The House of Long Shadows

by Ambrose Ibsen

  Another moth drifted by. The grass took a bow as if to motion me towards the door.

  Swept up in the current, the fisherman began to crank the reel, and I lost my fight.

  I limped back to the porch, turning to survey the road.

  No headlights. No priest.

  With withering hesitance, I peered in through the dining room window. Nothing stirred.

  Another nervous glance at the road.

  Still no sign of the priest.

  I pressed a hand to the door.

  COME INSIDE, KEVIN! COME INSIDE, KEVIN! COME INSIDE, KEVIN!

  I turned the knob. It was warm, as though it had been held within another palm just moments prior.

  YES YES YES YES COME IN COME IN COME IN

  I pushed open the door.

  The rustling of the Callery pear sounded like a mess of thunderous applause. All of nature was delighted at my return; I was getting a standing ovation for reentering the house!

  I stepped through the threshold, the familiar scent of dust and construction striking me as comfortable, even sweet. My pulse quickened as I beheld the downstairs of my home from the doorway.

  You're home! I thought with a flash of rapturous joy.

  I eased the door shut with my back.

  At hearing the mechanism click, my pulse shot up further. The joy had been fleeting, though. The sound of the door closing had cancelled my inner parade and now something else was surfacing. It clawed its way through my guts, played hopscotch on my nerve endings.

  Fear.

  I felt fear because I understood where I was—where I really was.

  It dawned on me all at once.

  “You've been fooled.”

  Twenty-Nine

  The house possessed all the stillness of a crypt, and the dust-riddled air—so sweet to my nostrils only a moment ago—now smelled every bit as rarified.

  Had I been of sounder mind then, and not bolted to the floor by terror, I might have done the sensible thing and gone right back out the door. Instead, I stayed put, waiting for something in the scenery to change and subsequently confirm my worst fears. I was held back, too, by a sinking and irrational dread that I might turn around only to find the door gone. The dining room, the stairwell, the living room, were all painted in soft light from the fixtures I'd left aglow, and in each of them I watched closely for the unseen painter to make some subtle mark in the canvas that would herald a nightmare.

  Calm was in short supply, but as I stood there I rewound my thoughts and went looking for reasons not to panic.

  Father Kaspar will be by soon.

  Irma hasn't managed to hurt you—probably because she can't. You aren't in any danger.

  Maybe the ghost just wants to talk.

  Nothing emerged as I stood there, struggling to cram breath into my lungs. My initial fright waned sufficiently that I took some hobbling steps towards the living room, all while thinking up other pleasing fictions.

  Maybe the ghost isn't in—maybe Irma's spirit isn't here anymore.

  Maybe... maybe there never was a ghost at all, and you imagined everything.

  What if there's something wrong with you, Kevin? What if you've been hallucinating?

  I bumped into a toolbox and a mess of odds and ends spilled across the floor. I didn't bother picking them up, but as I continued towards the chair in the living room, one item in the bottom of said box captured my attention. A clawfoot hammer. I picked the thing up; it felt right in my hand. However useless a weapon might be against the force that filled this house, I was comforted by its weight in my palm. I focused on the tool's heft and my feelings of helplessness withdrew somewhat.

  In my hotel room, I'd considered all kinds of ways I might communicate with the spirit—provided, of course, that she wished to talk in the first place. Feeling I had nothing to lose as I waited for the priest, I dragged my pounding foot across the living room, turned the folding chair so that it faced the front door, and sat down.

  I was going to try diplomacy.

  “H-Hello,” I squeaked, setting the hammer down at my feet.

  Upstairs, the floors could be heard to settle. Old timber popped and groaned as the building braced against the wind. It was a very normal kind of sound, and there should have been nothing unsettling about it whatsoever. But there was. Hearing the house vocalize in that way, I couldn't shake the impression that it had done so in reply to my salutation. By using my voice in this place, perhaps I'd attracted the attention of whatever forces prowled behind the scenes. I'd chummed the water. I could sense dark eyes locked on me, dissecting me.

