Haunted House

 

Haunted House

... well... the house is haunted, or supposed to be... never really a part of the neighborhood, older and set back from the lane, at the end of a corkscrew of sloping concrete among dark, hooded evergreens.  The other houses here show their faces eagerly to the street and press companionably against the white sidewalk, but there’s no sidewalk along the frontage for the haunted house, and, if you approach, you will have to walk in the street, then, slip through the gate where the fence is broken, and ascend that curlicue of driveway to the front step poured like a lump of sugar under a shingled hut tacked to the building to keep the rain from the shoulders of guests or trick-or-treaters come to the door.  Street lamp light scarcely pierces the battered palisade of evergreens and the house grows darker as you approach, the windows more intensely black and the ruptured siding seeming to ooze darkness and the rain-gutters are half-fallen, dangling from the eaves overhead like tomahawks.  There you stand, perhaps, regretting that you have made this wager with friends waiting behind and the house on its height shudders a bit with the impact of the wind and, then, with trembling finger you press the old ivory-colored door bell and, to your surprise, the thing still works and you hear it ring, more of a hiss really, like a discharge of electricity somewhere in the shadows of the home... This place is porous, when you press you face to the window panes, you can see that the inside has been invaded: squirrels, families of racoons, shredded carpet on the floor, and the steps leading upstairs all grisly with fallen plaster and broken ribbons of lathe, mold and fungus making a shelf across the top of a wall, the skeletal frame of a chair standing in stark contemplation of a wall mapped with continents of green-grey mildew – you ring again.  A house perishes when its borders are transgressed, when the outdoors pierces the walls and comes indoors.  You are supposed to hear chains clanking, something heavy being shoved across floor, moans and groans and, even, a banshee wail – but, it doesn’t happen tonight: you stand there pale and trembling, your sack full of Halloween treats dangling from cold hands, the other kids hooting and hollering on the street, carousing on the sidewalks among the more neighborly houses.  There’s no sound except the wind chiding the evergreens.  You’re relieved, perhaps, but, also, a bit disappointed.  Everyone knows the house is haunted, but there’s no presence here this Halloween, no sign of any kind at all –

A decade ago, an old brother with his old sister lived in the house.  One or both of them were demented.  People approaching the place, marching up that pig’s tail of driveway, were surprised to see tall pale figures, naked looming over an oak table the size of a rowboat in the dining room.  The figures were impassive, stretched-out like taffy, store mannequins that served some sort of therapeutic function for the old man and woman who lived in the place.  We thought it was their childhood home, a refuge to which they had returned when their own parents passed away.  Probably, they had lived in California in a big city and the woman, at least, had been married, or so it was rumored, but, now, they were alone, brother and sister in the big shadowy house among the white, narrow limbs and mask-like faces of the mannequins. Then, one day, they were gone and someone removed the naked mannequins, apparently ashamed of them, because the task was done under the cover of darkness and the half-dozen figures must have been buried in the backyard, between the abandoned rose hedges, or, perhaps, weighted and dumped in the river down the hill flowing through the municipal park.  After that, a collateral relative, a single mother with an autistic son, took possession of the house, but it was too large for her, too difficult to maintain, and, so, after several years the woman and her boy departed, leaving like the mannequins in the middle of the night, and, since there were home improvement loans secured by a mortgage on the building – loans, as it happened, but no improvements because the money had gone to pay household expenses –the bank filed papers to foreclose on the property.  The woman’s son had decorated some of walls with crayon marks, hatches as if to keep count of the days passing and outlines of his hand and clearly the property was in some distress.  It was at this juncture that an even more distant relative to the deceased siblings decided to cash out the house, a transaction that was proposed to the Irfan brothers, Sirhan and Sunyati, partners in real estate development.

The Irfans had the reputation of being slumlords, businessmen who bought distressed property, rented it out to students or newly married blue collar tenants, shirked making repairs or, even, fundamental maintenance, and, after exhausting tax credits for depreciation, sold the structures to developers who could use the bare lots (after bulldozing the wrecked homes) as building sites.  Something, however, impressed them about the old Victorian home with its many gables and complicated roof cut like the facets of a gem stone, tilting planes of shingles and carpenter’s gothic prisms high above the rose hedges and the dull sockets of the windows that were like extinguished candles or fire pits.  So Sirhan and Sunyati decided to invest in renovations to the house with the idea of flipping the property and turning a nice profit on the transaction.

