Stone, Ghosts and my Grandfather's House in Stanklyn Lane part II

...It's two days later now, Brighton has become blanketed with snow (now turning rapidly into impossible-to-walk-upon ice) and, apart from Monday, am not back at work until January 4th. I'm sat in an internet cafe on Western Road, afternoon turning to twilight, wishing I'd had another cigarette before continuing Thursday's entry. Ah well.

My grandfather's house.
Often over summers, my family would be joined by various cousins; John and Anne spring to mind more than any other. I remember a few 'ghost hunting' expeditions with them (up the stairs to the mysteriously opened toilet window, into the back room where 'noises' were heard), but the next real ghost stories, of a kind, that I remember came about over the Christmas of 1983 when my Nan died.
She had smoked her entire life, so, in her sixties she had developed lung cancer. She did not go into hospital but elected to stay at home. We had been down since the beginning of December, and the month leading up to Christmas was full of relatives, most of whom I didn't know very well. She died on New Years Eve ('do you want to say goodbye to Nanny Stone, she won't be here very long'). Remember that day so well, the appropriately funereal atmosphere in the house, my father looking glumly into a cup of tea by the fire.
She was buried a week later. i remember hearing my Aunt Linda say to my mother that she heard footsteps at night. My mother's admonishment to not 'tell the kids'. Footsteps at night. My sister and myself digested this information. If you believe in ghosts, then the explanation would be that it was the spirit of my nan, waiting for her body to be buried, but somehow in my mind, it became all mixed up with the atmosphere of the house, that soporific, hypnotic quality, grey stairs, unquiet angles on the landing. A soft darkness, both consolatory and disquieting.
I remember waking up one morning while it was still dark. half asleep, thinking I could hear the sound of hammering. 'Workmen' I thought to myself, before realising how absurd this was. The sound of hammering again. I pulled the blankets up over my head, but I couldn't get the thought out of my head that these were ephemeral 'night-workmen', phantasmal labourers, caught somewhere in the architecture of the house.

We spent the Christmas of 1985 down there as well, and the one thing I remember, more than anything, was the morning when we started the long drive back to Scotland. It was still dark. Black winter darkness, the snow sharpened into ice, and the stars looking like needles. Looking back at the house as it receded down the drive, and being relieved that I didn't have to sleep there any more. I didn't know how my grandfather could stand it, being in an empty house that always seemed so busy, someone always in another room that was empty, the dark steps promising to lead up or down to somewhere other than the hallway or landing.

My grandfather died in late December 1993. My parents had bought him the house, and at some point in the week after he died I found myself there with my parents, sorting through his stuff. There was nothing really to sort out. My grandparents were not collectors, and the rooms were mostly empty. I remember coins spilling out onto a windowsill in my grandparent's room, the air thick with memory and a warning nostalgia. The house belonged to abandonment now. To the hauntings the house seemed to generate.
For a while, my Aunt and her daughter, Ann, stayed there. My aunt, at my sister's wedding three years ago, told me that Ann was convinced the house was haunted, and the she too had 'seen things'. I had lost touch with Ann, and over that Christmas, I nearly ran into her in Kidderminster, missing her by five minutes. I hadn't seen her for years. I remember writing in my diary 'looks like I'll never see Ann again' jokingly. I had wanted to catch up with her for years. Cruel presience, for once an unfaulty and unwanted premonition. A few days later she had died. Panadol and alcohol. Twenty years old. No-one, to this day, knows what happened.
What did she see though? What was it that she knew and I knew about the house?
I remember being at the churchyard where she was buried, the one on the hill, along with my grandparents. Another January, can't remember when. Staring into the adjacent field. Frost, sheep, sunset-sky, and it seemed that time had paused. Writing in an old notebook that night 'timelessness, as I stared into that field, tine no longer existed.'

My parents sold the house soon afterwards. They were talking to the neighbours. In the week after Ann died, and before she was buried, they heard the sounds of movement in the house, of music playing.
The house was, of course, empty.

Fifteen years or more since I last saw that house. It comes back to me in dreams though frequently, always haunted, always with an extra room, a secret stairway, a forgotten corridor in the attic, always that sense of something else being there. Calling me back, and one day I shall go back, though what I will do when I get there I don't know. Ring on the doorbell, ask the occupants if they've seen a cowled figure.

I've only got five minutes left before my time is up in the cafe, so I must make this end briefer than I would have liked.

An epilogue.
A ghost story and a dream.

My grandfather's house. At the top of the garden where the chicken coop was when I had known it, I dreamt that there was a dog buried there because it had gone mad. I recounted this dream to my aunt, who said, with a strange air of resignation, that yes, there was a dog buried there, long years before I had born, because it had gone mad.
I had probably overheard this when I was a child, and what I had heard had got lodged somewhere in dream mechanisms. Nothing supernatural, no ghost story.
Like so much to do with that house though, that one word, that one word that keeps recurring:
-But-

I'll probably return to my grandfather's house in the future.
After all, it keeps returning to me.