Old Grey House

There was an old half-....or maybe even more than half, well no, less than half, much less- ruined grey building on a hill at the back of the town. Though I don't know why I said ruined at all. It was somewhat derelict and uninhabited but that's about as far as it went. That is to say it had the unmistakable, at least to me, suggestion of not being inhabited. It was on a road which didn't receive much in the way of human traffic, not that I ever noticed anyway, and so wouldn't have received much in the way of attention even had it warranted it, which it didn't. It was quite large for a domestic house and the large grey blocks it was built of were just that, large, and even unusually so, but this was hardly enough to justify, for example, stopping a passerby and pointing out the largeness of these blocks to him. If you asked him after the event, it's almost certain it's the person pointing out the large blocks who'd have really drawn his attention, though through politeness or fear he may have tried to conceal this at the time; even let on to be fascinated by these large blocks.

However, not that I'm sure a 'however' is warranted, a curious thing happened to the life of this building, not that its personal life actually changed in any way, but its life as a matter of external significance changed considerably, even fantastically, and this came about as a result of the spreading of a thought that this house possessed healing powers: that just by placing oneself in front of its grey facade in the right frame of mind ailments could be cured or eased, ailments inner and outer. How this thought sprouted noone seemed to know. The building was not religious in any way to people's remembering, noone remarkable had knowingly lived there, in fact not much was known about it at all, it being unoccupied and crumbling in its own minor key for a long time.

And so people started coming in ever greater numbers to meditate or pray, though it is not for us to pry into people's inner sanctums, in front of this building to have ailments cured, and it turned out, more than strangely, that ailments really often were cured. Was it the power of thought, of prayer, some psycho-kinetic energy or whatever you call it, some magical properties of the stone, maybe some saintly figure really had lived there- I have no idea. All I know is plenty were healed, much to the annoyance of some, some of whom demanded the building be torn down to discourage superstition. But this was not done as noone has yet figured out who legally owns the property. It's going through the courts as we speak.