The House of Long Shadows

by Ambrose Ibsen

“So, we hatched a plan. The girl was no daughter of ours any longer—she was the devil's alone. She had to be dealt with. In 1981, when she was 19 years old, I poisoned her. She proved susceptible to muscle relaxers. Irma had been prescribed some after a back injury she'd gotten after a tussle with Fiona. I injected the girl with twice what I believed to be a lethal dose and she went into a coma.

  “The rest, I suppose, you already know. I hid her body in the living room wall. We told people we saw in town that she'd run off on us, and though they were sympathetic, none seemed particularly surprised. But Fiona didn't die.” Weiss shuddered. He fished his inhaler back out of his pocket and set it on the table, preemptively. “Not right away.”

  “She'd been behind the wall for only a few hours when we first heard her stir. The voices—terrible, inhuman voices—started coming out of that wall, calling out to us all around the house. We heard her thrashing around in there, trying to break free. This went on for some nights. She died a slow death back there, and we heard every minute of it. And even when her body gave out and she suffocated, the voices kept going. Her corpse was still filled with them. Parasites.

  “We'd hoped that the spirits in her body would move on, that they'd eventually leave, but they clung to her like wasps in a hive. And they went on to incorporate themselves into the rest of the house, too. You'd walk around after dark and see long shadows up and down the halls, or feel someone looking at you in an otherwise empty room.

  “But those damned voices... Every night, you could hear them. Months had passed since we'd put the girl back there, and the voices kept on. I couldn't handle it, I moved out. Irma, though...” Weiss hesitated, jaw growing tense. “Nights and nights of this drove her out of her mind. She knew better than to listen to the voices and the terrible things they spewed, but even as she stuffed her ears with cotton or went out into the yard, the knowledge that the house was filled with them got to her. It began to affect her health, the constant stress and terror. The house was such a burden that it aged her and killed her years before her time. She'd wear earplugs after sundown, trying to drown them out.” Weiss drew in a shaky breath. “She didn't want to leave the house for two reasons. The first, was that she thought—rightfully—that someone should live there and keep an eye on Fiona's resting place, lest it be disturbed and the nightmare start up elsewhere. Her other reason was that, frankly, she'd always wanted to be a mother. Fiona had been a monster, but she'd been our responsibility, and to her dying day Irma had committed herself to the girl.

  “Irma's body gave out and she died before she could end up like Fiona. For that, I'm thankful. I abandoned the house after that. The neighborhood as a whole was on the verge of emptying out, and there seemed to be no chance of the area ever being spruced up. Maybe, far into the future, the houses would all be demolished and something else would be built there, but by then I reckoned I'd be dead and it wouldn't be my problem anymore.

  “I have a theory about the nature of that house, based on the changes I saw over the years. After Fiona came to rest in the wall, after her physical body died, her spirit and all of the others she'd housed became something else. Transformed, if you will. They integrated with the house, possessed the building, so to speak. And they laid low, waiting for someone to come in there and give them a new body. They would have taken Irma if she'd only listened to them. That's how they get in, I think. If you start listening to the dead, open yourself up to them, they sneak in. Slowly at first, so that you barely notice. Then, when the floodgates open, all bets are off. And I guess that's where you come in.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, though I already knew.

  “The spirits,” uttered Weiss, sizing me up with a frown. “They're in you now.”

  This news was not altogether new; I'd already suspected that the spirits had followed me out of the house. Nevertheless, I didn't believe that they'd made a home in me—that I was toting them around. I laughed nervously. “No, that's not right. They're tailing me, but... I haven't let the ghosts in. I would never do something like that. Fiona invited them, went looking for them, but I...”

  Weiss stared at me a long while, toying with his earlobe. “I suppose it is up for debate, isn't it? I saw Fiona ravaged by these spirits that now accost you, saw her transformed into a monster over the course of years, but what do I know? You're probably fine. Perfectly fine.” He waved as if to dismiss me.

