The House of Long Shadows Read online

  The tiles in the shower came down very easily. Many of them had barely been hanging on, and I soon discovered why.

  The wall behind the shower was water-damaged.

  I clicked my tongue and turned to the camera, tapping the mold-stained wall with my crowbar. “Ah, that's a shame. This wall is no good. Whoever installed this shower didn't know what they were doing. They used plain old drywall here when they should have used something water-resistant, like concrete backboard. I'm going to knock this drywall out of here and have a look at the space behind it. Fingers crossed that there's no serious damage.”

  I wrenched the toilet from its place and pretended to strain comically for the camera before lugging it downstairs and hoisting it into the dumpster outside. When I'd managed to loose it from the wall, I did the same with the bathroom sink. With those out of the way, I had more space to work with, and I began ripping up the floor tiles. All told, it took me just over two hours to pry up the tiles and dispose of them in the dumpster. The maniac pace of the work left me drenched in sweat, and hungry, but even as the afternoon wore on I didn't allow myself a break for lunch. Chugging a water bottle and munching on a handful of protein bars was all the break I needed. When it came time to use the bathroom, I pissed in the yard and got right back to work. I was determined to get as much of the work done as possible before dark.

  Throwing on my dust mask and safety glasses, I started on the next phase of work; replacing the damaged drywall with something water-resistant. “Let's see what's behind this wall, eh?” I said as I began tearing down the drywall around the shower. Better not be another dead body, I thought as the mold-blackened material began hitting the floor.

  Thankfully, there wasn't any corpse there. There wasn't even any mold or damage to the studs. I was so pleased at this that I actually cheered. “Hell yeah! Would you look at that!” I told the camera. I lifted it from the tripod and took a slow pan of the exposed wall. “Not a bit of mold. I keep lucking out with this house, I tell you what. All I'll need to do for this is hang some concrete backboard. When that's up, I can tile it just like it was before, and it should last for many years without problems.”

  I took some measurements of the space and wrote down the dimensions of the backboard I'd have to buy. I planned to pick it up at a hardware store on my way to the house the next morning, where they'd be able to cut it to size for me. After cleaning up the fallen drywall and hauling it to the yard, I then brought the camera downstairs with me to the kitchen. Feeling energetic and wanting to get some extra footage I could use in a later video, I took a sledge to the kitchen cabinets, knocking them to pieces with a few well-aimed blows. I carried out the splintered cabinets and heaved them into the dumpster. Making sure that the camera captured my struggle, I dragged the stove and refrigerator out to the front lawn—the latter taking me more than half an hour of breathless starts and stops.

  With hours of footage to sift through and a serious stink on me, I started packing things up for the night. The sun was beginning to dip in the sky and I was keen to light out before it was lights out.

  When the cleanup was finished, I shouldered my bags and prepared to lock up. “OK, Irma,” I said with a seasick smile, glancing around the downstairs. “Don't burn the place down while I'm gone. And maybe consider moving out, will ya?” I don't know why I called the spirit by that name—it seemed convenient, I guess. For that matter, I don't know why I insisted on calling out to her at all. Joking around about the situation made it an easier pill for me to swallow; maybe if I talked to her we'd build up some rapport.

  I clocked out and headed for the hotel.

  It'd been a good day, for once.

  Twenty-Four

  The hotel shower felt like heaven. I lingered in the hot water till my skin was red and savored the steam as I toweled off. After a hard day's work, there was nothing like feeling clean again.

  I'd have liked to crawl into bed right then, when my relaxation was at its zenith, but unfortunately I still had a video to put together. When I'd thrown on some sweatpants and a T-shirt, I hiked down to one of the restaurants located beside the hotel and brought my laptop with me. There was a quaint Chinese place that served hot tea with every meal, and though I got a weird look for setting up my laptop at the table, the server didn't give me any fuss. I ordered steamed pork dumplings as an appetizer and two dinner-sized portions of chicken and broccoli. Hungry as I was, I wondered if I shouldn't preemptively order a third.

