A Guest at Midnight
真夜中の客
The storm arrived at dusk and laid siege to Ellenmoor as though it bore the house a personal .
I had resigned myself to a solitary evening when the knocker fell, three times, against the great door.
No one calls at such an hour, in such weather, unless the errand outweighs the discomfort of arriving.
On the step stood an old man in a black coat, rain sheeting from the brim of his hat.
He offered no name, only a slight bow and the words: I have come to pay my respects.
Respects to whom, I asked, for the only death here was one four decades in the past.
He smiled, and the smile was in the way that a closed door is to a stranger.
To the house, he said, and to those it remembers, whether or not they choose to remember it.
I admitted him, against a caution I could not articulate, and led him to the one warm room.
He accepted brandy, warmed his hands, and studied me with the frank of a creditor.
You have your grandmother's eyes, he observed, and, if I may, her particular talent for locking doors.
The remark was gentle, and it went into me like a blade sheathed in velvet, and precise.
I asked how he had known her, and he answered a different question, as such men invariably do.
We all keep a room we do not open, he said; the difference is merely whose key goes missing.
Had I not been so tired, so besieged by the storm, I might have shown him the door at once.
Instead I heard myself confessing, in fragments, to a stranger what I had confessed to no living friend.
He listened without and without judgement, which is the rarest and most dangerous form of attention.
There was a night, he said at last, when you might have stayed, and did not; I think you remember it.
I had told him nothing of that night, and the certainty in his voice was worse than any accusation.
Who are you, I whispered, and he only turned his glass so the firelight moved within it.
I am no one you have not already met, he said, in the small hours, when the house is quiet.
His insinuations required no proof, for they addressed a jury already sitting within my own conscience.
, I understood then, does not need a visitor; it merely uses one to make itself audible.
When I rose to refill his glass, the chair he had occupied was empty, and quite dry.
No wet coat hung by the fire; no footprints marked the hall; the brandy stood untouched beside his seat.
The storm had not abated, yet the front door stood open upon the streaming dark, admitting the rain.
Had I known, when I opened that door, whom I was truly inviting, I would have kept it barred.
But the guest at midnight, I now believe, had been inside the house, and inside me, all along.