The Splendor of Fear

by Ambrose Ibsen

  We tried every which way to approach the front of the house by dry land, but there was nothing to do but get our feet wet. The stagnant pool before the house extended very nearly to the bottom step of the porch, and had about it a faintly rotten scent. It was the smell of water that had pooled and stewed and festered over the summer months until it had become almost syrupy with decay. Now it had been chilled, and scores of dissolving leaves hung in the stuff like mint leaves suspended in a revolting mojito.

  Jared brought me to the edge of the copse nearest the house and proposed a solution. “Just come around this way, near the trees. Water's not so deep here. Step slowly so none gets into your boots.” He wrapped his arms around the trunk of a sturdy tree and began stretching out a leg to demonstrate.

  This was entirely too much trouble to explore a house that was most likely a death trap. “You go on ahead. I'll wait over here,” I offered.

  “No, come on! Let's go together!”

  I grimaced. “What for? I'd rather not.” He gave me a pleading look in reply, but I dropped his gaze and paced about disinterestedly. There was nothing good waiting for us inside that place; I'd have bet my life on it. Some broken down furniture, maybe—a good photo op for urban exploration types, but nothing more. Maybe he's been looking for someplace unique to pop the question and he's decided to do it in there, I thought with an involuntary frown. If that was the case, my answer was going to be a hard “no”...

  “Oh, come on, Penny!” He touched the water with the toe of his boot and then threw his arms around the next trunk in the sequence. “There's nothing to it!”

  “Just like there was nothing to jumping across the creek, right?” Irritated by his insistence, I decided to gauge the distance between the trunks myself and began a slow advance towards the house. I held onto one of the trees and carefully maneuvered towards the next. It was slow-going, and every time my foot touched down with a little slap I felt sure the icy water was going to slosh over the top of my boot and soak my feet. The ground underneath gave with a little gush every time I stepped, resulting in an awful sucking sound.

  Jared made it to the porch after throwing himself towards the bottom step. His left foot touched down upon the stone, but his right trailed behind and kicked up the foul water with a splash. A fair bit of it soaked into his pant leg, and for a moment he stood there, trying to shake it off in disgust.

  I would have happily laughed at him, except that it was now my turn to make the jump. I crept to the driest patch I could find and gauged the distance between myself and the porch. Shoving off the tree, I landed next to Jared with a grunt, and thankfully he lent me a hand before I could lose my balance and pitch backward into the water. I had nearly done just that, as the stones beneath our feet had shifted under our combined weight.

  “That wasn't so bad, huh?” he said, sporting a winning grin.

  Standing upright, I looked out across the patch of water, then up to the house that presently towered over us. “Let's just get this over with.”

  Climbing up three steps of cracked stone, Jared and I stood before the entrance. The door had fallen from its hinges long ago and all that remained of it were splinters scattered about the foyer. How deep the foyer went, or what existed beyond it, was difficult to say—with its windows blocked by overgrowth, an impressive darkness had taken root inside.

  The building was a rude and crooked thing. It stood before me, mouth agape, and breathed its sour, dust-soaked breath in my face. The lines of the doorway and the contours of the wooden floors, which had undoubtedly been handsome in their day, were warped and uneven now, and I was sure before I even stepped into the place that the entire structure was held together solely by age. The house had carried on for over a century despite its abandonment through a kind of stubborn momentum, and it was possible it would carry on for still another, only growing in its ugliness. Warped as it was, no amount of work could ever return the thing to its former beauty. I was sure of that much.

  Jared went digging around in his pockets for his phone, but came up empty handed. “Shit, I think I left it back at camp. Mind if I use the flashlight on yours?”

  “Didn't you buy flashlights for this trip?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but they're back at camp!”

  “Well, that was money well spent,” I muttered. With a frown, I switched on my phone's flashlight app and handed it to him. “Let's hurry up,” I added. “The battery on that thing is almost dead, so don't push it.”

