The House of Long Shadows Read online

  I felt a touch of guilt for having been so eager to ward the woman off. This house was the only one on Morgan Road that could have offered shelter to a homeless person. All the others were crumbling, on the verge of turning to dust. If she'd made use of this house in the past, then I couldn't really blame her for being upset at finding it occupied and off-limits. Had the woman approached me, tried to explain her reasons for lingering about the premises, I would have offered to help her in some way.

  Still, as bad as I felt knowing I'd nearly threatened an elderly homeless woman with a boxcutter for looking into my window, I wasn't going to tolerate trespassing, and any act of hostility meant to frighten me off was going to be met with action.

  Though it may have been a little premature, I allowed myself to relax. It was entirely possible that the woman wouldn't come around again, but if she did, I felt confident I could deal with her. I looked to the Callery pear and considered mounting a trail camera to it for the purpose of gathering evidence. If the woman grew bolder in her visits, I'd have all the proof I'd need to get the authorities involved.

  Going back inside, I thought about calling the cops and letting them know the score. Perhaps they'd know the woman, or would be willing to do the occasional drive-by to deter her from coming onto the property. I reconsidered when, with a flush of my cheeks, I recalled my last dealings with the Detroit PD and the way the detectives assigned to my case had laughed their asses off at my recordings.

  On second thought, I'd keep them out of it for the time being.

  Now that I felt reasonably sure that the source of my frustrations was an elderly woman, my courage returned. I'd no longer jump at each noise or every flash of the porch light. I could handle this well enough on my own. She'd given me a solid fright, but surely she didn't represent a true threat.

  Making sure the doors were locked, I tried returning to my work.

  I tried returning to my work.

  I didn't get far.

  Though I patched up the hole in the kitchen drywall and busied myself with a few other small fixes, I was too scatterbrained by recent events to give the work the focus it required. While hammering in a loose piece of molding, I mashed my thumb. Unwrapping the mousetraps, I managed to catch my fingers in them several times while attempting to bait them, then again while leaving them along the baseboards in the kitchen and living room.

  I set up a few shots so that I could throw together a quick video. Aside from the drywall patching, I singled out a few of the house's most glaring problem areas and let the viewers know what kind of things they could expect in the days to come. The first area I highlighted was the kitchen, and I tore off a few pieces of the broken cabinetry to show just how degraded it was. In the master bedroom, I recorded some footage of the crack in the window, and promised the viewers I'd show them how to replace the pane.

  While in the bedrooms, I was reacquainted once more with those large, imposing locks on two of the doors. There was a sturdy hasp mounted to the inside of the door in the room closest to the top of the stairs. It was the type you could use a padlock with. Why someone felt the need for such a lock on a bedroom door was beyond me. Stranger, though, was the lock on the master bedroom door. It was located on the outside. I contemplated its potential uses, but to my mind one would only ever install such a thing to keep something locked inside of a room. Engaging that lock would probably have been like locking the door to a jail cell. Had the previous owners had dogs or something—had they used the room to house animals and keep them from the rest of the house?

  A tour of the bathroom and a careful bumping of the mold-encrusted tiles was next, and since everything in the room would need replaced—along with a good bit of the walls—I admitted that the bathroom would provide fodder enough for several videos. Lastly, I zeroed in on a warped floorboard in the dining room, which I speculated may have been the result of moisture damage from underneath. This would require me to get under the house and into the crawlspace, to search for potential water damage and to inspect the soundness of the foundation.

  I filmed myself getting snapped in the fingers by mousetraps for comedic effect and then signed off, having recorded more than I needed for a single day's upload. I transferred all of the raw footage on my camera—including the hour-long bit of the old woman standing outside the kitchen window—onto my computer.

  Before sitting down to edit video, I pulled up the number for a local dumpster rental company—JT's Dumpster Rental—and spoke to a man on the phone about having a 15-yard dumpster delivered. The gentleman verified the house's address, filled me in on the price, and then promised to have it delivered by end of business the next day. I had bags of drywall and busted cabinetry piling up in the place, and couldn't wait to get ahold of the dumpster so that I could begin clearing it all out.

  When I'd warmed a can of soup over my camping stove and eaten almost an entire sleeve of saltine crackers along with it, I began editing my footage. For close to three hours—until sunset—I putzed around, sorting and clipping the various bits I'd recorded.

  I made a folder specifically for the woman who'd been coming by, which I titled INTRUDER, and in it I stuck everything I had on her so far: The hour-long stint outside the kitchen window, the brief appearance in the upstairs. I hoped I wouldn't have anything else to add to that folder, that I'd never see her again. But just in case she did keep coming around, I wanted to make sure I had a visual record of her behavior that I could take to the cops.

  By the time I called it quits, I had not one, but two complete videos. I held one back on my computer for future use and uploaded the other, which ran through my bracing of the kitchen pipes and patching of the drywall. I anticipated another wave of encouraging comments from this one and promptly uploaded it to VideoTube.

