The House of Long Shadows Read online

  “Any idea what assisted living home that might have been?” It was a long shot, but they say you miss all the shots you don't take, so I didn't see the harm in throwing a Hail Mary.

  She shook her head. “No clue. For all I know, he's passed on.”

  “I see.” I reached out and shook her hand. “Thank you for your time, Lilian. And for your candor. If I include any of this footage in my videos, I'll be sure to let you know.”

  She thanked me and seemed genuinely pleased to have engaged in conversation. Maybe, in a small way, it had felt like the old days for her, gossiping about the goings-on in the neighborhood with old friends. By the time I got to the van, she was already back to her newspaper, the shawl tightened around her shoulders and the rocking chair moving slowly.

  Without rewatching the lengthy video I'd just shot, I already knew I wouldn't be using any of it in my uploads. I think, from the very start, I hadn't planned to use such footage to further my work. It had been all about my dogged curiosity from the beginning, and I cursed myself for going back on my promise not to dig deeper into the house's history.

  Still, I was glad to have met Lilian. The details she'd given me had painted the house on Morgan Road in a new light—a more sympathetic light. The people who had lived there had not had easy lives. I knew a thing or two about growing up in a broken, dysfunctional family, and so I could empathize with Fiona Weiss.

  Aside from quenching my curiosity, there was an added benefit to having learned about the people who'd once lived there: I found my fear surrounding the place had largely abated. I also had some new working theories about the spirit I was seeing in the house.

  Irma Weiss had allegedly heard voices. It seemed to me that she'd struggled with some sort of mental illness, and had been largely confined to the house. The spirit of the frail old woman I'd been seeing—the woman who seemed to speak in strange, inhuman voices—was almost certainly Irma. Ignoring the fact that two of the voices I'd heard had identified themselves as notorious killers, the idea that the spirit of a mentally ill woman might wander a place after death, still mimicking the voices that had plagued her in life, was as feasible an explanation as I could muster, given the circumstances. It was heartbreaking, too. Decades after her death, Irma still hadn't found peace.

  There was one big detail I wasn't considering, though.

  The corpse I'd found.

  Was it Irma's? My gut told me that it wasn't.

  To my mind, the spirit haunting the place almost certainly belonged to Irma, but the body was someone else's. I thought back to what the detectives had told me—that the body was probably a homeless woman. Since the house had become unoccupied after Irma's death in 1991, the house had sat vacant for nearly three decades. That was a lot of time no one could account for; a lot of time for someone to hide a body in the walls to cover up a murder.

  I couldn't totally rule out the possibility that the body in the wall had been Irma's, but provided that she'd had a normal burial, how had her body ended up in the house? Had someone dug up her corpse and stashed it behind the wall as some sort of sick joke? No, it had to be someone else's body. There was no other explanation I could come up with that convinced me otherwise. The way things were looking, the woman who'd been walled up had nothing at all to do with the haunting; she'd merely been an easy scapegoat...

  But, could I really be sure of that? The spirit I was seeing looked like the corpse.

  My head was starting to hurt.

  Maybe the spirit was Irma's.

  Or maybe it was actually Jane Doe's.

  Who could say?

  I made my way to the house and pulled into the drive.

  The morning was just about gone and I hadn't even been inside yet. My stomach rumbled and I thought about running out to get some lunch before starting my work, but recalling that HIN was planning to send some reps out to look at the place, I decided to stop playing games. The clock was ticking; if the network came by to look at my progress and found it underwhelming, it was possible they'd lose interest in me, and I wasn't willing to risk that.

  I pulled up my VideoTube channel on my phone and was delighted to find that my latest upload—the one I'd done a crappy job editing the night before—was actually trending on the front page of the site. It was amassing thousands of views by the minute.

  I looked at myself in the rearview. “All right. You've got this. Get in there and bust your ass. And just think—after this month is over, it'll be surf and turf every night. You'll be livin' la vida loca. Get to it!”

  With my pep talk out of the way, I started towards the house. Pushing open the front door, I gave the downstairs a tentative scan from the entrance and then, relieved to find nothing terrifying, summoned my sense of humor. “Irma, honey, I'm home!” I called out.

  My voice echoed up into the house and my smiled faded.

  The resounding silence was just plain unnerving. There was no way around it.

  Twenty-Six

  I nearly missed the deliverymen.

  After making a quick run to the store for the concrete backboard I planned to install in the bathroom—something I should have done earlier that morning—I was getting it in place, talking at the camera, when there was a pounding at the front door that scared the hell out of me.

  A pair of big guys met me on the porch, and once I'd signed for the delivery I watched them drag the crates of stained hickory cabinetry into the house. Beefy as these guys were, they had a rough time with it. I gave them each a few bucks' tip for their time and made some casual chit-chat while they caught their breath.

  The new kitchen cabinets had been a steal. I'd ordered them from a local company at almost half the usual price. The reason for this steep discount? The color hadn't been popular with consumers and they'd discontinued it. This set of cabinets had been taking up room in their warehouse and they'd marked it way down to hasten its sale. They'd even thrown in free delivery after I name-dropped my VideoTube channel.

