I

No one remembered the days before the House of Ivy, the time it didn’t stand shivering at the edge of a cliff, casting its dark shadows over the land. It was a house long abandoned, drenched in deep green ivy and moss, ever under the grey sky, trapped in the kisses of wind blowing from the ocean. It was easy to fool oneself that the house would collapse into the deep blue, disappearing without a trace, and even easier to hope, for ghosts haunted the house. Relentlessly they screamed in the night, their cries for peace ever so heart-breaking. No one dared to come near, and no one remembered who lived there once, long ago. 

No one but the oldest woman in town, who always shook her head in disapproval when asked about it. “It is not a tale to be told,” she always whispered, clenching her shivering, wrinkly hand around the wooden cross on her chest. “It is better to leave those poor souls in peace.” The woman passed away in her sleep, quietly, as the storm once again raged over the rooftops, the secret dying with her. 

Veronika kept that night in her heart’s memory; the moment she passed by the woman’s house, the rust and sweet scent overwhelming in the cool night air. The rain soaking her gown stained in brown, the suffocating wet of her sleeves clinging to her skin, the dark strands of her hair kissing her cheeks as she made her way through the mud. In the dead of the night, she saw the silhouette of the house. It shrieked in the grasp of wind, like voices of ghosts crying in agony. As she walked up, a mere shadow herself underneath the mad grey sky, the scent in the air changed. It was no longer just death she could smell; it was also the salt of the ocean, rising from the waves over the edges, carried by the storm. That disgusting, human taste that made her stomach twist. 

Lightning flashed in the distance, barely illuminating the house. Its broken angels and chipped gargoyles, the ivy leaves that glimmered briefly before sinking back into the dark. And a woman’s figure, sitting at the window and looking at her. 

She sat at the very same window, moons and moons later, looking at the wild sea locked in its eternal dance with the wind. The sky here was ever so grey, a fancy feature for the home’s dwellers. Veronika smiled, for the night she found her home seemed to have been not so long ago, while actually decades may have passed already. She still knew what the dust on the floor felt like under her bare feet, the warm shiver that slid down her spine as creaks echoed through the dimly lit rooms. 

“What are you doing?” a gentle voice broke the silence, pulling her back to the present. To the room whose walls glimmered in the colour of the pine trees, blood-stained floor, and empty mirrors. All the mirrors in the house were empty of people, there was no place for the dead in their reflections. Veronika never understood the purpose of keeping them; they no longer served their intended purpose, but Charlotte wouldn’t even hear of disposing them. 

“I’m thinking,” she replied after a short pause, not looking over her shoulder. Charlotte walked to her gently and sat on the floor, before her, resting her head in Veronika’s lap. A frown nested between her eyebrows, thin line of wrinkled skin showing disapproval. 

“I don’t like it when you think.” She raised an eyebrow, prompting Charlotte to shake her head and smile. “I meant that I don’t like it when you think like that. You become distant.”

She sighed, now frowning herself. “You have spiderwebs in your hair,” she muttered and reached for the thin, silk thread in Charlotte’s fiery strands. Her lover remained still, giggling to herself, suggesting that perhaps she ought to pay more attention to the door and walls she passes by. The spiders had infested the house, found their comfort all over the furniture they seldom used, and slept carefree in the corners of the rooms. They had made themselves welcome, and no one was bothered enough to send them away. 

Without a sound, three gowns flew into the room through the door Charlotte had left open. Soap had turned their collars yellow, and they smelled of roses and lavender. Light brown stains stood out on the fabric, decorating the collars, the sleeves, and the hem. They continued their way levitating towards the other door, wooden and shut, and dropped to the ground as they bumped into them. The two lovers laughed, watching their maid, transparent as always, as she opened the door in a gust of wind. The maid, Evie, paid no attention to them, her gaze as determined and empty as always. 

“One would think she would get accustomed to being dead after such a long time,” Charlotte remarked. 

Veronika shook her head. “You are being mean, Lottie.”

“My love, I prefer the term frank, thank you very much.” She looked up, now only leaning her chin on Veronika’s leg. Neither of them said a word. They just looked at each other, a quiet banter between two lovers in which neither of them could win, and that no longer had to be spoken out loud. 

