The House of Long Shadows

by Ambrose Ibsen

  I calmed down enough to inspect the upper level without further shouts or theatrics, and when I was done I found no one lurking in any of the rooms. I wasn't sure what I'd seen, where the shadow had come from, but that it didn't correspond to any late-night intruder was now apparent. Without the daylight to spruce them up with brightness, the rooms in the upstairs struck me with their ugliness. It was in shadow, rather than daylight, that their defects and filthiness became clearest to me. Peering into the ruined bathroom with only the light of the hall to see by, I wondered if such a place could ever be set right—hell, if any amount of renovation could ever make a house like this worth living in.

  So, no one had broken it. I'd left a window open and freaked myself out for no good reason. I supposed that made sense, even if I couldn't remember leaving said window open. I'd done stupider things in my life. Putting out the hallway light, I marched back downstairs.

  On the way to the living room, I stopped at the window to take another look at the handprint, but for some reason I couldn't find it. I must have looked like a real idiot, leaning this way and that, inspecting every inch of the pane, but no matter how long I searched, it didn't turn up. The handprint that'd been there only minutes ago had vanished without a trace.

  Like the shadow I'd seen coming from the upstairs, it was possible that the handprint, too, had been nothing. I'd been sleepy when I'd first glimpsed it, not at all in a steady state of mind.

  I returned to the air mattress. Keeping the wrench within reach—just in case—I pulled the blanket up to my chin to beat back the chill that still plodded around the room. There was time enough to salvage the night's sleep, to wake up rested, even, and I rolled onto my side with a yawn.

  I would have gotten to sleep a whole lot faster if not for the scratching.

  From the wall directly behind my head, I heard a light scrabbling noise, as of rodents scurrying. A furtive SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRITCH came in even intervals, traveling up and down the wall. I could hear them working their teeth against the baseboards, too. The sound left me feeling disgusted, and I made a mental note to purchase some mouse traps—or rat traps, depending on what I was dealing with. Though not a fan of rodents or other pests, my work often saw me coming face-to-face with them. I knew the scratching would eventually cease, or that I'd finally get tired enough to ignore it and drift off regardless.

  What I hadn't anticipated was just how long those damned things would go at it, how energetically.

  I slipped in and out of sleep for a time, the most furious scratchings always seeming to occur when I was on the verge of drifting off. It was like the pests wanted to get my attention, like they wanted me to stay up and chat. Eventually, in my tired stupor, I reached behind me and pounded at the wall to shut them up. That did the job, and they retreated to some other spot in the house to keep up their infernal racket.

  I don't know what time it was when I finally fell asleep. It wasn't long after I'd knocked on the wall and dispersed the rodents, I was sure. My dreams for the night were vague, comprised of real-life settings mixed with illusory ones, as I straddled the borders of sleep and wakefulness.

  And in one of those dreams—or what I told myself must have been a dream—I'd heard something just after pounding on the wall with my open palm. Upon remembering it, I assured myself it'd been nothing but my imagination, that it was impossible. But not long after the last rodent had gone running, I thought I'd heard something else coming from behind the wall.

  A low, rumbling laugh.

  Seven

  I lingered in bed past my alarm, and when I eventually rose it wasn't because I was looking forward to the mountain of work that awaited me. No, it was the realization that my newest video had gone live the night prior that ultimately drew me out of bed. I hunkered down at the table with my laptop to see how many views and comments I'd racked up overnight.

  As expected, the feedback was piling up nicely. In the hours since it had been posted, I'd already managed nearly forty-thousand views. Cracking open a bottle of lukewarm water to chase the dust out of my throat, I started scrolling through the comments, curious what my viewers thought about this upcoming challenge.

  Most were enthusiastic, supportive, but as usual there were some doubters in the mix, too.

