THE HOUSE THAT SLEEPS

Copyright (c) 2018 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

THE HOUSE THAT

SLEEPS

By R. Peterson

It’s ten seventeen PM and a battered ten-year-old 1949 Mercury sedan with a broken taillight thunders past the old Walker place heading south on the west side of Canyon Road. A side window is cranked down and an empty bottle of Coors beer is pitched into the snowball bushes just north of the gravel driveway. The sound of the Fleetwoods singing Come Softly to Me crackles over the radio as the window is rolled up.

A flock of starlings take flight from the ancient Maple trees surrounding the stone house and barn. They circle in the air like storm clouds and then settle back onto the skeletal branches with the road dust. The Porter Resonator mufflers attached to the hot rod rumble in the distance … and then there is only silence.

The Waxing Gibbous Moon rises in the east and drifts across the night sky slipping behind storm clouds like a spotlighted thief prowling the night. Long dead boxwood shrubs line the river-stone path leading to the covered porch. They glow like tangled balls of barbed wire in the brief periods of illumination. Heavy cedar treads groan imperceptibly as spectral riding-boots climb the stairs from decades past. A flash of lightning in the distance shows the elaborately carved Italian entry door, complete with cast-iron gargoyle knocker, hanging partially open on rusted hinges.

An ethereal hand pushes against the splintered Black Walnut door but depression-era sift, aged into concrete hardness, cakes the threshold and keeps it from moving. The wind moving from the east becomes an instrument of force and the door creaks open. The interior of the ancient parlor is a master painter’s composition of moonlight and shadow.

Strips of faded, rose-print wallpaper hang from the walls and ceiling, creating classical Greek columns like mineral dripping stalactites in an enchanted cave.

The faded claret hues of a classic Queen Anne sofa and a matching tea table in the sitting room look like a theatrical stage-set dusted with age. Now only Shakespearian-grey mice without squeaking parts enter center stage from two small chewed holes on each side of the once elegant upholstery. They maneuver through the rusted springs with the grace of hungry ballet dancers listening for offstage cues whispered from the walls that never come.  I am to wait … though waiting be such hell!

An overturned tea-cup lays on its side and a-decades-old faded stain on a knitted table cloth give the impression that someone rose from a comfortable seat in a hurry … and never returned with the same peace.

Dark arches lead from the smaller room into a grand hall. A grand piano, with an open lid and keyboard cover, sits in a glassed-in circular vestibule illuminated by moonlight. Beams of lunar reflection dance across the notes of the sheet music that’s scattered across the keys, the moonbeams are like children playing hopscotch on a broken sidewalk. A one measure badinerie plays after a decades-long pause, a testament that laughter is timeless and immortal.

From inside the walls and the skeletal structure of the house comes the distant sound of wind or laughter and tiny feet scampering through the rooms above makes dust fall from the ceiling like rain. A  half turn geometrical stairway with rose-vine mahogany rails leads to the rooms above and the small feet descend the rotted risers in clouds of shimmer and carpet-dust. Shadows chasing each other pass an un-draped window and then dissolve into a pile of hundred year old Vanishing Tribune newspapers scattered like giant playing cards on the floor.

A shout of thunder in the far distance shakes the old manor ever so gently and a fold-open Silvertone Instant Play record player, in one corner of the parlor, clicks softly. A Venetian shade over a Chalkware lamp, depicting two children playing French Horns, suddenly glows from the residual power of memory. The turntable begins to spin and a woman’s crooning voice crackles from the built-in speakers.

“Broken hearted melody,

Once you were our song of love.

Now you just keep taunting me.

With the memory of … ba da da.

His tender love.”

A distant storm awakens but is still far away as the music fades. The old stairs make retirement groans after a stagnating pause between each gently rising creek … somewhere above, a door slams and it becomes the rumble of something bad that is … this way coming.

A gliding mammal of the species Rodentia sweeps through each open doorway and down a long hall, guided by resonances too high to hear … wafting leather wings … and searching for misplaced moments that have been lost in the shadows.

Only one door is closed. Dim light and flickering shadows of movement appear from under carved wood and dance with an icy chill warning into the hallway.

Lightning crashes into the rotted branches of an oak tree some distance away and makes night into day. A leather bound journal falls from a crowded shelf, inside an office  room filled with volumes of decaying literature, and lands with yellowed pages open on the floor next to a rain warped writing desk.

____________________________________________________________________________

May, 6^th. 1927

My dearest Tom … whom I miss like sunshine and flowers …,

I write to you every night in this journal because it’s the only way I can find sleep. If I knew where you were I would find an address from someone and send this in the mail. I don’t know why you had to leave me … us … the things that  Me - We  (I hope) dreamed about. As the years go by and now these long decades. Has it been that long? I imagine plenty of things that I might have said or done wrong … but nothing seems to be truth. Truth dresses a person for proper living with others and I’m alone and naked with my thoughts.

I once told you that I could survive anything as long as I knew you were in my world. Sometimes late at night as I lay in my bed I know imagine that I hear the sound of moving waters coming from far below me as if an underground river might be flowing a mile or so under my bedsprings. This is the time that I feel most your spirit (that would mean you were dead) beside me. The slightest noise from outside and I’m running down the stairs in my flannel nightgown ( the one you bought me for Christmas 1887) looking for that ever-onery (impossible for anyone but you to ride) mare Comanche to be tied to the visitor rails  … kicking the hell out of my wooden barn doors the way she always did while we laughed (sometimes kissed but not enough) and drank coffee and my English Tea on the porch. They say and I believe that Memories are forever and it’s a good thing they are … because that’s all I have left without your fine company. Please come back to me !!!!

Wherever you are know  that I will always love you … forever.

Elisabeth.

            An angry wind blows white cotton curtains outward from a window in one of the open-door bedrooms. For a moment it resembles a nineteenth century woman draped in flowing satin gazing into the dark night … lingering and forever waiting.  Another crash of lightning … this time it’s closer! Perhaps hitting the upper branches of the long dead Maple tree peering in the upstairs window just outside the broken glass.

            A ghostly roar moves through the house lifting the dust from the floor and walls in a storm of blind passion and fury. Rain beating against broken shingles on the roof sounds like a steam train rumbling across a shaky bridge as torrents of rain pours through the cracks in the ceiling. The piano is playing loudly as is the record player. A woman’s shriek of despair turns into a scream that sets the earth on fire. There is nothing inside the old house that is not in motion flying through the air like a thousand black birds locked inside a nightmare of hell fire in eternity. 

Within a moment the entire house and everything in it is consumed by a blast furnace of flames fueled by oxygen winds. The stairs turn to embers and then ash as the front doors blasts open. As suddenly as the roaring tempest began everything stops. There is no fire … only a lingering silence … and soft shadows.

The door closes on ancient piles of sift and then becomes one again solid and unmoving. A night breeze whispers and then laughs in the trees.

There are only memories under the clouds, the moon, and the stars.

No living human has walked these haunted plots for years … and there is no one here now.

 … in the house that sleeps.

THE END?