Winter Spirits

​

 

Chapter I

 

It was Friday, December 13th 2013 and on my winter walk I saw the mighty Stag emerge from the woods and graze in the open fields. As I approached he stood across the path blocking my way, his black eyes wide in his frost coated head, his great antlers high and magnificent. In those few moments of our meeting as our eyes locked he stared into me and in his eyes I felt he had all the winter spirits in him.

 

It was bitterly cold everywhere, not only outside but in the house too. All around there was a festive feeling in the air as Christmas decidedly approached. In the house there was a goodwill buzz going around, people walked about with distracted smiles on their faces, saying hello to each other when they usually wouldn't even look at each other. Some had gone so far as to decorate their doors with tinsel and cards and some even had put proper wreaths up.

 

It was Friday 13th, which was supposed to be unlucky, but I didn’t feel unlucky. I wasn’t prone to superstition. The house was a huge detached Victorian, Gothic style mansion. It was quite square looking from a distance, with high windows and high angled roofs that pointed ever upwards. It was very well appointed and was adorned with striking stone features. It was built with materials of top quality when things were made to last, when it was never dreamt of to cut back, when a structure was created to last as long as possible. On the large dominant front gable a huge finial pierced up into the sky, like a man’s finger pointing to emphasise the ever present gloom overhead. On each corner and at regular intervals, just beneath the rickety cast iron guttering, stone gargoyles crouched, facing outwards, covering every main point of the compass, put there to warn off evil spirits. The gargoyles had crazed expressions on them, looks of fixed shock and pain and mad horrific laughter. To the north they looked with snarls, to the south they faced with gritted teeth, to the east they stared out sombrely and blankly and to the west they wore a look of open defiance.

 

The house stood at the top of a T-junction and so from its large front windows you could look across the long front garden left and right along the busy main road and also down the smaller side street straight ahead. To the outside world the house went unnoticed as it was set back so far, but at one time the house would have been more at the centre of things and lived in by one big Victorian family.

 

It would’ve been a grand and happy place, lavishly decorated, buzzing with life, with lots of children, many servants and at the head of it all the wife and husband. It would've been like that for at least the first fifty to sixty years of its life.

 

Now it was divided up into many separate dwelling places, rooms, flats and flatlets and was generally run down and in some need of repair. In need of repair and just general cleaning and care. There was plenty of damp and dust in every corner, it hung in the air, it was everywhere. The damp inhabited the dark places, the places that never got warm, like the sides of walls that had no light and underneath the windows where moisture dripped. The dust filled the corners of window frames and coated the uneven creaky floorboards, it built up in drifts and blew around in gusts.

 

​