  I threw on some headphones and sipped at my Oolong while reviewing the day's footage. I'd recorded for several hours, and there was a lot of fluff that would need trimmed. I started with the first scene of the day, my work on the shower, and cleaned up the sound as best I could during the muffled portions where I was wearing a dust mask. Pleased with this scene, I skipped ahead some to the part where I'd started carrying bags of tile out to the dumpster.

  That was when I first heard it.

  I didn't think anything of it, at first. In fact, I thought I was merely hearing the chatter of some other patrons in the busy restaurant. It wasn't until I cranked up the volume on my headphones that I became sure it was coming from the recording, rather than my immediate surroundings. And with that realization, one of the pork dumplings I'd scarfed down began a slow climb up my esophagus.

  There were voices on the recording.

  And they weren't mine.

  I sometimes talked to myself, muttered, when at work. But that wasn't what I was hearing now. The recording featured a few unfamiliar voices in low conversation, and from the sound of it they'd been just a few feet from the camera—so close that they echoed somewhat throughout the cramped bathroom. I hadn't heard them at the time of the recording, though, which made no sense.

  The longer I listened, the more I realized they weren't wholly unfamiliar.

  One, high and wheezy, sounded like the air escaping a punctured balloon.

  Another, coming in reply to the first, was a low, painful groan like a frog that had just been stepped on.

  I dropped my fork onto my plate and sat upright, moving a little ways into the recording.

  There I was, on screen, dropping more tiles into a garbage bag. I bitched and complained to myself about the weight of them as I lifted the bag off the ground. There were no other voices, no noises save for the jangle of shattered tiles as they settled in the bag. I walked off-screen. My heavy footfalls faded as I descended the stairs. From far-off, I could be heard to open the front door.

  Before I could write off the hushed voices as a mere coincidence, they started up again. The moment I was out of earshot, the moment I'd stepped out of the house, the eerie chatter continued.

  “What the fuck?” Though my binging on Chinese food was at least partly to blame for the perspiration forming across my brow, it was in listening to those voices that I really began breaking into a cold sweat. I'd heard them before, these voices. I'd managed to push them out of my mind for a time, to half-assedly convince myself that they hadn't been real. But here they were, captured on tape.

  And they were frightfully clear.

  “It's not a dream,” said the croaking one with a sickening laugh, and I was sure at that moment that I wasn't listening to anything remotely human.

  One voice, so low that it hurt my ears to listen to it, droned, “Can you hear me, Paula? This is your Edward—Edward Franklin Ames.”

  Another voice entered the picture, this one disturbing in its echoey androgyny. “Let me in. I won't hurt you...” A growling laugh followed. “It's me, sweetheart. Bradford from Annapolis. I just want to talk, Sarah.”

  I paused the footage and removed my headphones. There was soothing instrumental music playing overhead, and for a time I let it flow into me.

  The waitress came by and asked if I was all right. “You look pale,” she said, handing me the bill.

  I choked down a cup of lukewarm Oolong and handed her a pair of twenties, shaking my head so fervently it was hardly convincing. “I'm fine. Fine.”<
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  Having had my fill of video editing, I shut my laptop and tucked it away. The waitress came by with my change and I hurriedly left the restaurant, my head swimming and my entrees abandoned half-eaten. I had more video to edit—there'd be no way around that—but I needed some time to think.

  Starting into the cool evening, I stopped by a coffee shop across the street for a flat white. Rather than getting sloshed at the hotel bar like I'd done the night before, I sought the alertness caffeine would grant me. Maybe, with a little espresso in my veins, I'd be able to figure out what the hell I was hearing in the background of these recordings.

  The laptop in my backpack seemed to weigh more than usual, as if the horrors I'd just discovered on it had real mass to them.

