Head cases

by Scott Nicholson

  She motioned the girl into the kitchen, a room colored in orange walls and burnished counters.

  “You're probably hoping for my nieces, but I'm afraid they're not around to play with you right now. Can I cut you an apple?” Mrs. Tanser asked again, and Tricia nodded.

  “Good.”

  After awhile, the older woman went back to her grinding, pounding work at the counter, and talked to Tricia from across the room.

  “Hmmm…where did we leave off last time? How it all began, I think. Yes. I suppose you’re wondering, what happened after the Whites lived in White House?”

  The girl nodded, and Mrs. Tanser barely waited for that response.

  Mr. White was found in the basement. I won’t go into how his disposition was, other than to say that the bones of Mrs. White and Baby White were found with him. The house was eventually sold to another family, and life went on-for a time.”

  Mrs. Tanser brushed the dust from the lapels of her maroon collar. It smeared like dried milk across her chest.

  “You can’t hide the past,” she said. “Nor can you hide from the past. What is, is, and what was, was. The next people who bought this house pretended that the Whites hadn’t killed themselves here, and as a result…”

  Tricia looked up from her slice of apple with a keen gaze of expectation.

  “Well, they didn’t consider the fact that they might also spend their lives-and deaths-here.”

  “Sometimes,” Mrs. Tanser said, eyes looking far, far away. “A mother’s love is not endless. In fact, it doesn’t even really begin.”

  The older woman rubbed a tear from the wrinkles at the side of her eye, and forced a grin. “Silly old woman I am,” she said. “You’re just a girl and you can’t even begin to understand the twists and cul de sacs of a mother’s love. I had a tough one, is all, and even now I can hear her scolding me. I’ve met your mama at the PTA, and she’s not like that. Not like that at all. You’re a very lucky girl.

  “So where was I? Oh yes, the next family. A pastor, the father was, come here all the way from Omaha. Why here, again I’ll never know. This must be the end of the line for some folks, and they just don’t know it. Hell, why would they come here if they did? Something draws them though, because no matter how many young folks try to escape this town after they graduate, the place keeps growing. Back in those days, before the Great War, there were just a couple hundred here, and the Martins moved into this house with a huge welcome from the townsfolk. For a time, Pastor Martin even held services right here in this house-in the sitting room, I believe-until a proper parish chapel could be built down in the center of town.”

  “All that holiness didn’t settle things apparently, though, in White House. Because the pastor and his family came to a similar end as the White’s did. Things were happy here for a few years, and the Martins had two children, Becky and Joseph. But, just like Mr. White, Pastor Martin’s vocation began to consume him, leaving Mrs. Martin here in the house all alone with the children day after day. The story goes that Mrs. Martin got bit by the green bug, and started thinking that Pastor Martin was spending far too much time down at the new chapel in town. There’s no telling if it’s true or not, but she thought the pastor was making time with a pretty little hussy in the back pew, while she was trapped here, in this old, cold house with two screaming kids.

  “I’m talking too big for you, aren’t I?” Mrs. Tanser said noting the confused expression on the girl’s face. “The pastor’s wife thought he had gotten a girlfriend, is the thing. And he was married to her and she didn’t want him to have a girlfriend. So she started locking little Becky and Joseph into a small room at the back of the house. Someone, probably Mr. White, had added on, and built the room by hand. It wasn’t completely true. Sometimes, Pastor Martin would come home at night and hear those kids screaming in the back of the house, and when he’d let them out, they’d tumble into the house proper shaking and blue with cold, because none of the seams of that room were level. The outside could leech in easily, you could see the grass waving in the wind through the gaps and the draughts on this hill in the winter are something horrible, I have to tell you. Even asleep in that big four-post bed upstairs, I put an afghan on top of the covers in December. Can you imagine how cold it must have been for those children when they could actually see the outside through the cracks in the walls?

  “Anyway, Pastor Martin yelled at his wife many a time for how she treated those children, yelled so loud the people a mile down the hill in town could hear him and mark his words. And she’d yell right back and accuse him of taking the Lord’s work to the devil, not to mention that tart Beatrice Long. She thought he was making time with a church whore.”

