The House of Long Shadows

by Ambrose Ibsen

  I'd seen enough.

  There was someone looking at me from within the closet. The space was alive with that croaking laugh, so reminiscent of a baying amphibian.

  It greeted me with a mouthful of eyes.

  My legs gave out and I hit the floor. I heard a scurrying as of dozens of feet, and felt as many cold hands groping at my flesh as I lay prone. There was time enough for only a single scream before my wits revolted and I spun into unconsciousness.

  Thirty

  The chirping of birds.

  From far-off, the steady rapping of a woodpecker.

  The reek of that miserable tree was what really woke me. The pungent scent crept up my nostrils and shook me violently awake as I realized where I was.

  I blinked the sleep from my eyes and tried focusing on my surroundings, hoping that it was a mistake—a stubborn nightmare that hadn't run its course.

  I was in the house. In the living room, specifically. Beneath me was the metal folding chair. Somehow, I'd spent the night in it, sleeping peacefully. The ache in my neck attested to that. But I hadn't started the night in this chair. You were upstairs... in the master bedroom... And there was... With every incremental gain in cognizance, I recalled more of the horrors I'd witnessed the night before.

  I scrambled out of the room, burst out the front door, and began dry heaving on the lawn.

  I retched so hard that I feared my organs would come spilling out of my mouth, and when I finally regained control of myself I was unable to sit up. I rolled onto my side, clutching at my abdomen, and stared into the blue sky. It was a warm, pleasant morning. Even so, I couldn't stop shaking.

  What happened last night?

  I'd gone into the house—been lured there—while waiting for the priest. To my knowledge, Father Kaspar had never shown, though. Then, that thing had appeared—the woman. Irma. She'd come after me, chased me into the upstairs. I'd taken refuge in the master bedroom, but she'd been waiting for me in the closet. I'd passed out after that.

  I eased myself up onto all fours and then shuffled to the van. I dug my cell phone from my pocket—the battery nearly dead—and locked the doors as I dialed Father Kaspar. I wanted to know why he hadn't come.

  The priest picked up, sounding a bit tired. “Hello?”

  “Father Kaspar,” I began, clearing my throat and trying not to sound viciously angry, “this is Kevin Taylor. I called you last night, asked you to come to my house?” I paused. “You never came.”

  “Oh, Mr. Taylor.” The priest took a deep breath. “I'm sorry about that. You see, I did come by the house last night, though I was delayed due to some unforeseen car trouble. It was past 2AM when I finally arrived, and though I saw a van in the driveway, I did not find anyone inside. The door was open. I came in, called out for you, but there was no reply. I figured that you'd grown tired of waiting and had left the premises. I'm sorry—I would have called you to inform you of the delay, but I left my phone at the rectory.”

  “But...” I grit my teeth, wondering if the priest was trying to pull a fast one. “But I was there. I was in the house,” I said. “I didn't see you, didn't hear you. I kept an eye out for a while.” There were several hours I couldn't account for after passing out in the upstairs. It was possible that the priest had shown up, but why hadn't I heard him? If he'd really entered the house, he would have seen me sleeping in the chair—why hadn't he woken me up? And on the off chance that the house really had been empty upon his arrival... then where the hell had I been?

  Father Kaspar chuckled impatiently. “I'm sorry, Mr. Taylor, but when I entered the house I saw no one. I didn't walk through the whole house, but I waited for about ten minutes and called out loudly. There was no one there. The door had been left open, and I thought that maybe you'd gone out for a walk. I went around the property but didn't see you in the yard, either. I thought you'd packed up and gone. If you'd like to arrange something for a later date, I'd be happy to pencil in a blessing sometime this week.” I could tell by his tone that he was rather annoyed at having to recount his visit, and he seemed to be implying that I'd wasted his time. “In the future, I'd recommend not calling so late at night for these matters.”

  I apologized to the priest for his trouble and hung up.

