Miss Warner looked at the broken door of the old stone farmhouse. It hung open in the inviting way that she had been expecting. She tilted her parasol against the glare of the sun and peered into the shadowed room. She sniffed the scent of water. It was flowing somewhere nearby, and a fresh smell of spearmint and rushes drifted past her into the sunlight.
Miss Warner pushed the door and it opened at a slump, its upper hinge giving way. She stepped into the kitchen and looked around. It was exceedingly tidy, but dusty. She listened.
‘I’m here,’ she said to the dim room. ‘Who summoned me?’
Nothing stirred. She took a candle end from her basket and lit it with a match. The candle flickered rapidly and then stretched upwards into a clear yellow flame, stretching for the low ceiling.
‘Show me?’ Miss Warner asked the candle.
The candle flame dipped towards a closed door, set beside an alcove where a kitchen dresser had once stood. Miss Warner looked at its lock and then looked about the kitchen. The range was tidy and empty; the sink and wooden draining board were also clear of stray objects. An empty candlestick had been left on the windowsill.
She unlocked the door with the key from the hook on the wall and looked down the stone steps at a well-washed stone floor. She walked down into the dark space with deliberation. A cool draught flowed past her face carrying the freshness of a spring.
When she saw the broad archway ahead Miss Warner approached carefully, holding the candlestick high. Here there was no door, only an open space lined with tight sandstone courses and a curved barrel roof.
‘Beautiful,’ she murmured. ‘Surely not Roman?’
She glanced down as she began to step forward. She stopped.
The well water was still, a circle of black slate set flush against the sandstone walls. There was no lip or edging, just a hole in the ground filled with dark water. The room smelt damp from the dark green weed growing on the walls. A chink of light shone at her through a hole in the wall at head-height.
‘Well,’ Miss Warner said to the well. ‘Good afternoon. I could feel you pulling me along the lane. Were you looking for me, or for someone else?’
The well water stayed smooth.
Miss Warner considered, then spoke again.
‘You’ve been advertised in The Times. I’ll read you what it says.’ She pulled out a cutting from her pocket. ‘“Remote farmhouse, well-appointed residence, needs renovation, domestic well in situ”. I’m sorry you were described as “domestic”,’ she said, folding the cutting back into her pocket, ‘”Votive” would be more accurate, I think. I haven’t seen all over the house yet, of course.’
She paused. ‘Shall I buy the house? I could take care of you.’
The water rippled. Miss Warner thought she could feel amusement in the air.
*
Miss Warner bought The Well House at auction two days later. Lying awake in her room at the inn in Collingbourne Ducis listening to the owls that night Miss Warner remembered the overgrown condition of the lane that led to the house. She drove to visit it again the next day.
The lane was crumbling and overgrown, but it was a road. It seemed to lie along the county boundary, with one hedge in Hampshire and the other in Wiltshire. Miss Warner drove her old blue two-seater up it again with some caution. Hogweed and nettles caught in the wheel arches and her hat was knocked sideways by a low-slung festoon of a flowering white creeper. Its damp wrinkled petals stained her gloves yellow. She heard a green woodpecker cackle, then saw it dipping and bouncing ahead of her along the lane towards the house.
‘This won’t carry more than a milk cart,’ she observed after her car had lurched across a crack in the dried earth surface. ‘I shall have to engage a roadmender to strengthen the foundations before my furniture can arrive.’
She glanced back at the farmhouse peering at her from a distance and laughed. She drove up the lane to visit it again.
*
3rd July 1935
My dear Mrs Wyllie,
I have decided to remain here in Wiltshire until my new house shall be made habitable. But fear not: I have not forgotten the two short stories for the end of July and my weekly column on the history of magic for The Sunday Chronicle. As I cannot waste time driving down from London every other day to supervise the building works that I am itching to begin, I will remain here for the duration. Send any correspondence to me care of The Four Angels, Collingbourne Ducis, Wiltshire.
Best regards,
Miranda Warner
PS I will of course be delighted to receive you here at any time, especially if you come bearing cheques from my publishers, but I do not wish my address to be given out. My friends will know where to find me.
*
Miss Warner asked the landlady about a roadmender.
‘Michaelmas was the roadmender but he’s too old now,’ Mrs Mole informed her. ‘I should ask Tufton. I’ll get ‘im for ‘ee from the bar parlour.’ And she bustled out.
Tufton seemed businesslike and admitted that he knew the lane to The Well House.
