Semi-Detached

A spooky little romance, and an entry to the Halloween 2024 contest. Thanks as always to the admins for running these contests, and please remember to read, vote and constructively comment for as many stories as you can -- you might discover some new favourite authors, or be inspired to write your own tale!

All sexually active characters are over 18. Small content warning; the story does contain references to past abuse of one of the characters.

Prologue

It was a cold, late September evening, and I drew my overcoat close as I came out of the Tube exit and trudged through the dark streets. It had been a long day at work as usual, and I was keen to get home. Not that there was much waiting for me there: it was a small and gloomy semi-detached house bearing the weight of past centuries, and I lived alone. But once I had the lights and the heating on and a bit of evening television, it would be enough to get through to the next day.

This was not a glamourous part of London. It was an old town that had been swallowed up by the suburbs years ago and had lost whatever semi-rural charm that it had possessed. But it was affordable, if only just, and at least I owned my house, and with more hard work I might be able to find something better. I was much luckier than most in these dreary economic times.

There was a woman ahead of me, also hurrying home. I was gaining on her slowly as we made the same turns through several streets. She was wearing a red overcoat, and what looked like sensible black work shoes. She had long blonde hair. I couldn't tell much else about her from behind, and to be honest I wasn't paying too much attention to her as I was still a bit lost in my own thoughts.

Until I got close, and I had one of those 'duh' moments. I may not have been paying attention to her, but she was certainly aware of strange, heavy footsteps behind her. Her right hand was clenched, and I could see a long house key protruding from between her fingers. Her whole body seemed tense as she hurried along in front of me.

Bugger. I had been walking noisily behind this woman for several minutes, following her turns, and getting closer. Of course she was scared, because monsters had roamed these streets sometimes over the years, and I could be one of them. Curse my stupid inattention: I should have given her more space.

There's no easy way to deal with that situation, as far as I know, but I stopped walking, and pretended to be checking something on my phone for a minute while she got further ahead of me. I waited until she'd darted a look over her shoulder to check what I was doing (and hopefully reassure herself a little), and then started walking again, but more slowly. I was nearly home anyway, so this social awkwardness would resolve itself soon.

Or, at least I thought it would. Much to my surprise, when I turned the corner to my own street, she was there, at the doorway next to mine, the mirror neighbour to my semi-detached house, trying to get the lock and the door open in the dark. She was fumbling and still obviously distressed. The penny dropped: this was the new tenant next door. I knew from the last tenant that the door was a tricky one to get open, and the situation wasn't helping.

I had to somehow resolve this a bit better, and I decided that I should just be direct. I walked past her to get to my own doorway, opened my door so that she could see my purpose for taking the same streets as her, and then turned to face her. From this angle I could see that she looked to be in her late 20s. Attractive, but probably not at her best given that I had frightened her half to death with my clumsiness.

"I'm sorry for scaring you. You must be my new neighbour. My name is Vincent. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to assist you settling in, but otherwise I'll leave you in peace."

With that, I nodded gravely to her, and without waiting for any response, went inside my own home, turning the outside light on as I did so, hoping that would help her see a little better as she wrestled with her door. I left my door open as I put my things down in the hall, and then moved back to close it when I could hear that she had finally got through her door and then had it closed behind her. Perhaps it wasn't the smoothest I could have done this, but hopefully it wasn't awful, and she didn't think that she had the creepy neighbour from hell.

Whether I

was

the creepy neighbour from hell might be a different matter. We shall see.

Chapter One

I saw her again, ever so briefly, the following Saturday. I had just pulled up in my car on the street with my weekly shopping, and was unloading, when she came out of her front door, clearly on her way somewhere. She gave me a startled look when she recognised me, then a brief, tight smile, and then went on her way, walking towards the station. Clearly, she wasn't a sociable type or had her own reasons for staying clear of strange neighbours. I didn't think too much of it. Like any young man (and, in my early 30s, I still considered myself young) I'd had the occasional 'hot neighbour' fantasy, but I was also grounded enough to recognise that the real world is different. I knew nothing of her, and she obviously wanted nothing to do with me, and that was fine. I did have to admit though that, aside from the frightened rabbit look, she was hot. Today she was wearing jeans and a warm-looking green jersey, and I spent a few seconds watching her tight backside as she walked away, before catching myself and getting back to the task on hand.

