The Listeners by FinnyH 

"Time, children!" their father called, clapping his hands but once. "Seat yourselves before the fireplace and remain quiet."

"Must we do this every year?" Elijah muttered, though did not dare outwardly object.

"Why of course!" replied his younger sister. "Father says that every Christmas we have to hear a story. It's transition! Isn't that right?"

"You mean tradition," Elijah corrected, as he was often wont to do. "It's also childish. For babies and girls. I don't get scared anymore."

"Now, now," their father continued. "Your grandfather used to tell me ghost stories on Christmas Eve, and his father before him. Now I wish to tell one to you. And I promise -- you have not heard of this one before."

"Father," squeaked Evie, sat side-saddle on the rug beneath her, "you said that last year."

"Perhaps I might have, but this year my story is different. Do you want to know why?"

"Why, Father?"

"Because this story is true."

He turned to me before seating himself in the great leather armchair before his two children. "Noah, if you'd be so kind as to dim the lamps and then hurry along to your quarters, my boy."

I did as the master bid, but took my time in doing so, groaning as I feigned reaching up for the lamps. He did not altogether mind my stalling, but, similarly, he seemed in no hurry either, smoking a cigarette at his leisure before he began.

Christmas Eve ghost stories were my favourite part of the festivities, since the luncheon was none too memorable for servants. I was the only youth in the household who was not permitted to sit and listen to the master's tales, but of course, that did not stop me from hearing them.

With the lamps dimmed and the master's chalice of mulled wine full, the snow built high on the window sills and the candles on the Christmas tree flickering gently in the corner of the room, I at last made my exit. It was their perfect evening. A Christmas card if I ever saw one. Two small silhouettes in front of the hearth at the heart of a Victorian gentleman's reading room ... serving staff dismissed, of course.

But of what the master was not aware was that I knew of the disused adjacent bedroom, and year by year I would sneak in and crouch by the wall, able to hear the resonance of the master's voice through the boarding if I listened hard in the silence.

Careful not to disturb the stillness of the retiring household, I took up my position on the dusty floor as I had planned to do all year. All was quiet to begin with, and the only sound in silence was the distant creak of floorboards and my own light breathing.

"So this story is true?" Evie asked. Something in her voice coloured her unconvinced. "You mean it actually happened?"

"Happens, dearest," their father replied. "But you must tell nobody of it. It is called The Listeners, and it is a tale of unearthly affliction."

"Afflic... affliction," the little girl repeated, testing the word.

"It means general misery," he told her. "And it began in this house, with an artist named Theodore Brome.

Brome, according to local hearsay, was not a fellow who wanted for company. He was a recluse; a small, weathered man one would think a decade older than he was. Why I even remember his sideburns to be grey well before the onset of maturity, and I do believe he never married, but that is beside the point, children. I was but a child when Theodore Brome lived and worked in this house, producing his signature heavy-handed charcoal studies, and I recall him being a queer kind of man, even for an artist.

In public he would seldom show his face, and stranger so he would wear a woollen scarf about his ears, leaving only a slither between it and the brim of his top hat. At first I did not question it when I passed, but on the approach my nanny would hold my hand more firmly. My naive perception of this man did not consider him a danger to anyone, but the fear of him became quite contagious, passed down through my mother and father, to my nanny, my sisters and then to me. It was only then that I noticed other folk gave him a wide berth should their paths ever cross.

What did he hide beneath his scarf? Why, I did not know, children. But that was merely the beginning of it.

Theodore Brome had a routine, and in time we all became wise to it. At the toll of seven he would collect his daily newspaper and retire to his home, until the again in the evening, when Theodore Brome would barge from his house.

"Be quiet!" he would yell into the street beyond his gates. "Be quiet, all of you!"

It was due to these regular instances that after several months of it, my parents forbade me leave of our property at 7am or 7pm, and it seemed our family was not the only one to abide by this bizarre routine. On the unusual occasion that Brome took to the town outside of these hours, we were not to approach him, or speak to him, and altogether encouraged to pretend he was not there. He lived like a ghost, with his face and ears forever choked with that tattered woollen scarf, and his body strangely deformed beneath that coat as the years passed him by. He became hunched and bow-legged, and it seemed his elbows no longer seemed to bend. Whenever I saw him walk by outside of our 7 o'clock curfew, he would do so with his arms rigid at his sides, and his hands always faced forward.

By the day he grew stranger, but we tolerated him.

We were not to know what plagued him, however, until he tried to burn his own house down.

