One by One

by D. W. Gillespie

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Frank said, appearing beside her. He leaned in close, whispering into the cup of her ear so that Debra, who stood twenty feet away, inspecting the siding, couldn’t hear.

  “Almost couldn’t get her out here,” he said, a conspiratorial tone in his voice. “I knew it was a long shot. Mom and Dean, they were the hard sells, but you…” He clapped a hand on her shoulder. “I knew you’d like it.”

  Alice couldn’t keep the smile off her face if she tried.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take the tour.”

  The three of them made their way around, finding a long, wooden porch that stretched the width of the house. Alice took a few steps back to take it all in from a distance, and sure enough, she was looking at what would normally be the front of a house. From here, it was more symmetrical but no less odd.

  “Now,” Frank said as he held open the front door for them, “there are so many interesting little things about this place.”

  Alice walked in, staring at the cavernous hallways, the ceilings that seemed too tall, the blank walls and peeling paint. For the first time in her life, she thought about what their house meant to her, searched for the words that most perfectly captured the place where she’d spent the entirety of her childhood.

  Comfortable. Safe. Bland.

  But this house was so different, the change so drastic, that she struggled to make sense of it. The words that came to mind as she stared at the foyer were a far cry from what she was used to.

  Dark. Cold. And most of all, mysterious.

  “It might not look like much, but all the foundation is solid. No bugs, mice, anything like that. And this is an old-school building, so everything is solid.…”

  “You already said that,” Alice whispered.

  “Well, I’ll say it again!” he said with a grin. “Seriously, though, all we need is paint, a little bit of refinishing on some of the hardwood. I mean, look at these floors.”

  He stomped up and down, apparently meaning to signify…something.

  “Yep,” Debra said, giving her daughter a side-eye. “They’re floors all right.”

  “Okay, you need a little more to impress you, I can see that. Just let me give you the tour, and trust me, you’ll be in love.”

  Frank led them through like a genuine realtor, showing off the finer points wherever he could find them and seemingly making shit up whenever he couldn’t.

  “This here,” he said, tapping the doorframe, “that’s oak. Can’t beat oak.”

  “How in the hell do you know that?” Debra asked.

  “Honey, I have a life outside our family.”

  Alice laughed at the show of it all, but she had to admit, the place was something to see. Nothing quite seemed to fit where you thought it should, but that only added to Alice’s desire to delve deeper into the dollhouse. She drifted off from her parents, away from the guided tour to explore on her own. In the center of the house was a tangle of hallways wrapped around a staircase. Alice took the hall opposite the stairs and ventured deeper into the far side of the house. She stopped at the first room she came to, a bedroom from the look of it, and peered inside. It was small and cozy, the only room she’d seen with carpet up to this point, but it was somehow darker than it should have been. It wasn’t the paint or the cramped confines but something in the gray light that shined through the windows. She stepped across the room and looked through the smudged windows, squinting. A sudden face appeared, and she screamed.

  “Calm down,” her dad said from the other side of the window. “I told you this place was amazing.” He slid open the window.

  “Dad, you scared the crap out of me.”

  “Well…sorry,” he said, leaning against the window frame. “Check it out though.” He gestured behind him. “This used to be the back porch, and they turned it into a utility room. The washer and dryer are in here.”

  “How is that a good thing?”

  He stared at her, incredulous. “You have windows that open into another room.…” He said it as if there could be no question as to why that was a positive thing. “I’m thinking this could be your room. If Dean won’t get his ass here, he doesn’t get to pick.”

  Alice’s older brother hadn’t been up there yet, and she could only consider it a bit of a protest against the move.

  “Maybe I don’t want windows that go into another room.”

  “What?” he said, laughing. “It’s like a clubhouse or something. You kidding me? I’d have killed for something like this when I was a kid.”

  “It’s kind of just…I don’t know. Creepy.”

  “Creepy is good,” he said, leaning in.

  From somewhere behind him, Debra asked, “Are you coming?”

  “Go on up, I’ll be there in a second.”

  Frank waited a moment for her to leave, and then he leaned farther in. “Look at this place,” he said, a childish excitement in his voice. “It’s a small room, but just picture what you can do with it. Think about the wall colors, what kind of things we can hang on the walls, where your furniture can go. Come here.”

  Alice walked close enough for Frank to rest a hand on her shoulder.

  “This is yours,” he said earnestly. “Make it whatever you want it to be, baby.”

  With that, he was gone again.

  Alice continued exploring as her parents’ voices seemingly rang from all directions, echoing across the hardwood floors and high ceilings. The hallway through the downstairs was circuitous, doubling back on itself in a series of small bedrooms and bathrooms. Even without electricity, she could see the tall, three-sided mirror in one of the half bathrooms that turned her into endless reflections, stretching in either direction.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Frank’s voice filtered in from the hallway. “The entire house doesn’t face the road at all. There was an older dirt road from years ago that it used to face. That’s why it looks so weird when you pull up.”