‘It’s a corpse road,’ he mentioned. ‘You’ll take no harm from it. I can start on Tuesday.’
*
The roadmending proceeded with decent speed, so Miss Warner felt it suitable to flex an occult muscle she had not used for some years. The resulting thunderstorm tested the restored camber of the lane and showed the men where the water would flow when the deep ditches on either side overflowed.
‘Big ‘ole gullies you’ve got there,’ Tufton said with admiration. ‘We’ll cut the verges a tidy bit, to let your visitors see ‘ow not to fall in.’
Once the bedrooms were habitable Miss Warner advertised for assistance in the house. ‘I need a cook-housekeeper. Plain cooking, reasonable terms, no company expected, one orderly employer,’ she directed the registry office.
Rhoda arrived on a Monday on approval, in a large car driven by her younger brother William, who was the Collingbourne taxi. She brought with her a portable radio and her trunk was a greenish shade of shining black. She was wide, strong and capable.
Miss Warner had wondered how this reserved countrywoman would respond to the more esoteric objects in her house, but Rhoda did not flinch at the fine pen and ink drawings of capering devils and a jaunty goat-god. The shelves of leather-bound books received only a glance, but she looked with curiosity at the engraving of a witch trial.
‘It’s interesting, don’t you think?’ Miss Warner remarked.
‘Such funny clothes they wore then,’ Rhoda responded, and bent to lift a hair from the glass that covered a naked devil’s torso. ‘My granny had a picture of one of they devils, torn from a magazine. Vicar was cross to see it where she hung it, above the fire, but Granny paid him no mind. Most of the time,’ she remarked thoughtfully, ‘devils are just pictures. So my granny said.’
‘She was a wise woman,’ Miss Warner said.
‘Yes,’ Rhoda agreed. ‘She was.’
‘You don’t mind, then?’ Miss Warner asked, feeling unaccountably relieved.
‘No, Miss. None o my business. You don’t seem the killing kind.’ Rhoda straightened up, and the two women looked at each other squarely.
‘Thank you,’ Miss Warner said. ‘I am not.’
*
Miss Warner introduced Rhoda to the well. Then they returned to the kitchen and closed the scullery door. Rhoda made tea and they conferred in low voices.
‘The well is lonely; I am convinced of that. It summons people for its entertainment. But I suspect,’ Miss Warner said, ‘that it summons them for worse. The corpse road looks well-used.’
‘Corpse Lane has run here a long while,’ Rhoda allowed. ‘It’s old. The village likes the well. They tell it what’s going on through the gaps in the wall of the liddle round house at the back and come away refreshed. That’s why the path from the village comes out there, right by the wall.’
‘Does the well take victims? Have there been disappearances?’ Miss Warner persisted. ‘I do not desire to preside over the habitation of a murderous genius loci. Yet,’ she mused, ‘the well does not have untidy habits, and it keeps the scullery very clean.’
Rhoda nodded. ‘Sometimes we hear that someone is missing,’ she admitted, ‘But not often. There was a Tangley stockman four years back who caused a lot of ill feeling locally with money owed and never paid. He hasn’t been missed since the well took him.’
Miss Warner looked grave. ‘It is certain that the well took him?’
‘His head was found in the outflow,’ Rhoda said, briefly. ‘The well makes its choices, Miss. We can’t do more than keep the innocent out.’
*
The first uninvited visitor to The Well House was a confused coal merchant, uncertain as to why he had knocked on the back door as the house was not on his usual round. Rhoda placed a regular order for coal and firing, and walked with him back to the lane and his waiting horse and cart.
The milkman was surprised to find himself handing two pints of milk to Rhoda but he made no objection to her showing him the easy route past the house. ‘New here, then?’ he asked, uneasily.
‘Fresh in,’ she assured him. ‘But I’m from Collingbourne.’
‘Ah,’ he said, relieved, and drove his dog-cart down the lane, whistling.
An hour later she thanked and sent away the baker’s boy, who had brought crumpets and a cob loaf unasked.
‘What if the house calls down some bad ‘uns? You don’t want gangsters out here,’ the boy remarked, getting back on his bicycle. He adjusted his cap to tilt forward to look like James Cagney.
‘We’ll be all right,’ Rhoda smiled at him. ‘Bring four iced buns tomorrow, if you please.’
When he had gone Rhoda went down into the scullery and stood at the well house archway.
‘I’m obliged to you,’ she said into the darkness. ‘I think we have all the visitors we need now.’
She went to find Miss Warner who was pinning up the hems of the new drawing-room curtains: they had been made an inch too long.
