The Gothic Grange

The Gothic Grange. Gothic man does not want to be seen entering and leaving his house. Indeed, it is anybody’s guess where the front door actually is, since one is required to go round the outside of the house, searching the undergrowth for the sight of a doorknob on an ivy-covered wooden door. On this trip, the doorknob seeker is likely to be terrified by the sight of a sinister face staring through the diamond-pane of the ground-floored window. Gothic man would like us to believe that it is his Great Uncle Gus, locked up and grown mad over the years. But it is actually a mildewed, old portrait thrown in as a job lot when he bought the house.
Gothic man himself presents an alarming appearance. He wears shaggy beard, shaggy jumper, baggy trousers and shabby slippers. You will find out why as you enter the house; it is freezing. It also smells of mould. Gothic man would like you to think he inherited his pile, but he only bought it because it was going cheap when the previous owner couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments. The moth-eaten old trophy on the wall as you ascend the staircase was bought in a junkshop. The first room on the landing off the staircase has a pair of lancet windows, like those you see in an old church or castle. It is here that Gothic man keeps his computing equipment – he is actually a programmer, though he tells everyone that he is a poet.
Gothic man tried to keep a cat, but the comfort-loving beast deserted him for a centrally heated house at the other end of the road. The only evidence of livestock is a bat-shaped mobile hanging in the window. It comes into its own at night, when Gothic man turns on a red-shaded light. The bedroom boasts a turret. Here, Gothic man will tell you, a young maiden threw herself to her death, many years earlier, the night before her father was to give her in marriage to an undesirable suitor. But really, the only thing that ever fell from that window, pale and fluttering, was a pair of Gothic man’s own underpants that he was trying to dry after the clothes’ drier in the basement had broken down.