Brick and Mortar

Houses are of brick and mortar. If there's evil, it's in someone's heart. I don't remember who said that, but it mostly holds true. I say mostly because sometimes the evil in someone's heart can leach into the brick-and-mortar. The house on Cromwell Row was like that. It was one of five uniform constructions backing onto farmer's fields, the opposite of what you would imagine when given the prompt "haunted house". There were no gables, no accidents of architecture turning upper windows into eyes, and it was only one floor, a bungalow, just like its mates.

My husband and I moved into it following our civil partnership. He carried me over the threshold as part of a private joke about tradition. We were going to have a "proper" marriage, since those between two men were now legal, but decided on a partnership as a rejection of religion. He'd been a Christian in his teenage years and had since become a thoroughly materialist anti-theist. When I met him he was in the habit of spitting when he passed a church.

It was two weeks after moving in that I had my first uncanny experience. I was standing in the hallway when a feeling stole over me that at first I couldn't identify, and then didn't like at all. Since all aspects of this affair seem to defy the traditions of haunted houses - just as my husband and I defied the traditions of marriage, I suppose - this incident took place not on a moonless night but in the middle of the day, as I was slow cooking a stew and on my way to the living room to pick up a magazine.

I thought I saw something through the frosted glass panel of the front door but couldn't describe it then, and couldn't now. Some aspect of shadow, perhaps, which if I could recall would assume was just an approaching salesman, postman, Avon lady, whatever. But it was nothing, and somehow in the moment that was worse. I was held there for a moment when, at the end of the experience, an ugly old thought came into my head. 'So you're going to be his kept boy?'

That stung like a lit cigarette. I staggered into the living room and slumped into his armchair. I looked at his books, at the art he collected. He'd come out in middle age and like a lot of his type thrown himself into his new identity, compensating perhaps for a youth spent without gratification.

There were Gore Vidal novels, biographies of cabaret owners in '30s Berlin, and portraits of men embracing, free and unashamed. I was suddenly aware of how much younger I was, how we'd met when I was 23 and he was 46, exactly twice my age. I remembered the jokes about "daddy issues", and the remark his commander made on meeting me at a veterans' event. 'So, you're the little woman, eh?' I looked down at my apron, a pink frilly thing that had been my late mother's, and burst out laughing in a strange, bitter way.

And then in the corner of my left eye, I saw a tow-headed child in a frilled collar, playing with a plastic cooking set. I jumped out of the chair and stared at where I'd seen him, but only the carpet in front of the TV remained.

When my husband came home, normality resumed. We ate dinner, watched TV, bathed together - as was our habit at least once a week - and wound up making love. I didn't tell him about my episode in the hall and then the living room, but although I didn't realise then why I was doing it, I made a mental note to look into the history of the house.

I did this the next day and suddenly understood why we got the house for a song, so to speak. The agent was reluctant to divulge the information at first and only would when I promised not to sue, but it seemed that the previous residents were a couple, the woman of whom had been murdered by her partner in the living room.

I think I must have made a remark about male violence because he clarified that they had been a transgender lesbian coupling, 'as far from mum-and-dad as you can get' he japed and, hating myself for it, I laughed along. I've always been passive like that, my one moment of passion a WhatsApp message I sent my dad to sever our relationship.

Some strange instinct led me to the local library and its upstairs history section, containing all manner of parish records and other material delineating our town from its foundation before the Magna Carta. It was there that I learned that in the 14th century, a crossdressing sex worker was jailed for soliciting in the shadow of the castle, at that time abandoned following a feudal dispute.

This seemed to trigger in the community a moral panic about same-sex relations, referred to in the records as "perversions out of Leviticus". All in all, seven men were executed and one woman was placed in the stocks for facilitating sodomy via her hostelry, at which she accepted payment to turn a blind eye. She escaped death by claiming influence from the Devil whose stewardship over her soul she had since rejected.

The executions took place in killing fields, which backed onto a small lodging owned by the magistrate, demolished during the Reformation while the lot returned to its original ownership by successive farming families. The lot remained vacant until the current farmer sold it off to the local council and at last, the other side of Cromwell Row was re-developed...

I don't generally dream, but that night I did. I dreamt that I was standing in the shadow of a castle, leaning against the rough brickwork in crude, revealing dress. Leather boots and fishnet stockings, a tight corset and brassiere stuffed with tissue paper, a grotesque parody of a streetwalking sex worker.

From the swaying night trees in the distance came a man in peasant dress, and as he approached I realised that he was my husband, though he didn't recognise me. The cold air bit what flesh was exposed on my body, but worse was to come as the grinning, grimy, medieval blacksmith who was also my wealthy modern spouse wrapped his coarse hands around my throat and lowered me to the ground, choking the breath from my windpipe, and I couldn't move or fight back because I was paralysed in that way dreams have of paralysing you at a moment of terror.

The scenery shifted to a firepit in the middle of a field stuffed with braying townsfolk and with dizzying effect I was vertical again, though lashed to a stake. I was being strangled as a mercy so that I wouldn't have to be burned alive. My husband had become my father, as well as the magistrate, for some reason electing to throttle the damned himself. I awoke flailing, my husband grabbing at my wrists to try and keep me still, my eyes wide with fear on recognising him. Something between us snapped at that moment, I think, when he saw I was afraid of him.

I won't go into the deterioration of my marriage in the weeks after. It's too painful to recall at this time. But at a certain point, insane as you may regard it, I felt as though my life was on the line and if I stayed in that house and tried to "make a go of things", as my mother used to say, I would have ended up dead like one of the previous tenants. And I know who my killer would have been.

I know what you're going to tell me. That this is all just my subconscious trauma from this and that, internalised homophobia, etcetera. It's been said that gay men mature in their thirties, having had more to process and actualise in the years just after childhood than their straight peers. Maybe that's so, and maybe in five years, I'll look back on the events in that house as mere examples of prosaic human tragedy, elevated to mystery by a mind undergoing maturation.

Or maybe I'll just be glad that I left, since my now ex-husband still lives there, and recently acquired a new partner. With whom he's been heard to violently quarrel.