Halfway Up, Halfway Down

It happened when I was nine, at my grandmother's two storey flat in the tiny village in Derbyshire, where I was born. The house with an interesting past and the staircase that groaned no matter where you stepped on it.

I was staying the weekend while my parents drove up to my aunt's for something I wasn't old enough to be told about. Grandma had sent me to wait on the stairs while she went to find the quilts she kept in the hall closet. I liked sitting there. Halfway up, halfway down.

The house smelled like her, like rosewater and the inside of an old cedar chest. The stair runner under me was worn thin in a path down the middle, many feet wearing the pattern out of the carpet. A grandfather clock ticked somewhere behind me in the front hall, slow and even, the kind of sound you stop noticing until it's the only thing you can hear.

I heard footsteps above me. Slow. Heavy. The particular creak of the third floorboard from the bedroom, the one she always complained about and never fixed.

They started coming down. One stair at a time, slow, with a pause between each one like whatever it was, was in no hurry at all. Like it had already decided how this was going to go and didn't need to rush.

"Sweetheart?" Grandma called, and I heard the kitchen chair scrape against the floor.

I sat there for maybe two seconds. I've replayed those two seconds more times than I can count, trying to remember if I looked up, if I saw anything on the landing above me. I didn't. I want to say I was brave enough to look and I wasn't. I kept my eyes on the bottom of the staircase, on the front hall, on the strip of kitchen light spilling across the floorboards.

I ran.

I don't remember deciding to run. I remember being on the stairs and then I remember being in the kitchen, and in between there's nothing, just a blank stretch where my body did something my mind hadn't caught up to yet. Grandma was standing by the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand, completely unbothered, asking me what on earth had gotten into me. I couldn't answer. I just stood there gripping the doorframe, staring past her at the hallway, waiting for something to come around the corner.

Nothing did.

She sent me back up eventually, after dinner, to get ready for bed. I made her walk with me. I told her I didn't want to go alone and she laughed, the kind of laugh that says she thinks you're being a baby about the dark, and took my hand and walked me up. The stairs were just stairs. Nothing was out of place. Nothing ever explained itself.

I asked her, years later, if she remembered that weekend. If anything strange had ever happened in that building, any story passed down about the guests who visited the Hydro, anything at all. She got quiet for a moment, the way people get quiet when they're deciding whether to tell you something or spare you from it, and then she just said the place was old and old places make noises, and changed the subject.

This is a true story, the house was a 19th-century water cure establishment built in 1869, which later operated until 1963 before being converted into private apartments.