  I buried my face in my hands and thought long and hard about the night before. Just what had happened after I'd lost consciousness? Could I have possibly left the house without remembering it—gone sleepwalking? No, I'd never done that before.

  Then again, I'd come to in the living room, and had no memories about how I'd ended up there. The door to the master bedroom had been locked from the outside—I'd been a prisoner—and yet I'd woken up downstairs.

  I worked over my furrowed brow with my palms. Think! Why weren't you here when the priest arrived? Where could you have gone? And how the hell did you get out of a locked room? Did the spirit let you out?

  That was when I noticed it. My jeans, which had been a bit stained with paint the night before, were absolutely filthy. Long tracks of mud ran up and down the legs. My shoes, too, were muddy and damp. I pinched off some of the dried mud and felt it between my fingers. What did you get up to last night?

  Having had my fill of horror, I decided it didn't matter and powered up the van. When I'd reversed onto Morgan Road, I stamped on the accelerator and left the house behind.

  I decided then and there that I'd never go back.

  Thirty-One

  A shower and change of clothes did much to refresh me on the outside, but the filth that persisted within would not be washed away so easily. Lounging in the hotel room, desperate for answers, I feared the darkness would sully me forever. The events of the previous night were wedged deep within my psyche like a splinter, and I knew there'd be no removing it. It would heal over, eventually, and the body would break it down, but some trace of it would always remain.

  I was thankful to be out of the house. Seeing the outside world again was a pleasure I hadn't expected to ever partake in just twelve short hours before. And yet, the fear and stress remained a constant, almost as though the world could offer me no comfort. I may as well have been carrying around the house itself, balancing it across my shoulders.

  Though I was determined not to go back to the house, I still craved answers. The terrors I'd experienced in the last twenty-four hours required some sort of explanation, lest I spend the rest of my life puzzling over them. I turned to the only resource I had—the web. The house had scarcely been lived in since it had first been built, but recalling my conversation with Lillian, the woman who'd lived on Telluride Road, I had some reason to believe that the house's first and only owner, Willard Weiss, might still be among the living. Could Weiss, probably in his 80's and living in assisted care—if he lived at all—assist me? Was there anything he could tell me about his time in the house that would shine light upon the hideous things that filled it?

  For awhile now, I'd thought of the eyeless specter in that house as the spirit of Willard's deceased wife, Irma Weiss. I wasn't so sure anymore that the presence in that house had ever been a human being, though. It had seemed too nightmarish, too bizarre an apparition to have been a human soul. Perhaps Irma hadn't figured into it at all, and this thing—whatever it was—had more to do with the body I'd found in the wall. Even that seemed like a stretch; how could a human soul become so positively hideous in death? Though I had never been a believer in things like demons, I now had a strong feeling that there were evils in this world that transcended us human beings, and that the house on Morgan Road was likely home to them.

  I sat on the bed, scanning a list of care homes in the metro Detroit area and writing down phone numbers. As I did so, my attention was repeatedly drawn elsewhere—to the walls I shared with adjacent rooms. From the room to my right, I heard something like a woman wailing. It may have been someone actually crying, or else it may have been coming from some television drama. I tried tuning it out, but other sounds began entering the fray shortly thereafter, which only
added to my distraction.

  There were air vents on both sides of the room, near the ceiling, the slits in them half-open. Through them, while I worked at my computer, I occasionally heard strange sounds. Furtive tappings and scrabblings, as of unseen fingertips; then voices in hushed conversation. I knew that I was hearing the talk of people staying in nearby rooms, and that the sinister character of their voices must surely have been a product of their traveling through the vent system, and yet as I listened, halting in my work with a shudder, they seemed inhuman in their tinniness. Low and aberrant, the voices reminded me of all I'd heard in the house.

  I'd put together a list of twenty-five assisted living facilities and their corresponding numbers, and was ready to start calling each in the hopes of being connected with Willard Weiss, but the voices coming through the vents waxed dominant and set my nerves on edge. I stood beneath one of the vents, closed it all the way with a push, but could still feel the voices reverberating off the metal shudder as I pulled my hand away.

