There are places on this earth that
one must never go. One of those is the old duplex on Marigold Crescent, in my
hometown of Hinkley, South Carolina. One Halloween my best friend and I did
anyway.
I suppose we got the idea while we
were out looking for dead animals in the meadow, the two of us in our cheap
costumes. I was the Batman and William was something the name of which escapes
me, a creature from the African folk tales his grandfather had brought with him
across the ocean, and had told William about and helped him in making a
costume. I couldn’t name it but the getup involved much straw, and a wooden
mask that he propped on top of his head since it didn’t have eyeholes.
We couldn’t find anything out in
the thickets, and then William suggested it.
“Let’s go lookit the Moss place,”
he said. A curious tightness wrapped around my chest and I didn’t look up, at
first.
“You reckon?” I suggested.
“Yeah,” said William. “My dad says
no such thing as monsters and shit. Probably nothing’ll happen.”
Probably? I admit I was intrigued.
Though the sun was dipping behind the hills and the sky had tinted orange, it
was still light out. Surely nothing awful could happen to us in the daylight. I
tightened the straps of my plastic mask and we set off towards the suburb’s far
end, where the Moss place waited like the silent ruins of a forgotten
civilization.
I say that we got the idea while we
were out there scraping around in the dirt and grass instead of
trick-or-treating with the other kids, but it would be more apt to say that the
germ was formed over several years. My parents had never told me to stay away
from the place, and neither had William’s, but we supposed it must have been
common knowledge, the way that the warning trickled down from the adults to the
school kids and spread around the playground each October like a bad cold.
“Don’t go near that big house at the end of the road near Roger’s place,”
warned Harry Stockton, as he did every year. “It’s haunted.”
“No such thing as haunted houses,”
William would answer, and Harry would come back with a ‘Is so’, or ‘Yeah-huh’.
The year previous he’d called William a vicious word that he must’ve learned
quite recently, and they had it out on the blacktop to our classmates’ baying. I
am sure it was in keeping with that grudge that William decided this year would
be the year we went and saw this big house near Roger’s for ourselves.
The Moss place was an apt name, for
the thing loomed like a massive gravestone covered in twisting vines, to say
nothing of the dirt and sun-bleaching from too many years in disrepair. On the
way there I’d consoled myself with the assumption that if anything harrowing
were to occur, surely a neighbor on the street would notice and come to our
rescue; but as we closed in on our destination a sucking, black emptiness surrounded
me. It was a dreadful feeling, as though the neighbors, if in fact there were
any, would sooner feed us to whatever lay within the Moss duplex, speed us to
our fate rather than try to pull us back.
I heard an owl hoo somewhere near
us, but couldn’t see it. Time seemed to dilate on the walk to that place, for
by the time we reached it the sun was gone and all the light’s protection had
drained from the world.
“I’m kind of scared,” I told
William. He frowned, but I could see from the contour of his round cheeks and
the way his gangly neck gulped that he was too.
“I’ll knock on the door,” he said.
“Just walk up with me.”
Nailed boards covered one entrance
to the duplex, and so we chose the other, a beaten white monolith with chipped
brown lines and cracks like spider-webs on its face. The path was soft, strong
with the scent from weeds that scraped and brushed our shins as we walked.
When we reached the door I gripped
tightly the hem of my sleeve, like a sailor holding fast to a rope in a storm at
sea. My heart thumped so loud I wondered how William couldn’t hear it, and he
brushed the door with his fingertips.
“Just an empty ol’ house,” he said.
He took a deep breath, one so quiet
he must have been trying to hide it from me, and knocked.
Nothing happened. Relief washed
through me like a broken dam. William rolled his eyes, and laughed, then lifted
his fist to knock again.
The door flew open on a phantom
wind, and where there should have been shadow it was only white. A flowing ivory
curtain shaped like a madman’s parody of a person, with two sockets as deep as
death that must have been its eyes; it brandished its nub limbs and menaced us,
chanting hatred in some ancient forgotten tongue.
William shrieked and fled in an
instant, but I was shocked to the spot, warm urine flowing down my gray cotton
trousers. I was almost driven mad in that couple of seconds, locking eyes with
the white thing for an eternal moment before finding my legs and tearing off
screaming from those tomb-like stairs.
I chased after William. He was much
further out than I, already halfway down the street, sandals clapping on the
pavement in his flight. I made to follow, but was stopped by a creaking hand on
my shoulder, covered in cobwebs and bleached to the yellow of rotten teeth. A
smirking skull loomed over me and parted its teeth to guffaw, every breaking ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ buffeting me with fresh
horror that sent agony and strain through my knees. I collapsed, and knew that
I had soiled myself again as I tumbled into an inky abyss.
I did not know when I caught sight
of William running away from the house that it would be the last time I ever
saw him. None of the other schoolkids seemed to know for sure where he had
gone, only that his family had moved away less than a month later— when it was
repeated, they never quite clarified that William had in fact gone with them
when they did.
I have not gone near the Moss
duplex again, nor do I ever intend to. To say that I am content to stay inside
each Halloween would infer that I am happy, and I am not; when I seat myself by
the window, staring out at the waist-high ghouls and goblins, superheroes and
characters from old films, I would rather say that I endure. I endure every
season of jack-o-lanterns and leaf-yellow sky, in a cresting cycle of
nightmares where the specters of that place threaten to visit me again.
“Ha, ha,
ha! Ha, ha ha!”