  “I've been seeing them—Fiona... the shadows... And I've been hearing the voices. Just before I came here, at the hotel I'd been staying at, I—”

  “That's right,” replied the old man, chuckling to himself. “You've been seeing them outside the house. Which means they've found a way to move freely beyond the bounds of that property. Tell me, how do you think they managed that? For twenty—no, thirty years—after I abandoned that house, they stayed put. They fell into a lull. Fiona's corpse sat behind that wall, undisturbed. But suddenly you come along and find the body. You let her out. And no sooner do you let her out, do the voices start. And the shadows, and the sightings. No, I'm sure that things happened before you found that body, didn't they? It didn't feel quite right in that house from the very start. But you stayed. You stayed.” He laughed harder, shaking his head. “You gave them permission, kid. You made yourself at home there, and the pests that had laid their roots in the building descended upon you when you least expected it.”

  “No, no... That's...” I wanted to shut him up, to deliver some articulate argument to the contrary, but came up short. Thinking back to my first days in the house, there had been the long shadows, the seeming malfunction of the porch light, the disembodied footsteps, the scratching behind the walls. Things had only gotten worse after my discovery of the body, but even before that day the house had indeed given me a bad vibe. And Weiss was right about one thing: Despite my feelings about the property, I'd stayed there. Even the night after finding Fiona's corpse, I'd stayed.

  “Irma wasn't all there towards the end,” continued Weiss, soberly. “She knew to protect herself from the spirits—not to listen to them. Whenever she did listen, they'd tell her, 'Let me in. Let me in.' Like the wolf in the Three Little Pigs story. 'Let me in'. My wife was unwell, but she wasn't stupid. She never listened to those voices. But you did, didn't you? And you did nothing to protect yourself. What did they say to you?”

  I froze up at the memory of those strange and terrible voices. “At first, I didn't hear any voices. But then, when they did start up, they said all kinds of things,” I replied. “There was one... it spoke in rhymes. Others would be snippets of conversation. Or sounds of laughing. Crying, too. I don't know... there were so many. After finding Fiona's body, I ended up capturing some of the voices on camera. I listened to them, tried to figure out what they were saying. It was hard, though. The voices are so ugly, so... inhuman.”

  Weiss nodded. “Notice how they didn't start up all at once. Things got worse slowly over time, didn't they? It makes sense. I'm sure that the house had been used by squatters and the like for brief periods, but no one had properly lived in it for a long, long time. The spirits aren't dumb. They won't suddenly awaken, start jabbering from the onset. They'll start up slowly, wait until you're comfortable there. Until you're willing to dismiss their murmurings as voices on the wind. You've got to hand it to them—that's the way a predator seizes its prey. You were like a frog in a pot of water. They boiled you slowly. By the time you knew what was going on, it was too late.”

  I wasn't sure what disgusted me more: The idea that I may be filled with malign, foreign spirits, or the amusement Weiss expressed. “OK, enough. I get it. Staying in the house was stupid. I've realized that for awhile now. But surely it's not too late. I'm still not inviting them in like Fiona did. Surely I can cast them out... right?”

  “I wouldn't count on it,” said Weiss. “Maybe you can—call a priest and see. But if I'm right—if those spirits have changed... coalesced into something more virulent—then you'll have a hell of a time getting rid of the
m. You've only got one option.”

  “And that would be?”

  Weiss spelled it out for me. “Your only real option is to die somewhere remote, somewhere hard to find. From this day forth, consider your body a tainted vessel. Imagine it's filled with nuclear waste. How might you dispose of such a thing? I'll tell you how: You go out into the desert somewhere, find a ditch and you die in it, praying that no one ever finds you and catches the same batch of spirits that now cling to you. Maybe, in a hundred years, their presence will wane and they'll dissipate like a foul gas, returning to whatever hell they crawled out of. That's your best bet, and my only advice.”

  “You can't be serious,” I challenged.