  The day had been long. I'd worked up a sweat over the course of the day, and my overalls were hardly comfortable, but I couldn't find the energy to strip them off or to set up the camping shower outside. Reclining on the air mattress, I found myself at once exhausted and wired; my body was ready to tap out, but my thoughts were still running a mile a minute. I toyed with the idea of running into town for a six pack while waiting for my video to go live, but couldn't summon the will to roll off the bed. It felt so soft and comfortable underneath me that I didn't notice sleep coming up from the rear. Within twenty minutes, I was out. My thoughts were no less stormy, but my body had had its fill of activity for the day and powered down before I could even reach over and shut off the lights in the living room.

  Sleep was sweet while it lasted.

  Fifteen

  I felt weightless as I blinked at the dark, like I was floating along a lazy river. I was only dimly aware of the air mattress beneath me. With no little trouble I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, trying to wake up fully and gain my bearings. Minutes crept by and I managed to sit up, my body so stiff that it pained me to do so. Reaching blindly for the lamp nearest the bed, I groped for the knob and gave it a turn.

  It didn't come on.

  I tried looking to my laptop, to the battery packs I'd left charging on the table, but they'd been buried in the darkness, their little glowing lights nowhere to be seen.

  I sighed into my hands and rose on unsteady legs. It seemed the power had gone out. Perhaps the house's crappy wiring had somehow gone bad. Maybe I'd been drawing too much electricity, or the old power lines had finally given up the ghost. I stood, listening for howling winds, watching for streaks of lightning, but the night was perfectly calm. The weather clearly wasn't the cause, then.

  Another possibility crossed my mind.

  What if someone cut the power?

  Panic struck my heart like a riding crop, prompting its beat to quicken substantially. Nothing seemed familiar in the darkness. I wasn't able to make out the lay of the land and felt, once more, like I was adrift on a black sea. The nearest recognizable landmark, the dining room window, seemed impossibly far from where I stood. Its borders were painted in a thin veneer of
moonlight that almost resembled pale frost. Even if I'd gone right up to it and stared out into the yard, it wouldn't have done any good; my previous studies of the window had me well convinced that—without the porch light to pierce the veil of night—I wouldn't be able to tell whether anyone was lurking outside.

  Struggling to cast off the last vestiges of sleep, my imagination conjured images of that pale, white-haired woman from earlier in the day. I imagined her shuffling around the property in the perfect darkness, waiting for a chance to sneak inside. The settling of the floors as I shifted my weight almost gave the impression that she was there with me, lurking in some shadow-clotted corner of the room.

  The space between my shoulders began to tingle. Though it may have been paranoia—and I told myself that it was—a sensation like the weight of strange eyes fell upon me and I struggled to keep from hyperventilating.

  Lights. You need to get the lights working.

  I marshaled my wits and tried to remember where the breaker box was located. After a brief pause, I recalled that it was situated on the wall between the kitchen and living room, not at all far from where I presumed I stood. Turning on my heels, I staggered ahead, hands out in front of me, and began running my fingers along the wall.

  After a breathless search, I located the cool metal casing and negotiated the latch on the door. Effectively blind, I took a moment to feel out the components within, my nervous fingertips grazing each of the switches. For a time, it was all nonsense to me; I may as well have been standing deep within a shadowed pyramid, trying to puzzle out the meaning of an ancient pictogram etched into a wall. Fearing that I was not alone in the house, the task took on a heart-pounding urgency, and starting from the top I began throwing the breakers—first to the left, and then to the right—without caring what each switch corresponded to.

  The lights rushed back on.

  My delight, though, was short-lived.

  The bulbs in the fixtures flickered as though on the verge of burning out, and when they did come on all the way, they did so with an uncharacteristic glow the color of egg custard. My eyes acclimated to the light almost immediately, and I shut the breaker box, turning to survey the room around me. Everything was as I'd left it—the folding table, the camera gear atop it, the toolbox beside the bed...

  Hot bile wormed its way up my throat, and I had to clench my teeth to keep it from spilling out onto the floor. Nothing overt had triggered this response in me. There was no one standing in the living room or kitchen as far as I could see, and nothing was out of place. With nothing physical I could pin my fear on, it soon became apparent that the atmosphere itself was to blame; the mood of the place struck me as gravely disordered.

  The air was stuffy, possessed of the tell-tale staleness gained from circulating the contours of another's lungs. It felt like someone was standing close to me, breathing directly into my face; as if all the air I breathed had been held in someone else's mouth in anticipation. The mustard-colored light served to disorient me further. My surroundings were familiar, and yet, they were made unfamiliar by the orange glow.

  Then, from the upstairs, came a noise.

  A voice.

  I stiffened, my arms locking up in a jerk. The whooshing of blood in my ears made it hard to listen, but even if the words being spoken didn't fully register, the character of the voice was clear as day. The bile rose again like the mercury in a thermometer, and once more, it nearly dribbled over. I threw a hand over my mouth, choking it down, and tried to summon some nerve.

  There was someone in the house with me. This time, I was sure of it.

  Bumps and creaks and shadows could be explained away.

  But a voice?

  Arms held tightly at my sides and fists balled, I crept across the room. Pausing at the entrance to the dining room, I craned my neck and looked to the foot of the stairwell, my guts coiling. Placing one hand against the wall to keep myself upright, I forced myself to quiet my breathing and listened. I tried to figure out where, specifically, this voice was coming from.

