Space

Although there are a few moments in which the main characters remember situations that happened in the past, in other places, the action in this story takes place almost completely in an old and strange house whose owner, Mrs. Kaplin died fifty years ago.

The house is very important in this story because it is nearly a character in itself. The house with its peculiar atmosphere and aspect is necessary for the development of the story.

The garden is overgrown and completely neglected. The path which leads to the house is obscured by weeds and there is grass up to two metres high on both sides of it. This grass seems unusually dark and the strangest feature is that the grass never blows towards the house, only away. The exaggerated strands flap in the wind but always at an angle away from the house` s walls. One further thing is that the grass closest to the house has a brittle look, a broken scorched quality.

The house is a strange building; it is a huge wooden construction with balconies in odd places and overhanging upper floors. There are also two thin towers with slatted windows. It causes a dreadful impression in the darkness of the night with rain cascading from the slopping sections of the roof.

From the garden we can see a covered porch, but it is not an appealing refuge from the weather.

There are also windows, some of them with no glass at all, and the back door is a simple windowed wooden frame with the broken glass still lining the frame with knife splinters, and a mouldy net curtain flapping out.

This door leads to a back staircase with its deep red carpet festering with mould and the first few stairs rotten because of the rain. Towards the top some grubby pictures hang askew.

From the landing door dark corridors and broken windows can be seen. The narrator has the impression that they are being watched. He feels as if the whole house were alive and moving around him.

A dark corridor leads to a bedroom. It is tidy despite years of disuse. The bedspread is a deep lush red and the frame is dark iron. On the wall there is a picture of another house at night with a very similar frantic architecture as this one. In a window of the house in the picture, there is an old deformed silhouette with the head sunk into its shoulders, and behind it the room is lit in frail orange as if it were fire.

Outside the bedroom there are stairs leading up higher than the first floor. At the end of the stairs there is a broken window. The narrator and Kirsten work their body through it between the spikes of glass to reach the roof. Despite the rain or perhaps because of it, it seems a safer place than the house.

Academic year: 2002
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
©María José Muñoz Lorente
Universitat de València Press
mamulo@alumni.uv.es