  Tricia put a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn, and Mrs. Tanser pushed the plate of apples closer to the girl.

  “I’m going on too long, aren’t I? Let me speed it up for you some. An old woman can go on. One day Pastor Martin came home and for once, the house was quiet. His wife told him the kids had gone to stay with friends in town for the weekend, and he heaved a sigh of relief. The noise had really begun to get to him, and that, as much as anything, was why he’d been spending more and more time at the chapel. The Martins reportedly had a lovely dinner, and even broke out a bottle of wine to celebrate their brief ‘vacation’ from the children. Pastor Martin tried to get romantic with his wife, but she waved him off of that. ‘You wouldn’t want to make more of the little screamers, would you?’ she said.”

  Mrs. Tanser paused, looking quizzically at Tricia’s moon-round cheeks. “That probably doesn’t mean much to you yet, does it? Hmmm.”

  “Well, it came to Sunday, and Pastor Martin spoke after the church service with the folks his children were supposedly staying with, thanking them for their hospitality. But they looked confused at his thanks, and told him that they would be happy to have Becky and Joseph over any time, but they hadn’t seen the kids these past few days.

  “Pastor Martin was upset by that, and after the last service, headed home in a rush. He wondered if he’d gotten the family wrong that the kids were staying with. When he entered the house, for the third day in a row it was completely silent, but Mrs. Martin waited for him at the table.

  “‘Sit,’ she insisted. ‘Eat.’

  “He sat, but asked her where the children were. Mrs. Martin smiled sweetly, and ignored him, fixing herself a sandwich and then pushing the plate towards him. ‘Light or dark?’ she asked.

  “‘Both,’ he said absently, and as she put the meat on his plate, along with a long crust of bread, he asked her again. ‘Where are the kids?’

  “Mrs. Martin smiled that strange little grin again and nodded, as he lifted the bread to his mouth and chewed.

  “‘You’re eating them, dear. Becky’s light, and Joseph’s dark.’”

  Tricia’s eyes went wide and she set the piece of apple she held back on the plate, uneaten.

  “Horrible, hmmm? Apparently Mrs. Martin had used that back room to turn her children into cold cuts. When he screamed and beat on her for her horrible crime, she only smiled and smiled, and told him to make more with Beatrice Long. Back then, in a town this size, they didn’t have asylums, and so Mrs. Martin never actually left this house. Pastor Martin locked her in the room she’d killed her children in and fed her meals at morning and night. She never came out of there again, and whenever he’d break down and cry and ask her ‘Why?’, all she would say was ‘The house needs strong bones.’”

  Mrs. Tanser grinned. “Creepy, hmm? Want to see the room?”

  Tricia’s eyes widened.

  “Oh, don’t worry, the Martins are long gone from there. Come along, I’ll show you.”

  Mrs. Tanser led Tricia through a hallway and a long, dark sitting room to a white door. She turned a latch and a metal bolt clacked audibly before she turned the old round knob.

  They stepped through into a small, dark room. It had no windows at all, but still was lit. The sun beamed in through hairline cracks in the gr
out between the stones that had been shaved and stacked to form the addition. Shadows played like anxious ghosts on the walls and dust motes rained in lazy dances as the wind shifted and groaned outside.

  “This is it,” Mrs. Tanser said. “The infamous White room. They think that Mr. White built it with his own hands, and used the bones of his wife and son as the grout between the rocks. Mrs. Martin followed his lead. The paint you see in here? The reason the room is so white? She ground up the bones of those two kids after carving them up for lunchmeat here in this room. She used the dust of their bones to paint this room an everlasting off-white.”

  Tricia stared in horror at the walls. “The paint is…their bones?”