  “I... I want to talk,” I said, jaw clenching tightly as the words left my lips. It wasn't true; I didn't want to talk to the thing in this house. I wanted to pretend it didn't exist. But it was listening now, I was sure of it, and since I had its ear, there was nothing to do but state my case. Whether the phantom could be swayed from its terrifying course was another matter, but I spoke as earnestly as I could under the circumstances. “I want to know who you are. I've been seeing you all around the property for awhile now, and it seems you've been trying to get my attention. If there's something you want, I might be able to help you. Want to talk about it? If you're a spirit that's stuck here, maybe I can help you move on...” I trailed off, annoyed by my own rambling.

  There was movement across the floor. A long, ebon shadow that was not my own spilled out across the living room. Studying its length and watching its spread with a tightening of my shoulders, I realized that the person casting it stood a mere foot from the back of my chair. My sighting of the shadow coincided with a feeling of great pressure, as of someone leaning over me, bearing down on me with an intense stare.

  She's right behind you, I realized.

  I wanted to reach for the hammer, but I didn't budge. I folded inward the way a mouse might cower in the shadow of a looming snake. In the shadow I could see the phantom's sickly limbs, her tangles of hair. The apparition brought with it a repugnant scent, something like the tang of warm earth in a spot where an animal has been buried—and has only just begun to decompose.

  She could have touched me. She could have responded to my questions in her multitude of voices. Instead, she just lingered. My gaze slipped along a track with only three stops; the hammer on the floor, the shadow of the horror that stood behind me, and the front door.

  Finally, the shadow withdrew. I took this as a gesture of goodwill—she'd detected my discomfort and was giving me space. Thankful that the specter wasn't planning on lashing out, I found the boldness to ask, “Are you the g-ghost of Irma Weiss?”

  The first loud snap made my heart palpitate.

  The second drew my gaze to the right, into the kitchen.

  By the third, I knew where the snapping was coming from, and I grasped the legs of the chair beneath me till my joints locked up.

  The mouse traps. I'd set a number of mouse traps along the baseboards in the kitchen, and they were all being set off now. One by one. A small, white hand emerged from behind one of the tall boxes of new cabinetry, and three of its skeletal fingers wore the sprung wooden traps around the knuckles. Another hand reached for the top of the box, and then the figure raised itself up from the floor and stood to full height.

  White hair obscured most of the withered face, but I could make out the empty sockets that lived behind the veil. The cavernous hollows where eyes had once been widened and narrowed expressively. The sockets puckered like throbbing wounds, and from those depths, looking like so many filaments of ground beef streaming out of an extruder, came masses of red, thrashing worms. I heard individual worms strike the ground with a fleshy smack as still others reared their heads.

  Up to that moment, the phantom's lips had been shut, but as it reached over the box, a black maw came into view. Within that gullet—mouth opened so wide that the chin dragged against the top of the box the specter leaned upon—were small, trembling orbs, like pustules sprouting from the tissues of the mouth and throat. I saw those orbs fo
r what they really were as the thing crawled over the box and found sound footing on the stripped floors of the kitchen.

  They were eyes; countless, staring eyes.

  There was an almost deafening outpouring of voices. They issued not from the apparition's mouth, but from the air all around me. Inarticulate shouts, curses and hissing laughs erupted from every direction. The upstairs boomed with voices and, soon thereafter, pounding footfalls entered into the mix. Trembling in my seat, I suddenly felt myself at the center of a very crowded room. The air was thick with presence, and the hairs on my arms registered movement as unseen lodgers brushed past.

  The white-haired monstrosity grew nearer. Her steps were plagued by erratic jerks in the upper body, as though the limbs were being yanked in different directions; yet somehow, progress was still made, and within moments I knew she would be upon me.