  “I'm being completely serious. Do you think that I killed and hid Fiona for my own pleasure?” was his rejoinder. “It was the responsible thing to do. It needed done. As her father, I had to take responsibility for what she'd become. If I let it out of that house, then there was no telling what that ghost-filled abomination might have done. Despite her monstrosity, Irma loved the girl to the very end. Women are like that, aren't they? Sentimental. A mother can't help but love her child, no matter how awful they become. It wasn't like that for me. I suspect you haven't got any kids of your own, and so you don't know what it's like to be a father. In order to be a father, you have to be prepared to turn off your heart. To know when enough is enough. No, no... this is more than mere fatherhood. If you consider yourself a real man, then in situations like these you must set things right without hesitance.”

  I lacked the wherewithal to argue with the old man about the finer points of his outdated philosophies on parenthood or masculinity, but it occurred to me that his description of Irma—as an unfailingly loving mother—was the antithesis of what my own mother had been. In my life, the roles had been reversed. I'd merely been a boy—wishing always for warmth and parental approval. My mother had been the monster.

  “How can I stop it?” I demanded, as if expecting him to suddenly come up with a new, more appealing solution.

  He stood, his knees cracking as he did so. Shuffling across the kitchen, Weiss took the plate of food on the counter and brought it back to the table. Guzzling some soda, he burped loudly and sat back down. “I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there is no way out. You did it to yourself. You stayed in the house, gave those damnable things the audience they craved. If you truly value your life—your dignity—then hide away in some hard-to-reach place and—”

  “No! Don't even suggest it.” I fumed, pacing around the kitchen. “There has to be something else. Maybe this has happened to other people. Or, you know, there could be some clue in the house. If the spirits are in me, maybe I can return them to the house.”

  “You haven't listened to a word I've said,” replied Weiss, choking down a bite of his sandwich. “I don't envy your position, but you know what needs done. You know what you have to do. If you don't do it soon, you'll end up wishing you'd never been born. Now, kindly leave. It's getting dark, and I don't care to see what you've brought with you.”

  Rage flowed through me. “Why don't I just call the detectives who collected Fiona's body, huh? Maybe I'll fill them in, tell them whose body that is and how it got there!”

  Weiss shrugged me off. “Feel free. I have no guilt. As her father, I understood what had to be done. I manned up and did it. Unlike you.”

  The old man wasn't going to change his tune. I'd learned everything I could from him. I returned his cell phone to the counter. Leaving him to his dinner, I slid open the door and stepped out into the lawn. Before I shut it behind me, I thought to ask him one last thing. “There's something I've been wondering about. There's a Callery pear tree growing in the front yard. Why? It reeks. I've hated it from the moment I first saw it.”

  At this, Weiss set down his sandwich and looked sorrowfully past me, into the dusk. “Oh, the tree.” He sighed, wiping at his lips with a napkin. “I planted it for Irma. She loved its flowers, and I just wanted her to have something pretty to look at. She was a prisoner in that house towards the end. Tending to that tree was the only joy in her life.”

  I'd been planning a smart-assed reply, but I swallowed it instead.

  I took off, burdened with more than the ghosts I'd brought.

  When I'd arrived, I'd prayed that Willard Weiss would be of help to me. I was now leaving his place, weighed down with leaden hopelessness.

  Thirty-Eight

  I sat in the van, staring down at my phone. I had a new voicemail message.

  Though I couldn't bring myself to listen to the entire thing, the caller—a woman who spoke way too fast—was apparently affiliated with the Home Improvement Network. She'd been calling to “touch base” and wanted me to “get back to her”, presumably to arrange for a visit to the house by network representatives.

  I deleted the message before it finished playing and threw my phone into the passenger seat.

  I didn't care about that anymore. I wished I'd never cared about it in the first place. It'd been my determination to see the job through, to secure a TV deal at any cost, that had gotten me into this mess. Now I had nothing.

  No, not nothing. I would've much preferred to have gained nothing from the house, actually. But the house had given me quite a lot, and without my knowledge. The house had gifted me multitudes.

  The sun was going down. Night was on its way, and I knew what that meant.

  Weiss is right. You're absolutely fucked.

