It’s not a good thing to get used to, constant terror.
The way the phonograph won’t play anything past the beginning of “Just One of Those Things”—morphed into discordance—and Frank Sinatra’s first few lyrics, then repeat and repeat. “It was just one of those things,” the record sings, then goes back to the beginning and plays those few seconds again. The harsh discordance doesn’t even exist on the record itself. Even putting on a different record doesn’t change the song.
I can’t blame the house. It knows that was the song that marked the dreadful moment that spurred my continuous torture.
The slow and quiet way doors close behind me; the gentle way I have to ask for them to let me out. “Please open again,” I ask in a soft voice. “Please,” until the door slowly creaks open, a creak it didn’t have when closing.
And the overgrown plants—they’re never in the same place twice. Turn around and the strangely enormous spider plant is tangled in the upstairs banister. Return to the kitchen and the cactus plants are on the table instead of across the windowsill. They’re always inexplicably in a new place.
And the terror shakes up through my spine as I pretend not to notice. Everything is fine. Everything is fine.
Even now, a year after the incident that caused my second-by-second horror, looking into the bathroom mirror startles me, how my eyes look so bright red and bloodshot in the house’s mirror, but not in a hand mirror that isn’t connected to the house. The thing that gets me is that it lets me see that it has warped my image—that is what sends the most chills across my skin. Its decisions.
It’s hard to ignore the dog’s growls, distinctly directed at nothing, followed by his whimpering and slinking back from nothing. But it’s not nothing. It’s everything.
And the way it forces me to eat such repugnant food, turning everything rancid in the fridge after just one day. Heavy mold creeps across all of it after twenty-four hours of being in the house, the thick blackness extending far off it, as if it had been growing for years.
The loneliness is unimaginable, even in the grocery store. The house’s reach is inescapable, and it won’t show me what it does to my face while I’m shopping—it must be far worse than what I see in the mirror—but every passerby gives me far too wide a berth as I try to buy something, anything that the house will let me eat within its twenty-four hour window.
And I know why it gives me that time to eat. It wants me to keep on living. It thrives on my fear.
But it was even more obvious to me what the house wanted when real estate agent after real estate agent got lost on the way to the house, unable to find it—ever. And of course they would give up after half an hour of trying.
“I’m sorry. I can’t understand it, but if I can’t find your house, I certainly can’t sell it.” That’s what they’d always say. And with a tremor in my voice, each time I would reply in a whisper that of course the house heard despite my best efforts, “Thank you for trying.”
The phone allows me to call outside the house, just as Miriam tried to before this all began, but it chooses when it allows me to be heard, so that my friends, my family, the police can’t hear me no matter what volume I speak.
And of course I cannot leave the house permanently. Just the way people in the store avoid me, the same is true about anyone I try to talk to in person about buying another property or even renting an apartment.
I can’t imagine what the house turns my face into, but I can tell by their expressions—sometimes disgusted, sometimes horrified—that it’s worse than anything I can conjure in my head.
But as I said, after quite some time of the same routine, I’ve gotten used to it all. I’ve gotten used to melancholy and the kind of fear that sits below a thin surface of relative calm, broken every few minutes by these events and so many more that I haven’t mentioned.
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