  It's impossible, I told myself. You're hearing things. Those voices are confined to the house. There's no way you're actually hearing them here. It's just someone in the next hotel room—someone's TV or something. Stop fretting.

  I leaned over my laptop and started ringing up care facilities in the area. Even when the first few secretaries couldn't find a patient by the name of Willard Weiss in their registries, I found I was happy to talk to other human beings, and I tried prolonging my conversations with them by making small-talk. My list of twenty-five was whittled down to a list of fifteen, then seven, as I called and received word that there were no patients admitted under the name I sought.

  When only five facilities remained on my list and I was beginning to fear that I'd never find the man, I struck gold.

  The secretary who answered the phone for Tremainsville Meadows, an assisted care facility in nearby Auburn Hills, put me on hold while searching the patient registry, and then informed me cheerfully that there was, in fact, a patient by the name of Willard Weiss staying there. After I lied, claiming to be the man's nephew, she supplied me with his direct number in what I assume was probably a breach in protocol. I jotted it down hurriedly, and then she connected me.

  In the eighth grade, I'd once called a girl I'd liked to ask her to a movie. Back then, I'd thought my heart would give out while waiting for her to pick up, I'd been so nervous.

  The stress and anticipation as Weiss' line rang were easily triple that. The phone stuck to my sweaty palm, and I couldn't keep from rocking anxiously as I sat at the foot of the bed.

  Finally, there was an answer.

  Willard Weiss sounded gruff, bothered, as he picked up the phone. The secretary, who'd remained on the line, told him that he had call from his “nephew” before she signed off, leaving Weiss to mutter, “Nephew? I don't have any nephews. This has gotta be a mistake.”

  I swooped in before he could hang up. “Mr. Weiss? This is no mistake. I'm sorry to disturb you, but I'm calling because I need your help with something. I've been looking for a way to reach you for a while now.”

  Weiss grunted, his voice tinged in confusion. “Eh... you need my help with something?”

  “That's right,” I replied. “You see, I've been living in your old house—889 Morgan Road. I understand that you and your family lived there through the seventies and eighties. I have some important questions to ask about the property.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Mr. Weiss, I'm sorry if this is a bad time, but I've been having... well, some major difficulties in that house. I've been renovating it, you see. The house is in surprisingly good shape, but ever since I started staying there, I've been seeing things. Horrible things. And last night, everything came to a head. I understand that your wife, Irma, died in that house? There's something else, too. A while back, while fixing some drywall, I discovered a dead body—the corpse of a woman—ensconced in the living room wall. I was hoping that maybe you could shine some light on—”

  The dial tone sounded.

  The bastard had hung up on me.

  Willard Weiss was alive and well, but he wasn't in a talking mood.

  Thirty-Two

  I looked out my window at the sun. It was dipping over the horizon, setting the dimming sky ablaze in furious shades of pink and orange. A beautiful sunset by any measure.

  And I hated the sight of it.

  I wasn't in the house anymore and should have had no problems with the night. Despite that, my hackles went up at the prospect of the day ending, and that sliver of unease I'd been carrying around with me began to metastasize into something more prominent.

  I'd attempted to call Willard Weiss three more times since he'd hung up on me, and I'd spaced the calls apart by an hour or more. Unfortunately, he hadn't picked up for a single one, and I knew he was avoiding me. What his reasons were, or if he simply thought I was some sort of crank, remained to be seen. While passing the time between those calls, I'd checked my email and even had a peek at my VideoTube channel, where messages had poured in from users looking for my newest video. I didn't have the heart to tell them that there weren't going to be anymore.

