The wind picked up and the cold beads of water on my bare flesh incited me to shudder.
An old memory reared its head.
I'd been seven, maybe eight years old. My parents had still been together, then. It was summertime; I remember because the night was punishingly hot and we didn't have air conditioning. You'd wake up on nights like those with the bedclothes clinging to you like a second skin.
One night, before bed, I'd gone out to the living room to speak to my mother. All these years later, I sometimes have trouble remembering what she looked like. Her hair was dark. So were her eyes. The other details tend to blur. She'd been sitting on the sofa, watching the nightly news and smoking a cigarette.
She gave me a stern look for disturbing her; it was a little past my bedtime. She demanded to know what I was doing up. I confessed to her that I was scared. I'd heard something in my room—in the closet or under the bed, I can't remember—and I didn't want to be alone in there. I pleaded with her to come and check out the room.
With a smirk, my mother mocked me. “A little old for that shit, aren't you?” she'd said between drags. I remember she had this real debonair way of ashing her cigarettes; she'd flick the back of the thing with her thumb and let the smoke drift up from the corner of her mouth like she was some kind of old movie star.
I was pretty worked up. I didn't want to go back to the room until she'd had a look around. My dad was already asleep. I could hear him snoring away in the next room.
My mother put out her cigarette, and for a time it looked like she was going to humor me. “Let's go,” she said, pointing towards my bedroom.
I started back to my room and my mother kept on my heels. She followed me inside and ordered me to sit on my bed. Rather than start looking around for ghouls, she did something that baffled me. She pulled out the chair to my desk and placed it directly beneath the light fixture in the ceiling. Climbing onto it, she began unscrewing the lightbulbs.
The room went dark.
“What are you doing, ma?” I'd asked her.
She'd shushed me as though I were a crying baby, slipping the warm bulbs into the pockets of her sweatpants. And then she'd walked out, closing the door behind her.
I remember fidgeting in that dark room, curling up on my bed. “Ma? Why'd you do that?” I'd asked.
She didn't respond, except to lock the door from the outside with her key.
“Ma! I don't wanna be in here, ma!” A thin band of light came in beneath the door, and in it I could see my mother's feet as she stood in the hall. “I think there's something in the room with me. Please don't leave me here,” I'd pleaded.
With a laugh, I heard her lighting another cigarette. Her footsteps receded down the hall, and she replied, “I don't know if there's anything in that room with you, but if there is, you're going to find out real soon.”
With that, she planted herself on the sofa, got back to her news program.
I spent that night imprisoned in my room, the lights off, shaking like a leaf. Eventually—I don't know how—I fell asleep. When I awoke in the morning the door was unlocked. Nothing had “gotten” me. No monster had come lumbering out of the murk to gobble me up, and no terrible ghost had appeared at my bedside.
The incident really only served to drive home something I'd already learned by that age: The only thing I had to fear in life was my mother.
I was left shaken, humiliated by it all. From that day on, I'd been too ashamed to put much thought into ghosts—into bogeymen or things that went bump in the night. My fear of the dark never fully left me, but I no longer allowed myself to show it.
Humiliating episodes like that one hastened the split between my parents. Though my father hadn't been an especially warm or protective guy, he'd had no tolerance for the kinds of stunts my mother would pull, and I remember that the two of them would nearly come to blows over her cruelty towards me. My mother packed up and left one morning. She never said goodbye to me, and she expressed no interest in any kind of visitation arrangement. For my father's part, he wasn't exactly enthusiastic about being a single parent, but he made things work in his own impersonal way.
Even now, almost twenty years later, I felt a touch of humiliation coloring my cheeks.
I was so immersed in my thoughts that I didn't hear the car speeding down the potholed road. It was an old SUV. Loud music poured out of its open windows, along with catcalls from a number of female voices. A handful of college-aged girls laughed and shouted from the vehicle as I stood dripping in the yard.
