The Fall of Aletheia's House

Part 1

Ella slammed the door shut and put her back against it. Sweat was pouring down her face. It stung her eyes, gluing long tendrils of dark, curling hair to her jaw and down the length of her neck. She was soaking in sweat and couldn’t stop her heavy breathing or the pounding in her chest. Outside, moving away from the old ramshackle building, the sound of sirens exploded.

Godammit, Ella thought to herself. She closed her eyes and laid her head back against the warped pine door. If she hadn’t made it into the old house when she did, there’s no doubt the police would have caught her. Taking another deep breath, she tried to soothe her panic and her rage. I told you this was going to happen, Chuck. I fucking told you so.

When her fiancé had talked her into robbing the bank that morning, she hadn’t thought it was a great idea. A rough guy raised on the wrong side of the tracks, the six-foot-two, muscle-bound, tattooed convict was always coming up with harebrained schemes to get them money fast. Bank robberies, drug hold-ups, petty theft. Chuck Marshall was a man who could make a living doing anything but being honest. Ella loved him all the same, though, and didn’t know how to stop loving him. So when he begged her to drive the car, she agreed.

“You don’t have to do anything this time. Not like last time. All I need is for you to sit in the car. That’s it. Be my drive. Come on, baby.”

“Chuck, I almost went to prison with you last time. Not ‘a one of those cops believed my story.”

“Not this time, baby. You won’t even have to drive above the speed limit. I promise.”

Ella asked him for proof and he gave it to her. Laid at all right out in front of her.

“The tellers at the bank all go on lunch from twelve to two. The only person left is the manager, who doesn’t bother to lock the door. The town doesn’t even have its own police force. They get all their firepower from the next town over, ten miles away. We’ll be in and out, no hostages or nothing before the cops even get a whiff of the stickup. They’ll be mid-donut before they know what’s happened to them. Come on, baby. Help me out. You’re the only one who can do it.”

“Chuck you promised last time was the last time.”

“I know, baby. This time it is, I promise.”

In the end, Ella gave in like she always did. In the end, everything had spun into disaster…as it always did.

Now, she was stranded in the desert, at least thirty miles away from the nearest town, with ripped jeans, bloody knees, and no cash or phone to speak of. Even worse, she was alone.

After the heist had gone terribly, terribly wrong, Chuck and Ella had been forced to steal a motorcycle and tear off west, into the fathomless deserts that surrounded the little town of Hickory. The police, who had been lurking by much nearer than Chuck assumed, had followed them, as Ella knew they would. Chuck became more and more desperate to keep himself — and his lover — out of prison. So, at the last minute, he had thrown Ella from the bike beside an old abandoned house and roared off in the opposite direction, hoping to lose the law.

“I love you, baby,” Chuck had screamed before slamming on the brakes and driving his shoulder hard into his lover at the same time. Ella had gone flying off the bike and rolled hard on her side and knees, ripping her jeans and rubbing raw the skin beneath. A huge club of dust bloomed around her, mixing with the plumes from the motorcycle. It dust concealed her, but only for a few moments. Ella gathered herself, still trembling in pain and confusion, and ran into the looming shape of the old desert house.

For a moment it was a relief. Waves of adrenaline still ricocheted through her body, but Ella’s heart was beginning to slow. The sirens were more distant now and the sound of Chuck’s motorcycle was all but lost in their echoes. They weren’t coming for her. At least, not now. Ella had some time to gather herself and figure out the next steps. The small relief she felt at evading the police began to wane, though, when Ella opened her eyes and looked around at her derelict surroundings.

The house was old, older than anything Ella had ever seen before, and dark and dingy on the inside. Moth-eaten curtains hung over windows boarded up with rusted nails at awkward angles. Here and there, the bent and broken shape of furniture loomed in a creepy darkness that made Ella shiver. The whole place stretched out around her like one of those haunted houses she had been to as a kid, the ones her brother loved. Ella hadn’t loved them though and immediately felt the same weird sensation in her belly. “I gotta get outta here.”

She turned around and twisted the handle of the door. It fell off in her hand.

Shit. Ella looked down at the doorknob and sighed. This was the last thing she needed. Irritated, she shook the door frame a couple of times before planting her foot squarely in the middle and kicking it as hard as she could. The door wouldn’t budge. Ella’s annoyance dissipated a little and a trickle of fear set in.

“I’ll have to find another door,” she told herself. The place was huge, the type of place that would have had another door for the servants and delivery men to enter. Shaking off the creeps she felt, Ella set off in search of another door. All the while, her anger grew at Chuck.

If he hadn’t bumbled the robbery, none of this would be happening at all.

After arriving at the bank, it was clear that his information wasn’t entirely correct. The manager of the bank was there, it was true, but so was one of the tellers and a man who looked suspiciously like a plain-clothes security guard or police officer.

“Chuck, I think we should call this off.” It was a sound piece of advice from the man in the backseat of the getaway car, a friend of Chuck’s who had been talked into coming along for half. Ella looked at him in the rearview mirror and nodded. “I agree. If you go in there now, you’re going to have to take all those other people hostage. This could get really nasty, really fast Chuck, and you can’t afford that again.”

