Although there are a few moments in which the main characters' thoughts move back to the past and remenber things that happenned in other places, all the story takes place in and around Mrs. Kaplins' house.
The author wants us to get involved in the story with the main characters and with this purpose he describes carefully each detail of this frightening house which has plenty of ambiguities.
The story begins a stormy night, rain, thunders and lightnings will come with us all the time, soaking and scaring more and more. They meet in the darkness as they hear the church bells and open the blackened iron gate that leads them to the garden.
The garden
is completely neglected, the path and the ground floor of the house
are hardly seen because there are weeds and grass
up to two metres hight. The most strange thing in the garden is that the
grass seems to avoid touching the building, the grass never points the
walls.
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The house has also a very
peculiar
design: the structure is crooked, there are two towers on the roof,
balconies in odd places, windows out of line (some of them broken), over
hanging upper floors, etc.
At the front facade there is a covered porch to hide from the rain, but it doesn't look like any other warm and romantic porch. There are windows in the door, but we can see nothing through them. There is one door in the porch and another one in the back part of the house. As there are two ways to enter the house it depends on the links you choose while you read. |
At this point it is impossible to follow an order in the description because the house is full of corridors, stairs and rooms that we discover as we progress through the story.
The back landing has a good decor, but they have the impression that they are being observed, that there is someone right behind them. They see a staircase and the main landing door: two different ways, a decission to take.
The hall has something completely illogical: everything looks new and gleaming, but it is filty years from Mrs. Kaplin's death and nobody has entered the house since then. It seems as if the time had stopped in that room, but suddenly they start hearing a ticking and they find a wooden clock.
From the hall
they see a carved staircase, the
stairs are covered with a red carpet and the walls move and twist,
there is a strange pain sensation and the temperature becomes hotter as
they go upstairs.
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The parlour is downstairs. Surprisingly there is no dust in it. Everything in this room is elegantly decorated: ornate seats are plush green, there are carved mahogany tables, gleaming floorboards and a very appealing fireplace. |
The bedroom
is on the first floor. It is very tidy, the bedspread is made of red lush,
as the staircase carpet. On the wall there is a misterious picture of a
very similar house to the one they are in, but in one of the windows
in the picture there is a human silhouette and the room behind it seems
to be on fire.
Outside the bedroom they see a few stairs leading up higher than the first floor, following this way and going through a broken window they get to the roof. It seems a quite place despite the rain. There are two thin tall square towers with a slatted window in each.
Academic year 2002
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
©Teresa Gómez Sonlleva
©Diana Hervás Castillo
Universitat de València Press