Every House Is Haunted

by Ian Rogers

  “Why?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. I can send you the documents on the transfer of the deed, as well as the keys and—”

  “Save yourself the trouble, Mr. Kingsley. I have no intention of going back to that house.”

  Kingsley was silent for a moment. Thousands of miles of air hissed between them. “It was your father’s wish,” he said finally.

  “Yeah, well he can keep on wishing.”

  He hung up.

  Well done! a voice cheered in his head. It sounded like Beth. You sure put him in his place. Teach him to do his job.

  “Shut up,” Daniel said to the empty living room.

  You hung up on him, she said. You like hanging up on people, don’t you?

  “I didn’t hang up on you. I just . . . I just didn’t want to talk about it.”

  He stood up and went over to the calendar on the wall. The November sheet showed Rainier Avenue at night in the rain—in fact, every month showed some prominent Seattle landmark in the rain. Beth had given it to him as a gag after she moved to Reno, where the annual rainfall was measured in single digits, when there was anything to measure at all. They had been married for three years before deciding they couldn’t live in the same house together anymore. A year after that, Beth decided the city was too small for them, too. They still exchanged birthday cards, the occasional phone call, and Daniel thought that was better than some couples who had gone through the train wreck that is divorce.

  You asked a lot of questions about my dad, he thought, turning back to the window. Too many. He ran an unsteady hand over his stubbly cheek and decided to call it a night—or a morning, if you wanted to be technical about it.

  He dragged himself up the stairs to bed. The storm was breaking up, anyway. The good parts were over.

  The following morning the sky was clear and the sun etched the tops of the mountains with red filigree. He glanced over at his alarm clock and saw he had gotten an hour of sleep. He grinned wearily.

  It was a good night.

  Kingsley’s package arrived a week later. Postmarked London and stamped half a dozen times by the customs people, it contained a number of curious items: documents pertaining to his father’s will (written in a British legalese Daniel couldn’t make heads or tails of), a folded map with a note paperclipped to it, three keys attached to a cracked-leather fob, and a thick stack of Polaroid pictures.

  Daniel picked up the map and shook his head. I can’t believe he sent directions. Does he really think I don’t remember?

  It was true, Daniel had been trying to forget the house in Sycamore (and everything that had happened there), but the basic truth about memories still held: the things you wanted to forget were often the same ones you remembered most clearly.

  He tossed the map on his cluttered desk and picked up the Polaroids. He flipped through them, not really looking at them, and put them down as well. He started to crumple the big padded envelope everything had come in, and realized there was something else inside. He turned it over and shook out a small key. He looked at it closely and wondered why it wasn’t on the key ring with the others.

  The number 089 was engraved on the tiny keyface.

  He picked up the map again and read the note attached to it.

  Dear Mr. Ramis,

  First of all, I would like to apologize if I upset you in any way during my telephone call last week. The loss of a loved one, especially one’s own father, is a terrible experience, and I apologize if I conducted myself poorly.

  I have forwarded you the documents pertaining to the house at Sycamore, along with the deed and keys to the property. I have also included a number of photographs your father took of the house. He wished for you to have them. Likewise, I have included a key to a safe-deposit box located at the post office in Sycamore. I have attached a map with directions, supplied by your father, to help you find it. I don’t know what is waiting for you there, only that, like the house, your father wanted you to have it.

  Respectfully yours,

  Philip P. Kingsley

  Daniel put down Kingsley’s letter, feeling abashed. He wasn’t exactly choked up with guilt, but he thought he probably owed Kingsley a letter of apology.

  On the other hand, he still felt he owed his father nothing. And even though he spent the next hour gathering items for the trip to Sycamore, he told himself the only reason he was going was to find out what was waiting for him in safe-deposit box 089. If he decided to continue onward to the house (which was actually located on the outskirts of town), he probably wouldn’t even get out of the car. He’d just cruise up the driveway, take a quick swing around the dooryard, and leave.

