The House of Long Shadows Read online

  That was how it started.

  The first few jobs were awful; I remember hating every minute. At some point, though—maybe it was a month or so after I'd first started tagging along—I found I had a knack for this kind of work. My dad would give me orders. He'd tell me to load the truck with lumber, would order me to buy bags of cement and drive them to the job site, or to help him paint walls in refurbished rentals. Gradually, the demands grew bigger, and I became comfortable around tools.

  More surprising, I became comfortable around my dad.

  Time passed. I began doing things without being asked, taking on more responsibility. I handled simple repairs on my own and picked my father's brain incessantly. In a way that was alien to me, my father actually answered my questions, and he did so with a willingness—a joy—that I'd never seen in him before.

  Months went by and we started discussing the jobs ahead of time. He'd let me know the day's itinerary and I'd prepare accordingly, buying supplies per his instructions and doing a fair share of the work. We'd be cutting boards or fixing pipes, and he'd sometimes stop what he was doing to watch me, offering the occasional pointer. Enjoying the attention, I made an effort to constantly up my game, to impress him.

  One day, while installing a sliding door, he'd called me “partner”, as in, “Will you hand me that flathead, partner?” He'd never talked to me that way before. Stupid and starved for my father's attention as I'd been then, I'd teared up and I had to dig around in the toolbox for close to a minute, lest he notice.

  Right up till the end, my father hadn't been a talkative guy. A stereotypical “man of few words”, he'd talk at length about his work, but would offer mostly clipped replies when it came to casual conversation. I'm not sure if he knew he was dying—he must have felt something was wrong in the months before he passed—but if he did, he didn't breathe a word of it to me. That was why I was so surprised when, almost two years ago, prior to work one morning, he'd collapsed and coughed up blood.

  After an ambulance ride and a hospital stay of some days, where he was in and out of consciousness, a nervous doctor gave us the news. It was stage four stomach cancer. Terminal. There was talk of getting him into hospice, but the doctor confided in me that my dad wasn't likely to make the trip without dying en route, so frail was his condition.

  Rather than process this news like a normal person, rather than coming to terms with his mortality and sharing some tenderness with his only son in the days before his passing, you know what my father did? When I came to visit him each day, he'd ask me how the job was going. He wanted to make sure that I was still working each day, and that I hadn't allowed his illness to get in the way of the work he'd previously scheduled with clients.

  Barely lucid, his final words to me had had to do with the proper method for patching a crack in a house's foundation. Not long after that conversation, he slipped into a coma he never managed to come out of. He died three days later. There hadn't been any apologies for how he'd treated me growing up, no last-minute “I love you, son”. No, he'd used his last moments of coherence to let me know which fucking brand of concrete patcher he liked best.

  I inherited the family home, along with a fair bit of money from an old insurance policy he'd taken out after my mother had left. I hated that house, so full of bad memories, and got rid of it as quickly as I could, selling it at a big loss. I buried my old man and pocketed the remainder of the money, suddenly directionless. For a while, I lived in a Florida apartment, doing work for some of my dad's old clients. My future was less than certain, and I considered spending a hefty portion of my nest egg in getting a degree of some kind.

  While I was trying to decide what to do with my life, a relative of mine in Wisconsin asked me if I could explain how to replace his shower faucet. Insisting that it was an easy job, I shot a barebones video for him in my bathroom, explaining the process and demonstrating it on my own shower. I uploaded it to VideoTube so that he could easily reference it and almost forgot about it. For whatever reason, random viewers began liking and commenting on my video, claiming that I'd really made it easy to follow along. They requested that I demonstrate other fixes, started contacting me for advice on their own renovations.

  Enjoying the attention, I asked my clients around town if I could bring a camera with me to record my daily work. Most didn't have a problem with it. I uploaded videos at irregular intervals, mostly basic stuff—“How to Replace a Chandelier” and “Toilet Installation Basics”. The reaction to these videos was more robust than I could have anticipated. My views surged, people subscribed in large numbers to keep up with my content. I didn't know a thing about video editing then, but after chatting with a friend of mine who was good with computers, and who insisted I could make a solid living posting videos on VideoTube, I got serious. I made the videos prettier, more humorous, and I uploaded content more often.

  When I began receiving three-figure checks for ad revenue on my videos, I knew I was really onto something. Three figures soon became four. My subscriber count broke the ten-thousand mark. Then the hundred-thousand mark. When I surpassed a million, I was absolutely floored; passing two-million subscribers was even more exciting.

  It took me about a year-and-a-half to become one of the best-known home improvement guys on the web. I really didn't have any room to complain. I was on the verge of securing a TV deal, was living very well. Even without that network gig, if I kept doing what I was doing I'd probably be set for life. I felt very proud whenever I reflected on my past successes.

  The good vibes ended as soon as I focused on the here and now, however. The house on Morgan Road was standing in the way, casting one of its characteristic long shadows over my mood.

