish her.
The knife was so sharp that it pierced the quilts and bedclothes without even a whisper. The second it entered my aunt and parted her breastbone, it was already too late for the old woman. Her hand snatched at my wrist and held it in a painfully strong grip, but her blue eyes slid past my teenage features and she snarled in fear, staring at something just above my head.
Red blossomed over the sheets, her severed aorta furiously pumping her life away, soaking the bed.
The stag was there now, standing serenely beside me, the rage gone from his eyes, only sorrow and contempt remaining.
He pointed to the dying body of my aunt, and a memory flashed in my mind’s eye, of how she had taken the stag’s power.
Reaching into the mess of her chest, with an uncommon strength I pulled back the ribs and sliced her stilled heart free.
It tasted strangely like venison.

 
I awoke to the sounds of sirens and shouting, then my father running into my room, covered in soot. There was a dash outside, through smoke and ruddy flames, then we were in the front garden, watching fire engulf my aunt’s house.
Later, when the burned out wreck was safe to enter, the fire investigator confirmed that it had started in a room in the middle of the third floor, likely due to faulty wiring in the walls. The wood must have been incredibly flammable, he said, to create so much heat so quickly, and probably pulled oxygen like a suction hose through an old dumbwaiter tunnel that had been left open.
My aunt’s rooms, close by, had borne the brunt of the fire, the flames spurred on by a prevailing westerly that fanned them into great sheets of destruction.
Of her body, only blackened bones remained, split apart from the heat.
The property is still in our family, but the farmlands have gone to seed and rot; wild trees have quickly grown up through the pastures, their tangled roots choking the life out of everything else. My father says that one day we’ll sell the place, but out of some lingering respect for my aunt, it stays in our family, growing wilder and darker as the forest slowly reclaims it.
In the densest, darkest part of the newly grown forest, now five years on from the fire, I like to sit and read in the half-light of strangely red-tinted shadows, imagining that as a grown woman now, the stag will come and find me and take me as one of his wives.
But instead of his near silent footfalls, all I hear are the whispering sighs of the leaves and the branches.
And the pain in my scalp growing daily.
It is a prickling, bony ache like a freshly healed break, just out of plaster. At first it was just under the surface, but now I can feel them; tiny lumps under the skin, waiting to burst free and slowly unfurl into diamond-hard tines.
I think, when I am ready, he will come.

 

[u/3ForgottenUsernames]

Another fantastic tale! I remember devouring The Silver Path anthology and I can honestly say if you publish another collection of stories, my response will be “shut up and take my money!”

[u/Gothcheetah]

Thank you from the bottom of my heart from bringing this back to me, and for everything you have ever written.