Around this time, the elder brother, Sirhan, traveled to Iraq where a cousin had brokered a marriage for him.  For the first few days, Sirhan emailed his brother and said that he was planning to occupy the big house with his new bride.  But the woman proved to be unacceptable to Sirhan and, so, after a month, he left the old country and flew to Thailand where he became engaged to a girl that he met there.  Sirhan’s fiancee was not willing to immigrate to the United States unless he arranged for her sister to accompany her.  Although this was expensive, Sirhan managed it and returned to the Midwest and our city where his investments were mostly located.  Sirhan told Sunyati that once he and his wife were established, they would begin renovations on the big house on the hill.  He suggested that his younger brother apply himself to wooing Sirhan’s sister-in-law.  

An architect was retained and plans prepared for the home’s remodeling.  A general contractor was hired and the brothers’ partnership secured a loan for the work.  But, before any work could be done, there was trouble: Sunyati wasn’t interested in the match that his brother proposed to him.  Instead, he parleyed his encounters with Sirhan’s wife, intended as access to her sister, into a love affair.  As it turned out, the two women from Thailand turned out to be poor investments, at least, from a narrowly pecuniary perspective – both of them were addicted to gambling and lost large sums of money.  Sirhan’s wife drank to excess and the marriage deteriorated.  Nonetheless, Sirhan thought that moving into the big old house might save the relationship (he was hoping for children) and, so, he persisted with plans to repair the home.  The first thing that needed renovation was the structure’s battered roof.  Hail had shattered old shingles made brittle by the summer sun and storm winds had torn up the stainless steel flashing around the chimney and ventilation ducts.  Sirhan knew someone in the roofing profession, a contractor who had gone bankrupt but still hustled together crews to replace roofs, working for cash to evade the scrutiny of the Bankruptcy Trustee.  The contractor, JR Enterprises (“licensed and bonded” as per the placard on the contractor’s panel truck), gathered a six man work force to tear off the damaged shingles and replace them with cedar shakes.  JR said that he thought that his crew could accomplish the work in a single day assuming an early start and good weather.  The terms were cash money, half before the work and half when the job was completed.

The workers arrived in a rusty Honda van and pickup.  JR unloaded two cases of beer, a grill, and a couple pounds of skirt steak from his vehicle.  He had promised the crew a barbecue and beer after the job was done.  The workers spoke Spanish.  They eyed the big house with its high, steeply tilted pitches and gables with apprehension, even outright fear.  One of the men crossed himself before he buckled his tool belt around his waist.  Another man actually dropped to his knees, gazing up at the high perilous slope of storm-battered shingles; he crossed himself several times and mouthed a prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe.  JR slid two aluminum ladders out of the panel truck and the men aimed them skyward, tilting the ladders against the home’s old wooden siding.  Then, the men ascended onto the back and front of the house, gingerly clambering up to the highest point, the central ridge-line over the attic.  They explored the ramps and steep inclines of the roof, different slopes and angles tilted up into the blue sky.  JR loaded a bucket with strips of lathe and the men on the roof hauled these materials up to the crest of the house.  The lathe strips were nailed onto the roof where it was steepest, sloping upward at about a 45% angle, so that the workers would have toeholds to keep them from sliding off the steeply tilted surfaces.  Someone shouted words in Spanish and, then, there was a rending sound as crowbars tore through the old shingles so that they rained down, prickly with naked, exposed nails around the perimeter of the house.  One of the men had brought a boom box, mounting it the attic’s dusty, bird-lime spattered windowsill.  Ranchera music and polkas played with hooting accordion and tubas that gulped and belched in rhythm sounded over the ravaged back yard, the rose bushes with their blackened flowers, and the rank of sentinel evergreens wound around the house.  

JR left the site and drove to the brothers’ business offices in a strip mall at the edge of town.  He claimed the first half of his payment and told Sirhan that the work was well underway.  Sirhan said that he was concerned that the weather was volatile –  thunderstorms with high winds were forecast for later in the day.   JR said that his crew could work in the rain if required and that they would finish the job before the end of the day.  

