Ground Frost
by Jayan Singh
The House has slightly too much moss, even in the colder months, and no one seems to notice but Jude. It stretches across the brick like cobwebs, digging its way down to the frozen ground and back up again, curling under window panes and around the chimney. The bushes grow towards The House too, vines outstretched in the stagnant air like a hundred arms. Beau cuts the tendrils down into rounded hedges and seems largely unbothered that they continue to grow towards The House within the week regardless. They don’t have eyes, and yet, they come back to The House anyway.
It should be enough to scare Jude away. He isn’t sure why it hasn’t. He thinks about it often in the summer months, dew-brushed mornings when he’s watering the flower boxes. The cobblestone path leading away from The House is the only thing that does not move. It should be enticing, and yet, he is always more enticed by whatever Beau is making for breakfast.
They rarely have guests, if not solely for the fact that Jude has barely graduated from the status of a guest himself (and Beau’s vaguely rabid deer patrolling the thicket.) Jude wonders if it’s due to the feeling that dawns the moment you enter the door: the feeling of being watched, akin to an electrical current raising static along your spine, something old and archaic stirring beneath your feet. Though as Jude watches Beau open the door only long enough to snatch the flyer for the Christmas Market from the flighty postal boy before shutting it without another word, he deduces that it’s not just the hedges or the weird energy keeping the locals away.
He finds himself studying The House from all angles while he’s out in the garden, seeing if something obviously peculiar enough to point out will reveal itself to him once he’s freed from the feeling of eyes on his back.
“Didn’t you see that?” he asks, swearing that The House just took a breath in, the ivy pulling the bricks closer together.
Beau hardly looks up, gardening gloves reaching their elbows, crouched over several holes in the ground and a basket of dirty radishes. “See what?”
The cracks along the wooden beam to the right of the back door have disappeared. It clamps it together like a vice.
The ivy attempts to fool him with its delicate vines, innocent in the sunlight. Its leaves shimmer in the breeze as if attempting to absolve itself of all suspicion.
“Never mind,” he says, but it doesn’t matter much, because Beau has already left him to go rinse the radishes in the sink.
It doesn't help that it takes longer for Jude to fall asleep in the first place. When Beau has finished their nightly reading, he’s left staring above their bed, as they lay still beside him. (To an uneducated eye, they look like the dead. Jude, however, has a hypothesis that Beau does not actually need to breathe, but does so to calm people’s nerves. He is still testing this theory.)
It’s impossible to miss. The creaking resonates deep within the foundations, shifting the entire floor by a sixteenth of an inch – Jude stares at the ceiling as it repositions itself to smooth over a slant in the roof. A moment later, it creaks again, the support beams settling back down like aching limbs; the ceiling sinks in a little lower, getting comfortable. He looks outside for wind, but there is none, the tree branches motionless shadows against the window.
“The House is breathing,” says Jude.
“Go back to sleep,” says Beau, and rolls over.
“I think my house is haunted.”
“You think your house is haunted,” Adrian repeats, clearly attempting to entertain the notion out of common courtesy.
Jude scratches the back of his neck. “Well, not my house. Beau’s house. Our-- our house.”
Adrian laughs on the other side of the phone. (Jude doesn’t know what’s so funny.) “Remember when you told me you were moving in with your somewhat spooky potentially-Lovecraftian partner, and I said I supported you no matter what?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I still do, but I hate to say I told you so.”
“You’re my brother. You don’t hate telling me you were right about anything.”
“True enough.” He pauses. “This isn’t a distress call, is it? Do I need to come pick you up?”
“No,” Jude says, before even thinking about it, and then stops to actually do so. Downstairs, Beau is making tea. He knows it, because he hears the tinny splatter of the tap water against the ceramic bowl that they harvest the herbs in. He wants to stay for tea. He always does. “No, you don’t. I’m just . . . thinking out loud, you know?”
“Okay, well . . . That house belongs to their family, right? They might’ve, like, cast a spell on it or something. Or maybe it’s just super cyber-advanced and they just didn’t tell you.”
Jude pauses, his brow wrinkling as he pieces it together. “You’re saying . . . Beau is haunting our house?”
“Not exactly in that wording, but, yes. Probably.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“Well, it’s a hypothesis.”
“So you're just guessing.”
“I'm making educated guesses.”
“Great. Thanks for your help.”
“Happy to be of service.”
It turns out that calling your big-city, PhD-holding brother does not always end in logical explanations. Jude hangs up the phone and sighs.
On the morning of Beau’s trip, the two of them sit in exceptional silence as the final packing is done. Jude has not planned on telling Beau what exactly he will be doing while they’re away, mostly because he feels as though they would not approve of his plan to wait out the day in the shed behind The House. It’s not that he’s scared of being alone in The House, really. It’s quite the opposite. It's the possibility that he may not be alone in The House that is, frankly, terrifying to consider.
Of course, attempting to hide anything and everything from Beau is an impossible task to begin with.
“Don’t be frightened,” they say, tugging the drawstrings shut on their backpack, “the deer will keep you company.”
“I'd rather they didn’t.” (Jude is nothing if not honest.) “But I'm not scared.”
Beau is vastly unconvinced. “Your imagination is quite vivid. What you’re worried about . . . it’s not real. You know that. Right?”
