Creating a Haunted House: II
A horror series by Victor Sweetser
II
Blueprints
It was revealed to me in red paint.
I recalled those optical puzzles we used to try to solve as kids. Greg loved those, and I think had he been an artist and not a writer—had he, I don’t know, owned sketchbooks— instead of those journals he wrote in, he might’ve tried to create optical puzzles.
Here was one sitting in front of me. When you added color, it was more apparent.
Was the arrow made of a network of cracks on the basement floor pointing me to the south-facing basement wall, telling me that someone had been buried inside? I didn’t think so. It was curving, not pointing straight at the wall. I didn’t think it was telling me to go up the basement stairs, reminding me that I needed sleep like my husband had reminded me earlier, either.
Next to the arrow, the spray paint can was lying on its side on the concrete floor. Searching around the arrow, closer to it, paying more attention to the cracks, something stood out. I picked up the paint can and sprayed around the first arrow.
Sure enough, a second arrow, just as rough and just as aggressively playful, became apparent. Spaced about two feet apart, it too was curved and pointing in the same direction as the other, ahead of it as though both arrows were signaling a path.
A thrill ran through me. I spray-painted more areas of the basement floor, feeling like some kind of graffiti artist. (Or do they call themselves graffiti writers because they sign their names?)
But, even after the floor was riddled with red like the scene of a crime, I could only find those two arrows.
I put my hands on my hips, let go of the breath I’d been holding. “Of course,” I said. Shaking my head, I glanced over to the pile of journals on the craft table. “I’ve been reading too much from your journals, Greg. For a second, I almost forgot. All that we made together about the house, all of us dictating while you wrote it out and filled in the blanks, none of it happened.”
You can make it happen now, though, a voice in my head told me. I knew it had to be my own voice, of course.
I scratched at days-old stubble. “Right,” I said. “Wait a minute. The paths. We can do it right here—”
“In the basement,” I said next morning to my husband while we were eating breakfast.
“Is that why you dragged me all the way out here to my favorite café? Nice try.”
It was a little spot in from the suburbs on the way downtown, and it had locally sourced honey and spice-flavored lattes and the best avocado toast that had pistachios baked into the bread. Luca’s words, not mine, but I thought it may’ve been a contender for one of my favorites.
To claim a table, we had to get there at opening at seven in the morning. Window walls let in a lot of sunlight that was pleasantly warm, fighting against the summer-heavy AC in this cubicle of a cafe.
The line at the front counter stretched past the few inside tables and nearly touched the front door. There were also some picnic tables on the sidewalk outside that may or may not have belonged to the café.
“I don’t like this place very much,” I said, trying to keep from betraying myself with a grin, “so . . .”
“So you’ve made some sacrifices,” Luca said. “My heart goes out to you. But the answer is no.”
“Can I hazard a hear me out?”
“No.”
“Fine.” I sat back in a metal chair that wasn’t as comfortable as it could’ve been. For myself, I liked those dark interior cafes with couches where you could just disappear in the cushions and a cup of cappuccino. “Want to go pick out some new wallpaper for the guest room after this?”
“Okay. You get one hear me out. But first, let me just say: The way I understood it, your friend Patrick, who had some extra property anyway, volunteered a site. I’m also aware of how modest our basement is, and unless you plan on building out or down, don’t know how you all can create that haunted house—even the much more watered-down version—that will coincide with your plans. Wait, you don’t intend on building beneath the basement do you? Please tell me that’s not where you’re going with this.”
“Well, in theory—"
“Whose theory?”
“In theory, if someone were planning to expand on their basement, it would be much easier to build out. Problem with that is, we don’t have much yard to extend out, and also I’m worried about what we might hit, like water or gas pipes for example. If we build straight down, beneath the basement, I’m thinking it might turn out to be less of a hassle.”
“Less hassle than building your haunted house on a piece of land?”
A guy in a twill army cap with a bulky laptop carry case turned in our direction.
Luca lowered his voice. “Do you realize how crazy we sound right now?”
“Hey, this is your favorite spot. We’ve got nothing to hide from them.” Louder, and looking around, I said, “Yes, you hear that everyone, we’re building a haunted house.”
That earned me a kick to the shin beneath the table.
The guy in the army cap turned back around and the other people at the tables, if they'd even overheard, made a show of being too absorbed in their own worlds.
“I thought about it like this,” I went on to Luca. “If we wouldn’t have to worry about the façade because it’s underground, other than maybe adding some subtle tweaks to our house—not anything tasteless—to make it a little more gothic or something, we might come out actually saving more on this budget we’ve gotten together between us. And, like we added on over the years to our imagined haunted house as kids, it would be easier to slowly add on layers underneath over time.”