  “You just said that like five minutes ago,” Debra said. “And what’s the beauty in having a house turned the wrong way?”

  “It’s unique.”

  Alice met them back in the hall at the foot of a narrow set of wooden stairs. Above them, a single, small landing glared down from behind a thin handrail.

  “You don’t see stuff like this in our old neighborhood,” Alice said.

  Debra glanced at Alice and cocked an eyebrow. “It’s not our old neighborhood yet.”

  “Alice, come check out the upstairs. You got to. I promise, you’ll love it.”

  The three of them wound up the tiny staircase, taking a sharp turn. Frank led Debra deeper into the farthest recesses of the house as Alice lingered behind, staring over the edge of the tiny guardrail. It seemed so out of place there, as if the builders had forgotten to add a wall. She leaned forward, glancing down at the floor a dozen feet below her. The guardrail groaned under her touch.

  The upstairs hallway seemed endless, a narrow corridor with a bathroom on one side and a squat, half-sized door opposite. She leaned down, inspecting it.

  “Dad,” she called. “What’s this?”

  He peered out of a room farther down the hall, squinting. “Oh, it’s a crawl space. It leads to the attic, I think.”

  “Why is it so small?”

  “They used to build them like that,” he replied, the confidence in his voice waning.

  “That’s right, honey,” Debra said, peering out the bedroom. “You see, in the 1800s, everyone was three feet tall.”

  Alice laughed, and Frank shook his head. “There’s another entrance to the attic from the master bedroom,” he said with authority. “This is just another, smaller storage space. See. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Alice stared at the door as she walked past. It was weird, but then again, this entire house was weird. Why would
it start to make any sense now? Her parents were exploring the master bedroom when she found them. It was gigantic, easily the largest room in the house. The ceiling was angled, about seven feet on one side and nearly fifteen on the other. Sunlight beamed down on them from a long, narrow skylight set in the center of the ceiling, warming the room. Alice walked farther into the room, standing under the bloom of sunlight and looked up, smiling.

  “What the hell is that?” Debra asked.

  “What?”

  “That!”

  She pointed at the window to the right side of the room. Just on the outside, what looked like a ladder rested against the window frame. Frank stared at it for a moment, as if not quite sure how to spin it.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “It’s a fire escape.”

  Alice walked over for a closer look. The ladder was bolted to the outer wall, and it stood, solid and unmoving, about six inches away from the siding.

  “Why do we need that?” Debra asked.

  “Well,” he fumbled, “this is an old house. This is the only bedroom on the second floor, soooo, you know, if you needed to get out quick…”

  “Or get in quick,” Alice muttered.

  “Somehow,” Debra said, “I missed this little gem on our first walk-through.”

  She strode over and slid open the window before grabbing the ladder and giving it a good shake. It was, despite the peeling white paint, still solid. “Wonder if we can take that down.”

  “Why?” Frank asked, almost wounded.

  “I don’t like a direct line into my bedroom from outside. We’ve got smoke detectors. That should be good enough.”

  Frank stood for a moment, mouth open, appearing completely at a loss.

  “Well, if the two of you are done crushing my dreams, I can show you the real crown jewel.” He walked to the far side of the room and pointed out the window. “Now, if you two find a way to piss on this, well, I’m just going to have to move into a hotel or something.”

  It took Alice a moment to realize what she was seeing. The roof on the back side of the house was so gently sloping that it was nearly flat. Alice realized she could have stepped out of the window and walked around on the thirty-foot span of rooftop if she wanted to. But beyond that was the real attraction.

  “What do you think about that?” Frank said.

  It was, or once had been, an in-ground pool. A small, concrete deck was lined with a tall wooden fence, and in the center was a green, muck-filled hole half filled with murky water.

  “Oh, good Lord,” Debra said. “You honestly thought that would hook your daughter in? You poor, stupid man.”

  Alice stared, squinted, tried to imagine anything other than a sickly pond, but came up short. “I don’t know, Dad.…”

  “It looks bad, I know, but come down and get a closer look.”

  They trailed along behind him, back down the stairs and outside as he chattered on about more of the fine features of their wonderful find. On closer inspection, the pool looked far worse, but Frank’s animated excitement was almost contagious.

  “See, the hole, the concrete, the fence, even the pump! It’s all here. The expensive part is already good to go. All we gotta do is clean it up and replace the liner. I’m talking a fraction of what putting in a new pool would be.”

  The winter breeze blew through the yard, and Alice shuddered, huddling deeper into her jacket. An in-ground pool was about the last thing she could think about at the moment.

  “You said this place would save us money,” Debra said.

  “Well, you have to spend money to save money. You know that. And over time, if we fix everything up, we could flip it for a huge profit.…”

  Alice and Debra looked at each other, then back at the pool. Frank trailed off, as if realizing he was losing them.