‘Visitors coming into the house will be a worry,’ she said, looking up at Rhoda. ‘But not if they stay outside. We can’t interrogate everyone on the doorstep about their moral failings before we let them in. You must tell me when you expect a caller and we can make arrangements. I will not become an accessory to accidental murder.’
‘We could lay some charms, Miss,’ Rhoda suggested. ‘My granny’s spellbook has wards to place across doors and lintels.’
‘I can do that,’ Miss Warner agreed, and got off her knees. ‘I will seal the kitchen door as well. And if anyone comes to the front door I can examine their consciences for them. But I am not expecting visitors.’
*
Some weeks later the front doorbell rang at a quarter to four in the afternoon.
‘Pour yourself another cup of tea, Father,’ Rhoda said, untying her apron as she went into the hall. ‘I won’t be a minute. My lady will be coming back by the 6.10, so I shall send this person away.’
Mr Michaelmas nodded and lifted the teapot lid.
The lady waiting at the door smiled brilliantly at Rhoda. Her hair was the colour of deep-water weed and her skin was a paler green. Her prominent teeth shone whitely. When Rhoda found herself showing the lady in, she began to feel alarmed, but she also felt she could do no more than hold the drawing-room door open out of the way of the lady’s flowing green gown. Funny kind of old style dress she was wearing. Lovely drapery, rippling about the lady’s feet like something from a statue on a monument.
Then Rhoda stiffened. The lady was wearing no shoes.
But by then the lady was sitting in one of the green velvet chairs and she was dripping with water. Rhoda knew with a certainty that the chair would be ruined with the wet soaking through it.
‘Shall I bring tea, Madam?’ she asked, helplessly. The lady inclined her head and smiled even more widely.
While Rhoda was preparing a tea-tray her father set down his cup.
‘I thought your lady said there would be no visitors?’
She looked at him and said nothing. He wrinkled his brows and waited. When the tea was made and the scones and jam and cream assembled on the tray, Mr Michaelmas stood up and hobbled round to the door to the hall.
‘I’ll just have a look at her,’ he said, and set his foot on the step. But Rhoda slammed the hall door closed and pulled him back into the kitchen. Her face was desperate.
‘They’ve spelled you. What a nerve.’ He was surprised. ‘Why didn’t you stop em?’
She gave no answer.
Mr Michaelmas peered at her closely. His hand trembled when he touched hers.
‘I’ll do no good in here so I’ll wait for your lady outside,’ Mr Michaelmas said, and fetched his stick. He looked at her again and she unwarded the back door for him. As he limped outside Rhoda’s eyes shone with furious intelligence. She closed the back door and put back the wards with a cross gesture.
She opened the hall door, lifted the tray and turned to walk to the drawing-room.
*
When Miss Warner arrived home from London in the early evening, she came on foot. William had left her at the foot of the lane and she had walked its length to enjoy the sounds of the owls at dusk. She looked with pleasure at the sight of her drawing-room curtains rosy with light. Rhoda must have lit the lamps for her.
Mr Michaelmas stepped out from behind the ash bole where he had been sitting out of sight from the house. He touched his hat.
‘They’ve got Rhoda,’ he said.
Miss Warner stared. ‘Why, Mr Michaelmas. Who has Rhoda?’
‘They’ve put a spell on her and she’s can’t speak. It’s not natural.’
Miss Warner recovered her poise. ‘We must go in.’
Mr Michaelmas walked ahead of her around the house and looked cautiously through the kitchen window. The light was on but the room was empty. Miss Warner examined the wards on the kitchen door. ‘It’s sealed again. Did you leave this way?’ she asked.
‘Rhoda let me out. I don’t hold with wards if you can’t leave and enter your own house when you want.’
Miss Warner looked at him unhappily. ‘If you enter, you may not be able to leave. Will you stay outside now?’
He nodded. ‘I’ll pass the time of day with the well.’
‘Do you do that often?’ she asked with curiosity.
‘When I reckon it needs something new to think on. It don’t do to let these things brood. They get ideas.’
Miss Warner smiled, but her face was tense.
In the hall she listened at the drawing-room door and heard nothing. She breathed deeply once, then opened the door. When she entered the room she saw Rhoda, looking pale, standing beside the unlit fire. The light from the lamps made the room glow like a cave.
