The House by the Cemetery

by John Everson

  Either way, it was just one of many repairs he’d have to add to his list. First thing, was to make the list.

  Perry had said that structurally the place was solid, and just needed a month or so of touch-up work, but Mike wasn’t going to be responsible for people falling through the floor. Or a floor collapsing. He had his list from Perry of things their structural engineer had noted, but Mike was going to do his own assessment. And the first way to begin was ‘the stomp test’.

  Mike walked past the hole in the linoleum and stamped his foot down on the dusty, colorless wood that he assumed was probably maple or oak. It was impossible to tell with the grime, but that would have made sense in this area. That’s what grew in the forest; that’s what people had worked with a hundred years ago when the first settlement had populated this area and started to bury their dead around the small pond now known as Bachelor’s Grove.

  He stepped around the hole in the foyer and walked slowly into the front room. It was quiet here…eerily quiet, with the occasional hum of the road and the buzz of insects suddenly blotted out. The morning sun fought through dirty windows layered by years and years of spiderwebs and bug carcasses. He was in a different space here.

  A sacred space, his mind suggested.

  “A dusty place,” he whispered aloud. As he walked, the dirt moved from the floor to the air in lazy currents of filth.

  Mike walked around the corner. Once there had probably been a formal table and chairs in the shadowed space beyond. He could still see the dark shadows and holes where sconces had been mounted to the walls. But now…all that remained were holes…. And yellowed, faded wallpaper that had curled back from the seams at some points.

  The dark plank floors might once have been varnished and shiny. Now…they were simply dark. And stained. Any beauty they once held lost in dust and neglect.

  Mike retraced his steps to the hallway. The wood had creaked beneath his weight, but had not sagged. Surprising, but good.

  Then he stepped through the door across the hall and into the kitchen.

  “Oh shit,” he said.

  The wood floor suddenly turned to tile, and the tile, stained and yellowed…eventually gave way to a ragged hole in the middle of the room. There was a dark trail from the cabinets near the sink to a low spot in the center of the room that had apparently rotted through. He guessed that the water lines had been left on long after the last occupants had moved away. Or been buried out back.

  “Well,” Mike said. “There’s one week.”

  He knelt down at the edge of the rotten wood and looked through the floor into the basement below.

  “And there’s another,” he said.

  The basement was a mud pit, with furrows and troughs in the bare earth where puddles of stagnant water gathered. The thick smell of rot and mildew rose up through the hole.

  “Remember, you don’t need to make it livable,” Perry had said. “Just give us some floors, shore up the staircases and reinforce the beams in the basement. We want to make that into a crypt.”

  Mike stood up and shook his head. The crypt part was going to be easy.

  “Well…first things first,” he said. “We need to air this place out. It reeks.”

  He walked over to the window above the sink and after mopping away six inches of gray web with the back of his work glove, tried to lift it. A dozen spiders scurried out of the heavily webbed upper corners as the old wood creaked. But the window didn’t budge upward.

  “That figures,” he murmured. He tried the front room window, which looked out on the porch. It shifted up a few centimeters at his push, and then stuck fast.

  “No, sorry, that’s not acceptable,” Mike said, and reached into his portable tool bag for a small crowbar. “I’m not working in this stink all day.”

  The wood at the base splintered…but a minute later the window slid up the warped track and the morning air rushed over the sill.

  “Better,” he pronounced.

  He walked around the rest of the main floor, and jimmied a handful of other windows open. The stale, mildewed stench of the house began to give way to the scent of the summer breeze.

  Then he put his foot on the first step of the stairwell leading upstairs. Perry had mentioned that there was an attic suite that they had plans to use. Mike was apprehensive that the flooring would be dry-rotted…if not wet-rotted from holes in the roof. But he’d seen no signs on the first floor of black spots on the ceilings, so maybe the roof had somehow maintained integrity.

  He put his weight down on the first dark-stained step, and when it didn’t give, he gave it a good stomp. When nothing bad happened, he did the same to the next. And the next. There were 13 in all. When he stomped past the last one, he let out a sigh of relief. Then he looked around.

  The attic room was long – it was a single open space that extended across the whole length of the house. The sun shone in through one dirty window at the far end, and dust motes swam in the murky light that filtered through. The ceiling wasn’t finished; instead, when you looked up you saw the support beams and the actual upside-down V arch of the roof itself.

  The room still held the remnants of its last occupant; a yellowed mattress rotted atop a bedspring to his right. Gray chunks of the bed’s stuffing lay in clumps all around the bed frame, hanging from holes in the side of the mattress fabric; obviously humans hadn’t been the last creatures to sleep in this bed. A night table with an old wooden lamp on top flanked the bed. On the other side, a stack of old brown boxes leaned away from the wall; the topmost box had long ago given way and toppled to the floor; its contents – a mix of books and papers – lay spread across the wood plank floor.