"Be quiet!" he spat, over and over. I remember him so clearly, stood before his house as it caught in great tongues of red and orange. The smoke that poured from the windows smothered the street, and the soot did not surrender for weeks. "Now you'll be quiet!" he would cry, and he would lift his unbending arms into the air as would a conductor to this crackling, spitting orchestra.

The fire of 57 Hazeldale Way was the only time that Theodore Brome did not wear his scarf, but before I could truly see what it was that he hid from the world, my father had clasped his hands over my eyes and steered me away from my gawking out the window, but from what little I saw, and perhaps, children, my memory has conjured up a frightful image to accompany this terrifying scene, but I could have sworn Mr Theodore Brome had cut off his own ears."

There was a pause then, and I heard the faintest pair of gasps.

"But Father, why would he do such a thing?" Evie asked.

"Isn't obvious?" Elijah interjected. "You can't hear without your ears."

"I stand to correct you, my boy," said their father. "You cannot hear well without your ears. What I thought I saw of Brome's ears were but scarred holes either side of his head. After the house burnt down he sold it for pittance and a middle-aged couple moved in soon after the repairs. They were Mr and Mrs Colin and Hattie Ecob.

Colin was a green thumb; his wife was particularly house proud. Of course she had objected to residing in a home that was but black beams and charcoaled brickwork, but the repairs done to the house were marvelous, and gone was the outmoded estate full of dark secrets, built anew for a well-to-do couple such as they.

Hattie was a social woman, much unlike poor Theodore Brome. She went to all kinds of dinner parties and soirees, always with her white gloves high up her forearms and her hair in perfected frizzy curls. Her husband was a benign enough fellow, I suppose, though somewhat obsessed with his garden, if I might say so. Where his wife wore white silk, he would wear soil, and the green stains children wear with pride on their knees.

The more Mr Ecob tended to his garden, the less his wife would tolerate it, and soon word spread through my mother's friends that the couple slept in different bedrooms.

"Why, she says she cannot stand the soil!" I overheard my mother say once. "It seems to her that Colin positively provokes her hatred of household dirt with the things he does. A grown man should not play such cruel jokes on his wife. Hattie claims she found soil beneath her pillow, despite Colin swearing desperately he had not been in her room. When she found dry, black soil in the pocket of her overcoat she became concerned, but more so once the soil began finding its way onto the plate."

It became apparent in the following months that Hattie Ecob found this phantom soil in the queerest of places. Places soil should not be found, and it is perhaps unfortunate for her husband that he was a hobby gardener. Would she have found the soil had her husband not forever been up to his elbows in it? Who is to say, children? Not I. I cannot tell you.

One day, while on my way to school, I spied through the window the couple laying vast sheets over their furniture; the kind our servants use to keep the dust off the statuettes in the dining room when we do not use it. I found it most odd that the woman would go to such lengths in the name of a little dirt.

But it was when I overheard my mother saying that soot was falling from cracks appearing in the ceilings that reminded me of the general deterioration of Theodore Brome. Almost at the point of renouncing their marriage, the couple sold the house after only a year of residing in it, and nobody much missed them."

"Is that when you moved here?" I heard Elijah ask. "You said you were just a boy when your parents bought it."

"That is correct. I was ten years old."

"And what happened?" Evie blurted.

"Nothing," said their father. He paused and I leaned in even closer to the wall, ear pressed against the walnut boarding. "Nothing, until this Christmas."

I sat and waited in the room, black as pitch, silent as death, for the end to his tale. But it was then that the creak of a floorboard snatched my breath away. It was close. Closer than it should have been for an empty bedroom. I turned and saw nothing, but the stillness of the room did not at all soothe me.

I replaced my ear on the wall, but instead felt a layer of fine dusting come away against my skin. I thought not much more of it -- the room was disused, after all, and I did not know how long it had not been thoroughly cleaned.

"Children, there is something I must tell you," continued the master. "Something in this house wants to make its presence known to us. For years I have excused the groans and knocks of old foundations; the unnaturally filthy rooms our servants work so hard to clean. I cannot account for the soot of the hearth or the burning of over one hundred lamps. This year a grave chill crept over me, and I fear that the likes of Theodore Brome might have not been half as mad as we assumed they were."

"What do you mean, Father?" Evie said. Her voice was so weak I hardly caught it. "You're scaring me."

"And so you should be, children, for there are listeners all around. They work in subtle ways, so barely in existence that at first you believe you have imagined it. Touch not the soil you find in the house, my dearests. Nor the scratching inside the walls. Block them out. They are not there. The more you listen, the more you will hear."

It was then that I felt the cold breath in my ear.