The Last Brownie of Higgle Street

The House Nobody Stays In

The SOLD sign hung crooked in the rain, and the house leaned down over the gate as if to get a better look at them.

Wren Tully looked back at it.

It was the last house on Higgle Street, which was the crookedest street in all of Mistlethwaite — a short, hunched little lane where the houses leaned on each other's shoulders like tired old men who had forgotten what they were queuing for. Number Eleven leaned the most. It leaned so far over its own front gate that the rain ran off the eaves and missed the doorstep entirely, drumming instead into a puddle the exact shape, Wren thought, of a question mark.

Above the door, worn nearly smooth by four hundred winters, were letters carved into the stone. She tipped her head one way, then the other. An H, maybe. A word that might once have been a word. The rain filled the grooves and made them gleam, and for half a second she nearly had it — and then the moving van's brakes shrieked and the half-second was gone.

"Well," said Dad, rubbing his hands together the way he did before every disaster, "isn't she a beauty."

"She's a tip," said Mum, but she said it the kind way, the way she said it about coats people brought her that were missing all their buttons.

Olly, who was five and afraid of nothing, pressed his nose to the gate. "The house is looking at me," he announced, pleased.

"Houses don't look," said Wren.

This one did. She didn't say so.

The estate agent was a damp man in a too-large suit who had been waiting under a too-small umbrella and clearly wished he hadn't. He pushed the front-door key into Dad's hand as though it were hot.

"Keys, contracts, all in order, smashing, lovely." The words came out in one breath, end to end. "It's a fixer, course, but at this price — at this price —" He laughed at nothing.

Dad turned the key over. "Cheap for a reason, then?"

"Reasons, schmeasons." The agent was already three steps down the path, umbrella tilted like a sail. "Old house. Damp. The, ah —" He glanced up at the carved letters over the door, and something crossed his face, quick as a fish under ice. "It's only that nobody ever stays. That's all. Nobody stays."

"Stays?" said Mum. "What do you mean, nobody —"

But the gate had already clacked shut behind him, and the agent was hurrying off into the rain at a pace just slightly faster than a man should walk if there was nothing at all to hurry from.

Nobody stays.

Wren took her notebook out of her coat.

It was a fat, soft, much-mended notebook, its spine gone furry as a caterpillar, and it held the maps of every house she had ever lived in — six of them now, in four years. The flat over the chip shop. The cousins' cold spare room. The house with the wasps. She knew the truth grown-ups never said out loud: that a place could pack you up and post you on before you'd even learned which stair creaked. So she mapped them. Every room, every cupboard, every window. If she drew a place properly — corner by corner, in her own hand — then some stubborn part of her got to own it, just a little, before it could throw her out.

She wrote the date at the top of a clean page. Then, underneath, small and fierce so nobody could see:

Number Eleven, Higgle Street. This time we stay.

She did not let herself hope. Hoping was for people that places kept. But she pressed the pen down hard enough to dent three pages.

Inside, the house smelled of cold stone and old smoke and, faintly, of something warm she couldn't name — like the ghost of bread. Wren went room by room while the boxes came in, drawing as she went. The narrow hall. The kitchen with its great black hearth. The crooked stairs, where the fourth step from the bottom was broken clean through, a splintered mouth of a thing she stepped over carefully and marked on her map with a small skull, which was her private sign for danger.

By the time the van rumbled off, she had mapped the whole house. Or thought she had.

That night, the house behaved impossibly.

Wren noticed the broken stair first. She came down for a glass of water, stepping wide over the gap by long habit — and there was no gap. The fourth step was whole. Not mended-whole, with new pale wood and a smell of glue, the way Dad mended things. Whole as if it had never broken. Whole as if it were embarrassed to have been seen broken at all.

She stood on it with both feet. It held. It didn't even creak.

In the front room, where she had left a chaos of boxes tipped and gaping, the boxes now stood in tidy towers, smallest on top, labels all turned the same way out. In the kitchen, the kettle ticked and steamed though no hand had been near it; when she laid her palm against its side it was warm as a sleeping cat. And the plate of welcome biscuits Mrs. Mabberley from Number One had left on the step — six fat oat biscuits, Wren had counted them — the plate was empty. Wiped clean. Beside it sat a small, neat, perfectly square pile of crumbs, swept together as if by a tiny, tidy, very particular broom.

Wren stood in the dark kitchen for a long time, very still, the way she went still when a grown-up was deciding something about her in the next room.

