Gran's House

The painting had always been there.

That was what Mum said when Owen asked about it on the first evening, standing at the bottom of the stairs in Gran's house with his bag still over his shoulder and the painting staring down at him from the landing wall.

"It has been there since before I was born," Mum said, already heading to the kitchen. "Come and help with dinner."

Owen did not move straight away. He stood and looked at the painting and the painting, in a manner of speaking, looked back.

It showed a garden. That was all, just a garden, the kind you might see anywhere, with a low stone wall and an oak tree and a wooden bench under the tree. The paint was old and slightly dark around the edges the way old paintings got, and the sky in it was the flat grey-white of a day that could not decide whether to be overcast or clear.

The bench was empty.

The house was old in the way that meant it had its own sounds, settling and creaking sounds that Mum said were just the wood expanding and contracting with the temperature, which was a perfectly reasonable explanation that did absolutely nothing for Owen at midnight.

Owen noted this and went to help with dinner and did not think about the painting again until three in the morning when he woke up and needed the bathroom and had to walk past it in the dark.

He did not look at it on the way there.

On the way back he did, because the landing light was on and he could not help it.

The bench in the painting was not empty any more.

There was a figure sitting on it. Distant, small, not detailed enough to make out features. Just a shape. A person-shaped shadow on the bench under the painted oak tree.

Owen stood in the landing in his socks and looked at the painting for a long time.

Then he went back to bed and lay very still in the dark and told himself that he had not looked carefully enough the first time. That the figure had always been there. That at the bottom of the stairs in the evening light, tired from the drive, he had simply not noticed it.

He told himself this for approximately an hour before he fell asleep.

He did not check the painting the next morning. He walked past it with his eyes forward, looking at the stairs, and went down to breakfast and talked to Gran about ordinary things. But he could feel the painting on the wall behind him the whole time he was walking past it, the way you can feel a room behind you when you walk out of it at night.

He did not entirely believe it.