  A tall bureau stood to Mike’s left, blocking part of the light from one of the attic’s two windows. But the light from that window was still enough to expose how long it had been since anyone had lived in this room. The dust on top of the dresser was so thick that if he hadn’t been able to see the side, he couldn’t have told the color of the wood.

  Mike looked up at the wood arch of the ceiling and followed the beams to the edges. There were some dark areas in spots near the edges, especially in the northeast corner, but otherwise, the roof appeared sound. Hard to believe, but that would explain why the rest of the place hadn’t rotted into the dirt. He walked back and forth across the planks, testing the give. While there were some creaks, nothing felt soft. He shrugged. Maybe Perry and his engineer were right after all. If he just had to shore up the main floor, add support to the basement beams and drop some planks across the mud down there…that would be all right with him.

  Speaking of which…while he’d seen the basement through the hole in the kitchen floor, he realized he hadn’t actually seen the stairs to get down there. Mike walked back down the stairs and circled the walkway on the main floor. He poked his head into two empty bedrooms there, and a bath between them with a yellowed tub and black and white granny-tile floor that looked like a power wash with bleach was in order. He opened two hallway doors and found a couple musty closets, but did not find the stairway down.

  What the hell?

  Mike walked outside. Maybe the only entry to the basement was exterior? Odd, but this was a really old house.

  The sun had risen higher since he’d first stepped inside the place, and the fog had already burned away from the clearing. It was going to be hot today; the air smelled fresh, but pregnant with summer humidity. Great. He had a headache, he was going to be working in a stinking wreck of a rot-heap, and it was going to be 90 degrees. And he couldn’t find the damn basement.

  This week was starting out great.

  He took a walk around the perimeter of the place. Once you passed the old rotten wood of the porch and turned the corner, the lower five feet of the house was obscured by scrub bushes and grass. He waded through the tall grass, sticking as close to the stone base of the old house as possible. When
he hit the back, the grass began to thin as the tree cover took over. The entire rear section of the house was shaded by the tree line of the forest. He saw the entry he was looking for almost immediately. Stone steps that led down below the ground.

  Mike stepped down the old stairway half hidden by a thick cover of leaves.

  “The door is not going to open,” he said aloud. But he reached a hand out to the old rusty knob anyway.

  And damned if the thing didn’t turn.

  “How about that?” Mike said, and pushed the thing open. It gave a stubborn creak as it dragged along the sandy earth floor.

  Inside, the place smelled dank and dead. The ceiling was barely above the top of his head, and Mike ducked beneath beams that dropped lower to support pipes from above. Everything in front of him was black as night, no windows. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and shone it around.

  The earth dipped in places where water obviously sat sometimes after a storm. And as he moved inside, he could see the one spot of light on the mud, streaming in where the floor had given way above in the kitchen.

  “All right…so there’s a bearing,” he said, orienting himself.

  Mike scoped the whole basement out. Perry said he wanted to put down a plank floor and lead people through here…but if they were going to do that, Mike needed to drop a stairway down; it had to be part of the walk through the house – you couldn’t send people outside to find the basement!

  But then, in the far corner, he finally saw it.

  A set of plank stairs leading up. He walked over and stepped on the first stair.

  And with a spongy snap, the stair broke in half.

  The second one sagged when he put weight on it, and he stepped back down before it gave way. There was a wooden doorway perched at the top of the graying, rotting steps.

  “Okay,” he said to himself. “These go up somewhere…but where?”

  He used the pipes beneath the kitchen and bathroom as a guide, and tried to figure out where the stairs had to open, based on his brief survey of the house above.

  He shook his head. It seemed like the door should come out right where the den had been.

  Mike made his way back out of the dark pit that was the basement, and breathed an unconscious sigh of relief when he made it back up the steps outside.

  He stood at the top of the stairwell, studying the century-old stone and wood facade that stretched up and away into the tree-hidden sky.

  Something tapped him on the shoulder.

  “So, what do you think?” a voice asked from behind him.

  Mike nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “Perry?” he said, turning to face his friend. “Don’t ever fuckin’ do that to me again!”

  Perry stood there in the grass, incongruous in his standard gray suit and blue-striped tie, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Scared of an old haunted house?” Perry asked. “We ain’t even decorated it yet!”

  “Bastard,” Mike said, and shook his head.

  “Listen, I can’t stay,” Perry said, still grinning. “But I wanted to stop by and see what you thought of the place.”

  “It’s a pit,” Mike said.

  “But you can fix it?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, enough for what you want, sure. I don’t think anyone’s going to want to live here again, though.”

  Perry nodded. “That’s what I wanted to hear. Let me know if you need anything. Besides wood.” Perry laughed.

  Mike rolled his eyes. “I’ll need plenty of that.”

  “I thought you had plenty of that,” his friend said. “That’s what you always tell me when you’re drunk.”

  “Go to work, Perry,” Mike said.

  “Not before we talk through the job,” Perry said. He pointed at the front of the old house. “Take a walk with me?”