  Mrs. Tanser nodded. “It seemed a sacrilege to paint over the remains of those poor souls, so the room has been left exactly as it was when Pastor Martin sat down here in the middle of the room and… well…there’s no delicate way to put this. He blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. Lord knows where he got it, a man of the clergy and all. Someone wiped down the ceiling and wall over there…” She pointed to a shadowy stain to their right.

  “But all in all, the bones of those children are still right here, chalky and white, for anyone to see.

  “Oh my dear, you’re trembling; you’re white as the walls. Come here, I’m so sorry. I’m an old woman and talk too much. I forget myself. And you, just a 10th grader and all. Let’s have us a soda pop, hmmm?”

  Mrs. Tanser pulled the wide-eyed girl from the room and bolted the lock once again.

  “Don’t need any of those summer breezes or restless ghosts getting in,” she mumbled, and then shook her head. “Darn it all, there I go again.”

  The massive door opened with a long squeak. Mrs. Tanser peered through the foot-wide opening with a suspicious look on her face. Then her eyes lighted on the tousled hair of Tricia.

  “You’re probably here to see my nieces, aren’t you?” she asked.

  The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am. I don’t know them.”

  “Don’t know them?” Mrs. Tanser looked confused. Then she slapped a palm to her forehead. “My oh my, that’s right. They came a-visiting awhile before you came a-visiting. And you’ve been too polite to correct an old woman before.”

  She opened the door wider and motioned Tricia inside. “Sometimes it’s all a blur,” she confided, and pushed the door shut.

  “I remember now. I’ve been giving you the history of the house, and fattening you up on apples. Not the best choice for fattening, I’ll give you, but it’s what I have. No chocolate cakes up here on the hill!”

  Mrs. Tanser motioned her into the kitchen.

  “Where were we last time? I told you about the Whites and the Martins…There were others, too. But then in the ‘50s, they turned the place into an orphanage.”

  Mrs. Tanser laughed. “I know, it sounds ridiculous. A house where children kept dying in horrible ways. A house where children’s bones actually painted the walls white-and they turned it into an orphanage. But there you go. I wonder if they ever even saw the irony.”

  The rhythmic sound of a knife on stone filled the kitchen as Mrs. Tanser cut the girl an apple.

  “Here we go,” the older woman said, pushing a plate in front of the girl. She stared at the ceiling a moment and then grinned and nodded. “Forty-seven.”

  Mrs. Tanser scooped the core of the apple and a couple seeds from the counter and threw them in a waste can. “Forty-seven children in all disappeared while this house was an orphanage. That’s what I found out down there at the village hall. God knows why the town didn’t have this place bulldozed, but, then again, who cares so much about orphans?”

  The old woman shook her head in obvious disgust and then motioned for Tricia to follow her.

  “Grab an apple,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  Mrs. Tanser led the way past the dining room and a dark hallway and the horrible room of bone paint, with its locked door. She stopped at another door, this one painted dark as a 2 a.m. shadow.

  She pulled a ring of keys from the depths of her apron and explained, “Sometimes at night, I hear voices from in here. Terrible voices. Men howling. Children screaming. When I open the door, they’re never there…but I keep it locked anyway.”

  She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Tricia followed, though hesitantly.

  The room expanded to fill the eye with a vista of beautiful stonework and a floor of intricate mosaic. Like most of the house, the predominant color was no color. The room hurt the eye in its melding of cream and vanilla and starving, emaciated white. It also ascended three stories in the air and ran as deep as a football field.

  “Over here,” Mrs. Tanser called, and led Tricia to a corner. She reached down to the floor and pulled on a small cord that poked out from beneath the shards of tile. A hidden trap door opened upwards at her pull.

  “Look,” Mrs. Tanser pointed, and Tricia leaned in to stare down into the gap. The trap secreted a small cubbyhole, maybe 18 inches deep and a foot wide. Its bottom was hidden by dozens of small white pebble-like shards. They covered the bottom and stacked on top of each other like a pound of gravel.

  “Hold out your hand,” Mrs. Tanser said. As Tricia did, her arm visibly shook.