  User YungPiss44 wrote: This whole thing is fake. Seriously, I'll bet FlipperKevin has a whole team of professionals doing the real work. You guys are so stupid, giving him all of these views. He probably doesn't even know how to use a drill. #fake

  Comments like these were nothing new. A lot of people thought that my channel was fake. A certain subset of viewers believed that I had a huge team of professional contractors at my disposal—along with an endless stream of cash to pay them with—and that they did all of the work while I took the credit. Honestly, sitting in the dusty living room with burning eyes and a crick in my neck, that sounded like a fine arrangement.

  One of the most “liked” comments came from user ErikaBB. They wrote: Ooh, what's this? Does Flipper Kevin have a special friend over? They included a timestamp which pointed to the 1:47 mark in my video. I wasn't sure what this user was talking about, but the stream of replies to it piqued my curiosity.

  YungPiss44 made a reappearance in the replies to this comment, writing, See? It's fake. I TOLD YOU.

  Other users opined. I dunno, added one, does anyone really believe that one dude could fix a shitty house in a single month? Of course he brought help.

  Still another: I wonder if that's his gf???

  I wasn't sure what the hell they were talking about, but apparently, at a minute and forty-seven seconds into my video, there was something these viewers were willing to accept as proof of my having others in the house to do the heavy lifting. I queued up the video to that mark and watched closely, wondering what the fuss was all about.

  I had to pause and study the clip for almost a minute before I noticed it.

  The scene in question showcased the outside of the house. Specifically, the front of the place, as seen from the front lawn. At 1:47, after briefly focusing on the porch, I'd stepped back and taken a quick shot of the upper story.

  And that was when I saw what looked to be someone standing in one of the upstairs windows.

  It was the window corresponding to the master bedroom, the one with the crack in it. Standing a foot or two from the glass was what looked like a sickly woman in a lightly-colored garb. A thin, summery dress, a nightgown—something like that. Despite my footage having been shot in high definition, the image of the woman was rather grainy.

  “What the hell?” I asked aloud, rubbing at the screen with my fingertip. I wondered, rather optimistically, if it wasn't just a woman-shaped smudge on the display.

  It wasn't.

  Baffled and not a little unsettled, I decided to dig into the raw footage. How had I not noticed this before? Had I captured this figure elsewhere in my shoot? Was there anyone there at all, or was I just seeing things? Pulling up the original, unedited files, I zoomed in as far as I could on this particular scene, and was dismayed to find that the figure was still there in the window. Despite the zoom, the image didn't become any clearer than it was on VideoTube—if anything, it got more distorted.

  I couldn't see her eyes no matter how long I stared. I could make out what looked like a mouth, though—yawning, black, toothless. It reminded me of an anaconda's; jaw unhinged to swallow up an entire deer. One thin arm was pressed to a bent torso, and the overall impression was of a sickly woman nearly doubled over in uncontrollable laughter.

  A laughing woman?

  I pored over the footage—dug into the files that'd come straight from my camera—and could find no other trace of this figure in any other shot. During a subsequent pan to that very window, shortly before I'd carried the camera into the house, she'd vanished altogether, and examinations of the other windows yielded no sign of her.

  Immediately, I tried to think up an explanation.

  First of all, I was sure that I'd been alone
in the house since arriving the day before. The fright of the previous night—a thing for which, in the daylight, I was now rather ashamed—had proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt. There couldn't have been anyone in that window at that time—and if there had been, there would have been no way for them to escape my view. I supposed it was possible that they'd fled through the back door, but the fact was that we would have almost certainly run into each other upon my entrance to the house mere moments after having taken that shot of the upper level. At the very least, I would have heard someone running down the stairs, across the creaky lower story, or slamming the back door.

  More likely than not, this was a weird effect of the light. A reflection of something in the lawn, like the Callery pear tree, I guessed. Really, the outline of the figure was so vague and powdery that one could have read almost anything into it. And anyhow, it didn't resemble anything like a real person. No human being I'd ever met had a mouth like that. This alone was sufficient to disqualify it as proof of an intruder in my house.

  Still, it was unsettling.