I didn't see her on the Sunday or during the following working week. I'm a creature of habit though, and it seemed that she was as well, because next Saturday, I was again unloading my weekly shopping when she came out her front door, headed somewhere. This time she didn't look startled, hopefully having recognised that there had been no evidence of stalking during the week (or at least, not from me). She stopped to chat for a minute.

"I'm Alice. I'm sorry I didn't respond before. I know that you were trying to be a friendly neighbour. I'm just in a fragile headspace, and... well..." She trailed off, looking a bit flustered again.

"That's fine, Alice. I hope you're settling in okay?"

"Mostly..." She hesitated, and seemed about to say more, but then suddenly looked at her watch, and changed her mind. "I've got to go, Vincent. I've got an appointment."

She had remembered my name.

"No problem, Alice. Knock on the door anytime."

She hurried off down the street. Jeans and pullover as before, but covered from behind by a fleecy, casual jacket. It was getting colder.

Much to my surprise, there was a knock on my door that very afternoon, and when I opened it, Alice stood there, holding a small box that I recognised as from a (very nice) shop at our train station.

Her words came out in a rush. "My counsellor said that I need to establish support networks around me, and I told her that I thought I could talk to my new neighbour. She said that's okay but to tell you she'll be watching." She suddenly stopped, obviously embarrassed. "I'm sorry... that came out wrong. Um..."

I laughed. "That's fine by me. It sounds like I've been warned and rightly so. Come in."

I led her through to the small kitchen / dining area, which I knew was a mirror image of her own. This was an odd style of semi-detached house for its time (built sometime in the 1800s). It was relatively small and on a single level, with the kitchen and dining area at the front, a decent sized bathroom next to it, and then two bedrooms towards the back of the house, with a little back door leading to a reasonably sized yard. Originally, the toilet would have been in the backyard, but it had been moved inside the bathroom sometime in the past century. All of the rooms and plumbing fittings were set against the so-called 'party wall', the joint wall between the houses, with the corridor and windows on the outside. Some skylights in the bedrooms helped bring in more light. Being a single level house, that worked okay, but it was a difficult layout to update and expand without demolishing both houses and starting again. I had done what I could, managing to fit a compact triangular spa bath in the corner of the bathroom, and updating the kitchen.

"Have a seat, Alice. Tea? Earl Grey, Yorkshire or English Breakfast?"

"Yorkshire, and thanks." She sat demurely at the table, looking around the room while I fussed about, brewing a pot, pouring some milk in a jug and getting out the rarely used sugar bowl, which I suspected she wouldn't touch. I also got some plates and cake forks for the treats that she had brought, and soon we had a nice little afternoon tea in front of us.

"It's so like mine, but the colours are brighter," she said. "I think I like yours more."

"I updated mine a couple of years ago," I answered. "If you don't mind me mentioning it, the last tenant in your place told me that she thought that the landlord was a bit cheap."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, at least I could get it at a price I could afford, barely. Even a one-bedroom place is so expensive now."

This was the other strange thing. My house, which I had very fortunately inherited from a childless uncle, had two bedrooms. Hers had one. I hadn't had the chance to inspect next door in detail, but I gathered that at some stage in the distant past it had been renovated to create one larger bedroom at the back of the house, rather than two normal sized rooms. But why would you do that? I didn't mention the difference, but made a note to see if I could try and find out more, if she was open to letting me in one day to investigate. It wasn't an issue to pursue now.

We chatted for a little while about inconsequential things, as you do. I told her about my boring engineering job, and I learned that she was an analytical chemist, but working in the corporate side of a pharmaceutical company. "I wanted a bit of a break from potions and lotions," she said, "so now I'm the pretty face of serious science in the office, trying to get them to listen to what I say rather than looking down my top."