  My legs nearly gave out, and I slumped against the wall.

  It wasn't a voice, but voices. Plural.

  I couldn't say how many.

  Shuddering some feet from the stairs, I strained to listen. The dialogue was hard to make out, but that the voices were distinct and diverse was apparent from the very first. However dissimilar the voices may have been from one another, they had one quality in common: They were all utterly discordant.

  There was something aberrant about those hushed voices that shook me to my core, something about them that made them terrible, almost painful, to listen to. It was a good thing that the speakers were furtive, quiet. If they'd spoken in anything higher than conspiratorial whispers, I'd have probably punctured my own eardrums as a defense.

  In a word, these voices were inhuman.

  One among them was a grating drone, each syllable pronounced as through the wingbeats of a thousand wasps.

  Another, croaking and wheezy, was the sonic equivalent of parched earth. Listening to its repellent notes, one could not but envision a man at the bottom of a dry well, calling up to the listener as he died of thirst, the corners of his mouth cracking apart like clay.

  Still a third registered, sounding something like a low, childish whine—a breathy voice, whose highs and lows were reminiscent of an infant's wails and coos, respectively.

  There may have been others. It was impossible to glean the full number of speakers by listening to the low rumble of their voices, not the least because I couldn't stand to listen with closeness and pick them all out.

  As if hearing this hideous concourse upstairs wasn't bad enough, I felt an extra punch of fear because there was something familiar in the most terrible of these voices. I'd heard them before, on tape. That afternoon, in the recording of the woman outside the kitchen window, some audio had been captured. Low and muffled, the footage had featured numerous voices I hadn't been able to source. I hadn't listened to the recording with much care, but that some of the voices were the same I hadn't the least doubt.

  The intruder—intruders—piped down as I set foot on the bottom stair.

  I'd left a large wrench sitting on the second step, almost as if I'd predicted my need for a weapon, and presently I clutched it in my right hand. The second, third and fourth steps were climbed, and except for a cryptic shuffling—perhaps that of the gregarious trespassers seeking cover—the upstairs was plunged into unbearable silence.

  While I fought to announce myself, to issue a threat in a calm tone of voice, a man-shaped shadow passed along the wall of the hallway. It stretched out to an impossible degree, like black taffy, before snapping around the corner and out of view. I almost dropped the wrench, and my free hand shot to the bannister in search of support. With my heart in my throat, I pressed on to the top of the stairs, despite my better judgement.

  The shadow remained, cast across the floor of the hallway, though it issued from an unexpected place. There was no one standing there as predicted, no physical body casting the long, unnatural shadow. Somehow, the shadow's fountainhead was the far wall, near the hallway window, just past the last of the bedrooms. There was a long, wide crack in the wall. A crack that hadn't been there before. It looked like a deep fissure in a canyon wall—packed with darkness and ragged on the edges as if hewn by years of weathering.

  The shadow receded into the crack.

  I followed it, too scared and baffled to know any better. Brandishing the wrench, I uttered a shaky, “W-Who's there?” but I barely heard it myself.

  I stood before the gash in the wall, running my fingers along the crumbling edge. How the hell did this happen? I wondered. I found all the doors on the upper level were closed. Confident that no one could sneak up on me without exiting one of the rooms and thus announcing themselves, I allowed myself a closer study of the damaged wall.

  Leaning towards the crack, I peered inside, curious if the house had been damaged from the outside somehow. I was
sure the crack hadn't been there earlier in the day—that it had formed only in the last few hours, while I'd been downstairs, asleep.

  As I studied the broken drywall, the edges of the crack spasmed like the borders of a gushing wound. In the space behind the wall I saw something.

  Or rather, someone.

  A thin figure twitched just behind the crack. Brittle limbs like those of a milk-colored mantis brushed against the tattered borders of the opening, and a pale face stared out at me, half-covered by a mop of tangled white hair. There were no eyes in its wide sockets, but that it could see me was beyond doubt. I knew, because it laughed at me.

  When the mouth flopped open, as if on broken hinges, it did so to an incredible degree. The jaw clicked, the stub of a chin drooped until it pressed into the figure's throat, and the upper borders of the mouth flared out. It was the vacuous mouth of a marine predator, preparing to suck in an entire school of fish in a single gasp. Boisterous laughter spilled out from this immense, toothless maw; laughter of every imaginable pitch and character. The noxious voices I'd heard while cowering downstairs now rushed out from deep within the figure's throat, along with others—less recognizable but every bit as horrid.

  I staggered back, dizzy. The wrench hit the floor. And so did I. I landed on my ass and pushed myself away, staring up at the horror that now leaned out of the crack in the wall and fixed me in its eyeless sights. Two skeletal hands came to grip the upper and lower lips, and the figure began to open its mouth wider still. The popping of its jaw was drowned out by a cacophony of demoniac laughter—punishingly loud now—and as I stared into the yawning gullet, I thought I saw something stirring in the depths of the fiend's body.

  Countless eyeballs—twitching, shifting, staring—looked out at me from within the figure's throat.