Beau offers all the same monotonous bedside manner as when things go bump in the night. Jude can’t help but smile. “Yes, I know.”
“Good.” They turn their back to him, and then pause, before turning to add, “The House does not sleep. It’s the night that wakes.”
This does not help. Jude stares at them, waiting for them to clarify with something along the lines of, it’s just the wind, or The House doesn’t sleep because it’s a house and it’s not alive, silly, or if you hear footsteps it’s most definitely rabbits on the roof and not the anthropomorphized spirit of the shingles.
And then he realises that he’s imagining his mother’s warm voice instead of his partner’s, who says absolutely nothing to make up for the cryptic lesson that they somehow thought would comfort him.
They secure their hat around their curls. “I will be back by sunrise. If the postal boy knocks, send him away. I don’t want any more flyers.”
“Yes, dear. And if the sun comes raining down, I'll store the squirrels in the shed.”
Beau stares at him for a moment before he registers that they are no more assured than before.
Jude clears his throat. “What I mean is, everything’s in good hands.”
“I see.” They hesitate in the doorway. Glancing back at him, they cross the room, lean up on their toes, and tuck a strand of Jude’s hair behind his ear. “Take care, Jude.”
Jude merely smiles, catching their hand and pressing a kiss to their knuckles. “I'll miss you, too.”
They say nothing more, except for a gruff sort of noise indicating approval: One of Jude’s better talents. With that, they pry themself from him and turn on their heel, disappearing into the thicket. There is a beat of silence. And then it is truly just Jude and The House in the wistful autumn air.
There is not much to do, Jude finds, in a cabin surrounded by woods, when you cannot settle to read, and an early ground frost has set in. He digs fruitlessly at the ground beside the crop of radishes that he planted in late summer, but even though Beau dug at it just fine with the same hoe that very morning, the hardened ground does not budge.
He debates whether to go into town for preserves— just for something to do, desperate for a reason to leave The House— but remembers that Beau’s friendship with the general store’s manager keeps their cellar fully stocked and he may even be back within the week with more. He attempts to clean the shed, but it turns out that his comment was not entirely fictional, and is scared off by a family of squirrels.
This is how he finds himself, once again, alone inside The House.
Out of pure drive, he manages to keep himself busy until nightfall. Despite this being the most boring part of his day – which is to say, attempting to sleep, which is to say, sitting around waiting for something to happen – it is the part that he’s most used to.
Beau, as he has noticed previously, does not snore (nor breathe?) nor move in their sleep, so a bed without them doesn’t seem much different. He finds himself, as he does every night, watching the dips in the ceiling, as The House sways gently in the moonlight.
He isn't sure when he nodded off, but he can pinpoint the exact moment that something is wrong. The energy of the night simmers around him, hot coals on a fire, sparkling with sharply-lit ends; like it’s washing over itself again, midnight-blue, crescendo-ing waves receding on the shoreline only for that serrated edge to reappear. The faces in his dream continue to morph and fade, deer bones crunching under his feet, faint screaming or hysterical sobbing behind each corner that he turns.
In his dream logic, only half awake, he waits for Beau to shake him. Waits for their cold, cold, familiar hands and Your worries are unfounded, I will not die. And yet the bed is empty, so nothing comes. Then the floorboards groan, and the air around him plunges into ice.
Jude wakes with a start, cotton in his lungs as he gasps for air. The moment he becomes lucid, the temperature begins to warm; The House closes its walls further around him, like a security blanket. As he breathes, coming back into the world, The House creaks with relief, joints sagging into the earth. The ivy vines return to their places from where they had constricted so tightly around the brick.
Slowly, the oil lamps in the room come to light. Jude blinks, studying them. He rubs his eyes and studies them again. He glances at the ceiling. Something about the alignment of the bannisters seems taut.
Experimentally, he says, “I'm alright.”
This earns a groan of approval. The bannisters relax.
He lifts himself from the bed, following the oil lamps downstairs. The living room seems to shimmer with some kind of earnest hope, as if vying for appeal. It takes him a moment to notice that the warmth is coming from the fireplace, which has been lit –something he definitely did not do before tucking himself into bed.
He pads into the kitchen, making himself a tea bag from the newly dried lemon ball. As he works, he notices, out of the corner of his eye, that the oven begins to heat up, the boiler grate turning a faint red. He pauses. Too tired for a kettle, and to question anything else, he fills his mug with water and places it on the grate.
“So, I'm not crazy,” is the first thing he finds himself saying, having situated himself with tea and blankets in front of the fire. “Right?”
The House says nothing, of course, but the cupboards rattle in a manner reminiscent of an excited puppy dog. Jude sniffs his tea. He just finds lemon ball and mint, disproving his theory that he accidentally laced it with a hallucinogen of some sort.
A moment passes. The wind howls outside, smacking a tree branch into the windowpane, causing him to jump. He catches the blinds drawing themselves shut in response.
“Thank you. For the tea, and for the fire. And for . . . waking me up.”
The House dips and sways, though higher-pitched, as though carrying less weight in its creaking. Happy to please. Pleased to help. There is something very Beau-like in its one syllable answers.
As Jude sips his tea, at ease with the breathing, he notices moss creeping up on the front door. Undeterred by ground frost, even in the colder months.