Original Horror: Neufeld
Some doors close with a sound like an ending
‘Neufeld’ is based on a trip myself and two friends took to Brandenburg this summer. We stayed in a farmhouse exactly like the one described in this story and we were suitably terrified when night fell and the natural malice of the place began to filter to the surface. We made it out in one piece but the what-ifs the house presented stayed with me. What-ifs I explore in this story.
An audio version of this story, narrated by me and with sound design by the incredible Arvo Party, is available for anyone who wants a more immersive, and frightening, experience.
Stay spooky.
We cycle to a rental farmhouse for a few nights in the country. Escape from Berlin. Myself and a friend, Anna. It’s to be a sort of artists’ retreat. The “sort of” is a cushion… Neither of us are paying the rent with our creative pursuits, but then who is these days? It’s nice for us both to pretend that this could be our lives; the country, the space, the peace, the purpose.
The place — the nearest place — is called Neufeld; a village in Brandenburg: one shop, no bars, serviced by a single carriage train. The kind of place with no phone signal. Perfect for a getaway.
The land here is flat and expansive, and on these days at the throat of August, the sky is a damp grey shroud. Here, most features come in multiples of thousands: sunflowers, wheat, corn, solar panels, but here and there, a few sullen horses raise their heads from grazing to follow the hiss of our tyres. As we turn off the main road towards the village, a woodpecker bounces overhead, calling. There is no other bird sound, only a tractor humming its labour somewhere in the distance.
The front of the house is grey and low and squat, but the roof slides up to almost the same height again. A tall house. Out of proportion. An old house; pre-war at least. Above the front door, a mascaron face stares from inside a crumbling cast oval. The steps are crumbling too. The walls are cracked. Age has snuck up on this house, every fissure balanced and in tune with the creeping foliage. A crab apple tree set stubbornly in the overgrown garden has been casting off its fruit, and the rich, sour smell has a host of flies circling.
We’ve been told by the host that the key is in a birdhouse by the front wall of the property. There is no birdhouse and the front wall is covered in brambles. We take the path leading round the back of the house and find two barns set perpendicular at each gable wall. It’s already falling dark, so our fingers are skittery and shy as they push open rickety barn doors and move aside limbs of firewood. But the birdhouse and key are eventually discovered, the bikes locked, and we climb the steps to the front door. The key is original. The iron weight feels good in the hand. It slides home easy, the mechanism straining and releasing once, twice then the door falls open. There is a long hallway leading to the back door, the ass of a staircase, chipped doors to the bedrooms left and right. The cool of the house is wonderful and we tumble inside. The flies have followed us in. We quickly see to that. Some doors close with a sound like an ending.
There are three bedrooms, a large kitchen, and a bathroom. The bedrooms and hall are decorated sparsely but loudly; Christmas decorations, half-restored mirrors, a tapestry of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a music box with a dancing mime. A puppet hung by the neck. The furniture is old and spits dust when touched. We inspect, mock, pick up oddities and shove them in each other’s faces.
The narrow staircase leads up to a closed door. The steps are populated with pairs of shoes and a single stuffed owl with its head turned away. We’re already laughing at the oddness of the place. We tempt each other up the stairs, but neither of us are brave enough, so we slip into the final two rooms. The kitchen and bathroom are faithful to the aesthetic; lamps cobbled together from bleached tree limbs, a small radio, a trapdoor lurking under one of the kitchen chairs, and in the bathroom, a clawfoot tub. The plumbing is all exposed pipes, ligaments of copper spidering up across the walls. There are no curtains anywhere in the house. The shutters do not close. The night presses at each window and outside, a wind is picking up, gentle, but enough so that the brambles wrap the glass like knuckles.
We spend the night sketching and writing at the table, our dinner dishes soaking in the sink. There’s tea beside each of us, mine drunk and topped up again; Anna’s untouched and cold. I’d offer her a fresh one but the kettles by the window and I’ve been avoiding the windows. I think we both have.
She makes sure, steady strokes on her iPad as she works. Completely focussed. I have an empty notebook in front of me. I haven’t quite transitioned from thinking about writing to writing yet. It’s like I’m waiting for the night to start.
We listen to local radio. This German Schlager tune from the 60s starts playing. Focussing becomes one thousand times harder. It’s then that Anna asks, without looking up, if I believe in ghosts.
‘I don’t’, I say. And because that doesn’t feel 100% percent true, I add. ‘But I could. If the conditions were right. I mean, if I was in the mood’.
She nods. Makes a few more marks, turns the iPad one way then the other. ‘I think if I had to choose between a ghost being in this house or a stranger being in this house, I’d choose a ghost’.
I agree. It’s not lost on me, with an easy half a mile of absolute darkness between us and the nearest house how actually alone we are. How the neat squares of each window must glow with the light of our being here. A beacon: visible, vulnerable. How messy the barns are, how tall the sunflowers in the fields around us; how easy it would be to hide. Us, walking our bikes around the back yard, laughing at how obscenely spooky it was, and someone maybe there watching. A man would barely have to crouch at all.
‘Right’, I say. ‘Yeah. Up the ghosts!’
Anna just looks at me.
The lights blink. Barely perceptible, but they do off and back on again.
We stare at each other. We’re locked, staring at each other. On the commode in the corner the radio sputters. The schlager music fizzes out to static then back.
Through a laugh, I issue an indignant ‘wise up’.
All at once, I think we realise that neither of us are winning any prizes in pragmatism, and our imaginations are at risk of causing us full mental collapse. Anna whispers an oh-my-god. It’s just lights, I tell myself. It’s just lights. An old house. Bad electrics. I say that out loud, ostensibly for Anna, but really for the both of us.
