✦   A SITTING  ·  BUTTON HOUSE  ·  THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE   ✦

I lit one candle and asked if anyone was there. It took them twenty minutes to stop arguing over who should answer.

So. You've ended up with it. The great draughty heap at the end of the drive, the one with the damp in the east wing and the woodworm in the panelling and the solicitor who very politely suggested you sell. I'll tell you what nobody in the village will, love: this house is full.

I didn't have to reach for them. I barely had my coat off. They came the way the cold comes up off a stone floor — all at once, and from every room, and every one of them talking. They've been here a long while. Some of them a very long while. And not one of them can leave.

Let me tell you who you're sharing with.

— WHO IS STILL HERE —

✦ Robin — a caveman, the oldest thing on this land by thousands of years, struck by lightning while hiding up a tree from a bear. When the lights flicker, that is not your wiring. He'd like a game of chess. He will win.

✦ Sir Humphrey — a Tudor gentleman, very courteous, on separate terms with his own head. If you find it in the airing cupboard, be kind. Point it towards the rest of him.

✦ Mary — burned for a witch four hundred years ago. If you smell smoke with no fire lit, that's her. She was faint for me, love, very faint — some of them are only waiting, even after all this time. You may have come too late for her. You may not.

✦ Kitty — a Georgian girl, all sunshine, gone two hundred and fifty years and still delighted by everything. She'll have decided you're her best friend before you've taken your shoes off. Don't let her down. Nobody in her family was ever kind to her, and she hasn't worked that out.

✦ Thomas — a poet, shot in a duel in 1824 over a girl who loved him back, though he died thinking otherwise. He'll be in love with somebody living by the weekend. He'll write about it. At length. Out loud.

✦ Lady Button — the lady of the house, Edwardian, and she has never once forgiven it for being sold to anybody. She leaves by the bedroom window every morning. You'll hear her before your alarm does.

✦ The Captain — a wartime officer who never got near the front, and runs the place like a barracks regardless. There's a first name he won't use and a lieutenant he won't mention. Don't push him on either. He'll tell you when he's ready, or he won't.

✦ Pat — the cheerful one with the arrow through his neck. Scout leader. He'll have an activity planned for you by lunchtime. He'll be your favourite. He's everyone's favourite. He works very hard at it.

✦ Julian — the one with no trousers, a politician, and the only one of them who can lay a finger on anything in your world. One finger. Hide your remote. Mind your laptop. And keep back from the upstairs windows when he's in a mood.

...and the ones I'd rather not name aloud. (open at your own risk)

✦ A whole muttering crowd down in the cellar, dead of the plague and buried right under your boiler, who know more about your heating than you ever will and can't stand the trouser man. A little girl in the pantry who sings an old nursery rhyme after dark — and that one, love, you'll hear too. A sour old fellow in the next field over who'd thank you to leave him alone. And a certain someone in this house who has already sent one living soul out of a window and into a coma — but which of them it was, I'll not say. It's not my place. Ask around. See who goes quiet.

— BEFORE I GO —

Whether you can see them is its own strange business. Most people never will. You'd need to have nearly died — properly nearly, gone for a minute or three — or else be a babe in arms, before the world's taught you not to look. They'll see you, mind. Every minute of every day, including the ones you'd rather they didn't. Walk straight through one and you'll feel next to nothing; they'll feel all of it, and they will tell you so. They can't touch you, they can't eat your biscuits, they can't go through the floor, only the walls, so they take the stairs like the rest of us. And they cannot leave these grounds. They died here, and the edge of the land holds them like a wall. Every so often one of them finally puts down whatever kept them, and is taken — a bright light, no warning, no goodbye, gone for good. They have a rather unfortunate little phrase for it. They've no idea what it means these days. Don't you dare be the one to tell them.

Here's the part nobody warns you about: they will argue with you about the telly, and wake you screaming, and need you for every blessed thing — and then, heaven help you, they'll become the only family you've got. That's just how it goes, in a house like this one.

I've done what I can. I've told you they're real, and I've told you their names, which is more than anyone else round here will do for you. The rest is yours now.

I'm away before dark. Lock up behind me — not that it matters. The locks were always for you, love. Never for them.

And put the kettle on for the house. It's listening. It's always listening.

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