The road disappeared behind me as I drove up the narrow, rugged gravel driveway to my family’s ancestral home. As I rounded a treacherous bend, the old house came into view. I was glad that I had thought to rent a 4x4 pickup for the trip. Years of abandonment and neglect had led to that bend being partially washed out. That washout was the first thing that I would have to fix if I decided to renovate and repair the old ho...
The vacant, old house at the end of the lane beckons me. They always do - the dilapidated and forgotten. There is an appeal others overlook. Unable to resist its quietness, I settle in, deciding to call this place home. The wind blows through the window cracks, but it doesn't bother me. Oddly, I feel comforted in the chilled corners of the room - a warm welcome of sorts. Dust adorns the mantel. Cobwebs decorate the bland...
The basement didn’t show up on John’s radar until about a year after they had lived in the house, though other spots did, and much more quickly. His daughters took note of the upstairs hallway before they even moved in. Em said it felt weird. John felt it too, and even Alice, who did not put much faith in the supernatural, said she thought of the countless footsteps of previous lodgers and families who used to live here....
“Where the hell are all the forks?” John grumbled from the kitchen, not for the first time. “Emily takes them,” said El from the dinner table. “No I don’t!” wailed Em. El turned to her Dad. “Emily takes them and she hides them,” she said. “This is between her and me,” said John. “No need to get involved.” Sensing a temporary victory, Em added, “And quit calling me Emily!” John shushed them both and continued making breakf...
Em asked her Dad to mount a full length mirror on the inside of her door when she was nine years old. The mirror whispered to her just after she turned ten. Or rather, something in the mirror whispered. She had just started fourth grade, and for the first time in her life noticed that others looked at her, others judged her: her clothes, her skin, her weight, her hair. She started hearing words that had been around her al...
The girls had been getting along pretty well together in El’s room, El playing teacher, Em playing student (they always played the same roles without variance), but then Em had turned rebellious on her teacher and was threatening to not do her assignment until El shared some of her apple. Now they were fighting. John and Alice knew this because they were on the first floor of the house, in the family room, directly below...
In retrospect John blamed the incident on his own suggestibility, and on the scrapbook. The previous owner, Henry Stode, considered himself to be a bit of an amateur historian, at least when it came to the house. He had inherited an overstuffed scrapbook from the previous owner, who had inherited it from another previous owner. The book was not organized in any way; it had originally been a photograph book, with clear pla...
Dad was at work. Mom was at the grocery store. Her sister Em was at a friend’s house. El sat on her bed, playing with her kitten, Shadow. El had a feather on a string, and tossed it out like a fishing line for Shadow to chase. Something sounded from outside the room. Shadow jumped off the bed at once, his attention no longer on the feather. He bolted out of the room and took a sharp turn into the hallway. El followed him...
Clocks had a way of misbehaving in the house. Clocks often misbehave, particularly mechanical ones. The clock in the car that is two or three minutes slower than the clock last spied before leaving the house. The clock on the oven timer that never quite matches up with the always correct digital clock on the iPad being consulted for a recipe. The unused coffee-maker clock forever blinking 12:00, from now until the end of...
“You’re fat,” the little girl inside the mirror said to Em. It was long past midnight. Em’s parents and sister were in bed. Em was standing in front of the closed door of her room, where her Dad had hung the full length mirror. She regarded the reflection. The person in the mirror looked just like Em. She wasn’t Em, though. She wasn’t even a little girl, though she looked like one. She wasn’t Em, wasn’t a little girl, pro...
The house stood at the entrance to the block, dwarfing all the other houses. John and Alice learned a bit of the history of the house from the previous owner, who was a bit of an amateur historian. The original owner of the house, a Mr. Reginald Bowens--the man who built it, gave it life, brought it into the world--was a railroad scion for C&S Railways. The smaller houses in the neighborhood that huddled under the house’s...
The realtor described the place as a grand old dame of a house: a three-story high Victorian in a state of slight disrepair, built in 1897 but with so many random, period-inconsistent architectural details added on over the years (a deck over the front door, a mudroom added on the side, several of the larger rooms broken up with wallboard and framed for apartments) it did not qualify for the historical registry. People si...
THE ALMSHOUSE Chapter 1I remember my last day at St. Margaret’s. It had been snowing, as it did every winter in Ashford, Pennsylvania. The roads disappeared under blankets of white, and businesses closed, slowed by the weather and the Great Depression. From my window, I watched people hurry home to their families, breathing on their hands to keep warm. Everyone had somewhere to go, everyone except the twelve of us strande...
Her name was Tina, she worked in our data processing division. She always looked and conducted herself as the total professional who was dedicated to her job. Some dubbed her a cold fish, but I always felt they had read her wrong. As it always seemed that we had our lunch at the same time I attempted to break the ice by starting a conversation and to my delight she responded. Finally after a few weeks of polite conversati...
October 31, Halloween night. The haunted house will be closing for the season, and what a season. The final night was another night of record breaking crowds. The Jaycees had taken a gamble and it had paid off. Now I was older than most of the other actors by a least a year or two, but my real world my experiences made me seem much older in their eyes. Most of them were still in senior high and some in Junior high, but th...