  He held the phone out before him and brought light into the foyer. As our eyes adjusted to the scenery, I swear the very lines of the place jumped and shied from the light—recoiled the way a housebound invalid might when confronted with the sun.

  Panning slowly, we took in a vast emptiness. The foyer appeared to lead to a succession of shadowed rooms whose only remarkable features were chaotic accumulations of detritus. Jared took a few moments to test out the floors—despite my urgings against it—and finally stepped inside. The weathered planks seized under his feet but didn't give, and when he was sure they would support us, he waved me inside silently.

  It's hard to describe my reticence at venturing into the house, and harder still for me to rate the curiosity that ultimately impelled me to follow through. Jared stood several feet from the door, throwing the light around in thoughtful silence. I stepped inside as slowly as I could, shuddering with every whine of the floors till I was within reach of him. I linked one of my arms in his and looked to the light, which now brought new features into view.

  To the right of the foyer, through a passage once fronted by a thin door—long collapsed—was a high-ceilinged room featuring remnants of 19th century furniture. Age and wear had made it almost indistinguishable from the piles of leaves and other refuse that'd filled the corners, but beneath all the dust I could make out the distinct borders of a wooden side table in one corner, of a leaning cabinet in the other. Hanging from the ceiling by threads of gossamer silk was a lopsided chandelier, and at glimpsing it I held my breath, frightened that a reckless sigh might sever those threads and send it crashing through the floor.

  A closer study of said room yielded even more. Spread out across the floor at room's center was something like a rug. I couldn't tell what style, nor what material it was made of; the thing was so badly tattered and molded over that it had likely bonded to the floor beneath. Beyond the borders of the rug, near a window whose cracked pane was so cloudy as to appear milky, was a dark, squat thing I soon realized to be a rust-flecked wood-burning stove.

  We continued into the next room, windowless, which had once been lined in bookshelves. Most of the shelves had crumbled over time, and the books once housed in them had been cast across the floors. The walls in this room were stained a hideous blackish-green for several uncontrolled leaks from the upper story, and a faintly gangrenous smell hung in the air. Jared and I took turns trying to read the titles of the surviving books, or to flip through them, but they were in an awful state. The pages of some tomes crumbled to dust beneath our fingers, whereas others had congealed into a single, worm-eaten mass. Tucked away in a corner and flanked by two fallen bookcases was a sturdy little desk. Upon it we found some quaint items that had remained intact; a pair of glasses, an empty wine bottle and a humidor whose contents Jared inspected thoroughly.

  “Dare me to smoke one?” he asked, picking up a fetid cigar and twirling it in his fingers. The thing sagged like a dark worm in his grasp.

  “Put that thing to your lips and I'll never kiss you again,” I warned.

  He snickered and began pacing into the next room.

  I meant to follow him, but I fell behind. With the ghostly light of the cellphone issuing from the next room, I scanned the shelves nearest the desk in search of a legible title. My finger brushed against a number of clothbound tomes whose lettering had been effaced long ago, and a cursory glance into each revealed them to be completely ruined. Further up however, I discovered a dusty shelf whose contents had fared better against the
rot, and from there I plucked a slim volume with a strange cover; one of hammered metal. I was delighted to find it still readable.

  A highly filagreed title page revealed the title of the book to be Carte de Umbra Lungi. I wasn't sure what that meant, or what language it was, but began turning the pages in search of clues. The pages remained preternaturally crisp compared to everything else in the house. As I squinted at its pages in the low light, each of them crammed with flowing script, I felt a surge of excitement in my breast. The text had been painstakingly rendered by hand, and despite the book's obvious antiquity, it looked so clean and neat it practically jumped off the page.

  I don't know exactly how long I stood there admiring the book. As I turned the pages, one blurred into the next; the smooth script danced around animatedly like images in a flip book. I think that there were images interspersed, too, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were of. I know that they made me laugh—loudly—and it was that laughing that ultimately drew Jared back into the room.

