The Railway House

An edited version of this story appeared on flashesinthedark.com.

The railway house creaked and groaned at night.  Da said it was just the floor settling, but Cara knew better.  The house was an old soul, grown weary in the years of its disuse, and it grumbled its sorrows to the dark, murmuring of the lost days when trains stopped outside its door and passengers stepped onto the platform and inside for a kind word and cup of tea while a change of driver was made, or before a carriage pulled up and bumped them over the moor to the town or the manor house, the hazy outline of which Cara could see if it was an especially sunny day.  Not that she knew all this from memory, of course.  Da told her bits of it, when she begged him.  Stories of the outside world.  Sometimes when it rained the drops came in through the holes and cracks in the roof and walls, and then she imagined that the house wept.