Veronika was the first to let go and return the topic of their conversation. “I was thinking about the night we met.”

“Ah, yes”, exclaimed Charlotte as she stood up to sit right next to Veronika. “That dreadful night when I had hoped you were dinner ready to walk straight into my home.” 

“What a strange way to say it was the most splendid evening of your life.” 

The walls around them crackled under the sudden, strong burst of wind. Veronika curled up on the sofa, hugging her knees, and rested her head on Charlotte’s shoulder. Slowly, she reached for her hand, entwining their fingers. Human bodies were warm to touch, a sensation that Veronika often forgot about. Their kind’s bodies were cold.  Not like the ghosts’, those poor memories of men that lingered in this world, but like a body laid down to rest. 

Charlotte tightened the grip around her fingers, cackling like a mad raven on a winter’s eve. “You flatter yourself, Vera. The most splendid evening of my life was the one I spent with three drunk poets and feasted on them at dawn.”

Veronika heard that story many times, how her beloved spent the day hiding in the shadows of the poet’s house, steering away from the sun’s painful stings. And how she carried their bodies in the night one by one, tossing them into the deep blue beneath her home, and how the waves devoured those empty shells. 

Veronika smiled. “Truly, I suppose that one could never be matched.” 

“Perhaps. But the night we met comes as a close second.”

“Pity, for it is only the third on my list.”

“Now you just tease me.” 

She did not respond. Instead, she took a deep breath, soaking in the perfumes of decay around her. Of the mildew growing where the walls cracked, and rain found its way into the house. Lifeless moths trapped in the spiderwebs, their pale wings broken and limp. They sat in silence for some time. Still, breathless, in a moment of tranquillity laced with the cries of storm and their incorporeal companions. 

Over time, Veronika had learned all their names, through it was only Evie, their maid, who acknowledged her presence. The others, three of them, only roamed the damp and dark hallways , shrieking and howling, silencing themselves only when Charlotte walked into the room. Particularly Lady Jane, the oldest of them, whose gaze turned hollow and followed her around the room, as if searching for something. 

“Lottie, why do they haunt the house?” she asked, turning her eyes to the sea on the other side of the window. She expected no reply, for the first time she had asked Charlotte had avoided the answer. She only gave a shrug, claiming that perhaps they just wished to.  It was then that Veronika had decided to let the matter be, but as she thought once again of the woman that had died the night she arrived, her curiosity was sparked once again. 

She felt Charlotte’s body stiffen next to hers, her muted, gentle breath of discomfort. “They are mourning. As all of their kind do.” 

She paused, taken aback by this confession. “Over whom?”

Charlotte shook her head, releasing her fingers and curling up on the other side. “There were once more of them. More than Evie, Jane, James, and Henry.” She looked at Veronika hesitantly. “Henry is –“

“The little boy, I know.” She took a deep breath. “But why do they mourn?” 

This time Charlotte shrugged, offered an amused smile, and said: “How would I know? They must have their reasons.” 

Veronika stood up and knelt before her. She reached for her hand, pulling it to her lips and kissing it deeply, softly. “You know, I don’t mind if you don’t wish to tell me now.” She looked up, meeting her lover’s soft, painful expression. “We have eternity before us, you can tell me when you are ready.” 

She nodded, tightening the grip of her hand, and bent over the sofa. She pulled Veronika into a clumsy but strong embrace, barely keeping her balance. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and rain came pouring down from the sky, gliding down the cracked windows. The smell of soft moss flooded the air, of moss covered in salt, dirt and drops of blood. The house above the sea cast its shadows over the grass, quiet and content. 

II

The feast barely satisfied their aching hunger. The blood was weak, nearly tasteless on their tongues. They had fought back, the two who had recklessly wandered to the cliff. The man left two thin, dark scratches on Veronika’s cheek – the ring on his finger was silver, and her wounds now burned at the gentlest of touches. Scars would remain after the pain turned to mist and many suns sank into the ocean. She crouched over the limp, dry, wrinkled corpse. The woman lay beside him, the words she had so bravely uttered earlier now forever gone from her lips. 

