10. June 2026

The House On The Hill

There are buildings we admire

How an old house taught me that some places remember more than they reveal.

There are buildings we admire.

And there are buildings that watch us back.

This house was real long before it became part of The Incomplete. Hidden behind branches and silence, it stood slightly apart from the ordinary rhythm of life, as though time itself had chosen to move more slowly around it. Its faded walls carried no obvious secrets. There were no warnings carved into stone. No signs announcing that grief, memory, and fear had ever crossed its threshold.

And yet, standing before it, I could not escape the feeling that houses remember.

Not in the way people do.

Not through words.

But through absence.

Through the things left unfinished.

Through footsteps that no longer echo and rooms that still seem to wait for someone who never returned.

Years later, this house found its way into The Incomplete.

It became the old house where Ben and Kat crossed an invisible boundary without realising it. A place where the ordinary was interrupted by something quieter and far more unsettling. Where a small wound opened the door to questions neither of them had asked before.

I wrote:

"The sound returned. Muffled. Rhythmic. The same sound he had first heard in the old house."

And later:

"One... two... three..."

A counting that seemed less like memory and more like an echo searching for its source.

The house itself never explains anything.

It offers no revelations.

It does what the most frightening places often do: it simply exists.

Its windows observe.

Its silence lingers.

Its presence asks whether the spaces we inhabit are ever truly empty of those who came before us.

Perhaps that is why I returned to it while writing. Not because it was haunted, but because it understood something profoundly human: that we carry our unfinished stories with us wherever we go.

In The Incomplete, the old house becomes the beginning of a journey towards faith, loss, forgiveness, and resurrection.

But before it became fiction, it was simply a house standing quietly beneath the branches, keeping its own counsel.

Some places ask to be remembered.

Others refuse to let themselves be forgotten.

And sometimes, if we listen carefully enough, they teach us that the things left incomplete have a way of calling us home.