by Skylar Finn
“Maybe he’s got a split personality, like Norman Bates. Maybe he thinks he’s your aunt and lives in the basement.”
No sooner had Jesse uttered these words than a resounding crash sounded somewhere below their feet.
4
Emily and Jesse huddled together at the top of the basement steps as if on a life raft, the inky darkness beneath them like an ocean. To make matters worse, Widget took one look at the basement and immediately ran in the opposite direction.
“This seems ill-advised,” said Jesse. “After what we just heard? Maybe we should just leave.”
“It could have been anything,” said Emily. “Raccoons, something falling from a shelf. You know what it probably wasn’t? Richard dressed up like Matilda. Now come on.”
Emily descended the steps ahead of Jesse, flashlight in hand. The string hanging at the top of the stairs had illuminated nothing, and Emily hoped there would be a second light somewhere at the bottom. She hated basements, and this one was no exception.
“What do you see?” whispered Jesse. “Anything?”
“Nothing yet,” said Emily in a normal tone of voice, determined to keep things as un-weird as possible.
She swept the beam back and forth across the cement floor. Like any basement, it seemed to be filled with old junk: tennis rackets, speakers, a boxy computer monitor, and a tube TV. Relics from a previous time. Emily fixed an old gramophone in the beam of her flashlight.
“Look at that, Jess! We should take it up and use it, right?”
“Right,” said Jesse. “Totally.”
Finally, in the center of the room, Emily’s flashlight landed on a second skinny piece of string, connected to a bare lightbulb overhead. She pulled it, relieved when it illuminated the basement in its harsh white light.
“Hey!” said Jesse behind her. “Look at this!”
Emily turned to see a wooden table covered in carpentry equipment, old paintbrushes, and cans of paint. Jesse was examining a circular saw. “I can really use this stuff, then sell it once the house is done. This is definitely going to come in handy.”
Emily wandered the length of the basement, pausing occasionally to look closer at various objects she saw: a ship in a bottle, an oversized hourglass, a wrought iron lantern. At the end of the row of junk, she saw the source of the noise: a window set high in the wall had blown open and banged against the frame in a sudden gust of wind.
“Hey Jesse, do you see a ladder anywhere?” she called. “We need to shut this window.”
After a few minutes of searching, Jesse located a stepladder behind a torn fishing net and dragged it over to the window. He climbed up it and pulled the window shut, securing it with a rusty old latch.
“Gonna have to fix this latch,” he called down to Emily, pulling out his phone and starting a list in Notes. Emily was relieved. Distracted by the physical demands of the house, maybe he would forget about the more sinister implications revealed by Richard’s story.
Upstairs, they put out the fire and got ready for bed. The upstairs was still a relatively unknown area, so they entered the first room they found with a functioning light and dropped their backpacks on the floor. Jesse took his boots off and was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. Emily took longer, examining various tchotchkes that lined the dresser: ceramic lambs and faceless shepherds.
In the bathroom, she examined her tired face and concluded she needed to drink more water and get some sleep. Once she climbed into bed, she fell asleep nearly as quickly as Jesse had.
The room was dark. Emily sat up when she heard music playing downstairs. Her first thought was that Jesse, unable to sleep, had gone downstairs to practice. She glanced over and saw that Jesse was still fast asleep next to her.
“Jesse?” He stirred slightly, then resumed snoring. Emily sighed. Jesse slept the sleep of the dead.
She slipped her feet into fleece-lined slippers. Widget watched her, alert, from the center of the bed. She jumped down and clicked after Emily as she left the room and went downstairs.
The music grew louder. Emily realized it was coming from the parlor. This was one of the rooms she had yet to explore.
Emily went down a dark hallway towards the green glow of a light she didn’t recall leaving on. The gramophone stood in a corner, piping out a slightly sinister-sounding tune. Emily rubbed her eyes. They hadn’t brought the gramophone upstairs. Had they? Maybe Jesse went back and got it after they left the basement.
Emily approached the gramophone. Behind it hung the picture that must have been the basis for the portrait over the fireplace. Emily squinted, leaning towards it. There was something different about the photo.
In it were Matilda and the kids, just as they were in the portrait over the fireplace. But there was a fifth figure with them: a pale, slight, unsmiling girl. Matilda’s assistant?
Something moved in the corner of Emily’s eye. She turned her head and bit back a scream. Reflected in the black glass of the window across the room, the young woman stood solemnly behind Emily’s left shoulder. She whirled around. Widget barked loudly.
There was no one there.
After Emily had turned out the light and turned off the gramophone, she went back upstairs and crawled into bed. Had she seen someone outside, through the glass? Had it been her own reflection, refracted and doubled by some trick of the light? Emily felt sure there was some reasonable and logical explanation. There had to be.
This was what she told herself as she drifted off into a fitful sleep.
The next morning, Jesse left for the hardware store to pick up a replacement latch for the window in the basement. Emily made coffee and shut herself in the office. As always, she stared at the blinking cursor on the blank white screen. As always, the words wouldn’t come.
