This Is The House That Crack Built

I remember the last time we made this trip someone at the house told me that when you brush your teeth it is the only time that you ever clean your skeleton. I close my eyes and push the button for the automatic window to roll down, trying not to let the morbid imagery crawl further into my skull than it already has. I fight nausea. Thick sheets of black November air push tight against my face in ragged bursts. The driver deftly turns the last corner and motions for everyone to get out a few houses down from the old man's place. Protocol.

The front door opens to recieve us before we are even through the gate and shuts smartly behind us, five locks click in strata. The house is blissfully free of vagabonds today. We take our usual seats at the kitchen island, sharp clicks of lighters on the hard marble. The old man we came to see has sky blue eyes. The man with the sky blue eyes has a cat, the cats name is Coco. The cat has sky blue eyes too. His curtains are closed, eerie white strands of gossamer thin silk spill over a pair of brightly polished door handles, bound together with thick rusted chain loops. There is no lock on the chains but with every turn the dirty metal catches a hundred tiny satin strings, all tied to another rusty metal beam somewhere high above your head.

Today I have to smoke outside. I watch the carcass of an antique snowmobile lie helpless in the blinding beams of the flood lights pointed out of the windows, behind the tiny satin strings. I smoke half my cigarette and look for a place to put it out. The stars are shaking somewhere far above my head, I briefly wonder if someone ever turns them off then stub my smoke out in a pile of imported river stones and go back inside.

In these houses everything is constantly in a state of suspended animation. When you're given permission to walk through that door it's like an airlock to a breathless space. A kind of toxic fishbowl filled with mustard gas and French perfume.

This is a place we never leave. It leaves its oil on our skin. An invisible hot iron burn on your arm that never comes off. A tiny hair on your lip that never seems to go away no matter how often you pluck it. Just like them, these things never leave us. We are allies in a war with ourselves that has long been lost. These places are places of Hell. Dance halls of demons. Soup kitchens, shelters and confessional booths.

The man with the sky blue eyes blows out another lung full of acrid yellow smoke. He does not see the table in front of him. He does not see the young girl with dilated pupils opening and closing her mouth across the table from him. He doesn't see the changing of the sun. The seasons do not belong to him anymore. The most terrifying thing in the world is accidentally catching a glimpse into the eyes of a man who has long kept them shut.

They come to him, I come to him, to the house of perfectly and meticulously organized horrors. The medicine man of Neolithic times; stripped of the tasteful, traditional, banal charm of the charlatan. He no longer relies on fear or theater, it comes to him. And if you are lucky enough to pass through those frosted glass doors his ex wife picked out, if you're trusted enough to join the audience of the dead and dying ...then…only then…do you receive the blessings reserved for only the wicked. We who pass these doors pay in blood for snake oil.