What can you do during half term, with no car, in the middle of the French countryside, la France profonde? We have bicycles, our son reminded me. Our daughter has outgrown hers and prefers to ride mine, so I ride her sister’s bike. I have no shame! It has a musical horn, and a bell, so what’s not to like?
Our destination? The Ghost House.
It’s setting is perfect, South facing opposite a picturesque pond, in a little dip secreted away from the main road the Ghost House silently waits for its regular visitors. Someone else also comes here, leaving empty beer bottles and cigarettes in the stables. The plastic doll has been moved, but still lies forlorn amongst the dirt.
The main part of the house still stands but the roof is gone, lost to a devastating fire. Charred beams remain piled high in one room. All the other rooms have been cleared out. An attempt at resurrection perhaps?
Light spills in through open shutters, illuminating the tiled floor of one room. Keys still hang on a wall. We take them and try the locked door to the cupboard under the stairs. Inside there are only spiders.
The Ghost House is, in fact, remarkably empty of furnishings. Only the bones remain, the stone, the brick, the tiled floors. The skeleton of the building is here, with its chest torn open to the sky. Blackened timbers hang in the air above our heads, ribs of the leviathan.
In the gullet of its lower, darker regions, there are signs of lost wealth, of spoiled plenty, the beast wrecked upon the rocks of fate. We touch nothing, we take nothing, for this place is a monument to loss. We have no knowledge of its story, what came to pass, what has already been taken by the greedy flames that licked the flesh from the bones of the building.
Or who may still haunt the halls of the Ghost House when we have left…
14thcenturypoet 