There had been no dissuading him.

“Give it fifteen minutes and then we’re going in. I don’t care if we have to take the other two hostages. I’m getting that cash and then we’re getting out of town and out of the country. Mexico, baby! That’s what we’re doing. Today.”

Everything had immediately gone wrong, of course, when the plain-clothes man had turned out to be an armed officer. Minutes after Chuck and his pal entered the bank and demanded the money, he pulled out his gun and shot Chuck’s friend directly in the back of the head. Chuck had only just avoided the same fate. Running back and forth, he had slipped out of the front door right as a bullet went whizzing past his head. Her partner was crying when he jumped into the window of the station wagon and screamed at Ella to “Drive! Drive! Drive!”

Ella hadn’t asked for answers until they ditched the car twenty miles south of the small town Chuck had guaranteed was an “easy target”.

“We gotta get rid of this car. Now.”

“No!” Ella crossed her arms and refused to move. They stood in the middle of the parking lot like that while the sound of the sirens got louder. “I’m not going another step until you tell me what happened.”

The details churned her stomach. Chuck’s friend had gone down in minutes, his brains splattered across the plexiglass screens that separated Chuck from the teller and manager beyond. The man in the flannel shirt, who had casually been loitering near the entrance held a gun, a dozen or so feet away. A badge now dangled from a chain around his neck. Chuck recalled every detail in grizzly realism. His fear, the smell of his friend’s blood on his arm. It had been a miracle he escaped, he said. Now, stuck alone in the desert, Ella wondered if it was a miracle at all.

Floorboard creaked under her feet as she passed wall after wall of boarded-up windows where only shreds of desert light peeked through. Dodging her way around the hulking shape of the rotten furniture, she passed under doorways and through rooms with ceilings twelve feet high. As many rooms and windows as she passed, however, Ella never found another door.

There were no doors in the whole place, save for the door on the front of the house. No bedroom, no bathroom, no other room in the house had a door — even though some had thick door frames that hung with threadbare curtains. Ella could make no sense of it, nor could she make any sense of the house. All the rooms opened onto each other, but none ever seemed to lead back to the start. It didn’t long for Ella to become confused. Exhausted, irritated, and with a growing panic in her bones, she threw herself down on the floor next to a large wooden clock with decades of dust covering its golden face, obscuring the numbers.

What was she going to do? Ella didn’t know.

Her phone was gone, lost somewhere on the edge of the last town they had been trying to ditch the cops in. It had slipped from her back pocket as she clung to Chuck and prayed they wouldn’t crash. Out in the desert thirty miles later, the cops obviously didn’t know Ella had been thrown from the bike. They hadn’t seen her run into the old house and didn’t yet know she was involved. If Chuck was caught, then no one would know where she was. Chuck wouldn’t give her up for fear of getting her thrown into prison for the rest of her life (as he would be) and he wouldn’t risk the reputation it would give him. “That Bonnie and Clyde shit is tired,” Ella remembered him saying.

Ella was well and truly alone and now lost in a moldy old house she didn’t know how to get out of. Despairing, she took another deep breath before dissolving into loud cries. Everything was hopeless. She wanted to die. But as she dissolved into the lowest part of her despair, a loud bang roused her. Ella sat bolt upright.

The face of the clock was hanging open, and on the floor in front of it was a small, leather-bound journal wrapped in twine and covered in what looked like centuries of dirt and grime. Ella recoiled a little in fear. How had that happened? It looked like someone had opened the clock and the journal had fallen out.

“Your crying must have done it,” the scared woman assured herself. “You must have shaken it loose.”

Read it, a little voice inside her whispered. Pick it up and read it. Maybe it will tell you how to get out.

It made sense. Ella reached for the dingy little book and turned it over in her hands. The twine was wrapped together in a bow on the front, obscuring initials etched in faded gold. The cover was stiff with time, but soft yellow pages bulged along the edge, jutting at different angles, thick with all kinds of secrets and information. Ella wanted to open the book more than anything. This is someone’s journal, she thought. I shouldn’t read it.

Read it.

Ella forgot everything about her dilemma. As if my magic, Chuck, the bank, the doors, all of it had evaporated from her mind. All she could think about was opening this old journal and skimming her fingers over its velvety pages. The urge overwhelmed her. Putting her fingers on one end of the twine loops, she pulled hard. The aged cord practically disintegrated in her hands and the book fell open, laying bare its contents all too willingly. Ella was transfixed.

There, sitting on the edge of a shaft of broken sunlight that peeked in from a boarded window, the beautiful pages were revealed. Each of them was covered in the same spidery scrawl, but some also bore handsome pictures, illustrated masterfully by the same hand that had committed itself to the endless splay of text. Beautiful colors graced some of the images. Here a golden dress, where the deep blue of a summer sky. The pages seemed to come together to form some type of story. Is it real? Ella was confused.

There’s only one way to know, whispered that small voice.

Ella shrugged her shoulders. Something was vaguely tugging at the back of her mind but she couldn’t remember what it was. She crossed her legs and settled in against the wall. Then, she began to read.

© E.B. Johnson 2023