I turned around to give them a good look at my ass—prompting a new wave of howling laughter—and then flipped them off.
Returning to the house and putting on clean clothes, I tried to get back to business.
There was still a video to put together. The laptop called to me from the table in the living room, but I ignored it, trying to think of more gratifying distractions. I paced around, hands in the pockets of my sweatpants, and finally heeded the laptop's call—but only to turn on a bit of music. Johnny Winter's self-titled. Not having any neighbors to complain about the noise, I cranked the volume up to eleven and air-guitared like a dumb teenager.
Some minutes into my living room jam session—replete with detailed air-fretwork—I was startled by a pounding at the door. At first, I thought it might have been the college girls in the SUV from earlier. Had they gotten a look at the goods and decided to come by for a sample? It was dim and dusty in here, but I did have an air mattress—
The pounding sounded again. My shoulders stiffened and I turned the music down. Evening was in full swing now, and in the dead space between the firm knocks I could hear the nocturnal insects starting up in the lawn. Creeping towards the door, growing vaguely uneasy with every passing moment, I looked through the peephole. The front porch was lit up by the motion-activated light, and in the glow I could make out a figure standing near the door, just barely out of view.
A figure I didn't recognize.
Eighteen
I pried open the door and discovered a short, barrel-chested man with a tattered blue T-shirt on. The T-shirt read, “JT'S DUMPSTER RENTAL EST. 1957—LOCALLY OWNED AND OPERATED.” A large truck idled in the street, its hazard lights blinking. It was towing a big ol' dumpster in fire hydrant red.
“Oh,” I said, stepping out to meet him with a nervous laugh. “The dumpster rental.”
“Yessir,” replied the man. I wasn't sure what his name was—didn't care to ask—but in my head I referred to him as the eponymous JT. “Sorry to come around so late,” he continued, “you're actually the last delivery of the day. Had a lot of dumpsters to haul. Meant to come around earlier, but it didn't work out. Hope it's no inconvenience.”
“Not at all,” I said.
He looked into the house from the porch, then glanced around the yard, blinking hard like he was trying to wake from a dream. A smirk teased the corners of his lips, but it suddenly faded and he cleared his throat. “I, uh... I had a bit of trouble finding the house, truth be told. I didn't think anyone still lived out this way.”
“I get that a lot,” I said with a laugh. “Can't beat the privacy, though.”
His smile and accompanying nod seemed guarded, like he was holding something back. Pulling some folded papers from his back pocket—a rental agreement for the dumpster, I soon realized—he explained the terms and lent me a pen so that I could initial and sign in the right places. As I did so, he kept looking up and down the street with what I took to be strong curiosity. Curiosity and, I suspected, veiled disgust. When I handed back the paperwork, he hiked a thumb at the idling truck. “Where you want it?”
“You can drop it on the lawn, next to the tree,” I said after a moment.
He walked back to his truck, maneuvered this way and that until—about five minutes later—he'd gotten the dumpster up onto the lawn. Parking the truck, he got out and disconnected it. “That good?” he asked of its placement.
“Yeah,” I replied. “That'll be fine. I won
't have to carry all the junk in here quite so far that way.”
He nodded. Then, stalling, he turned and asked me the question that had probably been bubbling in his mind for several minutes. “Say, you fixing this house, then?”
“Uh-huh.”
He looked up and down the street again. “Don't say. Needs a lot of work, I'll bet.”
“Sure does.”
“I'm glad to see someone doing something with these old houses,” continued the dumpster guy, pudgy hands stuffed into the pockets of his oil-stained jeans. “I think it would be great if a millionaire came in and just bought them all. It's a lot of land, and it's just sittin' out here, unused, you know? They'd make good rentals if they were fixed up.”
“Wish I could afford to renovate more than just the one,” I lied.
“Why you fixing it?” asked the man, arms crossed now. “You gonna sell it off, or...?”
