The House That Remembered Everyone

The key still fit. That was the first thing Larkmoor Hall told Eleanor Ashby, and it told her in the language it used for everything — a small sound, the dry click of a lock that had not been turned in eleven years giving way as though she had stepped out only that morning. The great door swung inward on its own slow weight, and the cold breath of the house came out to meet her, smelling of dust and beeswax and rain in old stone, and underneath all of it something she had no word for, something that was almost a person.

She had come to kill it. There was no gentler way to put the matter, and Eleanor had never been a woman for gentle ways of putting things. The solicitor's letter was folded in her coat pocket beside the surveyor's report: *subsidence, dry rot in the west range, a roof beyond economic repair.* The land alone was worth more than the Hall had earned in a century. A firm in the city wanted it for forty houses and a road, and they had offered her a sum that would let her never think about Larkmoor, or her family, or any of it, ever again. All she had to do was sign, and let the machines come, and the last of the Ashbys would at last be free of the first of them.

She stepped into the hall, and the house began to remember her.