A lady in a flowing sleeveless green dress, fastened at the shoulders and girdled with weed, was sitting back in the green velvet chair. The back of the chair where she leaned was sodden, and water was pooling on the stone floor and the darkened hearth rug before her. The lady seemed to have eaten, as indicated by the ravaged tea-tray on the round table beside her and by the crumbs on the floor The lady looked around at Miss Warner’s entrance, and smiled even more broadly.
Her face seemed much wider than a human face, and Miss Warner could see her teeth protruding.
‘Jenny Green-Teeth?’ she asked. ‘Surely that’s not you? Ah: no. I think I know you. Be welcome here, in your own place, in my home.’ She sat down in the matching green chair on the other side of the hearth and smiled, close-mouthed, at the visitor.
The lady inclined her head and amusement rippled out in the air.
‘Could you release Rhoda?’ Miss Warner asked. ‘I doubt very much that she has done you harm, and we have treated you with respect since we arrived.’
The lady tilted her head, and her monstrously long teeth shone in the gleam of the setting sun.
Rhoda drew a shaky breath. ‘Shall I bring more tea, Miss, and Madam?’ she asked.
Miss Warner nodded and Rhoda skirted the visitor’s chair widely as she walked towards the door. She looked askance at the water still dripping onto the floor from the velvet padding and the green flowing skirts. ‘I’ll bring some cloths,’ she said.
‘I now understand,’ Miss Warner said, addressing the lady brightly, ‘why the ground floor is all paved with stone flags. Such a convenience for all. Have you resided here long?’
The lady tilted her head again as if to suggest that, yes, she had. She spread her hands wide to indicate an indeterminate length of time.
Miss Warner continued to make conversation as a monologue, and the lady regarded her with a curiosity that was only partly amused. There was hunger there as well. Miss Warner hoped Rhoda would bring more scones, or else she might have to invite this undine to stay for dinner, and she did not think she was equal to sharing a table with those teeth.
‘I hope that your visitors to the chink in the wall continue to provide you with amusing gossip?’
Miss Warner could hear the echo of her voice sounding like the prattle of a society lady as shallow as she might be brainless. She was beginning to feel uncertain.
At last Rhoda brought in a tray of sherry and biscuits. Miss Warner sighed with relief.
‘Will you take some sherry?’ she asked the lady.
The lady was intrigued. She chose Amontillado, fingering the stem of the old Georgian wineglass with appreciation.
‘I share your taste: I have never liked dry sherry but I keep it for the vicar. May we discuss your business here?’ Miss Warner asked, pouring her own sherry. ‘I assume that you are the genius loci for the well.’
The lady took another sip of sherry and inclined her head. No teeth were evident; she seemed to be listening seriously.
‘I also assume that it was you whom I addressed when I was first summoned. Are you satisfied with my dealings with you?’
She rather held her breath at this question for she did not know how she might protect herself and Rhoda if the undine had come with a grievance. But all seemed well; the undine’s teeth only flashed briefly and her smile was approving.
But then she leaned forward and her left hand shot out to hold Miss Warner’s throat with a damp, cool grip. Her mouth gaped wide. Now Miss Warner could see that the undine’s tongue was a forked black tentacle, coiled at the back of her mouth.
The undine released Miss Warner’s throat and sat back in her chair. Her expression was less apologetic than explanatory.
‘Two rows of teeth, my goodness,’ Miss Warner said weakly. ‘I see, indeed I do. What may I offer you?’
Without taking her gaze from Miss Warner the undine took a handful of the tiny cocktail biscuits that Rhoda made so well. She crunched them loudly. Miss Warner received a vivid impression of finger bones. She realised that the floor was in squalor, awash with crumbs, sodden pages from a newspaper, a disintegrating magazine that had been pushed from the table, all the aftermath of the undine’s drenching presence.
‘You require food?’
The undine nodded.
‘And if I do not supply it?’
The undine’s stare raked Miss Warner with a hungry gaze.
Miss Warner, aware that her walking shoes were now soaking, felt cross. ‘I cannot undertake to supply you with victims. I will not be a party to murder,’ she said firmly. ‘If anyone is so foolish as to approach your domain unsupervised, they must take their chances. But I will continue to try to prevent them.’
The undine raised her eyebrows, regarding Miss Warner with a cold eye. She rose and walked across the flooded room without taking her leave. The drawing-room door opened at her approach, and as she walked grandly into the hall the waters rushed out after her.
Rhoda was listening. ‘She’s gone through to the kitchen. And there’s the scullery door opening. Shall I lock it behind her?’
‘Please do.’