  Daniel put an overnight bag in the trunk of his car, next to his toolbox. He didn’t intend to spend the night in house, nor did he plan to complete any repairs, but he thought it was best to be prepared for anything. He had no intention of making a return trip.

  With his gear stowed, he slipped behind the wheel, catching his reflection in the rearview mirror.

  Drive up and drive down and that’s all, he told himself.

  But his eyes seemed to say something else.

  Daniel left Claremont Bay and travelled east on the I-90. He left the turnpike at Ellensberg and headed north on US 97. After an hour of trees, fields, and lakes, he started passing rows of tract houses set tastefully back from the road. Each one seemed to have a picket fence or a board fence or a natural border of trees or hedges. The houses were alike in another way, too. Each one had a garden gnome or pink flamingo or some other piece of cheap statuary standing on the front lawn.

  He passed a trailer park where rows of double-wides gleamed in the late-morning sun like miniature Quonset huts.

  Finally, he passed a green reflectorized sign that said SYCAMORE POP. 2400. The post office was in town, but Daniel knew he wouldn’t be stopping. The urge to see the house was too strong.

  Main Street was in rough shape. Peeling facades, crumbling brick, and shifting foundations had turned the buildings into enormous tombstones canted on ominous, horror-movie angles. He passed the post office, one of the few buildings that looked as if it had been built sometime after the Depression, and the sign in the window said it was open until nine. Daniel continued on.

  On the other side of town, Main Street turned back into US 97 as it climbed a steep hill. Hunter’s Hill, Daniel thought, grinning in spite of himself. I don’t remember if that was its real name, but that’s what Sissy and I called it.

  At the top of the hill, the road zigzagged around thick copses of trees before disappearing into the mountains. The feeder road which branched off to the house was still there, but the mailbox—and the post it sat on—was gone. In its place stood a pair of metal posts with a length of rusty chain hanging between them.

  This is new, he thought, and pulled off to the side of the road.

  He sat in the idling car, fighting a powerful urge to drop his foot on the gas and simply plow right through. It wasn’t about the time it would take to remove the chain; what bothered him was that his father had put it on in the first place. The chain was proof that he had been back to the house. The house they had vowed never to return to again. The house where Sissy had died.

  There it was. The part of his past that had pushed Beth away. The part that almost certainly was the cause of his sleepless nights. Death was supposed to be the end, but it hadn’t been in Sissy’s case. She was still with him, riding his shoulders like a bad habit he couldn’t kick.

  Eighteen years ago Sissy had gotten sick and died. Daniel didn’t know the exact nature of her disease, except that it kept her indoors. He had asked his father about it on only one occasion, not long before they went their separate ways, and he had replied vaguely: “Cancer.”

  Daniel remembered how it had been at first. Sissy had been allowed to roam the house, and she had prowled around ceaselessly. Then she had been restricted to her bedroom, and Daniel didn’t see her very much.
He tried to, but his father said Sissy was much too sick to see anyone. Finally, she moved down to the cellar, where she eventually succumbed to whatever ailment had plagued her for all those years.

  Daniel and his father had left the house soon after her death. Later, Daniel’s father told him the house had been sold. He said it was important to put these bad times behind them and move on. If you didn’t, they would come back to haunt you.

  But his father hadn’t sold the house. No more than Daniel had put the bad times behind him.

  I guess that makes us both liars, he thought.

  He turned off the engine and got out of the car. He went over to the padlock that secured the chain to the post. He fished out the key ring Kingsley had sent, found the key that fit the padlock, and turned it. It wouldn’t budge. It wanted to, he could tell, but the tumblers wouldn’t perform. The lock was very old and rusty.

  He went back to the car, opened the trunk, and took a ball peen hammer out of his toolbox. He hit the padlock until it snapped open. He dropped it on the leaf-covered verge and the chain slunk to the ground. He put the hammer back in the toolbox, closed the trunk, and slipped back behind the wheel.

