The House of Long Shadows

by Ambrose Ibsen

  Blinking, mouth dry, I felt sprigs of something like grass feathering against my palms. The scent of moist earth struck me in a great wave, and the surprise it incited gave me the jolt I needed to properly awaken.

  “What the fuck?”

  The stuff beneath me had felt like grass because it was grass.

  I was outside, beneath a pre-dawn sky, my clothing soaked through with dew. All around me, jutting from the ground like broken teeth, were stones—grave markers—whose engravings were too difficult to make out in these minutes or hours before sunrise.

  I was in the old graveyard on Morgan Road.

  And I didn't know why.

  “But... but how?” I raked a muddy hand against my cheek, the fingers feeling sore. A cold wind shot past me, almost knocking me back onto my ass, and I reached for a nearby tombstone for support. I tried gaining my bearings and panned around the site. In the low haze that clung to the openings between monuments, I was able to sight out the road. Looking up and down it as far as I could, I saw no sign of my van. My gaze drooped to my feet, their soles tingling like I'd just waked across coals. They were bare, and in the places where the filth hadn't completely coated them, they looked a bit cyan for the cold.

  I was dizzy, and had to drape both arms over the tombstone to remain upright.

  Clearly, this was a dream. A weird, distressing dream. I'd been having a lot of those lately. This had to be another one. I gave my forearm as hard a pinch as I could with my shaking, mud-caked fingers.

  The pain saw me inhale sharply.

  It was a fluke. It had to be. I was hallucinating the pain. Everyone knows you can't feel pain in a dream.

  I slapped myself in the face.

  I did it twice.

  The burning pain in my cheeks told me everything I needed to know.

  Pacing slowly towards the road and carving a path through the mist, I looked to the brightening sky. Using the taller stones to pull myself through the graveyard, I eventually stumbled onto the shattered road and had a look up and down Morgan Road. The few streetlights that actually functioned had blinked off in anticipation of sunrise, leaving the world awash in an eerie twilight.

  To my back, long shadows dipped between the stones. There was a rustling in the damp grass that, upon inspection, had no visible source. The wind struck me head-on and I felt myself becoming overwhelmingly nauseous. “W-What am I doing out here?” I asked between bouts of gagging. I stared across the mess of toppled monuments, waiting for an answer. “W-Who's there?”

  There was no reply.

  Hobbling like a zombie, I started down the road and hurried away from the graveyard. Every step was painful, but I trudged on nonetheless, my head too crammed with fright to dwell on the physical. I'd walked—not driven—several miles in the middle of the night to this remote, abandoned spot. And I couldn't remember a moment of it. One minute I'd been drifting off back at the hotel. The next, I'd come to like a feral child in the grass, surrounded by the dead.

  This wasn't the first time that I'd woken up without knowing what had gone on the night before, and I had a suspicion that the mud I'd found on my jeans the last morning might have come from this same graveyard.

  I'd been coming here in my sleep for two nights running.

  I'd been drawn here, outside of my own control.

  This time, though, I'd prepared for this possibility. Before going to bed, I'd set up a camera in my hotel room. What had it captured? Something told me that I really didn't want to know. It would be easier, funnier, to write this off as some kind of bizarre sleepwalking incident. If I returned to the hotel room and watched the tape, it was possible I'd find something terrible, something that would put a whole new face on the matter.

  It was time to leave Detroit. Whatever was plaguing me, drawing me back to this derelict neighborhood, had its limits. If I drove out of the State completely, eventually I'd get far enough away that it wouldn't be able to claw me back.

  At least, I hoped so.

  But I'd learned better than to rely on mere hope, and knew that I needed to seek out some answers before permanently leaving Michigan.

  I needed to see what was on that tape. Now that I knew I'd lost all control of myself after dark, I had to face to possibility that there was something wrong with me; that the house, or rather the thing lurking in it, had sunk its fangs in me. Had I been hypnotized by it? Possessed by that hideous specter I'd taken for the spirit of Irma Weiss? I felt the need to talk to someone with experience in these matters. Father Kaspar, the priest, might be able to do something for me. If there was something hanging onto my soul, maybe he'd know how to get rid of it.