  A hand reached out of the darkness and slapped me on the shoulder. “Penny, what the hell are you laughing about?” It was Jared, and the waver in his voice telegraphed clear concern.

  I blinked hard, realizing then that I had been immersed in perfect darkness for quite some time. My knees felt weak, like I'd been standing a long while with my legs locked out. The book fell out of my hand and landed with a rustle. “I was, uh...” I tried to swallow but couldn't find an ounce of spit. “I was reading this book,” I managed in barely a whisper.

  It was so dark in the room that I couldn't see Jared standing beside me. Even so, the evident disgust in his tone told me exactly what his expression was like when he said, “How could you have been reading?” I felt him wave his hands around in the air near me. “The phone died half an hour ago and it's been black as pitch in here ever since. I wandered on and got kinda lost back there... I couldn't find my way back when the light went out.” He paused. “I was calling out to you, but you didn't answer. What gives?”

  “Um... what?” I offered a caustic laugh. “You were in the next room. I couldn't have been in here reading for more than a minute or two. Are you high?”

  He exhaled sharply. “No, I walked through several rooms—probably the entire downstairs—and the light went out on me. You were supposed to be following. I called out to you constantly, and then I found my way back here, where you're chuckling in the dark like a creep. I was wandering for at least thirty minutes.”

  That didn't seem possible, but then he was so vehement about it that I couldn't find it in myself to argue. I could only shake my head. “I, uh... I dunno. I'm sorry. I guess I didn't hear you.” I combed a few locks of hair behind my ear nervously. “I was reading this weird old book—”

  “How? There's no light in here,” he asked.

  I blinked against the darkness, my knees pulsing. I had to admit I felt very strange—like I'd been standing in the same spot for a long while. My feet felt numb and my neck was sore for its downward craning. “There was this book,” I muttered, raking at my hair. “I was just looking through it. You had just walked into the next room, and...” Terror and confusion seized me. Except for the blur of pages, I couldn't remember anything else before Jared had approached me. It was like I'd just come out of a dream.

  “You're full of it,” he challenged. “You've been standing in this room, in the dark, for like thirty minutes. Maybe you're losing it.”

  A little insulted, I knelt down clumsily and groped for the book I'd dropped. “No, I swear I was just standing here, reading this thing. Hold on, let me see if I can find it...” I touched the floor, then began feeling out the metal cover of that well-kept volume. I recalled it had fallen near my feet, but no matter how I searched, I couldn't find any book on the floor.

  My fingers did brush up against something else, though.

  Feathers. Positioned in roughly the same spot where I'd known the book to land only moments ago, I felt a cold, sagging mass upon the floor. Its exterior was coated in what my hands took for feathers—some soft, others bristly. Baffled by this, I studied the object further, pressing and prodding with my blind fingers until I'd gotten the whole shape of the thing down in my mind.

  And when I'd done it, I seized and fell back, landing against Jared's legs.

  “What's wrong?” he asked.

  I'd rubbed several of those feathers between my fingers and had teased the bloated flesh beneath. Tracing the outline of the mass had brought me at one end to a pair of gnarled talons, and at the other to a smooth head, to lifeless, beady eyes, and a stout beak. It was a dead bird—a large one. My skin crawled and I threw my arms around Jared's leg so that I might pull myself up off the floor. I didn't have the benefit of a light, but felt sure that I was standing before a dead crow. At that moment, I couldn't have articulated why I was so sure of the species; I just was.

  “Penny, you're freaking me out. What the hell's the matter?”

  I tugged on his arm. “Let's... let's get out of here, please.”

  “Yeah, let's.” He linked his arm in mine and threw the other out in front of him to feel out the way forward. Taking slow, measured steps, the two of us held our breaths and tried to find our way out of the room. This library wasn't so far from the entrance of the house, and I knew that once we neared the foyer we'd be able to find our way to the exit by the grey light of day.

