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here’s no such thing as a free lunch – that’s how the old adage goes. The phrase never rang truer for me than the day we bought our new home. Jake, my partner, first found the ancient townhouse advertised in the paper and pointed at the asking price. Such a beautiful heritage building at such a bargain? There was something fishy about it from the start, but he insisted we go check it out, and we subsequently fell in love with the place.
The house was stunning. Tall ceilings with floral reliefs and lead lighting on the windows. It needed a touch up here and there, sure, maybe a new kitchen and a bathroom renovation. Melbourne city has few of these old gems remaining so we snatched it up immediately, both of us too afraid to voice our suspicions: why were no other buyers interested? And why had the house been vacant for so long? It wasn’t until we moved in that the truth came to light…
I found the stash of newspapers at the bottom of an antique wardrobe. I was about to hurl them into the trash heap when an image caught my eye. It was a photograph of our house, with the story dating back to ten years earlier. The headlines read ‘Murder’. Inside, grisly photographs of the very bathroom in which I had just bathed. Blood streaked porcelain and shattered gilt mirror. Needless to say, I was horrified.
Jake’s solution was to call in the bathroom renovators. Melbourne companies can totally revamp the place. What we initially thought to be dirt caked in the tiles and rust at the bottom of the tub turned out to be blood, and we knew there was no two ways about it. Since renovating, all traces of the horror vanished, but I still get a shiver when I think of what went on in there. And the creaking of the bathroom door keeps me awake at night.