Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Thornhill Surgery ·
The Dollhouse Nest at Thornhill
A family in an old terrace finds a wasp nest hanging in their attic that is built as an exact model of their house as it stood in the year they were most together, down to the furniture and the faded wallpaper, and the wasps have begun to rearrange the rooms.
The attic of the Ellery family's terraced house on Thornhill Road had been shut up since the 1970s. When Maggie Ellery finally had the boards taken up to insulate the roof, the builder called her up the ladder and pointed at the far corner. A grey papery mass hung from the rafters, the size of a football, with a neat round entrance at the base. Wasps were coming and going through it in a slow, unhurried stream.
The builder wanted to fumigate. Maggie told him to wait.
The nest was not a nest. When she got her torch to it and looked closely, she saw that it had been built in the shape of a house. Four storeys, with a steep roof and a bay window on the front, and a tiny brick chimney made of resin. Through the open windows she could see rooms, each one furnished with exquisite care: a kitchen with a table and four chairs, a parlour with a sofa and a piano, a hallway with a coat rack and a black telephone. The wallpaper in each room was painted in a faint floral pattern, pale yellow and blue.
It was their house. Not as it was now, but as it had been in the year Maggie's daughter, Lily, was born. The kitchen had the old green cooker that had been thrown out in 1985. The piano was the one that had been sold to a school in Calder. The wallpaper was the pattern her husband, Ray, had chosen for the bedroom, and had hated, and had never got round to changing.
She climbed down the ladder with her heart beating hard. She did not tell the builder what she had seen. She told him to leave the nest alone.
Over the following weeks Maggie went up to the attic every evening with a cup of tea and sat by the nest, watching the wasps. They moved in the rooms like small busy people. She saw them polish the piano, straighten the coat rack, and set out cups on the kitchen table in the early morning, four of them, though only three of the family lived in the house now. Lily had moved to Australia. Ray had died in 2011.
One evening she noticed a change. In the parlour, the sofa had been turned to face the window. In the kitchen, one of the chairs had been moved, very slightly, from the table to the door. In the hallway, the coat rack had been filled with coats, small grey wasp-coats the size of a thumbnail, each one hung neatly on its hook. In the bedroom, on the upper floor, the bed had been made up with two pillows, though it had been Ray's bed alone for twenty years.
Maggie reached out and touched the nest. It was warm. Inside, very faint, she heard a sound she recognised: a man's laugh, quiet and self-conscious, the kind he used to give when she told him a joke he had heard before.
The wasps did not sting her. They only moved aside, very politely, and let her look.
She has not had the attic insulated. The builder thinks she has lost her mind, and she has let him believe it. She goes up to the nest most evenings now, and she sits by the window and watches the little rooms fill and empty and fill again, and sometimes she sees, through the bedroom window, two small figures moving slowly in the lamplight, a woman and a man, dancing very slowly to a tune only they can hear, and Maggie hums along, and the wasps, in their careful, orderly way, turn the lamps up a little brighter.