  I'd watched enough ghost-hunting TV shows in my time to know what it was I'd captured. These were electronic voice phenomena—EVPs. The capture of voices that shouldn't have been there at all. Aside from videos or photographs, EVPs were about the best evidence of the supernatural that existed, though I'd never run across any so clear as these. Usually they were hard to make out, nonsensical, and could be attributed to radio interference.

  Not these.

  These were the real deal.

  I rushed back to my hotel room, hung up the “Do not disturb!” placard like I was planning on getting lucky and set up on my laptop on the bed. Without stopping to listen to the demonic little conversations in the margins, I managed to pare down the day's footage to the necessary tutorials and pieced together a video that was—I admit—sloppier than the norm. I uploaded it to VideoTube before I remembered to add in the intro animation, and unlike my recent uploads, this one didn't have any music in it.

  With the day's work out of the way, I turned my attention to the other matters that quite literally haunted me.

  Even with all of the lights on in my hotel room the place felt awfully dark. As I pulled up the raw footage and got my headphones ready, I felt increasingly nervous, like I was about to do something illicit. I'd gotten this feeling as a teenager, before playing with a Ouija board at a friend's house. Sometimes it would turn up in dark movie theaters, too, moments before a horror movie started rolling.

  Sitting on the edge of my bed, I looked down at the carpet and found that my shadow was spreading across the floor like spilled ink. What the hell? I shuddered, recalling the way the house on Morgan Road distorted shadows, and flopped onto the other side of the bed so that I wouldn't have to look at it. This whole city was fucked, I decided. When I was done with this project, I'd go to some other State, far away, where shadows knew how to behave.

  For a little while, I reviewed the day's footage with my headphones on, skimming the conversations that took place when I was off-camera between numerous unseen speakers. The croaking voice was a staple, and I seized up every time it spoke—though the others weren't necessarily less disturbing.

  One, a gasping voice like someone on the verge of suffocating, recited a series of nonsensical rhymes that went something like, “In the town where I was born, there was a boy who had a horn. And with that horn he drew the blood, the blood that nourished every bud. Deep in the marrow, a raven pleads; and in the marrow, the raven breeds.”

  I Googled this and some of the other bits I could comprehend, but nothing came up. The voice on the recording was apparently a real original, then.

  I thought to search for something else before I lost my taste for the recordings and shut down my computer altogether. An earlier voice had claimed to be that of an “Edward Franklin Ames”, reaching out to “Paula”. A search for “Edward Franklin Ames” did produce a result, and upon reading it, my confusion—and revulsion—only multiplied.

  There was a brief writeup on a website dedicated to historic Detroit. Specifically, Detroit's most notorious murderers. Listed among them was one Edward Franklin Ames who, in 1919, had murdered his wife, Paula Ames. His method? While she slept, old Eddy had taken a thick glass bottle and knocked her in the skull until it caved in. After getting locked up for this heinous crime, he'd been murdered by a fellow inmate in 1921.

  I tried sourcing the other name I'd heard in the recording, that of “Bradford and Sarah from Annapolis”. At first, I hit a wall, but taking a wild guess, it turned out that adding the term “murderer” to the search produced a hit. In 1952, a man by the name of Bradford Cox butchered a woman named Sarah Cantor a few miles from St. John's College in Annapolis. He'd killed her with an axe and had reportedly kept her dismembered body in the trunk of his car, only to be apprehended days later in his search for a new victim. A separate story, also archived on the Annapolis Messenger Journal's website, detailed Cox's suicide in 1958, while serving a life sentence.

  I was disgusted by these discoveries, and at the notion that the spirits of such monsters should still linger in the world. And yet I was also curious why the voices of these men—one from far-off Maryland—had turned up in my recording. The article on Ames listed the site of his crime, and it was in a part of town some twenty minutes away from Morgan Road. He hadn't murdered his wife in the house I owned, so why had his voice been captured on tape? Bradford Cox had lived all the way out in Annapolis, Maryland. Why was I hearing his voice now, some sixty years after his suicide?

