The House of Long Shadows

by Ambrose Ibsen

  I rolled onto the highway and started going south. I wasn't sure where I'd end up. The tank was half-full and I just wanted to put Detroit behind me for good.

  Food. It'd been a while since my last meal. Maybe I'd be able to think more clearly if I ate something. I couldn't think of anything that sounded remotely appealing, but every few miles, when the billboards for restaurants popped up, I took a gander and tried to decide which exit to take.

  In the distance, stretching into the sky so that it was backlit by the final embers of the day, was a cathedral. The sight of it brought me a good deal of relief, and I assured myself that I wasn't alone in this—that there were still people in the world who could help me get rid of these things. My visit with Father Kaspar had gone sideways, but surely I'd find someone else who could cast these ghosts out of me.

  Or, I wondered, what if they aren't in me anymore? What if they've moved on?

  Now that I was speeding out of Detroit, there was no telling how the spirits would react. I rolled down the windows, let the fresh air wash over me. The feelings of stuffiness and occupation in the van immediately dissipated.

  The further I drove, the more I wanted to believe that the spirits had never really been inside of me. You never spoke to them... you never went looking for them. You never gave them permission. Unlike Fiona, I'd never formally invited the things into my body, and I'd never gone looking for them. She had been overrun by spirits because she'd courted them, “swallowed” them up. That was a big difference. Perhaps the spirits had taken an interest in me, but so long as I didn't want them there, they would never be able to stay in me like they had in Fiona.

  I had a warm feeling right then. A feeling that, somehow, everything was going to be OK.

  Glancing at the next set of billboards, I decided to take the next exit to grab some Arby's.

  Before I could shift into the right lane, I felt a strong tickle in my throat and began to cough. My lungs ached as I hacked over and over again, a terrible itch running up and down my airway. Something needled my epiglottal flap—a tonsil stone? When I finally caught my breath, I hit the dome light and opened my mouth, inspecting myself in the rearview mirror.

  What should have been a momentary glance became a full-on stare as I discovered a bump on the inside of my mouth, just beyond the soft palate. It was fairly small in size, looking very much like a boil that hadn't come to head. I kept one eye on the road, another in the mirror as I reached into my mouth and explored the new growth with my fingertip. It ached, and as I touched the angry flesh I felt something just beneath the surface that wanted desperately to protrude.

  I pulled my finger out—to keep myself from gagging—and had another look.

  In having nudged it, the lump had seemingly come to a head. A bit of white peeked out at me.

  That was when I realized I wasn't looking at a pustule, or a tonsil stone, but at a sclera.

  An eye—presumably the first of many—was starting to emerge from the inside of my throat.

  As if the owner of that eye were delighted at my discovery, a loud, croaking laugh emanated from the van's rear compartment.

  I knew then what I was becoming. And I knew, too, that the kindest way out was death.

  After that, I only remember slamming into the median.

  Thirty-Nine

  The nurse shook out a freshly laundered pillowcase and stuffed a pillow into it. Bringing it to the bed, she instructed me to sit up so that she might set it behind my head. “You weren't like this for the first few days,” she said, smiling. “I was here the night they brought you in. You were like a different person.”

  I pushed aside my dinner tray, packed with unappealing, mass-produced foodstuffs, and sat upright. “First few days? How long have I been here, again?” I blushed. “Sorry, I'm still a little fuzzy on the details...”

  The nurse was a chatty woman named Denise. She was in her early 30's, recently separated, and had two children—a boy and a girl. Her son, Daniel, was named after her ex—a drunk. She held out hope that they'd be able to save their marriage through couples therapy. One of her girlfriends, a hair stylist named Becca, knew a woman at her church who'd gone through marriage counseling with some local relationship specialist, and after just two sessions...

