Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall

It was very odd, I have to say. I even asked him, have you been here before? He just shook his head and said, “No.” He could just tell, he said.

That’s why it’s so strange that he didn’t know about the barrow — the superstitions and whatnot. I don’t know how he found it — if it was on the ordnance survey or he simply came upon it during one of his jaunts in the wood. The rest of us never knew it existed — we scarcely left the house some days, practicing. But Julian was always wandering off in the middle of the night or before the rest of us woke. He was always an early riser; when we were boys he’d be up before dawn.

“The best part of the day,” he’d say. “Before it’s had a chance to get broken.” But everything gets broken eventually.

Tom

The oldest extant parts of the house were Tudor. An entire small Elizabethan-era manor tucked off to the back, surrounded by yew trees. Very lovely but dark — the trees were hundreds and hundreds of years old and overshadowed everything. A thousand years, maybe. Do trees live to be that old? You reached that part of the house by a narrow passage, very dim, with oak paneling. There was a long, narrow hall with a minstrel’s gallery, stone flags on the floor. On the upper floors, there were any number of rooms. I couldn’t tell you how many, because I only had a very cursory look when the estate agent showed me around. But what I saw was marvelous. Lovely carved paneling, small leaded windows. Beautiful National Heritage stuff. But very dark — not a lot of windows, and most of them deeply set into the walls.

Nobody slept in the oldest part of the house, though Les says she thinks that’s where Julian and the girl went that first night, before going to his room. And Les was kind of stalking them, so she’d know. I suspect they wanted privacy, off on their own where no one could hear them. Julian — so well-mannered, quite gallant. Old-fashioned. I’m sure he thought he was doing the others a favor, quietly disappearing into the shadows with his lady-love. But it had the opposite effect, as such things do, especially when you’re young and living in close quarters. It made everyone suspicious. A real daisy chain: everyone in love with the wrong person! The only ones who got what they wanted were Julian and the girl. I can’t think of a single commune from those days that survived. All those utopias undone by sexual rivalry, and who didn’t do the washing up!

So no, everyone pretty much stayed in the main part of Wylding Hall, which was more like a farmhouse and quite lovely. Slate floors, a high-ceilinged, whitewashed central hall with the original oak beams and fireplace, windows that looked out across the overgrown lawns to the Downs and woods beyond. That became the rehearsal room. They’d all meet there whenever they woke and stay there all night, sometimes, playing. Electricity had been brought in after the war. It hadn’t been updated and was a bit dicey, but it did for the amps and guitars. Down the hall was an enormous old kitchen with an ancient gas cooker, a long trestle table, mismatched chairs. Gas refrigerator that wobbled whenever you opened it. I’d checked everything out before I rented it to make sure it worked. Which it did, barely.

There was a toilet room and a bath downstairs, and upstairs a number of bedrooms — seven, I think, in that wing. The furnishings were rather sparse, but everyone had a bed. Some of the rooms had a desk; some had a wardrobe or chest of drawers. One had a great, huge chair that was almost a throne — Jonno took that one. Julian’s room had a proper desk looking out a window, with a beautiful view of the Downs to the west.

That’s where he wrote “Windhover Morn”—you can see the photograph on the gatefold sleeve of his desk, with his notebook and that mess of music sheets and pens and pencils and his guitar on the bed. Such a beautiful view that was.

Ashton

My favorite part of the house was definitely the rehearsal room. That’s where everything came down. We’d wander in by ones and twos; everyone was usually up before noon. Then we’d jam or listen to whatever song Les or Julian had been working on. Some days, we’d get so caught up in playing that we’d forget to eat. Didn’t forget to drink, especially Will. We had all our equipment set up in there: little PA system and all our guitars. Will’s mandolin and sitar and god knows what. He even taught himself to play the viole de gambols, a true sign of a man with too much time on his hands. Jonno’s drum kit. There was a beat-up old upright piano pushed into a corner. First thing we did was drag that out into the room. Julian used to play it: “Greensleeves” and John Dowland, songs that weren’t composed for piano, but Julian played beautifully.

And you know, that piano was tuned perfectly. From the very beginning, I thought that was weird. Had someone come in to tune it? That would have been extremely odd, considering that absolutely nothing else had been done to the house to keep it up.

There were other weird things, too. Like the house always smelled of woodsmoke — fresh woodsmoke, like someone had a fire going in it somewhere. We’d been warned against doing that, as the chimneys hadn’t been cleaned in decades. At any rate, it was summer and far too warm for a fire. We’d open windows, burn joss sticks — no matter what we did, it still smelled of woodsmoke. The rehearsal room less so than the rest of the house.

And there was the Bird Room: this little corner room in the back of the house, near the old wing. Not much bigger than a closet, with an eyebrow window high up, facing west. I was looking for a loo early one morning, just a few days after we arrived. Will always took forever in the loo, and I got tired of waiting. I think that’s where he taught himself to play the fucking viole.

None of us had really explored the place yet, so I wandered down this back corridor in my stocking feet, trying doors to see if I could find a toilet. The knobs were hard to turn, and a few were locked, so I never did see what was inside. But most opened onto empty rooms, or rooms filled with old furniture mashed up against the walls, or just piled on top of each other. Carven tables, chairs, wardrobes, settles — it was like Antiques Roadshow gone mad. Finally, I reached the end of the hall, and there was just one door left that I hadn’t tried.

It opened right up. I barely touched the knob, but it turned like it was greased. I stepped in and immediately covered my mouth with my sleeve. The air smelled bad — truly foul. Not like a dead mouse or rat, not really like anything dead at all. Not like a clogged drain, either. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever encountered. It smelled thick , like I was breathing in some kind of vapor: marsh gas or something like that, though I’ve spent time in the Fens and I’ve never smelled something like that, not even close.

For a moment I thought I’d be sick, but I fought it off. I was wearing a bandanna — I had long hair then — so I covered my face with that. The room wasn’t empty, but I couldn’t clearly see what was there, just dark things sort of heaped on the floor. Rolled-up carpets, I thought — there were old oriental carpets everywhere. There was only a single small window high up in the far wall, all covered with dust and cobwebs, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust.

It wasn’t rolled-up carpets on the floor. It was birds, hundreds of birds, maybe thousands. I yelped and jumped backwards and bashed myself against the door. But the birds didn’t move.

They were all dead. Little birds, wrens or sparrows — I didn’t know from birds. These were tiny, small enough to fit in your hand, and brown, with twisted tiny black claws, all piled atop each other like they’d been shoveled there. Some of them — a lot of them — were missing their beaks.