Depends Who's Coming
At Stormhill House, the rooms changed depending on the guest…
Millie was halfway through her joint behind the kitchens when the west wing shutters started slamming themselves open.
“Oh, here we fucking go,” said Ana, without even looking up from her phone.
Rain swept across the courtyard below in long silver sheets. Somewhere deeper in Stormhill House, pipes groaned like the building had just woken up hungry.
Millie frowned toward the windows.
“Bit early, isn’t it?”
“Depends who’s coming.”
Ana took the spliff back and leaned against the damp stone wall. She was wearing the house’s housekeeping apron over a Metallica shirt and fluffy pink slippers someone had abandoned in Room Thirteen sometime in the nineties. The staff kept trying to throw them away. They kept coming back.
From inside the kitchens came the distant sound of Chef yelling at a saucepan.
Millie lowered her voice.
“Who is it?”
Ana checked her phone again, snorted, then, shoulders sagging ever so slightly, turned the screen around.
CHLOE ST. JAMES
Author of Untamed Masculine
Host of The Sovereign Man Podcast
Retreat Facilitator • Speaker • Emotional Alignment Coach
Below the bio sat a photo of a stunning blonde woman in cream linen smiling beside a distressed-looking man holding a ceramic mug with both hands.
“Oh no,” Millie whispered.
“Yeah.”
“The masculine energy one?”
“The very same.”
Millie stared toward the house windows.
The curtains on the third floor had begun slowly closing themselves one by one.
“Oh, the House is going to put its whole pussy into this.”
Ana barked out a laugh so suddenly she inhaled smoke and doubled over coughing.
“You say that every time.”
“Not like this I don’t.”
The thing about The House was that it wasn’t technically inanimate. And, unfortunately for everyone involved, it had opinions. Which would have been manageable if it hadn’t also been judgemental.
The real problem, though, was that it hated certain kinds of people.
Not in a screaming-corridors-and-blood-elevators way. The House was… subtler than that. Its hostility had the same energy as customer service staff dealing with somebody who says they’re ‘actually very easygoing.’
But yeah. Some people really wound it up.
And not the sorts of people you’d expect a House to hate, like murderers, interestingly. Or adulterers – funnily enough, it actually seemed to enjoy adulterers. The wallpaper usually got incredible.
No, what The House hated with the quiet ferocity of hospitality workers spotting a customer five minutes before closing was performance.
People who confused branding with identity, or men who called themselves visionaries. (shudder). Women who described cruelty as honesty. Anyone who said the word authentic too many times in a single conversation. Honestly, you can’t blame a House.
Last year it had given a crypto billionaire a bedroom that slowly filled with cold seawater every time he said “disruption.” Nobody had slept for days because The House kept laughing through the plumbing.
The back door creaked open behind Millie and Ana.
Chef stepped outside holding a tray of peeled potatoes and a cigarette somehow already lit. His eyes fell on the approaching cream Land Rover with a podcast microphone sticker in the back window.
“Tell me that’s not the fucking podcast woman.”
Ana nodded solemnly.
Chef closed his eyes.
“Jesus Christ.”
Above them, somewhere in the upper floors, a chandelier exploded in anticipation.
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Written in response to Day#16 of Bradley Ramsey’s Halls of Pandemonium writing challenge, where a house or a room changes according to the person who enters…
I love this house.
Loved it!