  Pushing away from the computer and rifling through my backpack for some breakfast, I replayed my memories of the previous day. Could there have been someone in the house the day before? A squatter? No, that isn't possible, I thought for the hundredth time. I'd been in and out of the house all day, had replaced the locks and ensured their sturdiness. Except for that issue I'd had with the window after dark, those had all stayed locked, too. No one could have gotten in without my knowing it, and anyone already in the house would have been found out almost immediately.

  I was half-way into unwrapping a granola bar when my hands got a little weak. I remembered the handprint I'd seen on the dining room window the night before and shot up from my chair. What if that handprint belonged to the person I'd captured in my footage? What if they'd found some way to open the window from the outside?

  Returning to the window, I knelt down and took a long look at the glass. The warm morning sun came through it, leaving the dusty wooden sill fragrant. There were no handprints to be found. A smudge here and there, but nothing else.

  Without a good explanation, I turned to the next best thing: Putting it out of my mind completely.

  It was nothing. Obviously nothing. And even if there had been someone in the house, they wouldn't be getting in again. This house wasn't abandoned anymore. It was mine, and I'd taken some care to secure it. The light I'd installed on the porch would ward off any nighttime visitors and I'd make sure the doors and windows stayed closed and locked when I wasn't around.

  There's nothing to worry about.

  When I'd polished off a second granola bar and washed my face with a damp cloth, I began plotting out my day. The hardest thing, for me, has always been picking a starting point for my projects. In my experience, it's best to single out one room and work on it exclusively until it's finished. Seeing as how I was spending most of my time in the living room, I settled upon fixing that room up first. Incidentally, it also seemed the easiest choice.

  The living room was about fifteen by twenty. I'd given the space a pretty solid clean the day before so that I was well-acquainted with its defects already. The biggest thing it needed, aside from a bit of electrical work to get its outlets working again, was some new drywall. The wall behind my air mattress had begun sagging over the years and looked on the verge of cracking. I wasn't sure if it was due to water damage or mold, but ripping out the bad drywall and hanging some new would be simple enough, and I liked the idea of easing into this project with such an easy task. Hanging drywall was one of my specialties.

  I made a quick list of things to buy, took some measurements, and then set off for the nearest Home Depot.

  But before I hopped into the van, I paused on the porch. I locked the door and tested it. It didn't budge. I walked around the house, through the dewy lawn, and did the same with the back door. Both doors were perfectly secure. Despite knowing they were shut, the paranoiac in me insisted that I check all of the lower story windows. When I saw that they were all closed, I finally set off.

  I backed out of the driveway, and as I did so I couldn't help but look up at the window to the master bedroom. There was no one standing in it, but I wondered whether someone would enter into view if I waited long enough.

  I thought better of testing that hypothesis, and drove away faster than was wise on the crumbling road.

  Eight

  I can still remember the first time I put up drywall. It can seem like a daunting task if you've never done it before, and I recall that I was doubly nervous because at that time I still hadn't gotten used to working alongside my dad. He'd made it look so easy, but then he'd been building and renovating houses since before I'd been born. It could be that I've prettied up the memory in retrospect, but I sincerely think he could have done drywall—and most any other job—blindfolded.

  It'd been a cold autumn day, rainy, and we'd been hired to hang some new drywall in an apartment building. There'd been a leak in the roof and the existing drywall had bubbled and cracked in several places. We'd patched the roof the day before on what had been my first time on top of a three-story building. To this day, I don't do very well with heights, and roof work ranks among my least favorite jobs.

  On the day we'd first done drywall together—after he'd enjoyed his pre-work Camel on the apartment's balcony, of course—he'd pulled up the waistband of his dungarees and gotten straight to work. We took turns breaking up the existing drywall, and in just under an hour we'd gotten the new stuff up. I've been working in houses for a little while now and have put up my fair share of drywall solo, but even now I'm in awe of how smoothly things went that first time, when I was under his wing. It was truly textbook.