“What, until you reach hell?”
I sipped my baklava latte, my pinky finger out for kicks. “We could maybe work that into the marketing?”
“Marketing. No disrespect to you and your friends, but do you think you’ll actually earn anything back on this venture?”
“Not a clue. But you only live once, right? And life is short. Greg didn’t even make it to thirty.”
“Don’t use that to get my permission.”
“Sorry, I didn’t really intend it that way.”
“You understand that people will be walking in and out of our house, right? Assuming this is even possible with building codes and pulling permits or whatever else is needed.”
“We could build an extra path for it, connected to the house but not part of it, leading down into the basement. Wait, does this mean we’re good? I still need to discuss it with my friends, but of course I wanted to check with you first.”
“Means I’ll think about it, and I think you should get a better handle on everything it would entail, beyond material costs, before seriously entertaining the idea.”
“Of course. We’re just heading into the blueprints stage now.”
That afternoon, Jennifer, Sally, Patrick, and I sat at the big craft table in the basement, Greg’s old journals between us. We each had a mug of the coffee my husband had generously offered to brew for us before getting back to his virtual job, and the empty plates from the lasagna I had cooked before their arrival stood arranged around the journals like figures around a mansion.
The others were a little hesitant at first—I think Patrick especially because he’d already set aside that piece of property—but what brought them around was not anything I said. It was Sally telling us that building down rather than up might’ve been the kind of symmetry Greg would’ve enjoyed.
Still recovering from the car accident, Sally was seated in a wheelchair. She had been carried down the basement stairs by Jennifer and Patrick.
“We would never be able to build it exactly how we imagined,” Sally said. “Building down might do it more justice than anything we could attempt above.”
“Right,” I said. “The alternative is something that isn’t really a house because—let’s be real—we don’t have the budget to create an actual mansion, much less a house with enough of what we want. And unless we did decide to only operate it seasonally, this wouldn't be a house anyone would be living inside.”
“Home to Haunts,” Patrick said, trading a look with Sally.
“Yeah, we could call it that,” I said. “Greg might’ve gone for that too if he hadn’t been so—” I stopped myself, backtracking. “I mean, you know how he was about naming the house.”
“I don’t remember that,” Jennifer said.
“Look, we can come back to the name later,” Patrick said. “What’s next?”
“Blueprints,” I said. From beneath the table, I pulled out a plastic file box and put it down on the table. I opened it up and handed them each a manila folder. “For your convenience, I’ve gone through the old journals and made a list of the floors and rooms and what was inside them. We can design the floor plans from these. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same, obviously, but this gives us enough to go on. I was thinking earlier, it’s too bad Greg wasn’t an artist, right? We might already have a lot of what we need.”
“This was swell of ya, Jack,” Patrick said, flipping through his printed-out copy of the notes I’d made from the journals.
“Well, what can I say. I was inspired. We made a good team back then.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” Jennifer said. “The first floor.”
From beside my seat, I put two more items onto the table: an architect sketchbook with blueprint drafting paper and a mechanical pencil. “Patrick, you’re probably closest to this stuff because of your real estate work. You want to do the honors?”
He looked at us all like he’d been cornered, then shot a glance upward before reluctantly nodding. “Sure, I’ll give it a shot.”
“I don’t mind jumping in when you get tired,” Sally said.
Our hearts in our throats like we were knocking on the house’s front door for the first time, real or imagined, we launched out.
#
My first instinct was to not make a sound.
In the cold, dark place where I’d found myself after the thing that came out of the front door had attacked us, I crawled a little before I was brave enough to stand. As sure as I was that the earlier house was much different, I was unsure where I was or what I had to contend with.
I crawled all the way over to a wall before standing, feeling my way up each inch. Then, I slid around the wall. It felt like plaster, and beneath that, I could make out bricks. My hands touched what had to be a light switch. I flicked it. Immediately I was struck by the low, violet lighting.
As soon as I turned around, something cloaked in black dropped from an empty panel in the ceiling, from out of that recess. I fell back against the wall, biting down a scream. It had a skull peering out from its black hood and was made of fabric and plastic and, I realized, wasn’t the thing that had attacked us outside.
It appeared to be a cheap grim reaper hanging prop like one might buy online or at a Halloween store.
Clinging to the corners of the room were obviously fake cobwebs. The leering grim reaper just above that was a fraction of my size was soundlessly laughing at me. It seemed like a childhood prank, maybe to remind us that it knew us from back when we were kids, or was there something else behind the cheapness of it?
The release of that prop may have been triggered by the light switch.
For the most part, I didn’t remember this room from our designs.