Mice did not stack boxes. Damp did not mend stairs. And nobody — nobody she had ever met — swept their crumbs into squares.

She thought about nobody ever stays, and she thought about the warm kettle and the whole stair, and the two thoughts did not fit together at all, which was exactly the sort of thing that made Wren Tully want to stay up all night and find out why.

So she set a trap.

She fetched the bag of flour from the kitchen box and dusted it in a fine pale layer across the floorboards in front of the hearth, soft as the first frost. She put one oat biscuit — the last of Mrs. Mabberley's, saved from supper — onto a chipped saucer in the very middle of the flour, like an island in a small white sea. Then she sat down against the wall to watch, with her notebook open on her knees and her pencil ready, fully and completely intending to stay awake until something came.

She wrote, at the bottom of the page:

Things in this house that should not happen but do.

She got as far as number three.

The cold woke her. Grey, thin morning light, and her neck stiff against the wall, and the fire long dead. For one stupid sleep-blurred moment she thought she had failed — that nothing had come, that she'd dreamed the whole strange night.

Then she looked at the floor.

The saucer was licked clean. The biscuit was gone, not a crumb of it left.

And across her careful field of flour, marching plain as anything, were footprints.

Tiny ones. Bare ones. No bigger than a baby's, but not a baby's — these had toes splayed wide and a heel worn hard, the prints of small feet that had walked a very long way for a very long time. They came up to the saucer. They circled it once, considering. And then they walked away, neat and unbothered, across the boards and along the skirting and straight to the low dark wall beneath the stairs —

— where there was a door.

A small door. A square, ancient, iron-hinged door, hardly knee-high, set into the wall and shut fast, with the footprints leading right up to it and not coming back.

Wren knew that wall. She had drawn it last night, careful as anything, corner by corner.

She turned the pages of her notebook with cold fingers until she found it. The hall. The stairs. The wall beneath the stairs, plain and unbroken, exactly as she'd mapped it.

There was no door on her map.

There had never, ever been a door.

Footprints to the Cellar

From Wren's Notebook: Rule One of a new house: map everything, even the scary bits. Especially the scary bits.

The footprints were still there in the morning.

Wren had half expected the night to take them back, the way nights took most things — a noise, a hope, the look of a room before you'd learned to be careful in it. But the flour she'd shaken across the hall floorboards held its dusting like frost, and right through the middle of it ran a line of small bare prints, toes and all, no bigger than a teaspoon laid end to end.

The biscuit was gone. The saucer had been licked so clean it shone.

She crouched and put her own finger beside one print. Hers was bigger. Of course it was bigger; she was a person and this was — she didn't have a word for what this was yet. She had a notebook, though, and a stub of pencil tied to it with string, and that was very nearly the same thing as being brave.

She followed.

The prints went where she had not gone the day before. Past the cupboard under the stairs, past the cold larder with its one shelf and its smell of old apples, to the dim end of the passage where the wallpaper went from yellow flowers to no flowers at all. And there, set low in the wall, was a door.

It was a small door, for grown-ups — Wren had to stoop, and she was ten and not large — but it would have suited the owner of those footprints perfectly. Black wood, studded with nails gone soft and orange with rust. A padlock the size of her fist, shut tight, its keyhole packed with the grey felt of years. And over the top, three plain words she did not understand, because the cold reached her first.

It came under the door in a steady thread, the way water finds the low place in a floor. Not a draught — draughts blustered and slammed and were honest about themselves. This breathed. In, and out. Cold as the bottom of a well, and it was the second week of spring with the cherry tree out front already gone pink and silly with blossom.

Wren put her hand flat to the wood. Then took it away.

She turned to the careful map she'd been making of Number Eleven — every room, every cupboard, the stairs she'd counted (thirteen, which she did not love) — and she looked at the dim end of the passage, where she had walked yesterday, and where she had drawn, in pencil, a blank wall.

There had been no door yesterday.

She was nearly certain.

She wrote it down anyway, because a thing you write down stops being a feeling and starts being a fact, and facts you can manage. Cellar door. Padlocked. Breathes out cold. NOT on yesterday's map. She underlined NOT. Then, because Rule One was Rule One, she made herself look up.

Letters were carved across the lintel, deep once and worn now to shadows, the way a name on an old gravestone goes back into the stone. She traced them with her eyes, then with her finger, the way her teacher in the school-before-last had taught her to read by touch when the words went swimmy.

