The Longest Day

By Leon Craig

‘The ghosts are much less bad at this time of year, my aunt thinks she’s got rid of them,’ Zara said, inviting me to Almgard for the midsummer weekend.

I vacillated about whether to join her, I was jobless, heartbroken, miserably depressed – probably easy prey for any lurking spectre. In the end it was the repeated sightings of my ex in the gym which we still shared that made me decide to go. Gina had been my whole world before she dumped me.

There had always been a reason why previous midsummers were ruined. Last year I had lost my job and Gina didn’t want to deal with me, the year before that she’d lost hers, the year before that we went to the woods and she was casually scathing about the whole concept and then the year before that I was newly in love and forgot about it.

The Swedish hills were so green as to be almost iridescent, hills dotted with dark red houses painted with local ore. Zara’s aunt collected us from the pink-blossomed rural station, a reserved, powerful woman with long white hair. The forest we drove through was thick with silver birches, shining like exposed bone in the dappled darkness and as we drew closer to the house down a long, narrow track I was amazed by the quantity of bright purple wildflowers along the verge, beside mounds of dried firewood stacked as tall as two men. We came to a standstill in front of Almgard, its yellow ochre walls rising three stories high, framed by the shimmering silver lake behind it.

On either side of the wooden stairs up to the house, bright pink geraniums erupted from funereal-looking grey stone urns. Inside, every single surface was covered with Turkish carpets. The aunt went to take care of her horses, leaving Zara give me a tour of the house. She ushered me from dining room to drawing room and onwards, each space connected by great double doors and I found myself tensing each time she pushed through, waiting for unknown terrors. The house was beautiful, high-ceilinged, walls crammed with leatherbound books and paintings of various family members.

Zara rerouted me in the entrance hall, ‘We don’t use that staircase, only the other one.’

‘Why, did something happen?’ I peered suspiciously at the heavy doors enclosing one of two flights of wooden stairs, walls flanked by etchings of notable eighteenth century Swedes.

‘No idea, we just don’t.’ She heaved up her bag and gestured for me to follow her.

Each step was bowed in the middle from centuries of footfall. In the light-filled rotunda upstairs, a blank-eyed sculpture of the Virgin Mary loomed over us, slightly larger than life size, hands clasped in prayer. Zara opened doors at random. There was one room I immediately disliked, even before I turned left to see a wooden doll with legs akimbo on a mantelpiece, cloth face gawking in a way that struck me as deeply unpleasant. I stepped swiftly back and she said to my relief, ‘We’re not in there, that’s the old ballroom.’ We struck out again, along a corridor clad in brown wallpaper so damp it looked like swags of skin were peeling away from the building’s bones.

We were in two interconnected bedrooms with one dark wood single bed each, high windows showing views of the forest and a heavy door between us which closed with a latch.

‘Which one would you like?’ Zara asked and I looked around, worrying about feeling menaced by the tall wardrobe in the end bedroom. I plumped for the other one, with its ceiling-height ceramic stove and tiger-skin carpet, the head of which had clearly been chewed at some point by a family dog. She giggled and pointed upwards at the corner of the ceiling, which was grey-black and buckling. Oh no. This must be the Void Room. Previous guests had apparently reported the sensation that it was sucking at the edges of their sleep.

‘It picked you. No take-backsies.’ Zara had grown up here and could be as glib as she liked, though she still said she would never go in the attic alone.

We got changed and headed down for a drink on the terrace with her aunt and uncle. The table was a vast lichen-covered millstone with plastic deckchairs positioned around it. They switched into English and began telling us about the elms by the terrace which had become diseased and had to be cut down. Despite the summer sun, the wind blew cold enough that we needed to wear jackets borrowed from the iron rail just indoors. The boot room adjoined the cellar and I tried not to look directly into the darkness as it stretched away under the house. While attempting to participate in conversation about gardening, my attention was caught by a little wizened face which had been stuck on to a boundary stone at about ankle height. It was made from some kind of dark metal and gave me an unsettled feeling.