  As the delivery truck rattled down the road, I went back up to the bathroom and apologized to the camera for the holdup. An hour later—after some minor difficulties—I got the concrete backboard up, as well as a moisture barrier. The next day, I'd probably start tiling it. I moved the camera into the bathroom proper after that and got some detailed shots of the shower drain. I removed the rusted cap around the top and shined a light into the opening to make sure there were no obvious defects. Previous tests had proven the drain free of leaks, so that was good enough for me. I measured the width of the opening so that I could cut the tiles to a snug fit and filed away the notes for later.

  I was done working in the bathroom for the day and brought the camera with me downstairs, where I unveiled the new kitchen cabinets and graciously thanked the supplier. It would take me an afternoon to install them, at least, and I tentatively planned to begin that job when the bathroom was finished.

  The rest of the daylight hours were spent tearing up the ugly linoleum in the kitchen. I cut it away in strips with a utility knife, but getting it un-stick in certain places took a good deal more effort than I'd expected. Carrying out armfuls of the flooring to the dumpster, I was surprised, by the final load, to find the sun slipping out of view.

  That was my cue to get out of the house.

  I'd gone about my work more or less happily that day, not stopping once to think about the house's history or the spectral presence that, even then, was probably watching me from the shadows. But when the daylight began to wane, I found it hard to think of much else, and I hurried to get my things in order for the next day.

  Standing proudly in the kitchen, I took a little bow for the camera and stamped on the stripped floors. “Voila!” I said. “What kind of flooring do you guys want to see in this kitchen? New linoleum? Tiles? Hardwood? Let me know in the comments!”

  I shut off the camera and broke down the tripod, stuffing both into my duffel. After that, I spent some time chasing dust bunnies with my ShopVac in the kitchen. All the while, th
e light coming in through the windows steadily dwindled.

  I almost lamented the fact that I had to go. I knew the risks in spending time in the house after dark, but I was on such a roll I hardly wanted to quit. If I worked into the night, I could have the bathroom fully tiled in no time. The thought of working ahead appealed greatly, but the dying light made a good argument for clocking out early.

  Still, it felt nice to get some work done, to make actual progress. Up to this point, my work in the house had been fraught with all kinds of delays. This was one of the only days I'd really had a good time working. I'd been in the zone. As I gathered my keys and phone and prepared to leave, I thought back to my father, and the way he'd worked with a zen-like focus all those years. The man had never been more at peace, more accessible, than when he'd been hard at work. Was this the kind of joy, the kind of accomplishment he'd felt in his long career of fixing houses? He wasn't around for me to ask anymore, but simply ruminating on the question made me feel a little closer to him.

  My night wasn't over yet. When I'd showered and eaten, I'd stop by the hotel bar for drinks while editing the night's video. Then, if I got to bed early enough, I'd—

  I paused at the front door, tracking movement in my periphery.

  I'd been reaching out for the knob when something had shifted subtly to my left. An old, familiar dread imposed upon my good mood as I eased away from the door and withdrew a step or two into the dining room. It had probably been nothing. I hoped it had been nothing, anyway. I glanced around the dining room, then up towards the stairs.

  That was when I saw it.

  When I saw her.

  At the sight of the phantom, I clutched my keys so hard that they dug into my palm.

  A thin, pale figure dressed in a milky garb stood at the very top of the stairs, long tendrils of white hair fluttering in the draft like knots of cobwebs. She had her back to me, but I could still feel her eyes fixed on me as though they were embedded somewhere nearby. It was like the walls themselves were a part of her sensory network.

  It appeared as though she'd paused in her ascent of the stairs. One thin, veiny leg was perched on the uppermost step; the other was frozen on the step beneath it. She stood completely still there, like she'd been caught in the act of something—or like a dangerous animal basking in the scrutiny of an onlooker before lashing out.

  I was paralyzed, my mouth going dry and my knees buckling.

  To an onlooker, it would have seemed like an easy thing to simply walk out that front door, to leave the house altogether. There was enough awareness in my fright-stalled mind to further complicate my situation however, and that's exactly what I did when I chose not to escape, but made an attempt at dialogue instead.

  “W-Who are you?” I asked, my voice breaking like a teenager's.

  The woman on the stairs didn't move a muscle. As though reality itself had glitched out, she remained cemented there.

  Several moments passed before I found my voice again, asking, “Are you... are you the ghost of Irma Weiss? Tell me, who are you?”

  The reply came not from the figure atop the stairs, but from elsewhere in the house—the kitchen, from the sounds of it. As though the house's passageways were mere extensions of her throat, the woman croaked in a bone-chilling voice, “I am a raven that seeks to nest in your skin.”

  Dumb, mammalian conditioning required me to trace the source of the voice to the kitchen with my sight. When I saw no one there, I glanced back to the top of the stairs, where the woman—hitherto frozen like a statue—was now moving. With quick, rigid steps, she was coming down the stairs.

