The House

There’s a danger in there. We shouldn’t go in there. They have secrets made of small leaves and strange histories. If we go in we will find nothing.

It’s an old house, next to the new ones, in the old town we have grown up in, as philistines with baseball bats and short-sleeved shirts. It’s an old house with a creaky door with a cobwebbed knob. No one has lived there for years. It is unsafe. A crowd is forming behind us.

We must go in. But we shouldn’t go in. There’s a danger in there and I can almost taste it.

Still we enter. Still we walk slowly, in awe, with no flash cameras, with eager souls. The others are following us, tugging at our clothes because of the dark.

There is a story to be told for every room. There is a history but I only know some of it. Knowing too much could be dangerous. Knowing too little could be deadly. We could make it up. Or we could get out of here. I don’t like being haunted. We shouldn’t like being haunted. The crowd is abuzz.

One of the crowd – the youngest – is almost giggly with anticipation. She has heard more stories than we have but we are the oldest so we have to lead. Sometimes having the most responsibility is dangerous.

The youngest one tells us that she once heard the house was to be demolished, that a prospective buyer wanted to sell the land to our fathers. But then there was a lull. Months passed and the buyer backed out at the last minute. He backed out quietly, with only a note on out-of-state letterhead to show for it. He hasn’t been back to town since. And this story we believe because the youngest one, a child, wouldn’t voluntarily speak of buyers and letterhead.

I am afraid for myself. The silence is relentless. There are ten of us in here and none of us can hear a thing, none of us can make a sound. It is dark and old and dusty and dead in here and we aren’t adding a single audible breath to the room’s sound. We have been turned into nothing, ten of us, and we are helpless to do a thing. The youngest one speaks first but most of us don’t hear her. We are in another room now. There is tugging at our clothes, a train of children and teenagers both frightened and overjoyed and the youngest one is at the end of the line and we can’t hear her.

Perhaps she has said something important. I can hear breaths of concern, that the youngest one is missing. I hear the front door slam, perhaps she ran outside. I want to ask the one who was supposed to be in front of her if anyone is tugging at his clothes, if anyone was tugging at his clothes, but I can’t say a thing.

Often we are brainwashed to believe exactly what we want to believe.

We find a spiral staircase and one by one the nine of us now walk upstairs to where the real secrets are answered and the deadest ghosts recline. I try count the footsteps. I can tell there are more than five of us but probably less than ten. I am hoping we have only lost one. I am scared. There is danger upstairs.

I make it to the top first. There are two directions to walk, straight ahead or to the left. I walk straight ahead with my forearm leading the way. I touch what feels like a slightly ajar door and I push it forward only to realize I should have pulled it toward me. I change course and pull and feel for the opening and I walk through. I don’t say a word because I want everyone to follow me. I want everyone to feel the same fear I am feeling as I enter the first upstairs bedroom, where the deadest ghosts are said to recline.

I stop and I wait until I no longer hear footsteps. I count the steps I do hear. By my estimation seven of us are in the room. I know the youngest one never made it to the stairs. The next two youngest may have stayed downstairs or gone to rescue their frightened child friend. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are eight of us. Or nine or five or one, me, making echoes that sound like others. Maybe the person tugging at my un-tucked shirt is a ghost, no longer dead and reclining but lithe and spry and here.

Next I try to find the first upstairs bedroom closet. The closet, according to local legend, is where it all happens. This is where the victims, sanguine and oblivious, spent their final restful night, before they woke in the morning to the terror in the closet that doesn’t have a name, the dread that so surely occurred and just as certainly cannot be defined. It smells like a thousand years in here I say to myself and though there were no houses in the town a thousand years ago, though this house is no more than a hundred years old, my sense is shared by the others in the room, I think, I hope, I fear.

In the daytime, before we entered the house, I said to the group, we need to do this while we are still young so we have stories to tell our children, so they navigate the world with an endless curiosity. I know now that I tell a good story. I know now that I didn’t mean any of it.