When Rhoda returned from the kitchen with stout floor brushes Miss Warner had taken the undine’s velvet chair out into the better light of the hall and was looking at it with grim resignation.
Rhoda went to open the front door to release the waters lapping on the mat.
‘Thank goodness I didn’t carpet the stairs,’ Miss Warner muttered.
Together they swept the undine’s waters out of the house.
‘That’s why the rose beds are so close to the front door. The flagstones in the corners by the drawing-room windows are drying already,’ Rhoda said in wonder. ‘That’s a marvel.’
‘Someone knew what they were doing when they built this house,’ Miss Warner said. She stood, looking out at the night, holding her brush upright like a staff. ‘Where’s the outflow?’
‘I beg your pardon, Miss?’
‘The spring fills the well, so its water must go somewhere.’
‘I’ll ask Father.’
‘Is he still here?’
‘I be here,’ Mr Michaelmas called out, and his figure hobbled across the drive to the front door. ‘I were watching from the ash.’
‘I’ll be glad to have your advice, Mr Michaelmas,’ Miss Warner said. ‘Is there an outflow from the well into the ditches of the lane?’
The old roadmender looked back at the lane into the dark.
‘I’ll bring a lamp,’ Rhoda said and disappeared indoors.
By the light of the kitchen oil-lamp they examined the ditches nearest the house. One had been fitted with an outflow trap.
‘That’ll be where the stockman’s head was found, bashing up against that wire grille,’ Rhoda said.
‘I shall take the grille out.’
‘It’s concreted in,’ Mr Michaelmas remonstrated. ‘Wait till morning; we can bring Tufton up and set him to dig it out.’
‘We don’t have enough time. I do not trust that lady not to drown us in our beds tonight. Stand back, will you?’
Without waiting Miss Warner stepped ankle-deep into the outflow waters and gripped the bars of the grille.
‘Your shoes, Miss!’ Rhoda remonstrated.
‘They’re already soaked. Stand back.’
The grille wires buckled gently, as if they were melting under heat. With a grunt Miss Warner pulled the mess of dripping wires out of their frame, like a mass of fishing net. She tossed the tangle into the bushes in the dark, out of the circle of Rhoda’s lamplight.
‘I am a little out of practice.’ Miss Warner said, clambering out of the stream, ‘But that did the trick. Now for the harder work. Raise up the lamp.’
From the farmhouse doorway Rhoda and Mr Michaelmas saw Miss Warner’s long shadow cast itself down Corpse Lane.
‘Come out,’ her firm voice said from the edge of the dark, and she stamped her sodden foot. ‘Come out.’
Cold air came out of the outflow tunnel first, dank and sullen, and then there was a rush of flood waters, filling the ditch and running over the driveway. The house now stood at the edge of a shining sheet of blackness, rippling with malevolence at its edges.
‘It’ll have to flow downhill,’ Mr Michaelmas declared. ‘We’re on a rise.’
As the waters shrank, flowing into the ditches on either side of the lane to find the quickest way downhill, the undine’s hair emerged like floating weed upon the black pool’s surface.
‘No,’ said Miss Warner from the edge of the dark, her voice resolute. ‘Go.’
The undine rose glaring from the waters, but the flowing streams of water pulled her downhill. For a clawing second she flailed at the edge of the lamplight but an inexorable flow bore her away down the dark gully at the edge of the lane.
*
‘The waters will have found the stream now, and she will find a new home. I did give her a push,’ Miss Warner admitted later. ‘But I think I did right. Hold the lamp higher, Rhoda. Is the spring cleaned out now?’
‘It be,’ Mr Michaelmas said, hauling the last bucket out from the well. ‘Look what she left at the bottom.’ He tipped out the bucket on the stone floor of the scullery, and wet things rolled out. Their edges gleamed in the lamplight.
‘Be careful, that axe head looks like flint,’ Miss Warner warned, ‘It will be sharp. Those are bones. That’s a broken knife blade. And coins too; lots of pennies, I see. I knew this was a votive site. Perhaps it will attract a more benign spirit now.’
Mr Michaelmas was shovelling the objects back into the bucket. ‘I’ll bury these,’ he said. ‘Do you want a new spirit?’
Miss Warner laughed, a little ruefully. ‘Now that I have a choice, I don’t think I do. I would prefer to just have a domestic well.’
–
Kate Macdonald is a recovering publisher and an editor, a literary historian and a former university lecturer in English literature. She lives in Malvern in the English Midlands and comes from north-east Scotland.
© Kate Macdonald, 2025
Halfway Down the Stairs 
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