When my great-uncle died, he willed to me, who apart from my son was his last surviving relative, a lonely mansion in the Scottish hinterlands. The home had once commanded acres upon acres of green sward and yellow-daffodilled pastures, but of late all of it had been blighted by industry, neglect and a general subsidence. Tall chimneys dominated the horizon, spilling their oily smoke into the black-clouded skies. For miles around the soil was nothing more than sticky mud alternating with stretches of lifeless dust.
         Bogg House itself, Tudor Gothic with some more recent renovations, stood battered yet still strong, its many greenhouses and walled secluded gardens choked with dead flowers and dreadful thorns, smelling of rot. Later, when William and I began to hack our way through it all, blood would drip from our lacerated arms onto the parched earth.
         We moved in and began the renovation. Even after the workmen left each day Will and I often found ourselves working far into the evening, plastering cracks, caulking holes, unclogging drains, painting walls: the house trembling and the fireplaces moaning in the autumn Scottish storms.
         One night during the first week of our repairs I awoke for an unknown reason, and, moving to the window, fancied I saw a young woman in a white shift, her hair loose about her shoulders, fleeing from our parlor out into the endless moorish night. But when I descended to the ground floor, the French doors were locked as tightly as always.
         During the second week of our repairs, William found, stuffed behind an attic rafter, an oilcloth packet of eighteenth-century bank notes, worth a fortune.
         During the third week, we hauled a large wooden trunk out from the back of a storeroom and when we opened it we discovered half a dozen men crammed into it, alive and well, it seemed. They were dressed as old-fashioned gentlemen, and their bodies were so ingeniously twisted and bent around each other that there seemed not one inch of room to spare in the man-filled trunk. We attempted to extricate them but they resisted. Woe be your touch, they complained.
         The following day we discovered a similar trunk, this one filled just as perfectly by the coils of an enormous snake, a boa or anaconda, its head hidden from our view somewhere behind its foot-thick body. From the depths of the trunk, a hissing. Through the window, in the dead garden, on the dead branch of a hazel tree, in the late afternoon light, sat an owl, a raven, a crow and a hummingbird, serenely observing us.
         William was distressed. Ghosts and spectres and harbingers, said he, monsters, living men and dead money—what a fearful benefaction we have received, father.
         Nae, ’tis worse, Will, I spoke. I fear we have inherited a house full of symbolism.
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