  Backwards.

  Bony hands against the wall and bannister, the woman kept her back to me and rapidly descended. Watching her jerking movements was like watching footage of someone walking on a VHS tape, but in reverse.

  That was enough to get my legs working, and without hesitation I reached behind me and grasped the doorknob. At roughly the same moment the specter reached the foot of the stairs, her white hair swaying and the edges of her leathern face entering into view, I rushed outside and slammed the door shut behind me. Lunging out into the yard from the porch, I failed my landing and gave my ankle a solid twist.

  I had to crawl through the grass to get to the van.

  Even as I fled, I could hear the fleshy smacks of her white hands against the kitchen window. In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed her sinkhole of a mouth falling open, and from inside the house there erupted a racket like the roar of a crowd.

  The pain in my ankle didn't really get to me until I was a mile down the road and the initial shock had passed. I could barely feel the accelerator beneath my swelling foot, and I nearly ran into a slow-moving bus. I grappled against throatfuls of bile and white-knuckled the wheel until I managed to double-park in the hotel lot.

  When I finally went into the hotel, I didn't head straight for my room. I paid the bar a visit, asking the bartender for a bag of ice I could throw on my pulsing ankle.

  I also asked him for as many high proof drinks as he could legally sell me.

  Twenty-Seven

  Ever been asked a stupid-ass question by a buddy along the lines of: “Would you eat a bucket of live cockroaches for a million bucks?”

  I was faced with that kind of scenario, and it went something like: “Would you finish renovating a house occupied by a terrifying phantom in the hopes of landing a TV show when all is said and done?”

  Icing my ankle in my hotel room, I was struggling to decide.

  Do you really want this? How badly? What risks are you willing to accept, and what are your lines in the sand?

  I returned to this question off and on while absentmindedly editing video on my laptop. The result was going to be embarrassingly shoddy, but I made sure to include a shot of my red, swollen ankle at the tail end to garner some sympathy and understanding in case the next upload ended up a little late. I told the viewers that I'd tripped on my way down the stairs. They never would have believed the truth.

  Already some hours into the night, I hadn't been able to yank my thoughts free from the house's jaws. That apparition had me in her clutches. I couldn't look outside the window in my room without seeing long shadows creeping along the nearby lot. There was something mocking and nefarious about the way passersby in the hallway conversed; I knew that I was only imagining it, but their voices seemed either too deep or too faint to be properly human, and I felt like they were all talking about me as they passed by the door.

  For all my terror, for all the fiery pain in my ankle whenever I hobbled around the room, I still wanted to woo the people at the Home Improvement Network. Call me stupid—I wouldn't disagree with you—but with so little keeping me from the opportunity of a lifetime, I was determined to see this project through.

  Somehow.

  I hadn't figured out the “how” yet.

  My first thought was to call a priest to bless the house. It worked in fiction, after all. If I could get a kindly old priest to splash some holy water around the premises, then perhaps Irma would get the hint and leave. Over time—and as I tried deciding on which priest to call from the diocese of Detroit—my faith in this course wilted and I started considering something more hands-on.

  What if I went back to the house and talked things out with its spectral tenant? Her spirit was hanging around for reasons unbeknownst to me, but if I could zero in on them, then maybe I could ease her into the next life and off my fucking property. This struck me as the most sensible thing, save for one vital detail.

  The ghost of Irma Weiss was not especially talkative.

  When asked, “Who are you?” the ghost had replied, “I am a raven that seeks to nest in your skin.” The very thought of that exchange made my guts writhe. Whether this was meant to be taken as a literal warning of possession, or as some kind of darkly poetic metaphor, I was unsure. Any further dealings with the house and its resident spirit would require a good deal of caution, though—more than I'd previously realized.
/>   There'd been that note, too—her vandalizing of the email I'd posted on the living room wall. “WE WANT YOU”, it had read.

  I still wasn't sure how many spirits I was dealing with here, but having encountered the presumed ring-leader of this haunting operation, I had reason to suspect that this note, like the raven comment, was meant as a threat. The spirit in that house wanted me. Why, or what it hoped to do with me was unclear.

  What would Irma have done if she'd caught up to me in the house? I'd asked myself before if she was able to harm me, but hadn't been able to answer the question definitively. I still couldn't answer it, but recalling the way she'd pinched me in the arm I had to concede that she was capable of certain physical acts.

  Perhaps I, too, could physically interact with her.

  If this situation could be dealt with by punching her in the head, I'd gladly reconsider my personal rule about never hitting women. Of course, it wasn't going to be that easy, and I suspected that Irma could throw some haymakers of her own if she so wished. Direct confrontation was unwise.

  Hopeful that I could source some aid elsewhere, I busied myself with research. There were a few people who could potentially help me with this matter; the two living members of the Weiss family. If Willard Weiss and his estranged daughter, Fiona, still lived—and I prayed that they did—then they were among the only people on Earth who could shine some light on what was happening back at the house. I began searching for the two of them in earnest.