That November, it rained. It rained so much that the water line in the canal threatened to top the towpath and the brook in the woods swelled, groundwater bubbling up to meet the rain. The rain dripped in from the kitchen roof and I placed metal buckets across the floor, each drip turning to a clang as it landed. The bathroom reeked of mould and the damp clung to my skin and clothes no matter how many times I tried to air it; its thick, earthy smell always present. 

I moved silently about the house, each footstep chosen and set down carefully. The world outside was muffled by the rain and the walls were spongey with collected networks of mould, interlaced from foundations to roof. The hum of cars was distant; I was protected from everything beyond my body and home. I wanted to cut silently through the house, disturbing nothing but the spores which stirred in ready expectation of my footfall and flit through the air on my breath. I liked the quiet of my own company; I liked the way that the silence made my loneliness somehow more acute, but at the same time more bearable, as if it reached out to cradle and comfort me. Sometimes the only sound I heard each day was the beat of blood in my own ears, keeping tempo with the slow, soothing tick of the clock. Time seemed to stop for me in the damp house, stretch with lethargy: my days measured in the lifespans of mould and fungi.

Settling down at my desk to work, I breathed in slowly and tried to type my thoughts before they leaked out of my head and disappeared, dripping from my ears like the rain through the roof. My work was mundane, simply something to pass the time. The rain thrummed against the window, a constant companion. Through the murky panes of glass, I could see only an open expanse of treeless sky. No birds, like some sort of perverse ill-omen: I looked out of the window for something to give meaning to my life, an indication of my future, but found only an absence. Each thought was hard to capture, to pinpoint, to get down onto paper. My eyes kept glazing out of focus, my thoughts elsewhere. 

It fell dark early. The day never really had a chance to get started at all, the sky forever one unending expanse of grey, stretching outwards in every direction. Out in the tar-black evening, the garden light flicked on and off, briefly illuminating the sodden garden furniture and throwing long shadows across the lawn. I told myself the light’s motion sensor had just been triggered by the wind which beat against the sides of the house, the oncoming storm. The light left bright spots in my eyes when I blinked. I stretched my spine, my joints creaking with rust. When I flicked the switch of my desk lamp on, a familiar shock of electricity pulsed into my hand and through my arm. Water had run from the walls into the electrics again. The light pooled against the desk, and I liked the way that I could move from the light of my lamp into the safety of the shadows simply by settling back into my chair. 

The house was too close, too warm. I struggled to keep my eyes open, and eventually I gave in, traipsing up the stairs to bed, dragging my heavy legs one at a time onwards. Unsure of the time; everything murky and fuzzy. I had taken the curtains off the rail in an attempt to get as much of the feeble light into my room as possible, but it had seemingly made no difference. No light demarcated the days, little sound either. Lying in bed, I stared unseeing at the ceiling until I fell into a dreamless sleep. Another day done; another task ticked off a non-existent list. 

Waking, the room was shadowed, monochrome, the house quiet save for the wind outside and the familiar drip, drip of the rain. The walls of the room pressed in towards me. Dragging myself from the warm covers, I staggered towards the nearest wall, pressing my palm against it. The surface was cool, soft, giving. Wet. Taking my hand away, I stared at my palm as its slickness caught what dim light there was coming in through the window. Each step of the stairs creaked as I descended. The kitchen, too, smelled of mould. I felt the spores in the air against the skin of my cheek, patiently waiting to enter my body each time I breathed in, seeking unspoken permission. 

The mould was an accepted part of life here – my mother had always said it was recompense for building our house on water-spirit land. In their fury, they exacted their revenge, pushing water up through the foundations of the house, encouraging mould to spread and reach ever onwards. They moved invisibly, intangibly through the fabric of the house, the mould the only evidence of their presence, their cast shadow. We were superstitious people. In my childhood, however much we had tried, days spent scrubbing the walls with bleach, we could not get rid of the mould. Sometimes we thought it gone, only for it to return with a vengeance the next week, black patina creeping across the walls. We had tried to play tricks on the water-spirits, piling all of our chemicals into the bins on the end of the driveway, letting them think they had won this perverse game, before suddenly returning triumphant from the shops with armfuls of different kinds of bleach, specially targeted to this and that and the other household ailment. But the water spirts were part of the fabric of the land, something which had existed long before our house was built and would exist long after it was gone, brick and timber returned to the earth, foundations concealed by knots of bracken. Eventually, the company of the mould became preferable to the constant chemical tang of bleach and the warnings from my father not to stand too close to the walls for fear of ruining my clothes. Now that my parents had gone, it was just me and the mould, always the mould, the mould, my constant companion. 

I threw open the double patio doors and cold air rushed into the kitchen, rattling the mugs hanging from the cupboards. The wet air whipped against me and the cold entered my lungs. I left the doors open, returned upstairs, dressed. Coat hood over my head, I descended the stairs once more. The house was now pleasingly cool, the cold air heavy with spray, the only thing capable of raising me from my days-long stupor of warmth and silence and mould, sealed up in the house. The wind pushed through the open doors and crept its way around the ground floor, reaching with elongated fingers up the stairs. As a child, I had always imagined that monsters were waiting in the dark to chase me up the stairs whenever I turned the hall light off, forcing me to sprint-crawl against the carpet and wood. Now, in a sense, something did wait for me. This time they didn’t chase me from the dark, but instead pulled and pushed me towards the open doors and the outside, grey and overcast but still too bright compared to the womb of my house. 

The rain didn’t bother me, it never did. Nor did the mould, really, anymore. I had made my peace with it. I accepted that the spores in my lungs were the price exacted for the crime of building on this land. I was used to the wet, living here. Born in this house, it was as if I had been pulled from the wet clay of the ground and moulded into a shape resembling a person by the hours I had spent running feral along the brook which cut, deep in its ravine, through the nearby woodland. My parents hadn’t watched me as I played there, but something else had. 

Now I retraced childhood steps and followed that same path along the snaking trail of the brook. I followed it for hours, goaded on, boots plastered in mud, the ground shifting sluggishly beneath my feet, as the brook swelled upwards to claim the roots of trees. Mud churned with clay and the bordering trees bent forwards with the weight of the rain, the effort of pushing back against the continuous onslaught of wind, heavy branches trailing in the rushing water below. Above, the flat grey sky stared impassively down. Eventually, I climbed down from my lofty vantage on the path and entered the ravine, careful steps as I grabbed twisted tree roots and leant for support against rocks which jutted suddenly out from the edges. The ground shifted under my weight, sliding forward. I took comfort in the familiarity of this movement, an echo of childhood memories of slipping down towards the water. 

My feet dug into the ground and I pitched backward, sliding into the mud, soft and yielding to the shape of my body. The wind continued to howl and the rain continued to pelt the ground, the brook rising, rising. As the water inched up my body, creeping into the dip of my waist, I held my arms out in front of me. Staring at the semi-translucent skin of my wrists, I wondered if my blood ran a little darker than it ought, as if the mould spores were in my veins as well as my lungs, one final act of vengeance from the water-spirits.