  My father had never been a talkative man. As a kid, he'd been more likely to get annoyed by my childish questions about life than to answer them. In that apartment I discovered a side of my father I'd never seen before, though. He'd answered all of my questions with uncharacteristic patience, as if the subject matter required the utmost care—as if he were passing on some treasured oral tradition. I'd never known my father to be an especially passionate person, but in his attention to detail and calm guidance I'd glimpsed something like real enthusiasm behind the silent, tough-guy veneer. In a small way, I'd felt like I'd really gotten to know the man that rainy afternoon.

  We'd gone back home when the job was done, showered, and eaten in near silence as was our habit. But that evening, my dad did something that left me completely blindsided. He came out of the kitchen with two beers while I was sitting in front of the TV. He handed me one and told me I'd done a “good job” that day.

  I hadn't known what to say. I ended up doing the smart thing and opted not to say anything, lest I ruin the moment. Instead, I sipped the beer and basked in the sun of my father's approval. Pabst Blue Ribbon had never tasted so good.

  That's what I was thinking about as I loaded everything into the back of the van.

  I'd picked up sheets of drywall, shims, drywall screws and compound. I had everything else I needed back at the house. After hitting up a drive-thru and treating myself to an early lunch, I made a slow return to the job site, taking in the scenery as I went.

  This part of Detroit didn't have anything I could call a “scenic route”, to be honest. Every building I passed—both commercial and residential—looked punished by neglect. Those that had been reasonably kept up—a pawnshop, a delicatessen—had thick bars on the windows to dissuade prowlers from patronizing them after hours, and only added to the grotty, unfriendly atmosphere. And then I started down side streets, through neighborhoods.

  Along these roads, where there were boards thrown over potholes, the houses looked lived-in. That is, at first. Here and there you'd see someone sitting on a porch, or cutting the grass. A mailman trudged down the sidewalk delivering letters. Signs of life. But the longer I drove—and the closer I got to my own property on Morgan Road—the less activity I saw. I began to encounter the odd
empty house here and there, the occasional abandoned lot.

  Activity waned the further one went into the tangled network of streets, giving the impression that entire neighborhoods had been cut off by some unseen vise, until finally one was surrounded only by dereliction. Morgan Road and everything adjacent to it was practically a gangrenous limb. It had been excised from the whole, left to rot in the open. Eventually, it would all crumble away, but for now it was a sprawling monument to the gods of decay.

  Driving through these streets and doing a bit of exploring to delay the work ahead of me, I discovered an interesting feature that was little more than five minutes from the house.

  A graveyard.

  It seemed rather small. Seeing as how I didn't spend a lot of time in such places, I had only the graveyard in the Florida panhandle where my old man was buried for reference. This patch, perhaps the size of a football field and crowded with faded, lopsided headstones, struck me as tiny.

  With some french fries to finish and a desire to stretch my legs, I parked along the curb and decided to take a closer look. There was no gate, no sign posted to warn off visitors. In fact, the signage that had once provided the graveyard's name was nowhere to be found. Only rust marks on the concrete pillars at the entrance indicated where it had once been.

  The grass was tall, and there weren't any flowers at the graves. Most of the inscriptions near the front were hard to read, worn down by the rain and wind, but as best I could tell the bulk of the headstones belonged to people who had died prior to World War II.

  I walked between the graves, munched on cold french fries and inspected the sorry-looking ornamental angels whose wings had been weathered to nubs. Like the broken down houses that surrounded this place, the unkempt state of the grounds invoked a certain disgust. And unease. When the people who'd lived in this area had scattered to the four winds, they'd abandoned more than their homes. This graveyard, whose many stones had been intentioned to act as memorials, was forgotten. Save for a few, it was impossible to make out the names on the monuments. Anyone could have been buried in the plots. That the legacy of any human could be reduced to a blurry headstone was distressing enough, but as I walked back to the van and spied the tottering houses across the street, so indicative of the area's profound deterioration, I wondered what else had been forgotten. What memories had been abandoned in those houses? What histories, what sins, had been swept under the rug in their desertion?