Every House Is Haunted

by Ian Rogers

  PRAISE FOR IAN ROGERS

  “Rogers continues to engage and intrigue with his trademark cross-over of the supernatural mystery . . . [his] writing has a cinematic quality that is fully immersive.”

  —Bloody Bookish

  “Wry and stylishly bizarre, Rogers hits the mark dead on. . . . I hope he’s on the job for years to come.”

  —Laird Barron,

  author of Occultation

  “Ian Rogers’ stories are old-fashioned in the very best sense: classic thrillers in the spirit of Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson. Every House Is Haunted is full of well-crafted, satisfying twists, a fine companion for any reader of literate horror.”

  —Andrew Pyper,

  author of Lost Girls,

  The Killing Circle and The Guardians

  EVERY

  HOUSE

  IS

  HAUNTED

  IAN ROGERS

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  Every House Is Haunted © 2012 by Ian Rogers

  Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr

  Cover design and interior design/artwork © 2012 by Samantha Beiko

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-919-4

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited by Helen Marshall

  Copyedited and proofread by Sandra Kasturi

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For my mother, Judith Anne Rogers (1946-2001)

  No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

  —Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

  “For a minute I felt as insubstantial as a ghost. . . . The actual world was a house, with its roof falling in, dissolved so thin you could see the sunlight through it.”

  —Ross Macdonald, The Sinister Habit

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE VESTIBULE

  Aces

  Autumnology

  Cabin D

  Winter Hammock

  THE LIBRARY

  A Night in the Library with the Gods

  The Nanny

  The Dark and the Young

  The Currents

  THE ATTIC

  Leaves Brown

  Wood

  The House on Ashley Avenue

  The Rifts Between Us

  Vogo

  THE DEN

  The Cat

  Deleted Scenes

  The Tattletail

  Charlotte’s Frequency

  THE CELLAR

  Relaxed Best

  Hunger

  Inheritor

  Twillingate

  The Candle

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  INTRODUCTION

  Five days after graduating from high school, I had a spinal fusion to help correct and keep my scoliosis from worsening. The surgeons used scraped bone from my hip and metal Harrington rods to fuse two-thirds of my vertebrae. I stayed in Boston Children’s Hospital for one week and then spent the rest of the summer before my freshman year of college house-bound while recovering. I was alone for most mornings and afternoons with both of my parents at work and my younger siblings hanging out with their friends.

  So with all of that summer me-time looming, I figured I’d have a go at reading Stephen King’s It and its 1200 pages. Sitting in my pillow-padded rocking chair in the already sweltering living room, I read the first chapter—the monster in the sewer lures then kills the cute little brother who I imagined to be my little brother—and threw the book across the room. There was no way I was going to spend that summer alone in my house and terrified out of my gourd, so I quickly moved on to a book about Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition to Easter Island. I don’t remember any details from the Heyerdahl book. But I could recite to you that first chapter of King’s It if you’d like. And yeah, after Easter Island, I went right back to Derry, Maine.

  I spent most of that recovery-summer shuffling slowly from room to room looking for something to do, not that I was in any physical condition for something to do. With It reverberating in my head, I also spent the summer avoiding our creepy, dark, old basement, which was where we kept our ordered-by-the-month supply of important groceries like cereal and cans of Hi-C. While the basement had always terrified me as a child, that summer every room in my house held potential horrors. That summer my house was haunted.

  That said, I can’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy my imagination running away with me; it was the only kind of running I was capable of during my long recovery. That newly minted but physically damaged eighteen-year-old about to go off to college was in awe of possibility: afraid of what might happen yet exhilarated by what could happen.

  Ian Rogers’ remarkable book is a time machine that carries me back to the summer when I was home alone and deliciously scared, to the summer when I unknowingly fell in love with horror stories, the very kind that Ian Rogers expertly writes. Ian’s stories are explorations of the cosmic, social, and personal what-ifs, of the terrible and wonderful awe of possibility.

  In the stunning opening story, “Aces,” Toby is left to care for his irascible, charismatic, and potentially dangerous younger sister Soelle, who may or may not be a powerful witch. One of Ian’s many strengths is his ability to illustrate authentic interpersonal, or more specifically interfamilial, relationships within the context of the larger what-ifs of the story. Toby and Soelle’s sibling relationship is oddly warm, fraught with peril, and utterly compelling. The questions as to whether or not Soelle is responsible for the death of a classmate and for the disappearance of their parents serve as a perfect tone-and-theme-setter to Every House Is Haunted. Familial concerns come up again in the terrifying “Inheritor,” with Danny inheriting a long-abandoned childhood home from his estranged father; a home in which his sickly sister suffered terribly and died. Here the family dynamic
is as corrupt and diseased as the haunted house.