I didn't feel like going through the whole song and dance and simply said, “I just like a good fixer-upper, that's all. House has good bones.”
“I see, I see.” He laughed, brushing a hand against his ruddy cheek. “When I was young, years back, I remember the houses on this street were all empty. We'd come here to, you know, mess around as kids. Some of 'em were full of punks—drug dealers and shit. But we'd use some of the houses for parties. It's been years, but I'm pretty sure I went to a party in this house, once. Good times. I remember, there were mattresses in some of the rooms. We were all blitzed out of our minds, and this one chick—”
Out of politeness, I listened to this man's reminisce about a drunken blowjob he'd received in the 90's in the house I was now fixing up. A lovely story, to be sure.
“Well, you take care,” he said, departing. I watched him climb into his truck, spared him a wave, and then slipped back into the house.
Earlier in the day I would have welcomed company; after that bit of back and forth, I was now fully committed to my solitude.
I got back to my computer, turned the music up a bit higher, and began working on my video. Starting through the day's footage, I recalled with no little shame my behavior in the crawlspace—the panic I'd felt, the way I'd sped out of there like a frightened kid. I'd trim all of the unflattering footage away and preserve only the instructive segments. Doing so took me the better part of an hour, at the end of which I found myself with a fully-formed video ready for mass consumption.
The crawlspace video was uploaded and I retired to the air mattress, an arm draped over my eyes.
There was one bit of the footage that stuck out in my mind—a scene I hadn't included in my final video, but which raised some questions in me. I'd found a chalked handprint in the crawlspace, along with a set of initials. F.W.
I reckoned that the print had been made a long, long time ago. But whose was it? There was no way to be certain. Still, in the twilight of my day, as the fatigue took hold, I daydreamed about the house's history. I didn't have a lot of facts to fill out its timeline with, and so tried to imagine what the place had seen in its many years.
Before all of the parties, before the decay had set in, what had this house been like and who had lived in it?
Whose ghost is haunting this place?
Nineteen
It was a touch after 3 AM when the headache pushed me back into the territory of wakefulness.
The pain seemed to issue from the goose egg on the right side of my head, just behind my temple, and though it had gone down substantially since I'd first gotten it in the crawlspace, I could still feel the ping pong ball-sized lump there. It was sore, a bit warm to the touch.
I switched on the lamp nearest the air mattress and went rifling around in my things for some painkillers. As I did so, my back began acting up on me. Leaning over too far, I felt a little spasm in my lumbar region and immediately sat up, lest I topple over in a gnarled heap.
If this was life in my late 20's, I wasn't looking forward to seeing what the next few decades held in store.
I couldn't find the bottle of Tylenol I usually kept in my backpack. There were still a few packets of pain pills out in the van's first aid kit, but as I stood and glimpsed at the incredible darkness that flourished just outside the dining room window, I thought better of going out to retrieve them. I sucked down some water and paced around, a hand pressed to the lump as though I could somehow smooth out the pocket of angry flesh.
Standing with my back to the small bedside lamp, I caught a glimpse of my shadow stretching across the floor. As I walked circles around the room, the shadow followed, growing to the excessive length I'd come to expect. I waved an arm around, cast a little hand puppet up against the wall, but couldn't for the life of me understand why the shadows in this house behaved in such a way. Queerer still was the manner in which my shadow would hook around corners as I turned in my wanderings; the way the edges of my silhouette would hitch for a moment, as if hitting a snag, only to double in length the next instant.
Having tired of all the shadow play, and of the way that the single lamp seemed to render the adjacent rooms in abominable shadow, I set about turning on all of the lights in the downstairs. In doing so, I walked past each of the windows and had a look through them. The night was misty, and thin fingers of fog threaded the air. It looked gloomy, picturesque in a way, but I found myself sorely wishing I'd sprung for some cheap mini blinds for the lower story windows. Thanks to the pervasive fog, I couldn't see much of the outside, and yet I doubted that any nocturnal visitor to the property would have much trouble looking into the well-lit house from that same yard. I considered putting out all of the lights and just returning to bed, but the ache in my head kept on and I parked myself in front of the computer instead, looking for something to raise my spirits.
