From the outside, the hundred-year-old Tudor looks like every other house on the block. Six bedrooms, three and half baths with a butler’s pantry! shouts the listing. Standing in the arched doorway, I know I have no business being there.
It’s a chilly spring day, and the housing market is heating back up. Gone are the foreclosures and panicked sellers that haunted every street with broken dreams and threats of financial ruin back in 2008. Regardless, vulture developers and bargain hunters like me still circle the listings and patrol the auctions and skulk through the open house tours, hoping for a steal.
The stately Tudor being sold “as-is” stretches up three stories over my head to a sharp point against the clouded sky. A hint of rain blows through the old-growth trees, and their gnarled branches claw at the slate roof. A young couple push their way past me out the front door and into the yard, shaking their heads and whispering to one another. Such a shame, they say. Too bad, they say. They climb back into their BMW and drive on to another house.
Cowards, I think. As an engineer, taking apart old buildings and putting them back together is my job, my hobby, my passion. A house like this needs me, I think, staring up at the glittering leaded-glass windows. It needs love. No matter what lies on the other side of the door, we could love each other. Never mind that it’s the sixth house that I’ve fallen for this month. Never mind that my husband will surely kill me. This house could be the one.
Then I go inside.
A cold, mildewed basement smell hits me, and then sewer gas coats the back my throat. The taste is unmistakable. It’s the used-bile taste of drained and winterized pipes and dirty rags stuffed into toilet traps. The gas seeps up through the rusted sewer lines running under the house and out into the street. Did they drain them in time? I wonder. Did the pipes freeze last winter before the bank took possession? There would be no way of knowing until the water gets turned back on.
The radiator is missing in the foyer and in the cavernous living room to the right and the banquet-sized dining room to the left. They’d been stolen sometime in the night and sold to scrap yards. No one asks questions when addicts appear like vampires in the wee hours of morning, holding the dripping guts of a house. Not in Cleveland anyway.
Evidence of squatters rattles across the quarter-sawn oak floors. Broken bottles. Used needles. Cigarette butts. None of this bothers me. Profane graffiti scars the walls leading up to the second floor. I picture a pimple-faced boy, eyes lit with perverse glee, as he defaces the wall with a pentagram. Just kids committing their first crimes. Nothing to worry about.
I worry about the burst pipes as I climb the stairs to the second floor. More missing radiators. A dead mouse in the corner of a charred fireplace. A broken armchair. The bathrooms are ticking time capsules with their cracked porcelain sinks and hand-pressed subway tiles. Maybe they could be s—
Oh, God!
The toilet in the second bathroom is overflowing with excrement. Whoever roosts there at night clearly doesn’t care about the dry pipes. I look over my shoulder as if the vagrant might be lurking behind me. Then I see the blood.
A trail of reddish black stains the tiny hexagon tiles of the bathroom floor. Smeared lines lead out a second door and into a bedroom as though a body has been dragged. The trail ends in a dried puddle on the wooden floor. A bare mattress sits three feet away. The ticking is torn and blotted with horrifying shades of brown and yellow.
It’s a crime scene.
Someone died right here, I think, staring at the stains. The thought sends a buzzing jolt down to my palms and the soles of my feet. I can see a body being dragged by the shoulders into the bathroom. I can hear a faint screaming in the back of my mind. Were the police even called, I wonder? I search the doorway for signs of yellow tape and find none.
Were the police even called, I wonder? I search the doorway for signs of yellow tape and find none.Was it an accident? A suicide? But the dragging of the body points to something more sinister. Every killer I’ve read about comes to mind in flashes. Buffalo Bill would love all this room to work, I think and search the corners for Thomas Harris’s death moths. Or was it the vampire Lestat feasting on the steady influx of delinquents and addicts? Or did Korede forget to clean the evidence left by her sister, the serial killer?
“Let me know if you have any questions,” a voice calls from the floor below.
“Thanks,” I say and back away from the murder room. Glancing down the winding ornate banister to the foyer, I picture a scene right out of Turn of the Screw. Ghastly Quint winks at me from the foot of the stairs, and then he’s gone.
Down the long hallway of doors, the walls tilt ever so slightly as I imagine the sound of someone dying echoing through the empty rooms. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within . . . and whatever walked there, walked alone.
The next bedroom shrieks with madness. Hot pink slashes like angry lipstick all over the walls, the windows, and even the glass. The dried-up paint can sits in a splattered corner, the brush sticking out of it like a knife.
Another pair of buyers walk past the room. “…she went crazy. Drugs,” the man is saying.
“Excuse me,” I call out to him. “Sorry to eavesdrop, but do you know what happened here?”
“Not really,” the man says with an uncomfortable smile. The woman looks down at her shoes. “The husband died a few years ago, and his wife just sort of fell apart.”
“Did she do this?” I point to the missing radiator in the corner and then the hot pink smeared over the windows.
“The daughter,” he says and then with a lilt of hope asks, “Do you think you might buy the place? We live across the street, and I have to tell you this really is a great neighborhood.”
I hardly register my noncommittal reply or the man leaving with his wife. I turn back to the hot pink scars. Toni Morrison’s ghostly Beloved hovers in the corner of my mind for a flitting moment—angry, forsaken, and lost. The daughter.
She went crazy. Drugs.
Crazy, I think, turns a simple crime and into something darker. Crazy hears voices and sees ghosts. Crazy clouds the lines between the real and the imagined, between humans and monsters. Assuming these lines exist at all. But who was the monster here?
In my mind’s eye, the specter of the dead father looms in the linen closet, watching me pass by. A rabbit-eyed girl in a torn nightgown skitters between the rooms behind me as I turn the corner to the bedroom over the garage. The wails of a grief-stricken widow howl from the other side of the house.
A dead body lays in the hallway.
For a pinched breath, the body seems as real as a Patricia Cornwell autopsy, and I can see the splinters of wood digging into the torn fabric where the body has been dragged. I can hear Kay Scarpetta dictating her notes, and I wonder if she’ll catch the guy. I wonder if the murder is as simple as that.
Halfway up the creaking attic stairs, an envelope lays on a dusty tread next to a dead spider. I pick it up to see that it’s never been opened. It’s addressed to a girl. It’s from a local university and postmarked 2016. I turn it over in my hand twice before setting it back on the step. This girl is still out there somewhere. She may still be breaking into the house in the dead of night to steal more scrap metal or possibly just to sleep and wander the halls and pretend her father is still there.
This house will never belong to me, I realize.
I give the Realtor a quiet thanks before walking out the front door. Developers will no doubt come and rip out the guts of the place. Walls will be torn down and rooms opened up. The kitchen will get an enormous island. The bathrooms will be gutted and expanded. The future buyers will never know about the bloodstains or the paint splatters or the unsolved murder or the girl.
Unless, of course, she comes back.
Gazing up at the bedroom window in the corner, the pink paint is muted and obscured by rain clouds reflected in the glass. If I squint, I can see the tangled hair and unhinged eye of someone’s daughter staring back.