Zara and I were both drooping from the journey, so we retired upstairs after a supper of herrings and potato. Elodie, the girl I had just begun dating, was texting me and I felt I needed to keep the conversation going. I hoped this was a sign that I was becoming obsessed with her, instead of Gina. Elodie wanted to know about my preferred holiday type and how much alone time I needed. Considering questions which had previously been determined for me by Gina’s requirements was disconcerting, though if I didn’t know the answers now, perhaps I never would.

Before we turned in for the night, Zara suggested that I shut the door between the rooms and latch it, as she sometimes had a tendency to sleepwalk.

The next morning, I woke a little later than intended and said Zara’s name a couple of times, but not especially loudly in case she was still sleeping. Receiving no answer, I assumed she had probably gone downstairs anyway. I went to rootle around the room for the cardamom bun I’d bought yesterday, but as I was trying to find it, the door between our rooms abruptly opened. It creaked on its hinge and swung wide towards the stove before bouncing back to rest halfway

‘Did you do that?’ Zara stood in the doorframe, looking confused.

‘Nope, I thought you did?’

‘I was just picking out some clothes for today. The latch is on your side.’

I went to lift and drop the latch a couple of times, as if my useless examination of it would reveal anything.

Seeing I was beginning to panic a little, she said ‘Come on, let’s go down and get some coffee.’

Sat outside the house eating slices of rye bread slathered in chanterelle butter and gently teasing the cat, it was easier to dismiss the incident with the door as draughts and under-caffeination. We stayed in the sunshine reading and talking about Zara’s upcoming house move, hopefully the last of five within eighteen months, and Gina’s curious decision to hand me a pair of gym shorts and a raggedy tank top which I knew were not hers or mine during the exchange of our things late last year. She had refused ever to confirm or deny whether there was another woman in the picture, leaving me locked in perpetual uncertainty.

Zara suggested we go for a swim, so we grabbed old towels and went round below the house. Along the way she picked tiny wild strawberries, jewel-bright in the palm and shared them with me. Zara had had a terrible winter as well and we’d leaned on each other a lot, this trip was one of the notions formed in the endless grey trudge of January when we had needed things to look forward to. We stripped off, hung our clothes from a nearby tree and raced into the icy water. I decided to leave my jewellery on because I couldn’t think where else to leave it. After we’d acclimatised and were doggy-paddling along the tree-lined bank, she said ‘You do seem to be texting Elodie a lot, though. Is it going well?’

‘I think so, but it’s like my heart is still beating sideways because it’s so crushed. I’m not myself yet, but I don’t want to hurt her or lose her.’

An electric blue dragonfly alighted briefly on top of Zara’s head and then took off again, glinting in the afternoon brightness.

She said ‘Well, it’s early days. She’s still deciding about you too.’

Drying off after the swim, there was a tickling sensation on the back of my leg and unsure whether it was a water droplet or a probing tick, I reached round to slap it. My favourite chunky silver ring slid off my finger as I did so and I turned round to look for it in the grass, but couldn’t see it anywhere. Zara and I searched each patch of bracken nearby, but after  systematic exploration both of us had to conclude that it was gone. It was the only nice thing which Gina had ever given me. I had the urge to laugh but I knew that if I gave into it, I would become hysterical.

The evening lengthened into a blue dusk that was not exactly night and I went along to Almgard’s single bathroom, which could only be reached via Zara’s uncle’s study. In summer the lamps were not turned on, the glow outside meant her aunt and uncle regarded it as pointless, but emerging afterwards, it had finally gone dark. I darted through the study, where a single daybed was set up, I wasn’t sure for whom, and on into the drawing room, which felt as if someone had just stepped out the moment I entered. I picked my way across the floor carefully, the carpet here had been cut into strips like carpaccio and they shifted about treacherously under my feet. Reaching the hall I turned, desperately trying to remember which of the two staircases was forbidden, but I didn’t want to wait any longer down there than I had to. I rushed up one on tiptoe and as I made it to the landing, the fairy lights that lined the picture window flicked on suddenly.