“Cursed you be for eternity”, she cried as Charlotte held her tightly in her grip, reaching for her neck. Veronika could only laugh and admire her strength to fight back. 

“Oh, but my dear, don’t you know we are already cursed?” she replied. Horror grew in her eyes, only to disappear as her neck cracked, and Charlotte dug her teeth in the woman’s neck. 

They presented the corpses to the sea, as always. Watched them splash into the seafoam lace on the heads of waves, sink into the abyss. Veronika cursed them under her breath, three times, so their souls would never find peace. The full moon shyly peeked between the clouds, casting its silver shadows as they walked through the thin snow back to the house. In their white gowns, covered in blood head to toe, they were nothing but two phantoms on a cold winter’s night, to a mere observer just two more ghosts haunting the House of Ivy. 

Veronika could feel Charlotte’s worried gaze  on her face, glancing at the sign of her own carelessness. But she said nothing until they entered the house, closed and isolated within the walls of their home. Her worry then turned to panic, and she gently caressed Veronika’s cheek. 

“Are you well?” her fingertips left a bloodied mark on Veronika’s face. Her breath smelt of rust and salt. Veronika nodded, smearing the leftovers of her meal with her sleeve. 

“I am well,” she whispered, as if not to break the quiet of the room.  “It stings a little, but I will be fine.”

“We should have buried them,” Charlotte hissed, “and danced on their graves as the moon shone above us.”

“The snow has frozen the ground, and we could dance regardless.”

Charlotte pursed her lips and rolled her eyes. In Luna’s silver, their skin glimmered greyer than it did in nights deeper and darker than this one. Blood still dipped from their fingertips, thudding mutely on the carpet. 

“We could dance, and Evie could play the piano.” Charlotte reached for her hair and tilted her head to the side. She stared for a moment. “You have blood in your hair.”  She licked her finger, smiling. “Why don’t you go wash it, and I could comb it?”

Veronika put her arm around her waist, closed her eyes and kissed Charlotte’s forehead. “What a splendid idea, my love,” she said and made her way up the shaky, wooden, old stairs, to the bathroom where the water was ice cold, the window long shattered, and the walls mildew black.

Veronika always had to sit in the bath, its white edges barely reaching her waist. She would sit there for what sometimes seemed to be days on end, the water gently caressing the surface of her skin. The tips of her hair floated on its surface, thin and dark. A rose-scented bar of soap she always kept in the right corner, always just slightly out of reach. 

After she rinsed hair thoroughly, she returned to the parlour, that grandiose room where the ivy had found its way in through the cracks on the window frames, and ruined, faceless portraits decorated the walls, and there was an old piano in the right corner. 

She sat on the floor, right before Charlotte, and leaned her head back. The snowstorm rose outside, it whistled in deep voice, howled as lady Jane made her way down the hallway, her sobs echoing the room as she passed by the open door. Charlotte took her comb, the tiny trinket she kept for years that have passed. Veronika closed her eyes and enjoyed the gentle tugs at her hair as Charlotte detangled it patiently. In that moment, when the cold pinched her skin, Veronika would have sworn she could spend eternity like this, in a mundane moment of sitting before her darling. Fed. Fresh. In complete, fulfilling silence. 

After some time, words escaped Charlotte’s throat. “Do you remember? The before?” 

Veronika felt a punch in her gut, an uncomfortable feeling of a broken taboo sliding down her spine. They had never spoken of the before; none of their kind did. The before was fragile. Tainted by the morality of its state, fogged by the moons that have passed and that will continue to pass. She tried to shake off her discomfort before she brought herself to reply with a sharp, distant no. A face flashed before her eyes, dark and gentle. The eyes she could not envision, those windows of the human soul. She had forgotten, but she could not remember remembering at all. It was as a dream of a dream, a thread so thin to hold onto, and that thread wrote out a name she no longer recognized or could pronounce. 

Charlotte paused for a moment. “You lie, my love, but you do not lie well.” 

“Truly, I don’t remember. I remember a face. A name perhaps, but I am not quite sure.”

“A face?” 

“Of a man.”

Charlotte giggled, amused, like a child giggles when they learn something they hadn’t expected, something they believed they shouldn’t know. “Is this a man you once loved?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps.”