Luckily, I was watching her eyes as she said this, but it was a close-run thing. Her eyes, incidentally, were blue, her skin fair and very lightly freckled, her eyebrows blonde and not particularly sculpted. She struck me as somebody who was naturally pretty and knew that she was expected to present well, but irritated by the fact.

I was feeling confident that I was starting to see the real Alice rather than the frightened bunny of our first encounters, and I decided to take a risk. "Alice, you mentioned a counsellor who is ready to leap in and protect you, and you looked apprehensive the first couple of times I saw you. I don't want to pry, but please do let me know if there's anything I could help you with."

She suddenly looked down at the table, and I felt bad. "I'm sorry Alice, I shouldn't have asked."

"No, it's okay, Vincent. I intended to talk about it: I just find it hard." She paused for a minute, and then looked back up at me. "It's not really that complicated. I'm coming out of a difficult situation and there's somebody I really don't want to meet again. I have many reasons to avoid him, and they're not trivial. It means that I'm jumping at shadows a bit."

I nodded and thought for a minute. The last thing she needed was somebody playing white knight, but I could still be helpful.

"I can give you my number," I said, "and I can swivel my security camera to make sure it covers your entrance as well as mine, and give you access to the feed. And I'm home most of the time unless I'm at work. And you can always bang hard on the wall if you're under attack. It's not much, but it's a start?"

She forced a smile and nodded. "That will help. Thank you."

We moved onto other subjects and chatted for a while longer before she eventually got up to go. I was normally slow to warm to people, but I was quickly growing to like Alice. Her looks were helpful of course, but beneath them she was warm and intelligent, and she could be funny when she wasn't dwelling on her recent misery. Curse the man who had put her into this difficult space.

We swapped details, and I set up the video feed as I'd promised and installed the video monitoring app onto her phone. I didn't have any secrets to be exposed by her: nobody usually came to my door other than delivery riders. And then she was gone, and I thought little more about it until the next weekend, although I have to admit that she did pop up a couple of times in my fantasies during the week. I gave myself a bit of a talking-to about this: on the one hand it might be understandable for any red-blooded male to imagine things, boring white-collar worker or not, but she would not appreciate it if I blurred the lines of fantasy and reality, and she was clearly in no place for a romance.

It was a good thing that we'd swapped details for another reason, because I started to get occasional letters addressed to her, which I just dropped into her box. Her house was 18A, and mine was 18B. It was a common problem, solved in various ways through the ages, but clearly this had all been one property before the current houses were built.

Chapter Two

The next Saturday was almost a repeat of the previous, although with a troubling variation during the afternoon. I didn't see her while I was unloading the shopping this time, although that was probably because the traffic coming home from the local Tesco had been slow. But during the afternoon, I had a text message from Alice, inviting me over for 'Devonshire tea'. I was caught short: I had nothing suitable to take over, but decided to roll with it, and soon presented myself at her door. And indeed, she had made some exquisite scones, and paired them with a farmers' market-bought jam, an excellent cream, and a good English tea (we had Lady Grey this time).

"How has your week been, Alice?" I delicately enquired.

"Okay, but..." She hesitated. "Look, this is a bit weird, and I didn't mention it to my counsellor. Do you ever hear... moaning sounds coming from the back of the house?"

"Moaning?" I had to think about my next question. Well, she was no vestal virgin: in fact, she'd probably had more experience than me, even if it was bad. "Um, do you mean... sexual moaning, or ghostly moaning?"

She blushed. "Possibly both? And something else?"

I nodded. "I haven't heard any 'moaning' as such. But the last tenant... she said something similar once. She wasn't sure, and she was a bit embarrassed about it, but she said it sounded like a woman crying, and then a woman having sex. She tried to take a recording on her phone, but there was nothing."

I paused.

"To be honest, I think that might be why she moved out. She found it hard to settle here: she said it gave her the willies, but she couldn't say why. I was scared that it was me driving her away, although I don't know how."