I scrolled through the comments for my newest video, just a few hours old, and was very pleased to read them. Most of the comments dealt with the creepiness of crawlspaces in general. EEK! A snake! And all of those cobwebs... yuck. I wouldn't be able to go into a crawlspace like that. What if something bit me? wrote one commenter.
Another, less eloquently, wrote, Nah, screw that shit. I ain't going down in a place like that. With my luck I'd find a dead body down there!
I smirked at that one, I'll admit, and fought the urge to reply, “Actually, in this house, the corpses are kept behind the walls, not in the crawlspace.”
I paged through a few more comments, but despite the general tone of interest and encouragement among them I became gradually more unsettled by memories of the cramped space that existed just under my feet. Just remembering what it'd been like, crawling on my stomach, with the access door seeming miles away, chilled my blood and got my heart racing.
I leaned back in my chair and the floorboards groaned under its legs. Staring down at the knotted wooden planks, I wondered if anyone else in the house had heard it—if, by chance, there was someone there now, listening from the crawlspace.
How many times do you have to go through this? I shut my laptop. There's no one else here.
I mostly believed it, but even as I stood up and considered returning to bed, a chill surged through me. I felt it in my legs first. Then it came up through my torso, my arms. My teeth chattered. The air in the house was stuffy, uncirculated, but the cold had gotten through to me anyhow. Looking down at my bare feet, at the hardwood boards I was standing on, I fancied it was coming from down below, in that dusty, pitch-black crawlspace. The cold gave way to dread.
I'd felt this apprehension before. The previous night, when I'd been dreaming, I'd felt a subtle, unaccountable change in the air. It was like the feeling before a heavy storm breaks loose; the pressure drops, the air suddenly cools and you can feel the electricity brimming all around you.
I was awake. I certainly felt awake. I pinched myself on the forearm once, just to make sure, and the sting of it helped to bring me back to my senses.
A flash of light to my back brought my attention to the dining room window. The porch light had gone off.
&
nbsp; “Son of a bitch... This again?” I said, shuffling quietly to the window. The fog outside did much to bind the light, resulting in a brilliant haze that was almost more difficult to cut through with the naked eye than the preceding darkness had been. I stood there, holding my breath, and looked out across the front of the property.
In the moment before the light shut off, I thought I tracked movement in the yard. The light went out so quickly that I couldn't be sure, and the drifting of the fog only confused things further. When the light cut out and I was left staring into the misty night, I finally allowed myself to exhale and the burst of air from my mouth fogged up the glass.
I'd seen a shadow. Long and fast-moving, it had slipped past the Callery pear outside. It was one with the night now, invisible.
Was I losing my mind? I tell you, it certainly felt like it. I pawed at my eyes and took another look into the yard. But I turned up nothing. Nothing but the smoke-like fog. I made sure the window was locked, then journeyed to the other downstairs windows to make certain they were also properly fastened.
I had my back turned when, from the direction of the living room, I heard a click. This noise was followed by a sudden dimming of the overall light in the house. “What the...”
It had sounded like one of my lamps had been turned off—the one near the air mattress, with the twist knob, specifically.
That's not possible, I reminded myself.
Perhaps the bulb had burned out. Or maybe, just maybe, the lamp had malfunctioned.
But then, it had clicked. The little black knob on the side made that sound. I knew it well. Someone had turned it off.
That's not possible, I thought again.
Turning back towards the living room, I drew in a deep breath that I could scarcely hold in my lungs. The air mattress came into view, as did the edge of the table where the lamp was situated. Though I'd expected it, the fact that the lamp was indeed off sent a jolt of fright racing through me.
The House of Long Shadows Page 11