The first was easy. A tall ladder of an H.

Then a gap where the wood had crumbled. Then — she pressed harder — R, T, H, leaning into each other. Another bad patch, soft as biscuit. And at the very end, low and stubborn, a D.

H. Something. R-T-H. Something. D.

"Wren! Breakfast! Your toast is committing suicide!"

—

Dad had spread the kitchen table with paper. Not newspaper. Plans. Great sail-sized sheets of them, edges held down by the marmalade, the salt, and Olly, who was lying across the bottom corner eating cereal directly from the box like a small contented goat.

"There she is," said Dad, the way he said it in every new house, as if Wren had been lost and brilliantly found. He had a pencil behind each ear and the particular shine he got when there was something to do up. "Right. Family meeting. I have had VISIONS."

"That's the damp," said Wren, sitting.

"Knock through here," said Dad, slapping a wall flat with his hand, "for light. Take the larder out, it's a coffin. And first — first —" he turned the biggest sheet so it faced her, jabbing a thumb at a black rectangle he'd drawn in the front room, "we rip out that ugly old fireplace. Bricked-up monstrosity. Hasn't drawn smoke since the war, I'd bet. Get a nice clean stove in. Cosy."

Wren's spoon stopped halfway.

The fireplace was the only warm thing in the house. She hadn't known that until this second, but she knew it now, the way you know which step creaks before you've learned the rest of the staircase. The hearth in the front room was big and blackened and breathed warmth even cold, the way the cellar door breathed cold even in spring, as if the whole house were one long lung and those two its ends.

"You can't take out the fireplace," she said.

"Watch me, sweetheart." He winked. He meant it kindly. He always meant everything kindly, which was somehow worse, because it left you nowhere to push.

"It's — " She hunted for a reason that would weigh more than visions. "It might be holding the house up."

"Fireplaces don't hold houses up."

She thought of the door at the end of the passage. She thought, something does.

Mum came in with the wet washing and the tired smile and the pins still in her cuff from last night's mending, and the talk turned to chimneys and grants and whether the man from the smart car would really pay what he'd said for the place if they did it up nice, and Wren slid down out of it and back into her notebook under the table.

H. R-T-H. D.

She tried words. HEARTH? That fit the front of it — H, then a gap, then R-T-H. But there was more after. HEARTH-something-D.

She filled the gaps with her pencil, soft, the way you'd fill them with hope.

H — EA — RTH — OL — D.

She wrote it whole, under the table, where no one could tell her she was wrong.

HEARTHOLD.

It didn't mean anything she could find. It meant everything, the way a word does when a house has been keeping it over a door for longer than anyone alive.

—

She spent the afternoon hunting.

Not for the lost word — she had that, folded up small and warm inside her — but for the who. Footprints come from feet. Licked saucers come from tongues. Doors that aren't there one day and are the next come from something that does not want to be mapped, and Wren had spent four years and six houses being the thing nobody chose to keep. She knew exactly how that felt, and she was not about to do it to anybody else, not even a teaspoon-sized somebody who breathed cold and stole biscuits.

So she hid.

The landing was the best place. From the top of the thirteen stairs you could see down into the hall and along to the dim passage, and the banister was thick enough to be a person behind. She tucked herself there with her knees to her chin while the light went orange, then grey, then the colour of nothing, and the house ticked and settled and let out all the small sounds it had been holding in all day.

And then, low and cross and close, a voice.

"—great clomping newcomers, tramping flour about my floors, leaving doors a body's got to shut again — and now he wants to tear the heart out, the soft-headed lump, won't take a hint, won't take a broom across the shins —"

Wren went very still. The voice was small. It was old. It was muttering the exact tone Wren used when she was tidying up after people who'd never know she'd done it.

It was coming from the stairs below her.

She leaned. The wood gave one tiny, treacherous creak.

The grumbling stopped.

She made herself look — over the banister, down, into the dark of the bottom three steps where the stair-carpet had been torn that morning by Dad's hauled-in toolbox, and where now, kneeling on it, was a small brown whiskery shape, a needle flashing in one hand, the ragged carpet already half-mended beneath it into a neatness no person had done.

It froze.

It turned.

Two black-bead eyes came up out of the dark and fixed on her, furious as a wet cat, and the small thing snarled:

"OUT! Get OUT of my house, you great clumsy interloper!"