  There was someone else I'd have to talk to as well.

  Willard Weiss had hung up on me, but I wasn't through with him yet. Until I knew for sure that he had nothing to do with the haunting of 889 Morgan Road, no insights to share, then he'd remain on my radar. I had a feeling that I'd have to visit him personally; if he had his way, he'd just keep hanging up the phone. A face-to-face talk, even if I had to strong-arm him into it, was my only option where the old man was concerned.

  I made it into town within an hour, and though I looked like total shit, the locals—probably used to seeing the disheveled homeless wander about—didn't bat an eye. I slipped into a CVS and bought some first aid supplies before the cashier noticed I wasn't wearing shoes, and then caught a bus to a stop within a few blocks of my hotel.

  When I returned, I was shaken—but not at all surprised—to find the hotel room in a disarray. To begin with, the camera had been repositioned. I'd set it up on the tripod, near the door, before going to bed. It had since been moved some feet to the right, so that it was parked in the doorway to the bathroom.

  That was hardly the worst of it, though.

  The blinds had been left open—dangling from the wall—and all of the faucets in the bathroom had been left on. The bedclothes had been thrown everywhere, and the cords to both the lamp and alarm clock and been knotted together. The air conditioning had been turned to its lowest possible setting, lending the room an uncomfortable chill and leaving beads of condensation forming on the window as the new day outside began warming the pane.

  Most chilling was what I found scrawled across the bathroom mirror in soap. The bar of soap was still inside the sink, one of its corners worn down like a stumpy crayon. In rough letters, the following message had been left behind:

  Deep in the marrow, a raven pleads; and in the marrow, the raven breeds.

  It'd been one hell of a party, by the looks of it. A party I had no recollection of.

  Once I'd soaked my battered feet in isopropyl alcohol and picked the crumbs of asphalt from my cuts, I limped out of the bathroom and retrieved the camera. I switched out the dead battery and powered it up, sitting on the bed with my feet up.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw on that recording.

  Some fast-forwarding was necessary to get to the action. The camera had captured roughly forty minutes of content around all of the dead space. Curiously, the battery had packed up shortly after the action ended, almost as if it had been intentionally drained by some outside source. I'd had to switch it out before watching the footage.

  In the first two hours of the recording, there was nothing to be seen but blackness. This blackness was eventually interrupted by a flash of the bedside lamp. The bulb didn't come on like it usually did, with a click and a flash. Rather, as though the light were a liquid being poured slowly into the bulb, the light had gurgled on, appearing less yellow and more orange than was the norm. And when it came on, I showed up in frame.

  I was not sleeping in the bed, as I had expected, but standing on it.

  Staring at the ceiling with a blank expression, my hands hanging limp at my sides, I stood there, completely still, for ten or fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, the bedclothes—previously balled up and gathered at the foot of the bed—began rising into the air as if on a strong gust of wind. The sheets and blanket circulated about me
sluggishly, seeming to defy gravity, and as they hovered, their lacy borders came into contact with what appeared to be obstacles that were invisible to the naked eye. As the folds of fabric slumped over and became snagged on unseen fixtures possessed of real shape, the contours of what appeared to be heads, shoulders and outstretched arms appeared in their creases. The bed was surrounded by a dense, unseeable congregation, and I stood on the mattress at its center. As the swirling bedclothes washed over the members of this crowd, they at times looked like the generic ghosts one might see in television—figures draped in a sheet with holes cut into it for eyes.

  The light flickered off for a moment, and when it returned, I was no longer on the bed, but floating above it. My head was not visible, but I appeared to be in animated conversation with someone nearby, perhaps on the ceiling. My legs swayed beneath me like the string on a helium balloon, and a number of hushed whispers sounded across the suite, which made the camera speaker crackle somewhat. I couldn't hear myself, couldn't make out the din of conversation among the other occupants, but that I'd heard these voices before back at the house was beyond doubt.