  In the wildly entertaining and slightly skewed (and I mean that in the best possible way) “Cabin D,” a fatigued and forlorn diner waitress serves a bizarrely dressed man his last meal(s) before he attempts to confront the haunted Cabin D. Ian observes, “But hauntings aren’t restricted to houses. There are also haunted apartments and haunted trailers, haunted farms and haunted restaurants, haunted churches and haunted schools. . . .” Or, as Joe and his young friends learn in the eerie and fitting conclusion to the collection, “Twillingate,” there are haunted lighthouses and haunted shorelines as surely as his characters, and by proxy us, will all be haunted by the questions of who are you? and who are you going to be?

  “The House on Ashley Avenue” is a clever riff on the haunted house story, with an amiable psychic group who eventually does battle with the formidable house but only after detailing the potential dangers ahead. The playful interaction between Charles and Sally ratchets up tension before the final and satisfying confrontation.

  The juxtaposition of the chaotic supernatural with Ian’s grounded, empathetic characters is what gives his stories their heart. It’s a heart that beats fast in “The Rifts Between Us” where Stanton and other scientists attempt to explore the vast alien landscape of death. Or a heart that beats unbearably heavy, as it does in “The Candle.” Tom and Peggy, the weary middle-aged couple, are the source and power behind the story’s palpable dread. Their ennui, regret, and dissatisfaction of who they were, who they became, and who they could’ve been are the ghosts in their house. Those everyday anxieties of husbands and wives are given a further, creepily arachnid spin with “Charlotte’s Frequency.”

  Two end of the world scenarios are outlined toward the end of the collection. The first, “Hunger,” is a quick and stinging jab from the point of view of a patient zero, one who narrates with a simple, cold detachment that is unnerving and unique to the other stories in this collection. If “Hunger” is the jab, then the following story, “Winter Hammock,” is the twelve-round bludgeoning. An epistolary account of the world’s strange end from a college drop-out who works at Radio Shack, “Winter Hammock” is H.P. Lovecraft meets Tex Avery meets George Saunders. It’s a smart, savage satire of pop culture and our apocalyptic/zombie/Cthulhu zeitgeist; our haunted zeitgeist.

  But you don’t believe in haunted houses, Daniel.

  No he didn’t. Just haunted people

  Looking back on my summer of recovery, I realize now that I wasn’t so much haunted by King’s It or by my house and its dank basement and empty rooms as I was haunted by my condition within the house: alone, unsure, physically fragile and vulnerable. The truth is we are all perpetually haunted by our evolving yet constant condition of vulnerability. Ian Rogers knows this and uses our vulnerabilities to move us, to make us feel that truth. What more could anyone want from fiction? Rogers’ short story collection is a statement about the possibilities of horror short fiction as well as being a factual statement. Yes, every house is indeed haunted. Including yours.

  PAUL TREMBLAY

  5/17/2012

  ACES

  Soelle got kicked out of school for killing one of her classmates.

  They couldn’t prove she actually did it, which was why she received an expulsion instead of a murder charge, but there was no doubt among the faculty that she was responsible.

  Soelle told me she didn’t care if they kicked her out or put her in jail. She just wanted her tarot cards back.

  At dinner that night I asked her if she wanted to talk about it. Our parents should have been the ones dealing with this, but we hadn’t seen them in four years.

  “Talk about what?” Soelle snapped. “Tara Denton is such a baby. I read her cards wrong on purpose. She wasn’t really going to die!”

  “But she did die,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, because she ran in front of a bus.”

  “So you did predict her death.”

  Soelle tilted her head to the side and gave me a long-suffering look, as if she was the older sibling and I was the younger. “We all predict our own deaths, Tobias.”

  “Nice. Where did you get that?”

  She frowned. “Ghost Whisperer?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what actually happened.”

  Soelle blew a strand of her straggly blonde hair off her forehead and dropped her fork on the plate with a loud clink. She was going to be sixteen in August, but she still had the mannerisms of a young child. Most people grow up; Soelle was growing inward.

  “It was Algebra and I was so bored I could die. I was feeling fidgety so I took out my tarot deck and started shuffling it, practising some of those fancy shuffles you taught me. I started snapping cards down on my desk—maybe a bit too loudly, I admit—and Tara, she was sitting beside me, started giving me these dirty looks. I shot one right back at her and asked if she wanted to play. Do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘I don’t gamble.’ Like she had never seen a tarot deck before. What a zero. Anyway, Mrs. O’Reilly put some big complicated problem on the blackboard and said she had to step out for a few minutes. I heard she’s a drunk, so I figured she was heading off to the boiler room to get juiced. Robbie Moore said he saw her in the parking lot one time and—”

  “Soelle.”