  Maybe it was a coincidence.

  It's no coincidence, you damn fool. More likely is that the house you bought is some kind of portal to Hell. If you listen to these voices long enough, you're bound to hear Hitler and Mussolini carrying on, too...

  I tried not to think about it, returning to my previous stance of complete neutrality. Doesn't matter. It's none of your business. Just get the work done. Fix the house, get your TV deal and never look back. This has nothing to do with you.

  Putting out the lights, I dove into bed. Sleep played hard to get, and while courting it my mind went all over the place. As I'd been doing lately when things got tough, I thought about my dad and whether he'd ever had a weird or frightening experience in any of the houses he'd worked in. His reaction would have been much different than mine, surely; he'd have been cool and disinterested. Unflappable. He'd even stared down the specter of death without flinching, and had been absorbed to his dying breath with the work he'd been hired to do.

  If you listen to that tape long enough, you'll probably hear the old man make a cameo, I thought, and that brought me the closest thing to a laugh I'd had in hours.

  I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy the soft mattress, the quality bed linens beneath me. All I could think about was the house, though.

  889 Morgan Road was supposed to be empty right now, but if I focused hard enough I could practically see that frail, white-haired specter sitting in my chair, or pacing between the rooms. I knew she was there, and that she'd probably been there every night now for a very long time. The dusty air was likely filled with horrible voices, all of them pouring out of that drooping maw of hers.

  Irma, I thought. These are Irma's prime hours. She's up and about, I'm sure of it. I wasn't sure that the spirit really was of the house's previous tenant, Irma Weiss, but the name seemed to fit and I went with it. It felt better to give her a name, even a wrong one, than to simply refer to her as “the ghost”. Doing so made it easier to humanize her.

  Once, my dad had given me a piece of advice. It was rare for him to impart gems of wisdom, so I'd paid attention when he'd told me, “Don't shack up with a woman unless you're gonna marry her. You're asking for trouble if you let a girl into your life like that and you're not serious about it.”

  I laughed aloud, thinking of the dead woman who was stalking around my house at that very moment.

  Somehow, I didn't think that this was the kind of arrangement my father had been warning me about all those years ago.

  Twenty-Five

  My alarm went off at six in the morning.

  By seven, I was in the van, ordering a McMuffin and a large coffee.

  A half hour later, I was at the abandoned graveyard in what was fast-becoming a daily ritual.

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p; It had rained the night before, and little pools of standing water existed in spots where the ground naturally dipped. Being careful to keep my boots dry, I stepped over the puddles and walked along the grassy path, studying the grave markers and trying to read the faded names on them. Spending time in the graveyard daily, the occupants of the tangled plots were getting to be like the acquaintances one usually makes on their daily commute. There was Roger Smith, who'd died in 1922, and then there was Roderick Kemp who'd gone ten years before that, and who'd had a little cherub carved into the top of his tombstone. I felt like I was getting to know the whole crew.

  I was eager to get to work, but in no rush to enter the house until the morning sun had had a chance to reach its every nook and cranny. It was while idling in this way that I made an inadvertent discovery among the toppled stones. I'd been preparing to loop back around towards the van and was in the rearmost section of the field when one stone in particular caught my eye. It was the marker's relative smallness and simplicity that made it stand out among the rest, and taking a closer look I found it to be in rather good condition considering the ruination of those adjacent.

  It was a tombstone for an Edward F. Ames, who'd lived between 1888 and 1921.

  For a moment, I wasn't sure why the name rang a bell.

  And then, startling, I remembered where I'd first heard it.

  Heard the voice of Edward Franklin Ames, that is.

  “Can you hear me, Paula? This is your Edward—Edward Franklin Ames.”

  Pushing away the overgrown grass, I knelt down beside the grave marker and stared at it a long while, like I expected the name on it to magically change. The man—the infamous Detroit killer—I'd heard on that recording the night before had been buried here? Just minutes from the house I'd bought?