Sinister Normal Things

"There is a reason this place is called murder mansion," Tommy whispered to Hannah, his eyes on the ashen pink bricks that dotted between twisted iron bars. Only the front of the house was ever visible from the street, and no one lingered very long to get more than a passing glance. But there they stood, in strict defiance, two faces peeking in and out of the overgrown shrubs like windowed curtains, hoping to catch a glimpse of something worthwhile. Each house on this street was aging and solitary like a tomb. A graveyard, a mausoleum of lives passed, hoping the next would be better than the last—and so on, and so forth, until you arrived here, standing in front of 1521 Sycamore Street, where lives were cut shorter and shorter with each passing decade.

It didn't help that the house was hidden firmly behind hedges of mazed topiary and yards that never felt the passing of an idle foot. Bricks and smeared stone lined the first floor, ascending into hand-painted wood and dark, stained-glass motif windows. This was the kind of house discussed in passing whispers among troubled teens, where accidents were never really, truly accidental. It was the sort of place where you felt as though you had to hold your breath to get closer, or else you might never be able to breathe again. Hannah liked listening to Tommy's stories; he always seemed to have such obscure facts, not just the kind that made shadows move in the dark or the light disappear from a bulb. Many people had gone missing in Asphodel Falls, a dry, romantic town where crisp, tired days and a daft, drizzling rain dominated the skies. Young James Winters had gone missing just last summer, his bike and backpack left in the cul-de-sac adjacent to the house they called murder mansion.

"It was built in 1863," Tommy continued, shaking off a chill that seemed to pass through the both of their bodies, uninterrupted. "It is rumored that the daughter of Jones Earl Roberts the Fifth most recently acquired the estate—in the last fifty years or so—but it has long since fallen into disrepair. Mostly rumor, though. No one in town has seen any of the direct descendants, or anyone else for that matter, in ages, and her name doesn't appear on any of the registries."

"Doesn't look too bad," Hannah replied, her own eyes dancing between the sand-colored lace curtains and the bubbling glass diamond panes—where she swore she saw the reflection of someone staring down at her. "Someone must come by and keep up the grounds, at least," she mused, stepping closer to the iron bars for a better look. Her face pressed firmly against the cold metal. The smell of old pennies and freshly cut grass grew stronger, joined by the scent of something else. Something interesting, dark, cloying. Putrid.

Maybe a dead animal, a squirrel or a cat—much like when one of the river rats had fallen from the attic at her parents’ home, tumbling between the studs in the walls. You just let a few weeks go by with the windows open until the smell passed. Eventually, it always went away. The things in the walls always found a way out, they always do. This time, the sour, rotting, damp decaying smell had stuck just behind her headboard. Hannah preferred the smell, because it meant the desperate scratching had finally stopped—for now. The tiny, begging movements of a trapped animal she swore she could still hear if it was quiet enough, a phantom, filler noise. Her father hadn’t tried trapping it, but he hadn’t cut through the drywall to save it either. He had simply given her a warning, reminding her every night since to sleep with her mouth fully closed. His words pressed into her memory like air filling a balloon: “If you don’t, they will nest in your throat and chew through your blankets until they make you their home. That’s the problem with those sorts of beastly animals. No respect. No rules.”

"I like to think the spirits pass rather quickly," Tommy added. He must have been talking for quite some time after Hannah had become lost in her own darkly sinister, but mostly normal thoughts.

She nodded in silent agreement, having always assumed the spirits passed when the smell did. At least, that was what her father had always said: "Sometimes monsters don't go quietly, or quickly. Sometimes they linger like old garbage and oily water, clogging up pipes and stinking up forgotten houses until some poor chap finds them. Or maybe they just quietly turn to dust and slip into a measly abyss. That is where we all go, the in-between. Not here, not there, not anywhere. It’s something to look forward to, if you are one of the lucky ones."

Hannah smiled, a polite, curious smile as she wondered who the lucky ones were at murder mansion. Her eyes lit up at the thought of a mystery unfolding just outside her very home. She had grown up hearing all the stories: a young woman pushed from the balcony; a hapless fall onto a paring knife by one of the maids. So on, and so forth. It wasn't hard to see how the house had earned such a reputation. There was a suffocating symmetry to its outward appearance, a structure run on strict rules and subtle violence. It was a wonder to think what hid just beneath that facade.

Her eyes fell to the sidewalk, its neatly paved lines trailing out from the porch like the rays of a hapless luminary. Dark stains had long settled into the walkway nearest the last birdbath on the left, likely baked into the stone by an eternity under a tepid sun. Hannah liked to think it was dried blood from some body yet unknown, unclaimed, and mostly unfounded. Her eyes darted up toward the large, looming gargoyles guarding the roofline on all four corners of the house. They were mostly decapitated, as though the gods had come by and smote them, one by one, for each and every indiscretion in their sedentary lives. It was entirely possible; they were, after all, the only true witnesses to the horrors that befell murder mansion. Only the bases of their pedestals remained, sheared off cleanly as though desperate to be one with the Earth again. Hannah’s eyebrows knitted furtively as she wondered if this meant the gargoyles could no longer see, or if they had simply failed to protect the inhabitants of such an unlucky estate.

She wondered if the topiary hedges acted as a buffer, keeping the noise out as much as it kept it in. Tommy joined her in her desperate quest to get as close as she could without climbing the fence completely.

“What do you see?” he muttered, his muffled words barely a whisper over the leaves that skirted up around them. A cold, breezy gust of wind swept by, setting their bones to the sort of ice that cannot be remedied by heat, nor blanket. This was soul-inhabiting; the place got under your skin, invading your thoughts. But where the wind bit Tommy, it sank teeth into Hannah, finding no resistance. It was as though she and the estate were made of the same fabric—a deep, ancient recognition for the darkest of shades and all the monsters that lurked within.

“Nothing,” Hannah replied rather quickly. Her feet pushed her up onto the stone piling, her short body just barely grazing the edge of the thickest part of the bush.

Tommy soon joined her once-more, his head a few inches above hers. The heavy front door seemed to buckle under the weight of their gaze. Then came a frantic, familiar scratching sound—something tickling, clawing, trying to get out, trying to get them to step over the fence and come in.

“We should go,” Tommy whispered, his voice growing more nervous. Unsteady. “I think it is getting too late to be outside.”

Tommy dropped from the stone piling, his sneakers hitting the dirt with a panicked thud as he checked over his shoulder, already retreating toward the safety of the sidewalk nearest his house. Hannah lingered for a second longer, her fingers reluctant to let go of the rusted iron bars. She didn't feel the same lingering ice in her bones that Tommy did. If anything, the air blooming outward from 1521 Sycamore Street felt warm. Nurturing, almost, welcoming. Like the heavy, stagnant air of her mother's greenhouse in the peak of August, where things were meant to soften and decay so that new, stranger things could grow.

“Coming,” she called out lightly, finally stepping down and letting her sneakers land with a soft, indifferent thud in the dirt. She wiped the rust and dried moss onto her jeans, her mind already wandering to what she might have for dinner when she got home, wondering if her father had fixed the leaky pipe under the kitchen sink yet, or if it was still pooling that dark, oily water he liked to talk so much about. The frantic clawing from the mansion hadn't frightened her; if anything, it was just starting to annoy her, the way the steady tick of an old grandfather clock can keep you awake in an empty room, or the whimpers of a dying river-rat just above your head. As she turned to follow Tommy, she wondered if the scratching things in her own bedroom wall would finally be quiet enough for her to sleep with her mouth open tonight—or if she would have to go into the crawlspace and silence them herself.