  Why did I know all this? It was because every time the nurse had stopped into my room that day, she'd lingered ten, twenty minutes to chat. All of the staff here were like that, as if they were bored and looking for conversation. The one thing they hadn't talked much about was my arrival to the hospital, or how long I'd been there. It was like they'd all made a promise not to broach that subject. Even the doctors hadn't said much to me. They'd referred to my stay in “days”, had discussed a certain difficulty with my care in rather vague terms, but that was all.

  “Today is your fifth day,” admitted Denise, opening the blinds and letting in a bit of sun. “When they brought you in to the ER, I was told you were non-responsive. They hurried you to the ICU, did a bunch of scans to figure out why you weren't regaining consciousness. They thought you were in a coma. The scans didn't find anything, though, and then you came around. It's pretty miraculous. You got some bumps and scrapes, but for the most part you came out of that wreck OK.” She laughed to herself. “Though the scans didn't show anything, you probably bumped your head in the crash, and that's why you started acting the way you did.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, it's hard to describe. You've since told us you have no history of mental illness, and the toxicology panels all came back negative, so we know you weren't high. Trouble is, you acted very strangely those first few nights. You were in and out of it then, mostly sleeping during the day. At night you'd get up and walk around.”

  I tensed up. “I was active at night, huh?”

  “Yeah. And you used to talk to yourself. We had a new girl, a nurse's aid, working three nights back who came in to check on you during the hourly rounds. You scared her half to death. She said you were standing in the corner, talking to yourself. We see that in patients who struggle with dementia or certain mental illnesses. I think the trauma of the crash probably shook something loose. You look too young to me to have dementia.” She furrowed her brow. “Now, let me ask you something. Your license said that you were twenty-five, but that's a typo, right?”

  “Uh, no, that's correct,” I replied.

  There was incredulity in her gaze, but she said nothing more on the matter. Turning towards the mirror over the hand washing sink and really focusing on my reflection for the first time in awhile, I understood her confusion.

  I looked wrung out. My hair was more grey than brown now, and my skin was starting to sag.

  “The third night you were here,” continued Denise, “You really gave us a scare. You popped out of your room while the staff was doing shift report at the station. No one saw you leave. We had to call a code brown—a search for a missing patient. Security guards found you half an hour later, down in the morgue!” She laughed. “I don't know how you got all the way down there without being noticed. You even got inside! We ended up having to sedate you at night, to keep you from exploring. Now that you're with it again, it's funny, right? But when they told me they'd found you in the morgue, it was kind of freaky. Like a total horror movie thing, you know? That reminds me, my friend Becca, the hair stylist, she saw a movie awhile back that was really scary. I think it might have been one of those Stephen King movies. You like those? It was probably the one with the—”

  My time at the hospital had been a blur. Since totaling my van and ending up on the intermediate care unit, my grip on the passage of time had loosened considerably. Days had bled into nights, nights into days, and the only thing that had really stood out to me was the constant churn of faces. If I focused hard, I could remember brief interactions, like scenes from a movie.

  “Hello, Mr. Taylor. I'm Doctor Florian. I just wanted to see how you were doing today.”

  “What's that, Mr. Taylor? You'd
like more ice water? Sure thing, I'll bring the cart by.”

  “I'm sorry, Mr. Taylor, but the cafeteria only serves Pepsi products. Can I interest you in some juice instead? We have apple, orange, grape—”

  I could remember some of that back and forth.

  What I couldn't remember was any of this “strange” behavior I'd exhibited. I didn't remember talking to myself. I didn't remember wandering to the morgue.

  But that isn't to say I didn't believe it. There'd been a precedent for such behaviors in my waking at the graveyard. Sometimes, after dark, I wasn't in full control of my body, because the spirits would come out to play. Fiona had probably led me down to the morgue in the hopes of chatting up the souls of the freshly-deceased. For all I knew, there were now some former patients of this hospital in me, alongside Ed Ames, Bradford Cox and all the rest.

