Creating a Haunted House: III
A horror series by Victor Sweetser
III
The Cost
If it weren’t for gravity pressing down like the cost we had all paid for being there, we might have broken one of my rules and gone up the stairs.
At the foot of the stairs on a newel post, feast scenes from another place or era wrapping around it, Sally was still examining the other side.
We gradually came to stand behind and above her. I noted that the back of her wheelchair supplied by the house was scored with scratches, but I could not yet see what she was seeing, tucked in past the other stairway posts. Sally was close enough.
“There’s a gap in the design.”
Sure enough, when I was able to get a close look myself, the scenes of people in wooly skirts and dresses with their profiles skewed—the heads were painfully twisted on necks so that the viewer could see that they had two large eyes—the feast scenes wrapping about the cylindrical newels didn’t simply repeat. They terminated in a chasm in the wood before beginning again.
“Should we search for an entrance to the basement?” Jennifer said.
Sally had seemed reluctant before, as though something in her own secret set of rules were giving her pause, but she relented then.
We went into that first room off to the right of the stairs, which was a well-lit dining room, treading softly for fear of traps and other dangers. But we hadn’t designed this house, had we? It plucked different chords this time, not having any real clue of what might be waiting around each corner. It might've been that we were stepping foot into someone else’s haunted house, cultivated to scare and perhaps to kill or maim, too.
When we were all within the dining room, with its dark cherry rosewood dining table and matching porcelain cabinets, we stopped near the entrance, heads on a swivel but making no further progress. We took stock. The dining table, the twin window cabinets filled with tea sets and rhinoceroses. A painting of a landscape whose road was a red and black wound among some trees and too distant cottages.
Patrick was the first of us to take another step.
He opened one of the cabinets. He pushed some of the porcelain out, and it shattered on the hardwood.
I saw a fragment on the floor that might’ve been a rhinoceros horn, and it reminded me of Pete the undead unicorn and his lost horn.
“Take that!” Patrick screamed. He was talking to the house, of course. He lifted a chair up and slammed it down onto the tabletop before flinging it.
“It’s alright; I’m calming down,” Patrick said as we approached. He leaned heavily against another chair. Jennifer and I went over to him and Sally wheeled up to grip one of his hands.
We got it. Anger was sometimes the better alternative, even if demons were gnawing at the edges to get in.
“Keep going?” Jennifer said.
The dining room to the kitchen. The kitchen to a laundry room that led to a garage. There was even a compact silver SUV parked inside it. We almost tried opening the garage door, but considering where we were, or where we had just been before arriving at this house, decided against it for the time being.
We hadn’t been able to find an entrance to the basement, but it was about that time that Patrick said he knew this house, that he’d been here before.
None of the rest of us shared the feeling—as far as we knew this wasn’t the house we’d conjured from Greg’s sketchbooks—and after one of us put forward that it could be because of all those other houses Patrick had shown across his real estate career, and that he was getting them confused, he admitted, “That must be it.”
To all appearances, other than the feast scenes engraved into the wood of the newel posts at the foot of the stairs, this first floor was like that of an ordinary modern house. One that someone dwelt inside, not only home to haunts from our childhood imaginings.
It was while searching through cabinets in the kitchen for food to confirm this lived-in state, trying out the small white door to what we had assumed was a walk-in pantry, that we discovered the entrance to the basement.
The house that existed in Greg’s sketchbooks had never had a basement.
Cautiously, one after the other, we ventured down.
It was cold and musty in there. The walls were made of brick.
There were tools. Empty cardboard boxes folded and stacked, chairs, and lawn equipment. A large craft table. Stone garden gnomes. Typical things a basement might have.
“Okay,” Jennifer said, “we’re here. Are we expecting something to happen, because I’m getting the feeling we’ll be waiting a long time.”
“Why aren’t the garden gnomes outside?” Sally mused.
“Maybe someone brought them in,” I said.
“Still.” She wheeled over, pulled aside some plastic containers.
One of their exposed faces leered at me with tired sunken eyes, its mouth a pit of broken stone teeth.
Moving closer, I observed that the expressions on the other garden gnomes were different, but similarly eerie. One was sculpted in a way where it looked like exposed cheekbone stuck out above a smile that said it was happier for it. Another was a study in fear, its eyes on something that kept me glancing behind. The last grimaced deeply, wrinkles bunching on stony wrinkles, like there was no end to its physical torment.
All four of them held cups upward, as though making a toast.
“Are these supposed to be us?” Jennifer said.
“I think they’re like four different emotions,” Patrick said, “or vibes.”
“Did we have any garden gnomes in the house we designed as kids?” I asked.
“I don’t think—” Jennifer started to say.
“Hey, look!” Sally pointed down.
Beneath the gnomes, there was a sizable metal plate with rivets.
When we attempted to pull up the gnomes, they would not budge. Once directly above, we observed that the cups they held upward had holes in their bottoms, seeming to lead down into their wrists and into their bodies. And just maybe, it led further past that.
They weren’t toasting. They were asking that their cups be filled.
We searched the first floor for a liquid—wine, milk, water, anything would do—starting with the kitchen. Jennifer got hung up on how we’d brought weapons with us, which had not been of any use, but how in the heat of the moment we had not thought to bring drinking water this time.
In the kitchen cabinets, there were cereal and oatmeal boxes, bags of rice and sugar. Dry goods of all kinds. At first glance, it did seem to be an ordinary, lived-in kitchen. There was something crucial missing, though, and that was liquid. The sink faucets didn't work. The refrigerator wasn’t running, and no one needed to catch it. There wasn’t even a single can of tuna or bottle of pasta sauce whose liquid might be utilized. That told us two things. The first was that we seemed to be on the right track. The second was that the deck was stacked against us.
Once we were back in the basement, Jennifer found a box cutter among the tools.
“You don’t think—” My cold sweat was hitting its stride.
“It might not require much,” Jennifer said, “but there are four garden gnomes. And there are four of us.”
“The house we made together did feed on people,” Sally said.
I shuddered at Sally bringing that up, as it had been feeding her as well to keep her alive in that coffin treasure chest in its attic all those years.
How much of our blood might it cost? I wondered.
“But I think we ought to consider our options first,” Sally said.
“Second that,” Patrick said. “In case I’ve not made it abundantly clear, I’m not keen to give this house what it wants.”
#
We planned to build down. It would begin in the basement and spread its roots further below from there.
Glancing around the craft table at my friends, watching them gesture and laugh and reminiscence, a cold spot inside that had already been forming before the car accident that had killed Greg and injured Sally started to see a spark, and then a small fire was kindled. Warmth.
Down in the basement, I discovered something about the cost. It wasn’t the money we had set aside for materials and hired labor for creating a much smaller-scale imitation of the haunted house we had imagined as kids. It wasn’t the blood, sweat, and tears that we’d shed getting to this section of our various adulthoods. Or those that had yet to be spent on our horizons. It wasn’t Greg’s death or Sally’s injuries, and not just because those were a price we would never have been willing to pay.
It crystalized around a single word, like a token to give a ferryman to cross to another world.
Memories.
Room by room. The library with its slanting floorboards and all the books that you could never find, that breathed their own air when no one was watching. Drawing room seances like acts in a revolving play. Macabre puppet shows, unnerving ballroom dances, the creepy crawlies and the undead creatures from nightmare and myth.
Conjured though they were for the sake of our imaginary haunted house, they were memories just the same.