Two hundred years of feet wear a hollow into stone. Ten of our eleven steps have one. The fourth is flat and sharp, as if nobody has ever stood on it, and I have stood on it ten thousand times.
We have lived in this house for twenty-two years. It is a stone terrace with a cellar, built about 1820, in a valley town where everything is built about 1820 out of the same gritstone.
The cellar steps are the original ones. Eleven of them, each a single slab of stone, going down from a door in the back kitchen.
Ten of them have a hollow in the middle. If you have been in an old building you know exactly the shape: a dish worn into the tread, deepest a little left of centre because most people are right-footed and lead with the left going down, and the edges of the dish are soft, and the nose of the step is rounded off.
That hollow is two centuries of feet. It is a coal cellar, so it is two centuries of somebody going down twice a day with a scuttle, plus everything else a cellar is for.
The fourth step from the top has no hollow.
I want to describe it precisely, because for eighteen years I thought it was interesting and for the last four I have thought about it every day.
It is the same stone. Same colour, same grain, same bedding planes running the same way as the ones above and below it. It is not a replacement, or if it is, it is a replacement in matching stone laid by somebody with more care than anybody has spent on this house in my lifetime.
It is not proud or sunk. It sits exactly where it should, mortared in, and the mortar is the same lime as the rest and is as old as the rest, and I know that because a man who does stone had a look for me in 2021 and picked at it with a knife and said it has not been out.
The top surface is flat. Not new-flat, not sharp-arrised like a sawn stone. It has been walked on. There are scratches and there is a slight polish. It is the surface of a step that has been used, but not worn.
He said, that is fifty years of feet on there, maybe eighty. And the ones either side of it are two hundred and fifty.
Everybody who has ever heard about this says the same thing, so I will get it out of the way.
They say people must skip it. A step you can miss, an awkward riser, so everybody steps over it and it does not wear.
I have thought about that more carefully than anybody has thought about anything. The risers are all within half an inch of each other; I have measured them with a rule. There is nothing to make you skip step four rather than step five. And I have watched people go down: my wife, my children when they were small, my brother, two plumbers, an electrician, the man who does the stone.
Everybody stands on it. Everybody has always stood on it.
I stand on it perhaps six times a day and have done for twenty-two years, which if you do the arithmetic is not far off fifty thousand times, and I weigh sixteen stone.
The four years I mentioned started with the flood.
We had water in the cellar in the February, not much, four inches, and it went out and left a tidemark and a lot of silt. Everybody in the row had it. Nothing supernatural about a valley town and a wet February.
I spent a Saturday down there clearing up, and when the silt was washed off the steps I saw something I had never seen in twenty-two years, because there had always been a bit of dust and coal grit and a carpet offcut on the fourth one that my wife had put there in about 2006 and which I had never thought about.
The fourth step has an inscription on it.
Not carved deeply. Scratched, the way you would scratch something with a nail, in a small square hand, right at the back of the tread where the step meets the riser and where nobody would ever look.
Two letters and four numbers. Initials, and a year.
The year is 1874.
I am not going to give the initials. I have my reasons and one of them is that I looked them up, and they are the initials of a person, and that person has descendants in this town.
Here is what I found and it took a long time and most of it was in the local studies library on Tuesdays.
At this address, in the 1871 census, a family of six. In the 1881 census, the same family, five.
The one who is not in the second census was eleven in 1871 and would have been fourteen in 1874, and the burial register for the parish has that name in the November of 1874, and there is no cause given because there usually is not.
I am aware of what I have just laid out and I am aware that it is the oldest story there is. A child died in a house in 1874 and somebody has been telling that story for a hundred and fifty years.
That is not what I am writing about. I do not think the step is a memorial and I do not think it is haunted in the way people mean.
I think somebody scratched two letters into a stone in 1874, and I think the step has not worn since.
Because that is the actual fact and it is the one nobody engages with.
Wear is not a mood. It is stone being taken away by feet, a few molecules at a time, and it does not stop because of a sad thing. The step above wore. The step below wore. They are all the same stone from the same quarry laid on the same day and only one of them stopped.
The stone man's fifty to eighty years, working backwards from now, puts the start of that step's life somewhere in the middle of the last century, which is wrong, because it has been there since 1820.
Or it puts the END of it in about 1874, and everything on it since is not counting.
I have done one thing, and I did it in the March of last year, and it is the only reason I have written any of this down.
I put a sheet of plate glass on the step. Six millimetre, cut to size, sat on four little rubber pads at the corners, so that it covers the tread and the inscription and you walk on the glass and not on the stone.
It has been there sixteen months. We all use those steps every day.
The glass has a hollow in it.
Not a crack. A dish, in the middle, a little left of centre, soft at the edges, deepest where your foot goes, exactly the shape of the hollow in every other step in that cellar, worn into six millimetres of toughened glass in sixteen months.
I took it up last week and put it on the kitchen table and looked at it against the light.
The stone under it is flat and sharp and clean, and the two letters are as crisp as the day somebody scratched them, and I have put the glass back because I do not know what else to do and because whatever is being spared that step, I would rather it kept being spared.