  Mike nodded, and a minute later, they were inside, stepping through the debris as Perry pointed out the repairs he wanted to make sure Mike made. His head swam as Perry pointed out walls to be re-drywalled, and floors to be re-surfaced. At the end of the day, his friend/boss really wanted him to re-face the whole place. The Halloween decorators would be making it look creepy, not the naturally decrepit vibe of the old, aging materials that were here. Mike would really be building a ‘pathway’ through the decay. A frame amid the ruin to hold their pretend decay.

  After Perry had finished going on about how amazing this place was going to be and returned to his car, Mike walked back inside the old place.

  He’d almost forgotten his foray into the basement until he stepped into the den at the back of the house. And then…he walked the perimeter of the empty room. Where the hell was that stairway door? It had to be here somewhere. Perry had talked so fast and furious, he’d never even brought up the question of the ‘crypt’.

  Mike returned to the hallway and tried the closet doors there, following it back to the family room.

  He shook his head. Nope. The stairway just did not exist. Never mind that he’d seen it, along with a door…but still, it didn’t exist.

  “All an illusion,” he murmured.

  But he’d seen the evidence. And it all pointed…

  Mike walked back into the den and looked harder. The room was empty, sure, but that was empty of furniture. It was not, however, simply four blank walls and a floor. There was a closet and chair rail trim and a fireplace built into one wall. He walked across the long room and opened the creaking closet door…that led to nowhere. And then turned and looked at the old wooden bookcases built into the walls next to the fireplace.

  With his fist he knocked on the back wall of one of the bookcases. The echo that came back was empty, and Mike nodded.

  The case might look solid, but it wasn’t a permanent part of the wall.

  With his hands, he began to take down the old shelves to search for the creases he knew had to be there. He was going to have to find a way to pull at least one of these cases away from the wall they guarded.

  The basement was hidden from the main part of the house…and the entry had to be hidden here. He was convinced.

  He traced the outline of the bookcase carefully, finding both loose shelves and solid, immovable ones. When the second shelf on the far right segment shifted at his touch, Mike didn’t hesitate to lift it.

  That’s when things got interesting.

  The back wood of the case suddenly moved away from his hand with a creak. The shelf was actually a latch, and the back of the bookcase was really a hidden door, which now hung open.

  “Seriously?” he whispered. “The fucking haunted house has a hidden door?”

  He punched the thing open and lifted the lower shelf so he could step through into the small hidden room beyond. He still had his flashlight from walking the basement, and he flicked it on. The space was windowless and small, and the décor didn’t help make it feel any more expansive. The walls were all painted jet black, and the harsh white of what looked like bones littered the dark floor.

  He reached down and picked one up. There were three teeth sticking out of it. A jawbone! He dropped it back to the floor.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  In the center of the floor was a symbol he recognized from horror movies. A circle painted in white on the dark wood…a five-point star traced in the middle. More white bones were stacked in the dead center of the circle. Dark smears of something old and previously wet marred the floor.

  Blood.

  And bones. In the middle of….

  A witch’s sign.

  What kind of demonic rituals had gone on here?

  “Damnit,” Mike whispered. “I asked him, why haunt a place that’s already haunted? Seriously.”

  He walked across the circle, and found the thing he’d been looking for on the other side.

  A wooden frame.

 
A door. He turned the handle, and confirmed his suspicion almost instantly. It opened onto the rotted stairs that led down to the basement.

  But why was this room hidden from the interior by a bookcase?

  And who had been performing rituals there in the witch’s circle?

  Chapter Three

  Bong-Soon Mon walked up the broken sidewalk in front of Jeanie’s house lost in thought. The day had not gone quite as planned; he’d been working overtime all week to try to finish a coding project and he’d hoped to have it completed by the weekend. But now he was going to be spending the next two days wondering why the Quality Assurance test failed. On any other night, he would have stayed until he’d figured a way to address the critiques, whether it took ’til eight p.m. or two a.m. But tonight, he and Jeanie had a date.

  He rang the yellowed doorbell next to her beat-up old screen door and waited. She had told him in the past to just walk right in if the door was open, but he still felt funny about barging into someone else’s place. So, he waited. And then rang the bell again. He knew that she was in there or the inner wooden door wouldn’t be open.

  Something crashed inside. It sounded like glass breaking.

  “Jeanie?” he called through the screen.

  He was answered a second later by a blood-curdling scream.

  Bong no longer worried about being invited to enter. He threw the screen door open and charged inside. “Jeanie?” he called once more as he crossed the rug in the foyer.

  The scream came again, and this time he knew for sure that the anguished sound came from his girlfriend. But before he could do anything, a second later she appeared, running around the corner from the hallway to the back bedrooms. Her face was covered in blood – she looked badly cut – as if someone had slashed her with a knife. A slab of her cheek dangled away from her head near her chin. The whole right side of her face was glistening and wet, and he could see the white of her teeth through the hole where there had been perfectly smooth flesh when he’d seen her last night.

  “Bong!” she shrieked, and ran to his arms.