There was one item in that room that stood out, though, and what I’d been trying to avoid. My eyes finally alighted on and took it in: On an ancient-looking wooden stand was the gramophone, the old timey record player, with the big gaudy horn on it. This was something we’d put in the designs of our second floor’s haunted house, and that we’d seen when visiting the real version of our house about a year ago.
The record on the gramophone was already spinning.
Was I on the second-floor landing of our haunted house again? But this appeared to be a room, and a small one at that with less square footage than a typical bedroom. The plaster covering the brick walls may’ve been the color of buttercream ordinarily, but the violet lighting from the lone bare bulb hanging from the ceiling made it difficult to tell.
The needle of the gramophone came down on the record.
Recognition was immediate, because we had just heard a piece of that tune a year ago in the house and it had stuck with us. It was in the style of 1920s or 30s foxtrot, jazz, or easy listening, like something by Jack Hylton or Henry Hall, with horned instruments, piano, and strings, and most reminded me of Hylton’s “Blue Skies Are Around the Corner.” But far as we knew, it was different than the song that was supposed to have been in our designed haunted house, and it wasn’t one we had been able to find a record of in the real world.
But here it was again, slightly altered or maybe a different verse:
Memory
Is not as sure as destiny,
I’ll wail it over land and sea,
Across every road and melody—
The song was interrupted as the needle scraped like a nail over glass before coming up suddenly. The record started flying back the other way, and when the needle bounced down again, it played in reverse.
A voice. One that was speaking, not singing with the accompaniment of instruments. The voice did not sound human, perhaps because of distortion.
Welcome. A surprise is waiting for you at the bottom. If you want to reach it, you must follow these rules. Please listen carefully and memorize them. Here are your rules:
1. Only go down. Not all stairs are functional. Some are for show.
2. If you hear three knocks on a door, you must open that door after three seconds but before three minutes have passed.
3. When solving puzzles, you are forbidden to use triangles and the number three.
4. You must not share your rules with the others.
Violation of any of these rules will result in The One They Serve coming for you.
The record stopped playing and the needle went back up.
A part of the wall I hadn’t realized was a door, because it was covered in that same plaster-covered brick, popped open.
I didn’t go into that brighter light outside the door just yet. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe I was stunned by what I’d heard, or maybe a little of both.
These were not the same rules from the house we had created. There were some similarities, but down instead of up? Forbidding the use of certain pieces when solving puzzles? A surprise instead of treasure? The One They Serve and not those other entities we had faced? These rules were simpler but more specific at the same time and because of #4 made me think we’d each have our own separate set of them.
I was mostly relieved, though, because if there were others that meant my friends might still be alive.
Ultimately, I ventured out.
I walked into a foyer near some stairs. An antler chandelier hung above. Jennifer and Sally seated in a wheelchair were already there, in front of the stairs, and Patrick came out of a similar room across from me not long after. When Patrick and I exited, as though we had passed a motion sensor on the way out, the doors behind us closed and were seamlessly integrated with the wooden wall.
I glanced over at the front door. Was it as big as the one we had been approaching, wooden, and painted? It might’ve been a little smaller. Sally was watching me. “We could be in the same house” she said. “Not our house, I mean, but the one we found in this between-place. I think we should see where this goes instead of trying to escape.”
“Sally,” I said. “What happened to Pete?”
“She doesn’t know,” Jennifer said.
So the house took her undead unicorn and gave her a wheelchair?
“We’ll get him back,” I said. “I promise. And we can make sure he’s nowhere in this building before leaving.”
“Don’t know if we’d be able to get out,” Patrick said, chewing on his lip.
Before long, we were all examining the stairs. They were carpeted with floral and vine patterns. The railing was moulded wood, possibly black walnut. The wooden newels at the foot of the stairs were cylindrical, divided into three bands of engraved images—figures in shaggy skirts and dresses, seated or standing and sometimes holding cups or musical instruments in festive scenes that seemed to wrap all the way around the newel post before repeating.
“We shouldn’t—” I stopped myself, remembering rule #4, my rule #4. This was going to very difficult if we each had our own separate set of rules for navigating this house and had no way to share them. Within my rules was the rule for sharing mine with others, so I couldn’t exactly reveal that either. Switching tactics: “Do you think maybe there’s a basement?” I said.
“I think I’m picking up what you’re putting down,” Jennifer said. Patrick nodded while Sally was noncommittal.
This clued me in that maybe at least some of us had rule #4, the one about not sharing our rules, in common.
Sally was examining the back of one of the newels with the engraved scenes on them. “I don’t know,” she said.
The stairs went up before turning sharply around a wooden outcrop. The second-floor landing, if there was one, was beyond our current view.
To go up or to try to go down? We still hadn’t found an entrance to a basement or stairs leading down either, and for that matter had yet to see much of the first floor.