Emily closed the screen and got up, restless. It was difficult not to feel spooked by what she thought she saw the previous night. She told herself it was a byproduct of a restless imagination and Richard’s scary stories. People went missing all the time. It wasn’t that uncommon an occurrence.
Emily decided she would procrastinate dealing with her writer’s block by going through Aunt Matilda’s things and determining what could be sold. Since she and Jesse had only explored the first floor and she didn’t relish the idea of returning to the basement alone, she decided she would start at the top and work her way down.
As much as she’d rationalized the previous evening’s events, she decided to take Widget with her in case she got scared. The dog hesitated at the foot of the attic steps. Emily, having anticipated this based on Widget’s reaction to the basement, had a pocket full of treats and lured Widget the rest of the way by leaving one on each step until they were upstairs. Lulled by the treats, Widget forgot her earlier reservations and enthusiastically explored the attic. She sniffed the various pieces of antique furniture and the dusty clothes hanging on a rack.
Emily, following Widget’s lead, flipped through the clothes on the rack. They were all at least thirty years out of date and would have been at home in any vintage store. Next to the rack of clothes, a white wicker end table held an ornate silver jewelry box. Emily flipped it open and a tiny ballerina, dressed in a pink tutu and pink satin shoes, spun in a circle while the jewelry box played Greensleeves. Something about the song seemed vaguely sinister in the attic, and Emily quickly flipped the lid shut, cutting off the sound.
Beneath the single round window opposite the attic door was an old roll top desk, and on the desk was a black manual typewriter. Emily felt the same delight she had regarding the library for the first time: it was as if it had been placed here, just for her.
Emily walked over to the desk and examined the typewriter. Old as it was, it appeared to be in perfect working order.
Widget barked. Emily turned to see her sitting in front of the armoire in the corner, staring at it. Emily felt an unpleasantly chilly sensation and decided it was time to go downstairs. She hefted the typewriter into its case and headed for the door, whis
tling for Widget, who didn’t need to be told twice.
In the office, Emily meticulously arranged the typewriter and a fresh ream of white paper in the center of the desk. She pulled the chain on the banker’s lamp and rolled a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. Her hands hovered over the keys as she waited for her customary blank feeling to descend on her brain, barring all creative thoughts but the one of her imminent failure.
Instead, her fingers settled gracefully on the keys and she wrote with a fluidity that she had not for months, so much so that she felt scarcely aware of what she was writing. Prior to her writer’s block, Emily often felt that writing came so naturally that she wasn’t fully in control of the ideas she had or what she wrote—but this was something else altogether. It was as if she wasn’t even there; as if she was hovering over some distant shore, watching herself in the water below from far above.
Emily closed her eyes briefly and opened them at the sound of a truck door slamming. It was Jesse, back from the hardware store. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. She felt as if she was coming out of a trance.
Emily stretched and yawned, hearing the cuckoo pop out and chime the hour in the living room: six times. How had that happened? That meant she had been in the office for over four hours. She unrolled the current page from the typewriter and scanned it, eyes racing over the words.
I’m scared. I thought that being here would make me feel safe, but it doesn’t. I feel like something weird is going on, like there’s something somebody isn’t telling me. Everyone told me I was so lucky to be here, but I don’t feel that way. I feel like something is wrong.
Matilda and Cynthia seem nice enough, but when I look at them for too long, they look away. I can tell that they’re hiding something, I just don’t know what. If I look at them for too long, I can tell their eyes are lying.
I walked around the house yesterday because I was bored and there was nothing to do. I thought, at least there’s this huge old house to explore. Cynthia caught me looking in a closet and almost lost her mind.
“What are you doing?” she said, like I had just murdered somebody.
“Nothing.” I was scared and felt guilty. Maybe they would kick me out. “I was just looking for something I could draw with.”
She ended up being okay, just took me to the kitchen and gave me butcher paper and some colored pencils, but it was so weird the way she freaked out like that. All because I opened a closet with a bunch of tea towels in it.
At night, I can sometimes hear them whispering in the front parlor. It has an old heating grate, the kind that carries sound, and it’s connected to the one in my room. I can’t make out every word because it’s getting cold and they turned the heat on, so it’s hard to hear over the air gushing up through the vent. Most of what they talk about seems to be about money. I don’t get it. If she has this big giant house on a hill, isn’t she rich?
I miss my parents. I know that I’m supposed to live in a house and go to school, but at least I know they loved me. I didn’t like not being like other kids, but I liked having a family. I want to go to the park and visit them. Matilda says, “not yet,” but not when. Which is another thing I feel like I’m being lied to about.
I wish I could run away, but I know they’d just find me and make me come back here.
Emily frowned. She had no recollection of writing this. The first paragraph could have been her feelings about the move, but the rest of it seemed to be about the house—about Matilda and Cynthia, whoever that was. Maybe the second caretaker Richard had mentioned? If it was, did that mean that she was the woman in the photograph?
It had occurred to Emily to write about the house, because what better inspiration than a spooky old mansion on a hill? But she hadn’t meant to write this. She would have changed the names around. She would have changed the situation, out of respect for the dead.