  Though I'd brought the camera with me, packed with horrid footage of the supernatural, I hadn't even shown it to him. Not that he'd wanted to see it; he didn't need visual proof to believe in monsters. In his days living on Morgan Road with Fiona, I reckoned he'd seen his fair share of such horrors.

  To hear him tell it, I had no choice but death. You don't need me to tell you why I thought that was a shitty idea.

  I wanted to live. To make it through this somehow. Though Weiss had offered no salvation, I still believed—or tried to believe—that there was a way out of this. Even after watching myself on tape, floating in mid-air; even after coming to in the graveyard, I grasped blindly for an escape hatch.

  I was willing to concede the point that the spirits in that house had entered my body, that I now served as a kind of host to them. I couldn't feel them in any obvious way, but the not-so-subtle changes in my appearance made their presence hard to deny. My eyes and skin had changed, and my hair had started going prematurely grey, like Fiona's had.

  Thinking back on the time spent in the house, I tried to look at things through a new lens, applying everything I'd learned from Weiss. What I most wanted to discern was the exact point when the spirits had taken hold. Figuring this out proved exceptionally difficult, however. After a bit of meditation on my earliest moments there, I found I couldn't be sure of anything. Had I been in full control of myself throughout that first night, or had my reactions been guided by an external force?

  One easy case to look at was my own relationship to that abandoned graveyard near the house. I'd discovered the spot before I'd even found the body—before I'd even known the name Fiona Weiss. I couldn't have possibly known of its significance, or of Fiona's pilgrimages there to seek out new souls, but I'd found myself drawn to the spot, repeatedly, just the same. My gut told me I hadn't wound up there of my own accord. More likely, I'd been lured there by Fiona. Her influence, however subtle, was likely vaster than I realized.

  Until I'd spoken to Weiss, I had been certain that the body in the wall had been that of an old woman. I couldn't have guessed at the truth—it was too unbelievable, too grotesque. A peculiar girl had taken to inviting spirits into her body, and the resulting strain had left her an aged husk. It had resulted, too, in a specter more terrifying and loathsome than any borne of a single human soul. Countless spirits had taken up residence in the girl's body, and for decades they'd merged within her corpse. In Weiss' opinion, they'd mingled behind the walls of that abandoned house, evolving into something new, more virulent.r />
  Now, they were in me.

  Weiss had told me that I'd brought this on myself, and I hated to admit it, but he was right. I should have left in those early nights when things had begun feeling off. After the first few incidents, the first suspicions of trespassers, or glimpses of long, unnatural shadows, I should have backed out of the project. I thought back to the note, too—the one that Fiona had modified. She'd spelled it out for me, plainly. We want you. Many of us. All of us will be watching. I'd chosen to ignore the warning.

  I cursed my father, stupid though it was. I'd spent a fair amount of time wondering how my father would have handled the job, how my father would have fared in the face of such strange events. “Don't give up on this job! Dad wouldn't have given up!” I'd told myself. It'd been a terrible misstep to stick to my father's unreasonable standards, though. He'd been obsessed with his work up until his final breath. There'd been nothing healthy or virtuous about his passing. My father had been a perfect example of what I'd have done well to avoid in life. Instead, I'd clung to his memory and emulated his stubbornness.

  I started driving. The sun was slipping and every hair on my body began standing on end as if to watch it set. The van was large, spacious, but it didn't feel that way as I took off down the road, racking my mind for a destination. With every passing mile, I felt like there were other people in the cabin with me. We were pressed in like sardines, barely any room to move, to breathe.

  Thinking back to my talk with Weiss, something he'd said had really chapped my ass. “I understood what had to be done. I manned up and did it. Unlike you.” I wondered if Weiss would be so keen to “man up” if he were in my position. He'd made it sound like a simple thing—I merely needed to find a quiet place to expire, some place where my body wouldn't be disturbed. He'd implied with seeming delight that I didn't have the balls to do it.

  Believe me, I wanted to prove the asshole wrong, but I didn't want to have to kill myself to do it.