  I've never been one to leave a job half-done, but as I stared out across the graveyard I considered ditching the house and re-starting the thirty-day challenge elsewhere. Just the thought of driving back, of working inside it as though nothing had happened, made me queasy. If not for the network email I'd received the day before, which effectively tethered me to the accursed property for the next month, I knew I'd have packed up in the night and left Michigan altogether.

  There was no sense in my bellyaching, or in putting off the inevitable. I was going to do the work one way or another. However uncomfortable, I'd be through with the place by June. A month's worth of discomfort and unease in exchange for a lifetime of success; when I thought about the renovation in such terms, it really didn't seem so bad.

  I rolled down my window and pulled away from the curb, coasting into town. I made a pit-stop at a dollar store for some cheap mouse traps and then circled back towards Morgan Road. I loosed a sigh as the house entered into view, and from the driveway I decided to forge a kind of peace treaty with it. Tell you what, I thought, I'll fix you up by month's end. Just do me a favor and cut the shit. I don't want any more surprises, got it?

  I parked and shuffled up the driveway. The sky was clear but the scent of rain was coming in strong. The humidity in the air seemed to ratchet up the stink of the flowers on the tree out front, so that when I stepped into the house and slammed the door behind me, I was almost thankful to fill my nose with the smell of dust instead. Tossing the packs of mouse traps next to my laptop, I tried to decide on the next order of business.

  The drywall in the kitchen needed patched after my earlier work with the pipes. It was as good a place to start as any; a short segment on fixing holes in drywall would be good for a future video. I went looking for my camera, realizing a few moments into my search that I'd left it in the kitchen, on the dusty countertop.

  I picked it up, wiping the thin layer of grime from the bottom, and found that I'd accidentally left it recording. Oops. The battery was half-dead and would need replaced, lest I accidentally run out of juice while recording a later segment, so I carried it out to the living room to switch it out. I looked at the recorded footage and took a moment to rewind it back to the last bit of my earlier monologue, where I'd been bracing the pipes.

&
nbsp; The footage played in reverse on the viewfinder. I watched it in the corner of my eye, waiting for the last bit of my pipe-fastening tutorial to come on screen, while playing with my phone. Just a few minutes into the rewinding however, something appeared in the footage that pulled me away from my social media feed and commanded my full attention. I set down my phone and studied the viewfinder with closeness.

  The camera had been left on the counter, pointed towards the wall where I'd made the opening. Furthermore, the kitchen window had also been captured in frame, though only partially. It was in that window that I noticed something—something I hadn't expected to find, and that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

  I sat down and began combing through the mistake footage in earnest. I didn't notice it until the plastic housing of the camera began to creak in my grasp, but I was squeezing the device in both hands as though it were a neck I was trying to wring the life out of.

  All told, the camera had been left running for about an hour and ten minutes after I'd left the house for my lunch break. I returned to the spot in the footage where I'd finished taping up the pipes. A minute or two later, I could hear the sound of my van firing up outside, of the vehicle backing up and starting down the road.

  No sooner had I driven down the street had someone walked up to the house and stood outside the kitchen window. Owing to the camera's placement, only part of the individual's body was actually captured in frame; they'd been recorded from the neck down, their face conveniently cut off from view. Despite that, I had a pretty decent sight of the visitor.

  It was a woman, by the looks of it. She seemed to me of average height, with pale skin. Her arms hung limply at her sides, and her body was draped in a dirty, off-white garment that looked almost like a giant pillowcase. From the top of her unseen head came tendrils of silvery white hair that rested on her shoulders and stretched down to her breast. She looked unwell, completely out of place.

  And, in terms of dress, hair color and thinness, she bore more that a passing resemblance to the body I'd discovered in the living room wall.

  That was chilling enough, but as I continued watching the hour-long recording that had been made in my absence, other details provoked curiosity and, subsequently, alarm.

  I watched long segments of the footage—sometimes ten, even twenty minutes in length—and was unsettled by the absolute stillness of the woman.

  She didn't move in all that time.

  Not at all.

  After approaching the window from some unseen point outside, she stood completely motionless, her arms flaccid, as if rooted to the spot. Not even her hair moved, giving the impression that the wind outside, which I'd only minutes ago felt myself, had died off completely in her presence.

  There was more. The camera had recorded a number of voices over the course of this hour-long period, some of them masculine, others feminine. One was even child-like. Bafflingly, all of them seemed to issue from the figure in the window; they were muffled as if coming through the glass. This seemed impossible. Unless the woman was some kind of voice-acting genius, I doubted that any single person could possess such a range of voices. Maybe there were others outside the house, out of view of the camera, whose voices had been captured? Reason told me this had to be the case, and yet the longer I watched, the more sure I became that the voices were all issuing from this single woman, as though her unseen face boasted a dozen or more mouths, each with their own unique voices.

  I couldn't understand what was being said; without headphones on, it would be impossible to make out the words clearly. I skipped ahead, catching bits and pieces of new voices as I did so, until I reached the end.