  Except, after several steps, we found ourselves surrounded only by darkness. The expected light never materialized.

  Jared's breathing had picked up, and in the tightness of his grasp I could feel his hammering pulse. “The doorway... we should have reached it by now, no?” He grit his teeth. “The room wasn't this big the last time we walked through it.”

  “We had a light last time,” I added unhelpfully. “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction?”

  Standing in place for a time, trying to make sense of the sea of black, he reached around in wide arcs, hoping to feel a wall or doorway. Finding neither, he nonetheless connected with something that his hand recognized, and he took a reflexive step backwards. He threw an arm around my waist and then yelled into the darkness. “W-Who's there?”

  My joints stiffened and I leaned into Jared's tight hold. Ears perking up like a cat's, I listened for the sounds of another presence in the darkness, but picked up only our own heavy breathing. He tugged me hard as he took off swiftly in a new direction. It was reckless to walk this quickly in the dark old house, but that he was trying to build distance from something was perfectly clear. When we'd gone several steps without slamming into a wall, I asked him a question under my breath. “What happened? Was there someone...?”

  Jared's hand met something, and he thumped his palm against it in recognition. “The doorway!” Ushering me out of the library, we passed by the room where we'd seen the old stove and battered furniture, and quickly felt our way into the foyer—at the end of which we found the front entrance agape.

  But there was a problem.

  Practically skating over the worn out floors and dragging me behind like a child, Jared cursed as the entrance came into view. “There's no way... There's just no way!” Uttering a series of curses, he brought me out onto the porch, panting, and then looked up incredulously at the sky.

  It had been a grey afternoon when we'd entered the house, and the rain had only just stopped.

  The heavens were painted now in the heaviest tones of midnight.

  “How can it be dark already?” Jared was still staring up into the sky, and he barked out the question as if expecting the moon to answer. The moon burned a dim, coy orange behind a veil of swirling clouds. He turned to me, face white with panic. “H-How long could we have been in there?” he asked.

  I looked at him, then back into the house where only moments ago the two of us had struggled through the darkness. “We can't have been in there all day,” I assured him. Noting the watch he always wore on his wrist, I urged him to take a look. “What time is it?” />
  Jared glanced down at his old watch, trying to catch the feeble moonlight on its face to get an accurate read. As he did so, his expression sagged even further, if it was possible, and he began violently striking the thing with the heel of his palm. “Piece of shit!”

  “What's the matter?”

  He held his wrist out and shook the watch in my face. “The damn thing's busted! It just stopped!” Burying a fist in the house's doorway and knocking a flurry of splinters from the jamb, he stared out across the pool of semi-frozen water before the house. With a hand pressed to his brow, he took the first of the porch's three steps. “What are we going to do? I mean... are we losing our minds?”

  I didn't know how to answer that, and simply kept on his heels. Standing beside him on the bottom step, I peered over my shoulder, back at the house, recalling his earlier outburst. “Jared,” I asked, “was there s-someone else in there with us?”

  “No, no of course not,” he blurted too quickly to be convincing. The paleness of his face and the way he gnawed at his thumbnail nervously revealed him to be a liar. “I was in there awhile, lost, and before the light went out, I—” He cleared his throat to keep his voice from trembling. “I thought I saw someone a few times. You know, just standing in the corners of some rooms. But it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. And then, before we got out of there just now, I was reaching out for something—anything—and I guess I brushed up against...”

  “Against what?”

  By way of answer, he placed his open hand across his face and stared at me, wide-eyed, through his splayed fingers. “It felt like someone was standing there—like I touched their face.” He didn't stop long enough to let the horror of that sink in for me. He bent down and picked me up. Then, proceeding from the driest angle, he took a running jump off the porch. He landed with a splash near the edge of the copse of trees. Setting me down, he trudged through the muck and left the house behind with an eye towards the open wilderness. “We're going back to camp. And when we get there, we're leaving. Going home.”