Alice gave me a little smile, although she still looked pensive. "No Vincent, I doubt it was you. You're a little socially awkward, but within the realm of tolerance for the engineers I know. You seem fine, and if you're an axe murderer you wouldn't have told me what you just did about the previous tenant. But... I wonder what I'm hearing. I'm told that these old places really do have ghosts."

Scientist or not, she didn't sound like she was discounting ghosts as an explanation.

"Did you hear the moans from anywhere in particular?" I asked.

She looked at me, and then rose to her feet. "Come, let me give you the grand tour! Everything that can be seen in a one-bedroom semi!"

She showed me down the passage, past the bathroom, and to her bedroom, which was neat and tidy with a carefully made bed. It was larger than usual, and she had added a writing desk and some bookshelves to the far end of the room. A small door led to some walk-in robes at the back of the room, which further explained how the space from the second bedroom had been used.

"It kind of sounded like it was from here, or directly below," she said. "But there is no basement, of course."

"Well, there's two of you who heard it now. I suppose it could be some tricky wind effect, or weird mutant pigeons in the eaves, but you heard something."

We discussed it a bit more, but didn't really make any sensible progress, and after a while, I took my leave.

...

In the early hours of Sunday morning, my phone rang. I grabbed it, groggily. I had been in a strange nightmare, where ghouls had been swooping around my bedroom, moaning and cackling, while the still body of a young blonde woman lay on the floor next to the bed. I shook my head to try and clear it, and looked at the caller ID on the phone. I hit the 'answer' button.

"Alice?"

She was whispering, tense, afraid. "Vincent? Sorry.... I... Do you think you could come over?"

"Two minutes." I jumped out of bed, wrapped a dressing gown on, grabbed my keys and phone, and hurried to the door. Half-way there I remembered I was barefoot, but kept going; it was only next door, after all.

She let me in instantly. She was in a long, white nightdress with a robe loosely wrapped around her, hair unkempt. She looked scared. She held a finger to her lips, and then led me quietly down the corridor to her bedroom, motioning me to sit down on the bed next to her, and signalled for me to put my hand against my ear to listen.

I listened.

The sound was there, just as described. Very faint, but very definite. A woman's voice, rhythmically moaning, rising eventually to a faint crescendo, and then tapering off, followed by sighing, sobbing noises, and then fading into silence. And then starting again, going through the same sequence, with small variations.

We sat together for at least twenty minutes, before the moans eventually died off and stayed silent. Without realising it, I had put my arm around her waist to reassure her, and she had reciprocated, holding me tightly.

I finally spoke. "Not pigeons."

"Not wind," she replied. "A woman. Sex, but not always good sex."

I just nodded. Her call on that one.

"Vincent, would you mind staying the rest of the night?" she asked. "Not for... anything like that... but... I might need to be held again."

She got up to find an extra pillow, and fussed around a little, getting us both drinks of water, and then we lay down and snuggled together for a while, with me spooning her. Eventually, I heard her drifting off to sleep, and started to relax and do the same. There would be time to talk in the morning.

Chapter Three

I woke up to light streaming through the window. I was alone but in a strange bed, and it took me a minute to come to full consciousness and recall the night before. I could hear some domestic sounds coming from the kitchen area, so I assumed that was where Alice was. I was also busting to go to the toilet, but I had painful morning wood. It was pretty evident through the bedcover and I needed to do something, but there was no way that I was going to try and relieve it in Alice's bed. I deliberately moved my hands above the covers to resist temptation and resolved to think about something else for a bit, but unfortunately, just at that moment, Alice popped her head in while the situation was still unresolved. She was fully dressed. Her eyes flickered as she noted the hump in the bedsheets, but she said nothing about it, and instead smiled at me.

"Vincent, since you were such a gentleman last night, I'm preparing breakfast for us. You've got time to pop home for a few minutes for a shower if you like." She smiled at me, tossed over the dressing gown that I'd been wearing earlier, and then withdrew.

Nicely done, Alice, and to be honest I wasn't entirely upset that she had noted my prominent situation. Mild mannered I may be, but I was still a man. I quickly got up, got my gown on and belted it loosely over the offending spot, and slipped past her and out the front door.