Veronika felt a kiss on her scalp, a kiss a moment too long, before her beloved returned to the divine duty of combing her hair. “Lovely,” she said, and Veronika couldn’t see her face to discern if she truly meant it.

“Not a hint of envy in your voice?”

“Why would I envy someone who was part of your life before I was, and a man you don’t remember at that?” 

She had no answer, and it seemed like the right way to end the conversation. 

It seemed to linger, however. The feeling of a wall shattering before her as the never asked question was finally asked. There was  tension in the air, a yearning of a sort that made her feel as if she didn’t do what she should have done. Slowly, she moved away and turned around, facing Charlotte who stared at her blankly but played with the teeth of the comb with her fingers. Gently she sat beside her, closing the distance between them. 

“Do you remember?” Veronika asked. 

A moment passed as her eyes changed, their depth and shine dependent on the thoughts racing through her mind. Finally, she nodded. “Yes. Some of it. I remember why the ghosts are here, and I remember a maid that lived here.”

A maid that lived. When she first came here, there was only one person who was believed to know what happened here, how the House of Ivy came to be. 

Carefully, Veronika closed the distance between them. “Would you like to tell me about it?” 

Charlotte fidgeted. They sat in silence – maybe just for a moment, maybe for an hour. The ghosts levitated beside them, Evie attended to placing the portraits back on the walls and Henry immersed himself into the broken coffee table. She took a deep breath once, twice, a pitiful human habit that meant nothing to her body but served as an illusion of collecting oneself. “The ghosts are here because of me. They are mourning over my soul, for it can never be with them again. I watched as he drained them.” She smiled. “I don’t feel guilty about it, but I was afraid you…”

She never finished her sentence. Veronika pressed her finger against her lips, shaking her head. “This changes nothing, you could have told me sooner.”

Charlotte sighed. “Yes, I could have. I should have.” Without leaving much room for further discussion, she rose to her feet and extended her arm to Veronika, inviting her to dance. “The night is white, and the moon is full, there is no better time to dance than now, like we did the night we met.”

Veronika accepted her hand and rose to her feet. Her hair was still damp, and it stuck to the back of her gown still coated in the remains of the feast from earlier that evening. They moved gently to the centre of the room, calling for Evie to take over the piano. 

In the chains of winter, in the deepest cycle of a full moon, a lovely, charming melody echoed through the rooms of the House of Ivy. The ocean rose in unison, stretching its lacey arms towards the cliff, to the sky. And Luna, the mistress of the stars, shone through the clouds in all her glory, turning her gaze to the two silhouettes holding hands and spinning to the rhythm. They danced the night away, their bodies locked into one, as the mourners cried once again for the soul they could never have again, a soul that nestled next to another equally lost in the house that rose above the ocean.

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The House of Ivy © 2025. Barbara Jurić

Barbara Jurić was born in Split, Croatia, in 1999. She is a co-founder of FindRead, a website that was aimed at promoting works of Croatian authors. During her studies she was on editorial team of The Split Mind, a literary magazine published by Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Split. Her work was published on RainyWords and Maskerata literary websites. She lives and studies in her hometown.

The short story The House of Ivy was originally published in the Morina kutija, no. 8 (veljača, 2025). You can download it for free from our site or Smashwords.

Barbara Jurić, rođena je u Splitu, Hrvatskoj, 1999. godine. Suosnivačica je web stranice FindRead koja je usmjerena na promoviranje radova hrvatskih autora. Tijekom njenog studija, bila je u uredničkom timu literaranog časopisa The Split Mind, kojeg objavljuje Filozofski fakultet u Splitu. Njeni radovi su objavljeni na literarnim stranicama RainyWords i Maskerata. Živi i studira u svom rodnom gradu.

Priča The House of Ivy objavljena je u online časopisu Morina kutija, br. 8 (veljača, 2025.). Časopis možete skinuti ovdje ili s platforme Smashwords.

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Urednički komentar: Volimo kad nas gothic horror priča opsjedne svojom melankoličnom atmosferom, kao što je i ova, gdje nam autorica oslikava klasične i voljene motive vještim opisima.