  This was the closest look I'd ever gotten at the specter, and as she advanced I realized, with a roiling in the pit of my stomach, that my feeble attempts at outreach had been insanely misguided. Without thinking, I fell to the floor and scrambled for the hammer, which I then threw as hard as I could. The tool whipped past her, taking a few strands of white hair with it as it came to rest in the living room wall. From all around came the shouts and murmurs of an invisible crowd, and I felt the jostling of unseen hands as I prepared to run.

  Rising to my feet, I set out for the front door.

  I hadn't taken two full steps before I encountered a problem, however.

  Though I couldn't see them, the room was packed with people. They moved and shoved and grabbed like the members of a proper mob, and my attempts to rush past them were just as fruitful.

  A deep voice, scarcely recognizable as human, chanted, “LET ME IN, LET ME IN, LET ME IN,” from close-by.

  From what my eyes told me was open space, a sequence of piercing wails rang out.

  I felt an elbow in my ribcage.

  A cold hand pinched my cheek.

  The floors beneath my feet rattled and strained as though a hundred men were standing upon them.

  All the while, the phantom continued its pursuit.

  The mouse traps tumbled from the specter's outstretched hand, a shower of red worms lurching out after them. Convulsing as though pained, and only capable of a wet, labored gasping, the figure shuffled towards me briskly, unfazed by the other presences in the room. Backing away as quickly as I could through the packed space, I sought out an opening in the crowd, which led to my bolting from the living room altogether in a search for cover.

  My first instinct had been to run towards the front door, or to one of the windows, but the density of unseen bodies blocking the way to the exits was immense, and I was forced to flee further into the house, towards the stairwell. To do otherwise would have allowed the specter to catch up to me. She followed at my heels, moving as quickly as her toothpick-thin legs would allow, mouth agape. The hundreds of eyes studding the inside of that mouth all stared unflinchingly at me, and with seeming delight, and I understood then that this white-haired woman was being commandeered by the scores of eyes within her. All those eyes shifted independently of each other, but were united by the same mind, the same cause. They wanted me. The woman was merely a host—an animal given over to the control of parasites. The machinery of her body had been rearranged for the benefit of those interlopers. She was not in control of those stamping feet, those searching hands. The parasites were.

  A keening scream burst from the upstairs as I clawed my way along the bannister. I was shouldered and kicked by others on the stairs, felt unseen fingernails dig into my flesh. The blood they drew was real; rivulets of red cascaded down my forearm and dripped from my fingers as I fell upon the landing. Sighting a small toolbox I'd left near the top of the stairs, I took hold of its handle and cast it at the oncoming nightmare. The box clattered against the wall, showering the apparition in tools, but this didn't slow it down a jot. I kicked against the floor and gained my feet, racing down the hall and bursting through the door of the rearmost bedroom.

  The air in this room was different, and from the moment I ran inside and slammed the door behind me, I felt reasonably sure that I was alone. The pushing and prodding of foreign bodies ceased here, and for the first time in minutes I was able to draw a proper breath. The room was dark, lit solely by the paltry moonlight coming in from the cracked window. Leaning against the door, I felt a savage pounding on its other side, as if ten men were trying their damnedest to kick it down. I don't know how I managed to hold it closed, but I poured everything I had into the effort, and it held.

  There'd been a thin band of light coming in through the underside of the door from the hallway, but as I defended against the violent blows, I saw it suddenly snuffed out, and I knew then that the house had lost power.

  The blows eventually ceased, as did the footsteps and voices. Even so, they never completely cut out—attempts to enter the room were simply quieter. Stomping was replaced by quiet creeping along the hall; unseen hands took turns fiddling with the doorknob. Demonic yells became furtive snickers and pleading whispers. “Let me inside. Let me inside, won't you please?”