  “Picture this,” he said, taking a different angle. “What if we don’t go on vacation this year? We save all that money because the vacation is right here. I told you it would take a little imagination, but by the time spring comes around, this will be a sparkling blue diamond. Dean and his buddies will have a place to hang out, so he’ll be home more. Alice, your sleepovers will be all-night swim parties. And, Debra…honey…light of my life, every single day, you’ll be able to come out here after work and just relax. Maybe we could even put a little bar out here? And I, your loving husband, will be back there, making margaritas. We’ll be floating around all summer without a care in the world.”

  Alice was smiling, half because of how silly her father could be and half because she was already sold. She glanced over and saw her mother trying not to grin. It was a weird place, a slightly unsettling place, but there was a gravity to it as well. It had already pulled her dad in, and it was getting its hooks into her also. This, of all the places she had ever seen, was a prime spot to daydream. The woods, still strange, still terrifying, pressed in from all sides. There were secrets there, secrets everywhere, and to most people, that would be a bad thing.

  “I can’t even think of moving before Christmas,” Debra said.

  “We don’t have to,” he said, his tone telling Alice that he’d already rehearsed this point. “We’ve already paid for the old house up through January. There’s no rush! So let’s take a few weeks to enjoy the holidays, relax, do all the stuff we always do. I’ll start working on packing things up, doing whatever it takes to make this work. Then, the week after Christmas, we move in. The kids will still be out of school then, so there’s less pressure.”

  Debra was shaking her head but in a playful way.

  “One more Christmas at the old place,” she said with a grin. Alice looked up at the strange house, wondering how much it might change in the next month. It was their home now, and it was clear that she needed to get used to that fact.

  Frank turned from Debra to Alice back to Debra again. His eyebrows shot up a bit, and his smile widened.

  Chapter Two

  Alice’s room – the one with the strange, interior windows – was slowly gaining the appearance of an actual living space. The frame of the bed was set in the general spot it would finally live, and boxes filled with clothes, decorations, toys, and all of the other random knickknacks that made up her young life were stacked in an irregular pile near the door. The mental gymnastics had begun, the bare patches of wall being laid out in her mind with posters, her dresser, mirrors, and everything else she might need. It was, of course, a downgrade in size. Her previous room had felt more open, but the change wasn’t necessarily a bad one. The new room was cozier somehow, the ceiling lower, the walls tighter. It felt, in some odd way, like a hobbit hole, a tiny place in the ground that was hers through and through. Only one real problem remained as far as she could tell.

  Those windows…

  Her father had promised to get some blinds up before bedtime, but the day was already half gone. Always full of good intentions, he wasn’t the most efficient or handiest handyman in the world. She lay back on the mattress that rested on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, trying to get a feel for the place. The excitement was still there, still real and electric, but the night was coming fast. She knew, more than most, about how things changed in the dark, the things that shadows hid. Anything awful or terrifying that could be out there in the dark halls or gray crag woods, she had already imagined much worse. Nights were like that for a girl with an overactive imagination. Beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

  She glanced over at the pair of windows that looked out into another room, a long, bare corridor of unfinished wood. A bit of sunlight peeked in, but she could practically see the moonlight already, could imagine what it might be like in the dead of night. The moonlight wouldn’t be so bad, but the cloudy nights, the black nights, those would be something else. How easy would it be for someone to break in through the back door, the utility room, as her dad called it, and peer through those windows? Alice could alread
y see the face, the eyes glowing.

  “I thought you were unpacking.”

  She turned back to find her brother, Dean, standing in the doorway, one earbud in, the other dangling in front of his chest. Alice wasn’t sure if he refused to look at her or if there really was something interesting on his phone.

  “Glad you joined us,” Alice said, propping herself up on her elbow.

  Dean looked up at her. He was tall, already taller than their dad, but he hadn’t quite grown into that frame yet. He’d asked their parents for a weight set for Christmas, but they bought him a month-long gym membership instead. He’d gone twice, but she figured it wouldn’t stick.

  “I had stuff to do,” he replied.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. You’d do anything to get out of work.”

  “Whatever,” Dean said.

  “Seriously, where have you been?”

  “Over at Max’s,” he said, his tone going from bored to annoyed. Dean was one of the last of his friends to turn sixteen, a sore spot that Alice usually knew to avoid.

  “You’ve been over at his house a lot lately,” she snipped at him. “Bet he’s getting tired of driving you around.”

  He finished up with whatever bit of internet nonsense he needed to before glaring at his sister. “Your room’s smaller.”

  “I know,” Alice said. “I like it like this.”

  He took a few steps and peered into the utility room through the windows. “That’s…creepy.”

  “It’s unique,” Alice answered, parroting her father.

  “Did Dad pay you to say that?”

  “If all you’re going to do is complain, just leave.”

  Dean shook his head, curling his lip into a sneer as if he had a sour taste in his mouth. He kept staring out the windows a moment longer before turning away.

  “That’s why I’ve been staying over at Max’s so much.… This house sucks.”