  As if signaling a scene change, the light blinked off and on again, and the next bit involved me standing at the window, speaking to someone through the glass. I had my back to the camera, and my body was largely blocking the window. Even at this imperfect angle I could make out a reflection distinct from my own, and I was shaken by its deformity. Gaping black eyes of differing widths stared back at me as I mumbled. A gaping mouth opened in reply, and from within it there glistened a hundred quivering eyes.

  Irma.

  The light bubbled. When it came back on, the angle of the camera had changed to capture me standing in the bathroom. Someone—I couldn't be sure who—had moved it. This new position was sufficient to capture me fully in frame, but whoever I was chatting to in the mirror was omitted. To my horror, some minutes into this whispering exchange, I picked up the bar of soap and began writing on the mirror with it.

  I had been the one that left the writing on the mirror.

  There was a garbled flurry of voices accompanied by a burst of static as I dropped the soap and left the bathroom. The look on my face was dreamy, stupid, and a litany of long shadows flashed across the walls as I passed—all of them stemming from my own. I bumped the camera as I walked out, and then the main door could be heard to open and close. I'd walked out in my pajamas, barefoot, and set out for the graveyard then. The reasons for it were unclear, but it was plain that I hadn't been forced; by the looks of it, I'd thought it a wonderful idea at the time.

  The lights flashed off, and this time they didn't come back on. As darkness reigned however, there were occasional grunts and growls in the darkness, along with footsteps. Eventually, these petered out. Finally, the battery lost the last of its juice and the recording came to an end.

  The recording on my camera, it could be argued, was incredibly valuable. It was the most convincing proof of supernatural phenomena ever put to tape. I didn't think of it that way, though. To me, it was only solid proof of how screwed I was.

  The spirits in that house had followed me out.

  They were interacting with me after dark, when I should have been asleep.

  I'd brought them out of the house and into the hotel room. They'd hitched a ride like head lice.

  My skin crawled at the thought, and it took all my self control not to smash the camera to pieces. I didn't want to believe what was on it. I wanted to believe, as any ordinary Joe who might stumble upon it, that it was all bullshit—movie magic.

  With a shaky hand, I picked the camera back up and set it on the desk. Then, stepping into my boots and tugging on a sweatshirt, I tucked the device under my arm. There was someone who needed to see it.

  Father Kaspar hadn't been too impressed when I'd called him to bless the house in the middle of the night, but if I showed him this footage he'd understand the severity of the situation.

  If my hunch was right and I was currently carrying a number of spiritual hangers-on, then I was in desperate need of help. Showing him the footage would prompt him to take action. I'd submit to any ritual, any treatment, if it meant ousting the ghosts that haunted me after dark.

  I set out for the Thomas Aquinas rectory downtown, the camera rolling around in my passenger seat.

  Thirty-Four

  I didn't care whether it was Father Kaspar or some other man of the cloth who helped me. As I stormed towards the rectory, I simply kept a lookout for the first man I found with a white collar.

  The parking lot of the attached church was rather full, and a handful of people emerged from inside. A grey-haired middle-aged man in purple vestments stood outside the main door, shaking hands. A Mass had just let out, by the looks of it.

  I pushed past a few waves of parishioners, camera squeezed tightly under one arm, and jogged up the steps towards the priest. “Father?” I called, waving manically.

  The man turned. He'd been speaking to an elderly woman about making plans later in the week for brunch when I'd interrupted him. He spared the woman a smile, and that same smile tightened as he sized me up. I cut a rather deplorable figure in my mud-stained garb and wild-eyed state. “Yes, how can I help you?”

  The voice was the same I'd heard on the phone. It was him. “Father Kaspar.”

  He nodded, waited for me to proceed.

  “My name is Kevin Taylor. We spoke on the phone.”

  His eyes lit up and he looked at me with renewed interest—and possibly disgust. “Oh, yes. You're... the one working on that house. You wanted to make plans for a blessing, right?”