  It was at the moment that the figure drew away from the window, disappearing from view, that my terror reached a fever pitch, because less than a minute later the sounds of my van pulling into the driveway were captured clearly. Then the sounds of my opening and closing the front door, my pacing through the house, and of my picking up the camera and berating myself for accidentally leaving it on all registered in the recording.

  The figure had been standing in the window up until just a few minutes ago.

  My blood ran cold. I set the camera down with a bang and rose to my feet, gaze drawn to each of the windows. I expected to find the gibbering woman in one of them, watching me, but found nothing but the mid-day sun.

  My departure from the house and her arrival had occurred within moments of each other; so too had my return and her sudden exit.

  My heart went off in my chest like a grenade. My brow had grown damp with sweat while watching; my scalp and neck tingled so badly that I nearly scratched them raw. I dove into my toolbox and shoved a utility knife into my pocket. Walking into the kitchen, I looked through the window, searching for signs of the curious visitor and finding none.

  She was here only a few minutes ago, I thought, my throat tightening. And she might still be out there. Steeling myself, I stomped to the front door, made my way out onto the porch.

  It took me a few tries to find my voice. “All right,” I shouted. “Who the hell is out here? Show yourself!”

  Fourteen

  For nearly thirty minutes I stalked around the property.

  There was no sign of her.

  My search for the woman on the recording took me in a circuit around the grounds. I even wandered into the adjacent lots, nearly tripping over the cracked concrete foundations that had once served neighboring houses, and which were now buried by wild grass like Mesoamerican ruins in the Amazon.

  For all my efforts, I found only a tension headache and a palpable dread that parked itself in my throat.

  There had been someone outside the house. I had the video footage to prove it. Who she'd been, I couldn't say. I had no idea what her reasons were for casing the joint, either. If she'd been a common thief, on the lookout for things to steal, then she must've been the most inept burglar in history, because she'd made no effort to enter the house. I'd gotten more of a creepy, Manson Family vibe from the whole episode; only a lunatic would stand outside a window like that for an hour, unmoving.

  What really stuck in my craw was the fact that the woman looking into the kitchen resembled the woman I'd inadvertently recorded in the upstairs window during my first day at the house. I'd discounted that bit of footage as a weird reflection on the window from the outside—a graphic anomaly. Now, I wasn't so sure.

  The woman at the kitchen window also resembled the corpse...

  I tried banishing the thought from my mind, but the damage was done.

  Any resemblance between this weird visitor and the woman I'd found in the wall was absolutely coincidental. Full stop. Paleness, frailty and white hair were not exactly rare attributes, and I knew that there were probably a hundred women in this county alone who might have fit the description. I hadn't seen her face, but that she'd been a living, breathing person wasn't up for debate.

  Still, I couldn't silence thoughts of the corpse altogether. The night before discovering the body I'd heard scratching at the wall. I'd quickly and rightfully credited the local mouse population with that noise, but that hadn't stopped my imagination from doing terrible things upon reflection. If a corpse could scratch at the inside of a wall, why couldn't it come back to the house, too? You did let her out...

  However annoyed I was with myself for entertaining such stupidities, the dread remained in place. The fear that rippled through me was like an itch I couldn't reach; try as I might to scratch it with any number of implements—or explanations—it persisted.

  In an effort to frame the incident more rationally, I approached the house and stationed myself at the kitchen window, in approximately the same spot where the woman had stood. Peering inside, I wondered what had been so fucking fascinating that she'd had to stand there over an hour to fully admire it. From this position I was able to see a few things—the edge of the kitchen counter and the adjacent cabinetry, the boxes of supplies I'd stacked on the floor, the refrigerator with its missin
g door. None of it was interesting, though. None of it drew me in to the point where I'd have liked to stand and stare for a whole hour.

  So, what had she been looking at, then?

  Leaning against the outside of the house, arms crossed, an alternative crossed my mind. From that spot outside the window, the visitor would have been able to see the camera I'd absentmindedly left running on the countertop. Maybe she hadn't come looking for anything through that window, but—noticing the camera—had stood there a long while in the hopes of being noticed. Perhaps her little stunt had been intended to unnerve or intimidate—to send a message.

  This house had been no stranger to squatters, I reckoned. Having spied the woman in the upstairs window, I'd suspected that she might have been a homeless woman who'd been taking shelter in the building before I'd moved in. If that was the case, then perhaps she'd come around this afternoon, found the doors locked with new hardware, and had been frustrated by her inability to get inside. And so, wanting to intimidate the new owner, she'd stood outside the window, as if saying, “Get out of that house. It's mine.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted aloud, “that makes sense.” I was dealing with a disgruntled squatter; it was clear to me now. The woman in the video—in both videos—was a homeless woman trying to get back into the once-abandoned house she'd used for shelter. Come to think of it, there was another incident I could throw beneath that same umbrella, too. The porch light had seemingly malfunctioned the night before. At least, I'd thought it had. In fact, it may have been picking up the same woman's movements as she'd walked around the yard. Maybe she'd come back after dark, hoping to find the place empty so that she could spend the night.