The next morning was the maypole dance and after another night of completely blank, echoing sleep, I was looking in the mirror, trying to choose between two dresses. Worried that neither was quite right, I called out to Zara for her opinion. Once again, the door swung open. The movement of the latch behind me was blocked by my reflection, I only realised as it was already happening, hairs suddenly stiff on the back of my neck. I went to the doorway between our rooms but this time Zara was nowhere to be seen. I turned on my heel and went immediately down to breakfast, dress decided for me.

Zara and I spent the next hour rescuing wooden chairs from various barns dotted around the estate before gathering foliage and wildflowers to decorate the maypole. A fat toad was discovered hiding under a bush and Zara’s smallest cousin carried the toad around, proclaiming  him the May King. The pole was finally raised, every centimetre arrayed with different kinds of greenery. We clasped hands and danced around it in a circle, the family singing Swedish songs to which I didn’t know the words. One of the dances devolved into a chasing game, after which all the adults were worn out, though the children kept on going.

After lunch, Elodie wanted pictures of me and Zara in our flower crowns, but my phone was running low on battery. Charging had to be supervised because the plugs had a tendency to spark, but I would not venture upstairs alone.

We went for a walk along the edge of the forest, past the ruined bakery which had once served the estate. The hedgerows were bursting with Queen Anne’s lace, while all along the pale stony path, crowds of thin black slugs were attempting to cross in aid of some mysterious business. After about ten minutes of walking, Zara stopped and pointed through the trees at a tiny, perfect house at the centre of a clearing. Its windows were dusty, the path to its door dotted with wild orchids. She told me that one day, she would move there, along with her wife, she just had to find the wife first. We admired it, then walked on further to our destination, an open field dominated at one end by a vast mound of piled stones, bursting from the ground as if frozen in an eruption. There was nothing to indicate who lay within.

Zara said ‘You can add a stone if you want, and make a wish. People do that around here.’

‘I don’t know what to wish for. If I were wise, I’d ask to forget Gina. But I can already feel my memories of her slipping away and I hate it. Every time something good happens with Elodie, I feel like I’m betraying her, even though it was the other way around.’

‘Does Elodie know that?’ Zara asked.

‘It’s not fair to burden her with that, she didn’t cause me to be this weird and haunted.’

‘Perhaps the separation you still feel from Elodie is that you haven’t told her. What is a ghost but unfinished business?’

‘I have been trying to finish it, no thanks to Gina. As much as I want to live in the present, if I decide to let go, then it really is over. I can’t stay in denial that the damage is done, that it’s not all continuing somewhere, in some way beyond me.’

Zara wrinkled her nose, ‘You shouldn’t try to inhabit that reality, even if you were able to. But you can coexist with it, while moving forward in linear time yourself. Sometimes you have to look directly at the ghost, you know. My uncle’s mother died in childbirth in the room that’s now his study, he’s kept the daybed there ever since so she will always have a place of her own to come back to.’

Then Zara picked up a stone herself and went in silence to the mound, laid it at about knee height, inclined her head and waited for the right moment to make her wish. I listened to the wind moving through the trees, the distant lowing of the cows in a nearby field, swallows calling to each other in the early evening air. Eventually she straightened and we turned back for the house. A few paces from the field, Zara spotted the cat, who had apparently tracked us all the way from the house, his sandy fur concealing him against the path. He had now decided to get our attention in the hopes Zara would carry him back, which she did.

On our last morning, I scoured the room for any more misplaced treasures and hurried down to the car before the door could open by itself again. I wrote to Elodie that I was coming home, I would be there later that day, that I had missed her. As the car turned and we prepared to return along the gravel path, I looked up at Almgard to fix it in my memory and found my eyes drawn inexorably back towards our room, so recently vacated. I thought I saw a silhouette, hand raised, looking back, but it may just have been a shadow.

Leon Craig is the author of haunted house The Decadence (2025) and queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells (2022), both Sceptre Books UK. Leon's work has also featured in the Sunday Times, Nulla journal, Hazlitt, the Berlin Babel anthology and elsewhere.