  I don't know how I managed to keep them out of the room as long as I did, or what kept them from materializing within the room, through the walls, like ghosts in stories. But for awhile, things were quiet, and I came to feel something akin to hope—hope that I would escape the house. I wouldn't dare leave the room until morning—only when the sun was out, and its light had reached every corner of the damned place, would I be safe. I didn't know this for certain, of course, but it felt right, and I reckoned that a safe escape would be possible in five hours if only I could remain strong and repel the specter until then. I would have jumped from the window, but I sincerely doubted that I could make it to the yard without breaking a leg—or worse.

  Somehow, I'd have to stay in this room until daylight. That was my only option.

  I stood against the door in that dark room, trembling. The moonlight was so watery thin that I could hardly make out anything in my shadowed surroundings. There was a closet somewhere to my right, but I could only see it when the moonlight grew strong and was unimpeded by clouds. It felt like I was in a holding cell. There was nothing to do, nothing to see. One could only sit and await judgement.

  My standing in this dark room, frightened out of my wits, reminded me of the time my mother had left me locked in my bedroom with the lights out. Decades had gone by, but here I was, still the same, scared child. I was shivering in the dark just like I had that night, afraid that something would get me.

  I called out to my father, knowing all the while that no good would come of it. No good had come from doing so in my childhood years, either. I prayed, heathen though I was, that all of this would pass. I yearned to leave the house, and would happily forfeit any fame and fortune that might have come with renovating it. I was concerned only with my life, and felt a stinging regret for having played with fire. I'd been so obsessed with finishing the job and landing an offer from the people at the network that I'd chosen to ignore all the warning signs. I'd put the possibility of success ahead of my wellbeing, and now I was paying the price.

  You deserve this, I thought.

  The house remained still for a time, and I slumped onto the floor, keeping my back pressed against the door. I hoped that Father Kaspar would make a sudden appearance and clear out the evil that now ran riot over the property. It was a comforting mental image, if nothing else.

  Then, there was a metallic sound. Ca-clink. Startled by the noise, I tried to place it, wondering what the apparition was up to. It had almost sounded like a lock being thrown—a deadbolt. Unable to figure out what I'd heard, I'd been about to write off the sound completely when I recalled what room I was in.

  This was the master bedroom. On previous studies of the upstairs, I'd found peculiar locks on two of the bedroom doors. This one had a lock on its exterior—a lock, I'd fancied, that had been put in place to keep someone in
the room. I'd thought it strange, had puzzled over its purpose, then.

  Now, I was the one locked inside.

  I gave the knob a tentative pull.

  It didn't budge.

  I was going to have to kick the door down if I wanted to get back into the hall. Either that, or I'd have to wait for the warden...

  While tampering with the door and testing the lock, I heard a voice from nearby. It was not, as I first thought, coming from the other side of the bedroom door, the hallway. The voice, croaking and infernal, crooned from the other side of the unseen closet door, to my right.

  Probably, the presence had been in the closet the entire time, but had chosen to wait before announcing itself. It had waited until I'd calmed somewhat, till I'd had some time to foster hope. Now that I knew I was locked in and my despair was soaring, it was ready to make itself known.

  It spoke. “In the town where I was born, there was a boy who had a horn. And with that horn he drew the blood, the blood that nourished every bud. Deep in the marrow, a raven pleads; and in the marrow, the raven breeds.”

  Every muscle in my body seized up. With all the force I could muster, I sent my fists into the bedroom door. I took a step back and kicked it, too. It creaked, but it didn't break. Perhaps if I worked on it awhile I'd manage to bust through, but I had a feeling I didn't have that much time to work with.

  I couldn't flee the room and I couldn't risk a jump from the window, so I stood my ground, shakily. I felt on the verge of collapsing, and the pounding in my temples had me feeling dizzy. My strength was sapped further as a sinister laugh issued from the closet. Said closet was coming into view gradually, as the veil of clouds slipped off the moon's face.

  The closet door was sitting ajar.

  I could make out the dim shape of something standing inside. Inch by inch the door opened further, as if prodded by a draft, but before the whole shape of the figure came into view, the moonlight died out again.