At the ridgeline, the workers surveyed the bare roof decking, scarred by removal of the shingles, and knocked open in places by the crowbars that had peeled off the old shakes.  One of the men looked up and saw that the sky was green and swollen in the West.  It had become cloudy and, overhead, some white popcorn-shaped clouds skidded across the dark heavens. Thunder rumbled although it was so far away that it seemed scarcely a sound but more a vibration in the congested air, a faint emblem of things to come.  The smeared bruises at the horizon, gradually ballooned upward and reared above the house.  The men ate their lunches on the plywood decking, split open where old shingles had been ripped up, tearing apart patches on the roof.  The boom box merrily continued its serenade.  Someone muttered about the approachingstorm.  Slats of lathe were hammered onto the decking slopes so that the men could climb up and down on the shallow rungs pounded into the steepest sections of the roof.  A couple men went down the aluminum ladders to load new shingles in splintery sheaves into the hoist.  A couple of old men, one of them leaning on a cane, had come up from the neighborhood street to gawk at the work.  Methodically, working down from the ridgelines where shingles had to be bent and folded and, then, specially flashed to the roof, the crew began to cover the surfaces that they had laid bare.  One of the workers, rubbed his beard and said that they would be working in the rain in a half hour.

Before the storm began, a woman with two children in a small car pulled into the driveway and rounded the curves, winding up to front of the house.  She saw that the structure was ringed by torn shingles, dangerous with spikes of nail.  One of the men, working at the eaves line, leaned over the side to glare down at her suspiciously.  The woman said the name of her husband, but none of the men knew one another in that way on the job – they went by nicknames only.  The woman had heard her husband’s nickname at a backyard BBQ and so she used that word for him.  He slid down to the gutter, jamming his work boot into the stainless steel furrow on the edge of the house.  She looked up at him, a dark shadow hunching over the side of the house outlined against the bruised and chaotic sky.

The woman said in Spanish that immigration authorities had been seen in town and that they were at the canning plant were the pea-pack was underway.  She told her husband that the immigration officers were detaining people and hauling them away in handcuffs. Then, she cast a nervous look away from the house, as big as a mountain as far as she was concerned, to the car where the children were still buckled into the backseat.  The man said he would come down.

Suddenly, the rest of the crew stood, hitched up their pants and tightened their belts.  They looked from the top of the house across the small city, surveying the steeples and webs of millwright work over the grain elevators – there were no lights flashing yet.  The factory where the pea-pack was underway was hidden behind a hill.  Then, the men scrambled down the steep surfaces, slippery now that the shingles had been removed, moved single file to the ladders and began hurriedly clambering down.  They spoke in whispers as if fearful of incriminating themselves.  On the ground, the woman’s husband accompanied her to the car where the children were waiting and, after he was seated beside her in the front seat, she backed, turned, and drove rapidly down to the neighborhood, heading to a refuge somewhere and ignoring stop signs as she went.  The other men left the ladders still propped against the side of the house.  In the air above them, music sounded, bright and indifferent.  The workers hurried to the Honda van and the pickup and left the work site.

The gas grill, cellophane-wrapped trays of skirt steak, and the two cases of beer were left on the lawn, among the fallen leaves and burned-looking roses dropped from the hedges. The storm began with the wind inhaling the air so that it was sucked into the clouds and, then, replaced with a blast of cold rain, white like a jet of water falling over a cliff.  The leaves shook themselves free of the lawn and whirled up into vortices in the air.  Protected by the eaves, a man’s voice, high and piercing, cut through the hiss of the rain and the barrages of thunder.  The darkness turned everything dull green, a frictionless color in which veils of rain slipped over one another.  The intersections flooded and the gutters along the curbs filled with water running as cascades down the street slopes.  Some tarps that could have been spread over the bare roof and tacked down there, took flight, reluctantly, it seemed, flapping wet condor wings, then, going upward and sideways to be trapped by the rank of evergreens standing like hooded shadows around the edges of the house.                                                                                                                              

JR returned with an envelope full of greenbacks.  He saw the house standing stark and tall between the tilted brackets of the ladders.  No one was around.  JR tilted his head upward: somewhere in the house’s cadaverous facade mariachi music was playing.  An old man with a cane sat on the front steps under the little shingled box of the porch.  The old man winked at him and said: “Them all took off in a big  hurry.”  JR grabbed one of the tarps tangled up in the evergreens.  It was waterlogged and very heavy and there seemed to be no way that he could clamber up the ladder alone to drag the tarp over the rift in the roof.  He asked the old man for help, but, from within the shelter of the porch, the man said that he had a bad back and bad hips and was unable to assist.  A little later, lightning struck the top of one of the ladders and went to ground, blowing up a puff of leaves and mud.  JR pulled both ladders away from the house and left them stretched-out on the ground, next to the gas grill, the beer in half-melted cardboard boxes and the wet, red aprons of the skirt steak.  The lightning strike had shut down the music.  