Though it is unnamed we know that in the closet lived something, a person, a spirit, an animal, a ghost, something that had a motive to kill and make bodies disappear. Though it is unnamed it is understood this way, in these terms: something, kill, disappear.

As my arm reaches out for a closet I sense that I am stepping on what feels like dry leaves. The oldest one before me, the boy who did not come along today, the boy who gave us every detail he could name about the house, told me that early each spring, with the house’s surrounding oak trees plied with fragments of leaves, a harsh wind would touch down in the valley and the swinging shuttered windows would open wide, thirsty for the tree’s new life. The tree would shed its first set of small spring leaves, not yet full, hardly green and the wind would carry them into the upstairs bedrooms, this one and the next. The wind would dissipate and the windows would shut and the trees would be still, waiting to be replenished with the next rains which would always come the next morning by dawn, always the morning after the wind.

I didn’t doubt what the older one said to me. I believed it then and I believe it now as I step on the small dry leaves and I listen for the crackled footsteps of others.

The history of the leaves was not the most important thing the older boy told us. He also implored us not to speak, not to scream, just to breathe. If we spoke, if we screamed, we would perish in a blaze of light invisible to the living but unmistakable to the dead. Perhaps this is where the youngest girl went.

This is why when I hear a whispered voice in the bedroom I cringe. I am now more alone than before. This is why when I hear a scream following the whispered voice, a scream surely emanating from the child whose clothes were no longer being tugged, I cringe again, one less friend, one less confirmation of our journey into the soul of death.

If there were no more than seven at the top of the stairs, there can be no more than five now. I still feel the tug on my clothes, so we’re somewhere between two and five.

The terror I felt before entering seemed justified at the time. Now, though, the terror has been replaced by a sense of pride at being one of the few still left standing. I’m in the top half, perhaps in the top two, and this is a story I could tell to my children with pride. My friends may be dead but I didn’t love them as much as I love myself and the history I spawn.

I find a doorknob and know that I should pull, as is the case with all closets. Except this one. This one isn’t moving as I pull so I push. I hear a creaking door move forward. I disappear into the darkest place I have ever conceived of and I feel the second oldest one follow me, squeezing my shirt so tightly that it hurts both of us. I don’t know if anyone is behind us and I have to stop to think to count the footsteps and when I am primed to count I have to stop again to feel the airspace in front of me and when I feel nothing but air and I remember to count again I no longer feel anyone touching my clothes. I chase my short term memory. Did I hear whispers? Did I hear screams? Did someone say something, anything? And I swear I hear nothing. But perhaps I was too busy feeling and counting to hear. Perhaps I am alone. This makes me happy. I am the last one standing. They are all dead and I am still here and I am in the closet that houses the spirit that killed the people who now recline in the rooms of the house as the deadest ghosts of all. I am the bravest and I am the oldest and when I descend the staircase in a downward amoebic coil and I retrace my steps to the front door and I stay silent as death and I open the door into the safe night beyond this house I will be alone to answer for the ten of us. I will be questioned and I will be studied. Many will wonder what it is I carry that others do not possess. Some will say it is age. Some will say it is that I am a natural leader. Others will say I failed to lead but I will blame the higher powers, the house and its century of neglect and torpor. Some will suspect me of the darkest crimes but I will walk away from them. Now, the closet is defined for me, as I touch all three of its walls in succession, as I hear thunder crack and winds howl outside, as I remember that it is spring and this is the first storm, as I hear the shuttered windows bang open in a defiant thrust, as I feel the first of the oak leaves slap my smooth, un-goose-bumped skin. I hear myself breathe in, breathe out. I feel myself fighting against words. I feel a scream flailing its way up my throat. I twist my tongue to keep it inside, I clench my teeth to keep silent, but the thunder smacks and the winds grow stronger and the leaves won’t stop. I am too weak to stop this next scream. I can feel it punch my abdomen, squirrel up my windpipe, and shove itself into my mouth and because I die the moment I scream I hear nothing but I know it happened.