  If I was lucky enough to put this all behind me, it was possible I'd never make a video again. Fixing up old houses was a great way to stumble upon secrets that were better kept hidden, and I'd lost my taste for it all. Even becoming a TV star had lost its appeal. It was possible that I'd change my mind in the future, but somehow I doubted I'd ever put on a tool belt again. In fact, I got to thinking that maybe I'd never enjoyed it at all. Perhaps 889 Morgan Road had simply been the last nail in the coffin. A simple job pushing a mop or scrubbing toilets sounded mighty fine right about then. Better that than digging around in people's houses. There was too much history in those places. I'd gone into this renovation blind and was now caught up in a mess that, frankly, wasn't any of my business. I wasn't keen to run into the same trap elsewhere.

  I ordered room service and ate disinterestedly, keeping the TV on for some extra noise. A few bites into a slice of pizza, my thoughts shifted away from the pawn shop program on the screen and back to the events of the night before. I'd spoken to Father Kaspar that morning, and he'd insisted that upon his arrival there'd been no one in the house. He'd claimed, too, that the front door had been open. I was almost certain—certain as I could be of anything that occurred on that terrifying, chaotic night—that it had been shut. Pairing this curious absence of mine with the mud I'd discovered on my jeans that morning upon coming to, I wondered where I'd gone in the night, and why I couldn't remember.

  Had I gone into the yard? Somewhere else in the neighborhood? If so, why had I done it? I clearly hadn't been clear-headed in doing so. Possessed by fear, it was possible I'd run out of the house, delirious, and done all sorts of dumb shit. Not being able to remember even a bit of it is what really disturbed me, though.

  In case I really was getting up to nocturnal mischief without realizing it, I decided to set up my camera in the room. The battery would hopefully last through the night and capture any shenanigans in the event that I went on a nighttime stroll. It was a purely precautionary measure, probably a waste of time, but I set the camera up near the door of my hotel room and then prepared to go to bed.

  It was still early, but the activity of recent days had left me ragged. If anything was going to help me sort this mess out, it was regular sleep. I slid into the bed and put out the light, draping an arm over my face to block out the last traces of day that seeped in through the blinds.

  When next I looked out into the room, the darkness was damn near perfect. There was no more sun, and the only light came from imperfect sources—the slit under the door, the reddish glow of the boxy numbers on the alarm clock.

  Prone in the darkness, I courted a now familiar discomfort. Like an itch was spreading across my entire body, I reacted violently to the lack of light and balled myself up tightly beneath the covers. It was impossible to feel comfortable in the
dark. Without the lights on to convince me otherwise, I got the distinct impression that there was someone in the room with me—perhaps several people. Even as the air conditioner kicked on for a few minutes, the air remained too heavy to circulate, and its staleness clung to me like a sour syrup.

  I switched on the bedside lamp three, four times before I called it a night, and each time I found no one sharing the suite with me. But I had only to turn off the light to reacquaint myself with dread and to suspect, with more intensity than I had the previous time, an unseen occupant. In fact, without the lights on, I couldn't even be sure that I was still in the hotel. My understanding of the world had been nudged so far off base that I couldn't rule out the possibility that the switch on the lamp mediated the flux of time and space itself. Maybe, when the lights were on, I was well and truly safe in my hotel room. And maybe, when the lights went out, I was transported to the house on Morgan Road. Could I really be sure either way? Wasn't the darkness that fell upon this room of the same species that packed every corner of that accursed house? In that sense, I'd never manage to fully separate myself from the house. Stepping beneath the shade of a tree, or venturing into a dark movie theater would be sufficient to unite me with it, at least in spirit.

  I was too tired to philosophize further and mercifully drifted off.

  Thirty-Three

  I'd gone to bed in a pair of old sweatpants and a thin sleeveless T-shirt. The first thing I noticed when I awoke, aside from the chill that had dominated me from head to toe, was that the garments were sticking to my skin. It was like a fever had just broken, and before I could fully open my eyes the shivers and aches had their way with my limbs.

  The bed had grown scratchy, the mattress soaked through with what I took to be my sweat, though as I planted a hand on it to lift myself up, the sensation that met my fingers was nothing at all like a mattress.