  I'd been so out of it over the course of my hospitalization that I hadn't thought much about Fiona or the house on Morgan Road. My waking life had been consumed by banal interactions with staff, with routine medical procedures and preemptive rounds of sedatives that left me drowsy and uncertain. Whenever my thoughts did touch upon those terrible subjects, I tried dismissing them out of hand, hoping that a continued denial of the facts would be enough to save me.

  But every time I looked in a mirror, I seemed a little older. And apparently, I'd been going out of my room for nightly walks, or standing around, muttering in odd voices. As much as I wanted to believe that everything before the crash was fiction, the reality was impossible to deny. The worst was yet to come.

  Denise took notes on a clipboard after fastening a blood pressure cuff around my arm. She then hit some buttons on the bed. Sighing, she knelt down and looked at the buttons more closely, hitting them until they made a discordant dinging noise. “Not again...”

  “What's wrong?” I asked.

  “Can you stand up for me?”

  I did as I was told—with a lot more difficulty than I'd expected. My legs felt brittle, my muscles shrunken.

  Denise mashed the buttons once more, then invited me to sit back down on the bed. “I swear, every scale in this building is trash! This is the third one I've tried for you, and I can never get an accurate read.” She pointed to a little LCD panel on the right bedrail. “See? This is supposed to give me your weight, but even after zeroing it out, it's not giving me the right number. These bed scales are made to weigh patients up to six-hundred pounds, but it's telling me that you're over the limit!” She combed a hand through he hair, laughing. Tugging away the bedclothes, she asked jokingly, “You aren't hiding anyone else in bed with you, right?”

  I shrank away from her.

  Deep within me, I could feel an alien soul brushing against my bones.

  Denise had to go see her other patients and excused herself. She stepped out of the room, closed the door behind her, and left me alone. Where I would usually have invited the silence, I wanted nothing more than to listen to her inane chatter.

  The sun fell away from the window, hidden by clouds. I tried to distract myself by thinking about the weather—it looked like rain—but what I saw reflected in the glass bowled me over.

  There was a chair across from the window, near the doorway, intended for visitors.

  And there was someone sitting in it.

  The frail body twitched. Snow white hair hung down past the shoulders like lumps of Amazonian vines. Skeletal hands sat limp in the figure's lap. Though she did not move, I could feel Fiona watching me. Not with her own eyes—those were gone, long decayed—but with the dozens that blinked behind her lips.

  I sank into the bed, hyperventilated into a pillow.

  Ignore her. She'll go away if you ignore her.

  I felt the bed below me, the metal rails on both sides of me. These things were real. The figure sitting across the room wasn't real—not in the same way, at least. I was a part of this world, the physical world of hospital beds, of talkative nurses. Fiona had been a part of it once, but was no longer. She could interact with my world, wander through it, but her influence ended there. She was like a shadow peeking through from the other side—a memory.

  This isn't her world. Ignore her. You never let her in, never gave her permission, so she can't affect this world. Ignore her and she'll disappear. The more you think about her, the more you focus on her sitting there, the more power you give her.

  I cleared my mind, tried counting to three.

  When I finished counting, she'd be gone.

  I'd open my eyes at three, and I'd be alone again.

  “One,” I whimpered.

  I heard a fleshy foot connecting with the waxed floors.

  “T-Two...”

  There was movement at the foot of my bed. Hands gripped the bedclothes tightly. The rails creaked as someone climbed over them. I felt someone's weight pressing down on my legs, felt something coarse—hair-like—tickling my arms. Even with a pillow pressed against my face, I could feel someone watching me from above.

  To test the hypothesis I had only to utter “Three” and open my eyes, but I couldn't do it.

  The pillow was pushed gently aside. There was someone laying next to me. I could feel their cold lips pressed against my ear. They parted, and from deep behind them there came a quiet, croaking voice, which counted, “THREE.”

  Forty

  It was no small feat, getting discharged from the hospital against medical advice the next morning.

  A psych doctor had to come by and clear me mentally before I was allowed to sign the requisite forms, and I was warned that such a discharge would make it next to impossible to bill insurance for the cost of my care, which was by that time many tens of thousands of dollars. I'd be on the hook for every penny.