  A few families with young children wandered past. For their sake—and because I was already embarrassed for looking like a hot mess—I tried to rein it in. “No, it's... things have gotten more serious than that. The house isn't the problem anymore, it's...” I brought a shaking hand to the camera, squeezed it in my palm. “C-Can we talk, please?”

  Moved by the urgency and fright that was apparent in my face—or else wanting to get this encounter over with as quickly as possible—he nodded. “Yes, certainly. Let's... let's go inside, Mr. Taylor.” He smiled at the remaining church-goers as they filed out and then motioned to the main door, leading the way.

  I shuffled after him, shoulders tense, head low. “T-Thank you, Father.”

  “We'll speak in the sacristy, if that's all right with you.” Passing through the narthex, we entered the church and then cut a sudden right, entering a small room that looked half like an office and half like a dressing room. A pair of altar boys were sitting around inside, shooting the breeze, and the priest gave them a quick nod that made them scram. Kaspar eased the door shut and began removing his purple vestments, revealing the black cassock beneath. “So, what brings you here today, Mr. Taylor? I don't mean to rush you, but I'm set to spend some time in the confessional this afternoon, so I'm a bit pressed for time.”

  I held out the camera and gave it a little shake, as if he was supposed to understand. He didn't get it, and instead looked at me like I was a total idiot.

  “I, uh... I've been having troubles, Father. Serious troubles,” I said.

  “I can see that,” he replied, putting up his vestments on a hanger. “How may I be of assistance?”

  “Do you... do you believe in ghosts, Father? In demons?” I asked.

  He arched a grey brow. “Erm... What is this about, Mr. Taylor? Specifically?”

  I spilled my guts. “That house, Father. I've spent a lot of time in it. And all that time, there's been something in there with me. I didn't know it at first. I played it off, pretended like it wasn't there. Even when things got frightening, I... I ignored it, tried to work despite it. But... I can't ignore it anymore. Whatever is in that house—a ghost, a demon, I don't know what—is in me now. I think. I mean, it's... it's hard to explain. I have, uh... footage here that...”

  Father Kaspar's blue eyes narrowed and he leaned against a table, arms crossed.

  “There'
s something in me,” I reiterated. “I need it out. I... I need you to cast it out. I know how crazy that sounds, but I've... I've got proof. Can you exorcise me, Father? Please?”

  Father Kaspar patted my arm, and for a moment I thought he was on the verge of acquiescing. Instead, he began to shake his head. “I'm sorry, Mr. Taylor, but that isn't quite how it works. Exorcisms are rather tricky things. One can't simply procure an exorcism from any old parish priest—there are hoops to jump through, and only certain priests are trained to carry out such rituals. What's more, they aren't performed very often around these parts. Usually, the Church wishes to rule out psychological reasons for—”

  “OK, but... I have proof!” I interrupted, shaking the camera at him again like an angry fist. “I can show you!”

  “I'm sure that you do,” replied the priest, eyeing the camera. “But as I've just explained to you, an exorcism is not possible at this time. And while I'm sure that you think it a perfect cure for what ails you, I—”

  I interrupted once more. “Father, you're not hearing me! I have an actual problem here! I've... I've been seeing the most dreadful things. And I've been going places late at night—without knowing that I've even left my bed. I've seen things in that house that you wouldn't believe. Please, you've got to help me! I've got nowhere else to turn.”

  The priest, more bothered by my meltdown than anything, nodded to the door. “I'd be happy to bless you, Mr. Taylor. We can even pray for the intercession of St. Benedict, if you'd like.” He eased open the door and pointed to a small, square fountain sitting between the pews. “Come, this is our baptismal font. I'll bless you with holy water. Perhaps that will help, yes?”

  It wasn't an exorcism, but I was open to anything. I followed him out, standing beside the fountain. A large white candle stood behind it on a golden stand, and I looked down into the water, seeing my haggard reflection. A number of stragglers remained in the church, kneeling in the pews. They were probably waiting for the priest to finish up with me so that they could meet him in the confessional. Now and then, they looked over at us, and I wondered how much of my ruckus they'd heard through the sacristy door.