The Heart of Darkness

I glanced up at the first floor and paused as I trotted up the steps. Alice is ready to go into Wonderland. This one looked promising, I thought, I will enjoy this. It had an unremarkable front, a narrow, dark shop window with a door to one side, empty for years, boarded up and now used as storage. Like so many people, it becomes more interesting the deeper you go and the better you get to know it. All right, it is not a person, it does not have a soul, it is an inanimate thing - but the minds that conceived it and the hands that made it so long ago had bodies and souls, and built it lovingly, with skill and care, and it remains as a monument to their ruined age; hundreds of years ago. In some ways, it does have a soul.

Behind the ordinary Victorian shop front on the main street, it stretches back, and back - a large house built around 1600 for a merchant's family, his business and his goods. One side faces its own city yard, with private access to the river and the vanished barges full of goods, the other blind, massive stone wall guards the occupants from the neighbours. The ground floor and gable is all severe stone and tiny little bricks, worn by the weather, the many chips out of the quoins speaking of carts and wagons passing a little too close - but even the damage has worn down with the years. The upper floors are brick, with moulded brick window mullions ten bays long, some with the remains of lead cames and glass in them, set into wrought iron frames. An uneven, steeply pitched, dormered tiled roof frowns over the whole.

I approached the yard door, a studded, oak-planked affair in a heavy, moulded frame with a merchant's mark on a plaque above it. I unlocked the padlock and shoved the door open - it moved reluctantly against grit and debris on the floor. The smell of damp puffed out, with an undercurrent of dry rot, the cancer of old buildings, or so many believe. If you have never smelt dry rot, it is difficult to describe - it is a dead, rotten, composting smell, with a note of mushrooms and absolutely unmistakeable. A huge number of buildings have it, mainly due to inappropriate modern methods of repair and maintenance - carry out DIY repairs to an old building at your peril!

There is something about decaying old wrecks I adore. The faded magnificence. The redundancy of the huge fireplaces, the tall broken chimneys in every possible pattern of brick - octagonal, hexagonal, patterned with scrolls, diamonds, candy twists - ending in tops blackened from four hundred years of wood smoke - then the fires went out and the stacks got cold, moved slightly as they did so and created new and fascinating crack patterns in the massive walls below. I love examining the structure exposed by the patches of lime plaster fallen out, heavy as ceramic pottery, smashed to dust on the oak flooring. Looking up into one of these holes, I can see the guts of the building; moulded joists, which were covered by plaster as fashion changed in the 18th century. I am the first person to see them for two hundred and fifty years. I love the thought that this is the low point, and I am here to make the first resuscitation attempts to bring the thing back to usefulness and life.

Standing there gawping, of course, is a chilly business, and I had a survey to finish. It was cold outside, but like a fridge in there - the damp, still air had not been disturbed for years and the massive masonry seemed to exude cold. And another thing - the smell of dry rot was getting stronger.

I moved up the staircase to the top floor, the attic rooms built originally for children and servants, all exposed oak framing and dusty plaster. The dormer windows had been boarded up, so I put my head torch on, and shuffled slowly forwards, making notes on the condition of the oak framing. The roof has diminished principals and clasped purlins, a labour intensive 16th century method of roof support. I pondered over it lovingly, admiring the tight pegs holding the joint together, still good after all this time.

The next room joins the much later, Victorian roof of the shop at the front. There is an awkward junction between the two, some 19th century Mr Bodgit has had a good time in here - bits of oak, softwood and bolts everywhere, a clashing cacophony after the harmony of the beautiful structure behind me. As I ducked through the low opening, I gagged. The smell was appalling - powerful, overwhelming, of dead, rotten, damp timber. It was so strong I hardly dared to breathe.

I moved forward, carefully. The light of my head torch feebly lit the front of the attic space, and where the slope of the roof met the flat floor I could see a mound of something. I approached, cautiously. My torch shone on the biggest fruiting body of dry rot fungus I had ever seen. It must have been two feet across, and hung off the rafters and joined the floor in the angle of the roof. Dry rot usually looks like a brown stain, with a lighter border spreading over the floor, or forms cuboidal cracks in timber which it turns into dust, but this, this was something else! The very words, 'fruiting body' described the swollen, spore ridden, glistening thing perfectly. I was at once repelled and fascinated. The hairs on my arms prickled and I began to feel sick, but I simply had to get closer. I fully expected the thing to leap up and grab me, but it just sat there, a quiet menace. It reminded me of the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl, the remnants of the melted reactor at the heart of the concrete sarcophagus that encases the awful ruin.

What had caused this semi-sentient thing? Simply, lack of fresh air. The eaves of old roofs are open, to allow air to flow over the roof timbers and out the other side. Stick your head into a loft space, and it should smell fresh. Someone, a few years ago, had blocked the airflow. Warm air from the rooms below condensed in the attic, making the timber slightly damp. Not wet, just a little damp. There is nothing dry rot likes better than damp coupled with stagnant air. Given that, it will grow, and grow....feeding on the timber structure until all that is left is dust.

My nerve broke. In my haste to get out before the fruiting body 'saw' me* I grasped one of the rafters. There was nothing to hold. It disintegrated into foul smelling dust. The whole roof was a ghost of a structure, no strength left, still standing by habit alone. I fled.

*I know, I know! Daft isn't it? But alone in a large, empty, ancient, dark place with a living, almost alien thing, my imagination ran riot.