  He stared through the windshield at the tree-lined corridor before him. Branches stretched across the gap on both sides to form a vaulted roof.

  I’m going home, he thought, and started down the road.

  He was standing right here, he thought, or somewhere close to here.

  Daniel stared at the old house where he had spent a large portion of his childhood. It was here he had received his first lesson in death. He was holding the stack of Polaroids, shuffling them like a deck of cards. He took the top one and held it up and away from him, like a movie director trying to figure out the best angle for his next shot. He took a step backward, his arm still outstretched, then took three steps to his left.

  The house had been boarded up and left for dead. Creepers had taken over one entire side of the structure; the chimney was gripped in a stranglehold of vines. The paint had turned the lifeless grey that seemed to be the colour of all old houses. Some of the board panelling had come loose and there was some roof damage, but not nearly as much as Daniel had expected. The place still pulsed with a low, tenebrous life. Like a cancer patient holding on even though the chemo has stopped working.

  Did Sissy have chemo? Beth asked in his head. She didn’t, did she? She didn’t fade away. She just . . . died.

  A strong gust of wind swept through the yard, kicking up leaves and throwing them together with papery explosions. Daniel was reminded of last night’s storm and felt a pang of loneliness for his house on Claremont Bay.

  He stuck the pictures back in his coat pocket. His Maglite was in there, but he wasn’t ready to use it yet.

  He walked around the yard, instead, staring at his boots as they swished through the drifts of leaves that covered the yard. He was building up the nerve to walk up the porch steps and enter the house. It made him feel young and stupid. Like a kid trying to gear himself up and go inside the local haunted house.

  But you don’t believe in haunted houses, Daniel.

  No, he didn’t.

  Just haunted people.

  He looked at the woods that surrounded the house. Nature had been at work here, too. Give her an inch and she takes a mile, he thought.

  The trees had encroached like rubberneckers at a car accident. No one had been around to perform the maintenance necessary to keep the yard from turning into a jungle. And yet something strange was happening here. He couldn’t tell exactly what it was. Something in the way the branches bent and curved away from the house . . . almost as if they were recoiling from it. Instead of following their natural growth paths, they had been forced into strange, sinuous shapes that suggested some kind of intervention.

  Daniel took out the Polaroids and looked at them more closely.

  There were twenty-five of them, but only a few showed the house clearly. Most of them were off-centre, showing only a portion of the front deck or a piece of eave. At first he had thought his father was just a lousy photographer, but now, walking around the yard, Daniel understood. His father hadn’t been taking pictures of the house; he had been taking pictures of the yard.

  The trees in the pictures were not much different from the ones he was looking at today. But he could see the bigger picture they formed: a perimeter of trees whose branches would not enter the space of the yard, as if was protected by an invisible barrier.

  There was a single tree in the yard itself, but it was dead. Daniel’s father had set up a tire swing when he was a kid. The tire was gone, but a piece of the rope remained, swaying in the breeze like a lyncher’s forgotten lariat.

  Daniel wandered back to the porch steps. He gripped the wood railing and a piece broke off in his hand. A long, moaning creak emanated from the house. He patted the Maglite in his pocket as if it was a talisman.

  He climbed the steps.

  A single wooden plank had been nailed across the front door. Someone had written on it in what looked like grease pencil, but Daniel couldn’t make out the words. Without knowing what he was doing or why, he ran his palm across the plank and smudged it out. Then he gripped the board with both hands and pulled. It came free with a rusty squeal, and he tossed it dismissively over his shoulder.

  He took a deep breath, turned the doorknob, and pushed. The hinges screamed, and plaster dust came raining down from somewhere above. He couldn’t see anything, only blackness. The smell of mildew and long years wafted over him.

  He turned on his Maglite and a beam of light leapt down the front hallway to the kitchen.