Sirhan and Sunyati made claims against JR.  But, contrary to the legend on his truck’s side, he was neither bonded nor insured.  Furthermore, the Irfan brothers received a stern reproach from the Bankruptcy Trustee that no debts could be collected against JR since he was protected by his filing.  By this time, matters had deteriorated between the brothers, largely due to Sunyati’s affair with Sirhan’s wife.  Both women had serious gambling debts and had borrowed money from a same-day loan company operated by Laotian businessmen out of a local nails and therapeutic massage parlor.  Sirhan commenced both a divorce proceeding and a partition of partnership assets owned jointly with his brother.  Questions arose as to the valuation of the old house standing apart from the neighborhood with its complicated roof.  Two opposing appraisers as well as a neutral met on the premises.  The upper floors of the home, a warren of small chambers around a stairwell, were badly damaged with fallen plaster, sheaths of black mold on the walls, and ceilings with great sodden blisters full of fluid drooping down into the rooms.  Damage on the lower levels was mostly the result of animals invading the rooms.  

“Beautiful bones,” one of the appraisers said.  He dropped his mask that he wore over his lower face as a shield against mold spores.  The other appraiser lit a cigarette.  He stood on the driveway at looked up at the gaunt house with the pale boards of its roof exposed.  A tarp, pierced by sharp branches, hung among the belt of trees.  The third appraiser had stepped aside and was dictating something into a handheld recorder.  There was a faint stench: some beast had clawed apart a rotting sheet of skirt steak near the front door and the odor of the decaying meat tainted the air.

“Depressing,” the second appraiser said.  “You’re right,” he continued, “beautiful bones.  Look at the plaster work around the arched doorways on the first floor.  Real craftsmanship.  The stained glass panes in the side windows.”  The first appraiser said that he thought the craftsmanship applied to the built in cabinets was superb: “You could yank those out and probably sell them through an architectural detail place.”

The third appraiser, who was the neutral, had finished his dictation.  “Seen enough?” he asked.  “Yup,” the two appraisers replied and so they returned to their respective cars and drove away.

When graffiti began to appear spray-painted on the plaster surfaces of the first floor rooms, someone called a city inspector.  There were clotted knots of rags now in some of the rooms, evidence of small fires set on the floor boards, a stocking cap and a lost coat in the corridor leading to the kitchen.  Someone had torn the appliances out of the wall niches where they had been installed and stripped out the copper wires.  

The inspector condemned the house as dangerous and uninhabitable.  The housing official mailed notice to both Sirhan and Sunyaty that they should take immediate action to abate the public nuisance arising from the derelict structure.  Each of them claimed that the other was solely responsible for the home.  After several months, the City Council voted to demolish the house.  But actual demolition was delayed on the basis of legal complications.  Ownership of the house was disputed and the partition of partnership assets, subject to a court decree, was on appeal.  Furthermore, the marital interest of Sirhan’s wife in the property was problematic – it was plausible to believe that she had, at least arguably, a share in the house.  So nothing was done. 

 

After a trespasser somehow fell out of an upper story window, the city posted the premises as off-limits and wired shut the doors leading into the house.  Periodically, police visited the home, pulling up the long driveway to inspect the windows for flashes of light or the orange flare of a fire inside.  The cops took advantage of the isolated hilltop location and the screens of shaggy evergreens to nap or drink beer or make rendezvous.  

On Halloween, kids dared one another to depart from the street-lit sidewalk and climb the fishhook of the driveway to ring the “murder house’s” front doorbell.  By this time, the structure had acquired a fetid residue of horror stories and legends.  Enough kids took the challenge that the adventurers met one another coming and going on the driveway.   Once, so it was said, a boy rang the doorbell and the house answered from an upper window sill with a squeal of static and, then, the chatter of trumpets playing mariachi music.  No one knew what this meant and the phenomenon could not be replicated.

If you imagine the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor standing on her brick pedestal, the figure towers over excursion boats and ferries and tugs.  In her arm, the statue lifts her torch as the beacon of liberty.  The haunted house is raised above the rest of our town on the wooded hill where its ruins stand.  On the inevitable day that the house is set afire by some kid smoking meth or by vandals, the flames will make a spire in the night sky as tall as Liberty’s torch.  But, until that day, the place will just be a neighborhood haunted house.  There are many like it.