  “So the teacher left and I turned to Tara. She was kind of pissing me off at that point. I snapped down a few more cards, some of the trumps, and I said, ‘Do these look like playing cards to you, sistah?’ I was expecting Tara to say something smart, but she surprised me; she actually picked up the cards, one at a time, and looked at them. She asked me what they were, and I figured, what the hell, and I started explaining what tarot is. We weren’t bonding or anything—I was still thinking she was a twit—but she seemed seriously interested. I could tell because she looked kind of scared. She probably heard some the rumours about me that are always floating around. . . .”

  I nodded. “Go on.”

  “So I asked Tara if she wanted me to give her a reading. I told her she had to ask me to do it or else it wouldn’t work. I don’t think that’s true—in fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t—but it sounded kind of occult, sort of vampirish, and she seemed to eat it up. By then a few of the other kids had gathered around us, and Tara must’ve known it was too late to back out. So she started acting smarmy, telling me to play her cards and read her future, or am I too scared. I didn’t like that. First she says ‘play’ her cards, right after I told her they weren’t playing cards, and she says it in this joking tone, not for my benefit, or even hers, but because we had an audience. Then, to top it all off, she asks me if I’m scared, which I found doubly insulting since she was the one who was actually afraid. But then I figured out what the problem really was. What her problem was.” Soelle paused for a moment, possibly to take a breath, more likely for effect. “I realized she wasn’t scared enough.”

  “So that’s what you did?” I said. “You scared her?”

  “I don’t care if people disrespect me. They can say whatever they want about me. They can write it on the bathroom walls—they could write it in neon on the front of the school, for all I care. But tarot isn’t something to be laughed at. The cards don’t like it. They told me so.”

  “Uh-huh. So what happened?”

  “I dealt out her spread. Then I sat there for a while staring at her cards, looking like I was concentrating really hard on them. I knew the longer I took the more agitated Tara would get. So I started her reading—her joke reading, I might add. It wasn’t real. I made it up. I just wanted to take her down a peg, and in front of all the jerks she was trying so hard to impress. I put on this serious expression and shook my head, telling her I didn’t like what I saw. I began asking these medical questions, like if there was a history of heart problems in her family, is her father a smoker, stuff like that. Tara started getting freaked out. I had her cards laid out facedown, and I was flipping them over one at a time. The first card
I turned over slowly and smoothly, barely making a sound, but each one after that I started snapping them louder and louder. When I flipped the last one—a card I slipped to the top of the deck on purpose without Tara noticing—it sounded like a gunshot, and Tara actually jumped in her seat. She was really scared, Toby. That last card was Death, which, as any self-respecting tarot reader will tell you, doesn’t actually mean death but change.”

  “I would say death is a fairly big change.”

  Soelle’s shoulders twitched in a small shrug. She was tall for her age and tended to slouch, which gave her the appearance of someone expressing perpetual indifference.

  “Tara wanted to know if I was making it up. I told her I wouldn’t do something like that. I told her that the cards would turn back on me if I read them incorrectly. I’m pretty sure that’s bull, too, but it didn’t matter much because Tara wasn’t listening anyway. She stood up and started flapping her arms like she had to pee or something. She was breathing really fast and looking all around the room. She looked at me with these big saucer eyes and asked how she was going to die. Then I realized why she was looking all around like that. She was seeing death everywhere. I told her I didn’t know how she was going to die, that the cards weren’t that specific. Maybe she’d slip in the shower and break her neck. Or maybe she’d get kidnapped and chopped into little pieces.”

  “Or get hit by a bus,” I added.

  Soelle shrugged again. “Or that.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Some of the others were trying to calm her down. They tried to get her to sit back in her chair, but she pushed them away. She started saying something really fast. I didn’t understand all of it, but I think she was worried that one of the chair legs was going to break and she was going to fall backwards and fracture her skull. She started moving down the aisle toward the door, turning around and around. She bumped into Jack Horton, who was just coming back from sharpening his pencil, and she started screaming at him, accusing him of trying to kill her. She was absolute loony tunes. She started spinning around pointing at the chalkboard, the globe, even Blinky the classroom iguana—screaming about death, death everywhere. Then she ran out of the room. Nobody followed her, but some of the others went over to the windows. A few moments later we saw her come running out of the school and into the street. The buses were just arriving and”—Soelle drove her fist into her palm—“el smacko.”