  The floorboards creaked as he stepped inside. Everything was faded and yellow, like he had stepped into an old daguerreotype. Every surface was covered in a thin patina of dust. He put his hand on the banister and felt a low thrumming sensation race up his arm. He took his hand away and realized it was he who was trembling.

  You’re not really going up there, are you? Beth asked in his head.

  “No,” Daniel said. “Not yet.”

  He turned away from the stairs and stepped into the room to his left—what had been the parlour. It was empty except for a single straight-backed chair standing in the corner. The windows had been boarded up. Boarded up from the inside. Nothing was written on any of them, though.

  He turned right, passed through another empty room, and into the kitchen.

  The stove and the refrigerator were gone, but he could see the outlines of where they had once stood. The cabinets were open and empty, and again the only piece of furniture was a solitary chair.

  Daniel crossed the hilly linoleum to the back door. A plank had been nailed across it. He turned to his right and looked over at the cellar door. There was another plank, but this one had writing on it, three rows of gibberish that weren’t any kind of letters Daniel had ever seen. It hurt his head to look at it. He didn’t recognize the words—if that’s what they were—but he recognized his father’s spiky backhand script.

  Again, Daniel felt an urge to reach out and wipe the writing away. But this time he stayed the impulse and continued his trip through the main floor of the house.

  When he was finished, he found himself back in front of the stairs. He put his foot on the first riser and his hand on the banister. He was no longer shaking. He took a deep breath and climbed up to the second riser. He moved closer to the railing, away from the wallpaper which hung in long, thick tongues, and sidled up the rest of the stairs, feeling both juvenile and justified.

  Standing at the head of the second-floor hallway, he knew his time here would be short. The house—or rather, the memories of the house—was pressing in on him like the contracting walls of a torturer’s press. Whatever it was he had to do up here, he had to do it fast.

  He went straight for Sissy’s bedroom.

  Like the other rooms in the house, it was mostly, but not entirely, empty. The bed was gone, but the frame had been left behi
nd—a corral for the dust kitties that covered the floor.

  Sissy’s dollhouse sat in one corner, looking eerily like a miniature version of the house in which he was currently standing. Except instead of vines and creepers, it had been taken over by cobwebs.

  He caught movement over his head, and turned the beam of his flashlight on a spider the size of his fist. He let out a strangled cry as its long legs fluttered in the air, reaching for him.

  He stumbled backwards and tripped over his feet. He pointed his flashlight back at the ceiling, but the spider continued to hang there.

  Not a spider, he realized, only the sun—or rather a paper cutout of the sun his father had glued to the ceiling about a thousand years ago. Back when Sissy was bound to her room.

  Daniel remembered that day. Sissy was standing in the corner while their father read aloud from a book. He said it was an instruction manual. Something to help make Sissy’s room more comfortable for her. After he read from the book, he and Daniel had glued the sun and the moon and a whole bunch of cotton-ball clouds to the ceiling. Sissy stood in the corner the entire time, watching them. Not sad, not angry. She was just . . . Sissy.

  Most of the clouds were still up there, Daniel noticed, panning his Maglite across the ceiling. They were thick with dust and looked absurdly like thunderheads now. What he had thought were the legs of an oversized spider were actually the light-rays of the sun.

  He lowered the Maglite and noticed a large wooden chest under the room’s single, curtainless window. A smiling clown was still discernible on the lid, though time had transformed its happy, cheerful face into one bordering on the insane. Daniel wasn’t interested in looking inside. He had never liked that clown.

  He walked slowly, reflectively, to the window and looked down at his car parked in the yard. He tried to imagine his sister standing in this very spot, staring out at a world she was permitted to see but not to touch. He tried to imagine himself through her eyes: a towheaded boy playing in the yard, waving up at her with awkward feelings of happiness and guilt. He supposed some things never changed. He didn’t know how to feel about her then, and he didn’t know how to feel about her now.