Then faking steadiness, I ask, ‘Do you want another cup of tea, Anna?’
She looks at the kettle and at the velvet black of the window behind it. But she nods.
I fix the tea, coaching myself into a sensible head. The fact is: we’re not going to leave this house in the middle of the night, certainly not because some lights went funny, and the probability of a monster, incorporeal or otherwise, is very, very small.
‘This is flipping scary’, Anna says, and she’s laughing. And that’s good. It loosens something in my chest.
So, we’re back to where we were. Anna sketching and me almost writing, but the mood has changed because really we’re both waiting for the moment the lights will go again.
‘You know what’, I say. ‘We have locked doors between us and the outside. Every window has two panes and every window has a lock. We’re fine. Nobody’s getting in’.
Anna looks like she wishes I’d said anything else. ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘But what if someone’s already here’.
When it’s time to sleep we decide we’ll do so in one bed. It’s the only room where the shutters even half close and there are two doors; one into the hall, the other into the adjoining bedroom. It’s hardly comforting but at least it seems logistically sound. Every now and then I’m struck by how silly we’re being, then by how two lads in the country would hardly spare the lights or the radio or the isolation or the barns or the locked room upstairs a second thought. But there’s always that sliver, isn’t there?
I mean, stranger things and all that…
We listen to a history podcast about Marie Antoinette. She seems sort of sounder than what history has made of her, and that occupies us with chat for a while. Then it’s lights out. ‘See you in the morning’. I try for comedy with, ‘If we’re lucky…’ And we laugh at that, but the silence afterwards is terrible.
Anna is sleeping. I can’t. I keep feeling this compulsion to check the front door and that it’s actually locked. I think back to my old apartment building and the night I woke to the sound of door handles creaking and releasing along the corridor. One after another, closer and closer towards my apartment, and this awful, awful feeling that I’d forgotten to lock my door. I waited, sitting up in bed, staring, chest tight as a fist. But when my door handle depressed, the door stayed shut and the opportunist moved on. So, I have a preoccupation with checking.
Nonetheless, I can’t bear to leave the bed, unhook one of the flimsy door locks, leave this room and pass that staircase.
I begin to drift. It’s a sinking, freefalling feeling backwards through the dark. I’m aware, I think, that it’s happening. That I’m beginning to sleep, and the sleep will eat up the night hours that look more and more like torture the longer my mind runs from the front door to the back, up the stairs to the locked door of the attic and back down again: searching out every corner of the house for something that might hurt us.
But there’s nobody here. There’s nobody here to hurt us.
But there’s nobody here to help us.
A light scratching starts up in the wall behind the headboard. I roll my eyes. ‘Jesus Christ’.
Something grabs my hand under the blankets. Anna, breathless, hands scrabbling for mine, says my name over and over again.
‘It’s just a mouse. It’s just a mouse’, I repeat.
Her breaths are a metronome. I hold her hand while she wrestles with the tempo. What a way to wake up.
‘It’s just a mouse’, I whisper again, giving her hand a good squeeze before letting go.
She is still breathing so heavily that I almost miss it. A sound somewhere in the house. Maybe not even a sound, but the sense of sound; displaced air, movement, motion.
Minds can play tricks, I know they do. We’re already frightened and so in our heads now. It was just a mouse, but this sensation uncurls in my belly that says, This is different. Like if I strain hard enough, I can hear the brush of dry skin as fingers curl around the banister and cautious feet map their way downstairs from the attic.
I tap Anna’s arm to get her attention, gesture for her to listen. She catches it too. Her eyes widen, terrified. We listen to the threat of nothing. Until: a thump. Single. Horrible. A closed fist against drywall.
‘Christ’, I say.
I’m already telling myself it’s just a cat or there’s just a draft somewhere that’s blown something over and we’re hysterical. I mean, what’s the likelihood, eh? Stuff like this doesn’t happen apart from all the times it does. I’m flicking through my Rolodex for Very Rational Explanations when Anna grabs me again.
Outside, there’s the sound, barely, of a single floorboard creaking. The room is full of listening. There’s a beat, then the faint straining of a mechanism being wound.
The music box begins to play.
It’s faint, but not enough to mask the scrape of the poker being lifted from its cradle by the fire.
Anna’s nearly out of the bed, but I catch her clumsily by the hip and then by the wrist. ‘Slow’ I mouth. I press my finger to my lips.
We slip from the bed, each of us grabbing our phone in hand. I circle around to Anna, pass her and approach the door. I feel like vomiting. Anna is shaking her head. Big eyes. Pale face. I glance at the latch and with the breath rattling out of me, press my ear to the door. Syncopated, someone else is breathing.
I’m too scared to cry.
Someone, definitely, outside this room. Two doors. Two exits. We can leave. If we’re smart. Decisive. Disappear into the sunflowers, up the lane, onto the road. If we’re fast enough. We can just go.
But we double locked the front door. And left the key on the hook.
The back door just has a snib. So, maybe…
God. Anna was right. Someone was in here. We’d locked the doors, but someone was already inside. Waiting.
And then it strikes me, fully, the whole weight of the upset and the agony of being an unlucky woman. That, actually, there’s no right answer. Common sense and logic and caution and modesty and boldness and streetwisdom are the reserve of survivors, actually, not even then. A game of chance with horrible odds.
But we have to decide. We have to be decisive. Pick a door. The one in front of us that leads through the bedroom to the locked front door where the key may or may not be hanging, or the one to the side, to the hall and the backdoor, where the presence may or may not still be.
We exchange a look, like, well, it’s happened. A final ironic smile, and then we choose.
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