  The older woman squeezed her outstretched palm and grinned. “It’s okay. They can’t get you here. There time was a long time ago. Now. You see these?” She turned the girl’s hand palm side up and ran a finger across the top joint, on the other side of the fingernail.

  “I’m not sure what they intended, but I believe that little stack of bones down there are the top joints of all those missing orphans’ fingers.”

  Tricia ripped her hand away and gasped.

  Mrs. Tanser shook her head. “They say down in town that those orphans disappeared, but it’s no mystery where they went.”

  She let the trap fall down with a smack that echoed through the too-still room.

  “Just look around you,” she said and gestured at the intricately laid floor. “Those kids never left this room. Their bones are here, laid into the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Those kids built this room.”

  Tricia’s eyes had now widened so large that the whites of her eyes were circled in red.

  “Yep,” the old woman sighed. “You’re standing on them.”

  The girl screamed.

  “Just bones,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I wanted you to see, to understand. This house has a bad reputation, and rightly so. I’m sure those voices I hear coming from this room are from all those innocent orphans who had their fingers cropped off, and their bones ground down to shards of decorative tile.”

  “It’s this house,” she said and shook her head, pulling Tricia closer. The girl didn’t fight her embrace. All she could think of was that she was standing on the chopped-up bones of dead people.

  “Everyone who’s ever lived here has felt the need to add to the house,” Mrs. Tanser said, and pulled the girl towards the back of the long room.

  “The White House was large by the standards of the 1800s when Mr. White built it, but there have been many rooms added since. I showed you the draughty room last time you were here. And this room-which I think was probably a gymnasium for the orphans-was built over a long period. There are others. In the basement is a small closet that I believe was painted in the paste of a child…its colors are faded and dulled now, but it looks to be a mad swirl of mud and blood and bone if you stare closely. There’s a shed on the back of the property that has window frames that are rounded and made of what looks to be rib bones. And the lock on that shed is a primitive thing, but it seems to be made of an arm or a leg bone that drops into place and holds the door fast.

  “There's no way the realtor could have warned me,” Mrs. Tanser said. “There’s no way she could ever really have known-she wouldn’t even stand inside this house. I wish she could have told me what I was in for. But the house…once you’re here…”

  They walked across the long bone mosai
c room, and the chatter of Tricia’s teeth began to reverberate through the silence.

  “It’s okay, child,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I just want to show you one more room.”

  At the back of the long white room she stopped, and reached out to turn the latch on a door that only announced itself as thin seams set in the wall. It opened outward at her touch, and a cool breeze hit them as it did.

  “I think that some of the rooms people added to the house were afraid to show their real colors,” Mrs. Tanser said. “The people knew what they were doing, on some level, and they bleached the bones and carved the bones and crushed the bones into paste and mortar and paint.

  “But when the house told me…when I realized what I would have to do, I made a pledge to myself to be true to the children who came here. The people who grew this house. They shouldn't be hidden in pieces, I said to myself, but celebrated. After all, every thing has its place. And every place, its thing. The things that build this house have their place. They had life, and in death…they grow the White House in rooms of bone.

  “And this house…must have its thing. These days…that’s me.”

  Mrs. Tanser picked up a hammer and raised it above Tricia’s head. She breathed deep as the girl squealed and tried desperately to run. Her screams rang out like bullets scraping metal. But Mrs. Tanser’s other hand held the small girl fast. A trapped animal.

  “You’ll live here forever,” she promised. “And I promise you’ll hardly feel a thing. I can’t believe the torture some of these kids must have gone through. I could never be so cruel.”

  Tricia screamed again. A horrible, larynx-shredding sound. But she couldn’t break free of the old woman’s grip. Mrs. Tanser lived only for the house now, and Tricia had never felt such desperate strength before. The veins of the woman’s hands stood out blue and serious above the small girl’s reddening fingers. “I came to this town because I loved children. Genna and Jillie didn’t want to stay here either,” she whispered. “Look at them up there.” She nodded at two tiny skulls shrieking in silence on the wall. “But what could I do? I adore children. The house…This house…it never relents…”