This narrator sounded young: a kid, and as a general rule, Emily didn’t write child protagonists. They always sounded like an older person pretending to speak in the voice of a kid, and it sounded false. But this sounded like it could be taken from a diary—the diary of any young girl. Well, maybe not just any young girl. Maybe one who was stuck in a new situation she didn’t ask for, one that made her uncomfortable. A girl who was forced to deal with the decisions that the adults around her made, ostensibly for her benefit. But how much to her benefit had it really been?
Emily often asked herself these questions about a character as she wrote, but this was different somehow. This didn’t feel like a character she had created. Sometimes, characters seemed to have a life of their own, as if they had their own agendas and desires and Emily was merely a conduit for their will. But ordinarily, she was at least aware of what she was writing as she wrote it.
The typewritten pages disturbed her, and rather than reading anything else she’d written, she turned the sheaf of papers on the desk next to the typewriter facedown and got up to go to the kitchen and talk to Jesse. She closed the office door firmly shut behind her.
Jesse was in the kitchen, making stir fry on the stove. As usual, Emily felt relieved at the very sight of him. She hugged him from behind and then dropped into a seat at the table like a sack of bricks.
“Long day at the salt mines?” Jesse kidded her as he added peanut oil to the pan.
“Something like that,” said Emily.
“Me too,” he said. His back was to her, so he couldn’t see the odd expression on her face. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is just to find a latch for these old timey houses. I looked for hours! It doesn’t help that there’s only like two hardware stores in the entire town. The entire town! Some old-fashioned, family-run joint and a Home Depot over at the 29th Street Mall.”
“Huh,” said Emily, staring out the window.
“I ran into our friend Richard at the mom and pop shop. Asked me how the house was, then stared at me like I was going to run into the street screaming. I’m telling you, the dude’s weird. There’s something off about that guy.”
“Maybe he just…” Emily closed her eyes and suddenly lost the will to finish her sentence. She was feeling very tired all of a sudden.
“Just what?” Jesse turned, really looking at her for the first time. “Babe? You all right?”
“I’m just so tired. That old gramophone from the basement woke me up last night. I guess it turned itself on or something? I don’t know how those things work. I didn’t even realize you brought it up to the parlor.” Emily opened her eyes to find Jesse looking at her strangely.
“That thing from the basement? I didn’t bring that upstairs.”
Emily stared at him in total confusion. “But it’s there. I saw it. Do you think maybe Richard—” Her reply was cut short by a pounding on the back door, rattling the glass panes. She and Jesse turned to see two tall black silhouettes at the door. Emily screamed.
5
Jesse immediately picked up the long-handled wooden spoon he used to cook, wielding it like a weapon. Emily grabbed the fire extinguisher off the floor and threw aside the curtain over the glass panes of the door.
Two tall, attractive, well-coiffed people peered at them through the glass: a man and a woman. They were dressed head to toe in black. Backlit by the yellow overhead porch light, they looked like shadows.
“Hello!” The woman rapped lightly on the glass. “Do you have a moment to speak with us?”
Emily unlocked the door and opened it. They looked like replicants: black suits, black eyes, and shining black hair. The only thing to distinguish them from one another was the fact that the woman was Chinese and the man had pale skin like a vampire. Maybe he was Transylvanian. Emily chuckled inwardly at her little joke, and the pair regarded her inquisitively.
“Darla Chinn,” said the woman confidently, extending her hand. Her nail polish was a deep vermillion, her nails manicured stiletto points.
“And I’m Roger Oglethorpe,” said the man, extending her hand. “How do you do?”
They s
hook Emily’s hand, then Jesse’s.
“We’re from Three Star Properties,” said Darla. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“No,” said Emily. “I can’t say that I have.”
“We’re a local property management company, specializing in dealing with unique or…unusual properties,” said Roger demurely. “We’ve been very interested in this house for some time now.”
“Very interested,” echoed Darla.
“May we come in for a moment?” asked Roger. “We don’t wish to intrude, but we have a proposition for you that we think might be very much worth your while.”
Emily looked at Jesse. He shrugged.
“Sure,” said Emily. She stepped aside to let them in.
Roger and Darla slithered through the opening and sat themselves at the kitchen table. Emily and Jesse leaned against the counter, watching them warily.
“So,” said Darla over steepled fingers. “How are you liking this place?”
“We were shocked to see anybody living here, frankly,” said Roger, not giving them the chance to respond. “I mean, after everything that happened…”
Darla slid her eyes to the left, watching him. As he trailed off, she chimed in, as if on cue, “The murders, yes. So unfortunate.”
“Murders?” said Jesse. “We heard they disappeared.”
“Well, technically, they did vanish,” Darla amended her earlier statement. “But I think it’s fairly obvious that when three little children mysteriously disappear out of nowhere who the obvious culprit is.”
“You’re saying Matilda did something to them?” Emily asked.
“Well,” said Roger delicately, “most of the town feels that it’s a foregone conclusion.”
“Sometimes people aren’t who we think they are,” said Darla. “Of course, I would never want to speak ill of your family. But it would be dishonest of me to pretend that we don’t all assume that something terrible happened here.”