  It didn't matter. I dressed in a pair of surgical scrubs and lit out with only my wallet and cellphone.

  I'd stayed awake the entire night, fearful that Fiona might take me on another nighttime journey if I slept. When the nurses came around, I refused everything, not wanting their drugs to mess with my head. In that time, I'd struggled to come up with a plan.

  I had accepted the miserable truth. I was possessed, colonized by the souls of the dead that had come to rest behind the walls of that house after Fiona's passing. She was in me, too, and nightly directed me in seeking out more souls to add to the collection. If I allowed it, she'd keep on goading me, leading me to fresh souls in need of a worldly vessel, and my body would eventually burst at the seams. Already I had aged considerably, as she had. A human body is built to contain but one soul—the strain of hosting many was truly terrible.

  Willard Weiss had suggested that I commit suicide, and after all I'd been through I couldn't blame him for recommending it. I was a time bomb, and the only clear path forward was to hide myself away. Fiona had remained hidden for nearly forty years before I'd disturbed her. Perhaps if I could off myself in a sufficiently remote area, I'd be able to spare the world this horror another forty years. Maybe longer.

  But leaving the hospital had done much to reinvigorate me. I was reacquainted with my lust for life, and wanted to exhaust every other avenue before taking such a dire step. I would seek out every holy man in the Midwest, regardless of his faith, and request an exorcism. I'd go looking for the most respected experts in the field of parapsychology and would ask them to study me. Perhaps someone in that field would be able to crack the surface and free me of this curse.

  And, of course, I'd try reaching out once more to Willard Weiss.

  My talk with Weiss had not gone the way I'd hoped. He'd cleared things up for me, had provided me with all the information there was about the haunting of the house on Morgan Road, but he'd withheld salvation.

  I called him first thing, while waiting for a cab in the shadow of the hospital building. I didn't expect him to come up with a solution, to save me from this, but before leaving the city and seeking out answers on my own, I felt the need to speak to him again. His closeness to the events that had created this haunting made him
vitally important, and if there were any other details to be gleaned that might be of use to future investigators, I wanted desperately to know them.

  I hadn't expected him to answer, but he did. “It's you, isn't it?” was the first thing out of his mouth.

  I told him that it was, in fact, me. “Things are getting bad,” I said. “I don't look my age anymore. I feel like I'm falling apart, man. I'm losing track of time, and I see her everywhere. Each night, she's guiding me to do things. I was in the hospital, and even there...”

  Weiss was silent for a long while. When he spoke up, it was merely to berate me again. “I've told you this already, but you did it to yourself. You shouldn't have stayed in that house. I wish I'd burned it down. I wish I'd hidden her elsewhere. Maybe this wouldn't have happened, then.” He cursed under his breath. “You shouldn't have stayed there, kid. You could have avoided all of this.”

  “That doesn't help me much,” I replied. “And I didn't have a choice but to stay there. I was working on the house, fixing it—I mean, how was I supposed to know? No one told me about what had happened there, what souls were resting in the place. I've stayed overnight in a number of worksites before and never encountered something like this.”

  “No!” spat Weiss. “You did know, damn it, and that's why you're up Shit Creek! Tell me again, how many signs did you ignore, huh? How many things did you pass off as 'coincidence'? You fucked around in that house even when, deep in your heart, you knew you shouldn't have been there. You brought it upon yourself. I shouldn't feel bad for you. I do, but how I wish I didn't.”

  “That house was supposed to be my shot at something greater!” I shouted. My eyes ached with tears. “It was supposed to be a turning point for my career. I only had to fix it in thirty days and put out some shitty videos. People—important people—were interested in me! They wanted to put me on TV when I was done. No shit, I stuck it out. Even when things got scary, I kept working in there because I wanted so badly to succeed. But I couldn't have possibly known what I was getting into. No one could have known.”