I’ve been waiting for this night for so long, your memory warming the brick of my heart, the wood of my bones. Tonight, you’re coming home.
You may not understand yet that I am your home. But I know I was never far from your mind. I was behind your eyelids as you drifted in the borderlands between waking and sleeping, even as you’ve grown up, grown older, grown away. Your dreams whisper of that Halloween dusk seventeen years ago, the night we met. When your friends dared you to risk climbing onto my porch and peering through my window.
They probably didn’t expect you to take the dare, not then, not on a Halloween twilight. Even the dullest humans sense when the veil is thinnest, when the dead and living almost touch. Things that should not be alive are most awake, and things that are alive masquerade as dead. For you and your friends, all teenagers, it was a night for mischief and easy terrors, the sort you can retreat from and joke about later.
I watched your face as you approached me, a thirteen-year-old, playing at bravery. You were one of those kids who’d been attacked by a violent growth spurt and still didn’t know what to do with all the knees and elbows you suddenly seemed to have. Your step was awkward, clumsy. Your heart fluttered like hummingbird’s wings at the base of your throat.
You were afraid of me, like all the children in the neighborhood were afraid of me, have been afraid of me for decades and still are. The big, empty faux-Gothic mansion, my dark windows staring over the street like blinded eyes and the entrails of old plumbing and failed carpentry spilling out my sides. You could sense, in that child place too wise for adults to understand, that like many houses I was alive.
But as you climbed onto my porch, it wasn’t with the frantic bolt of a spooked creature. Your pace announced to your companions that you were unafraid. You and I, of course, both knew that for a lie, but I loved you for it.
The slowness of your advance began to agitate your friends clustered on the sidewalk, watching. “Hey,” one of them called to you. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”
But you didn’t turn around and flee. I could see the intensity of your eyes, the beads of sweat rising on your forehead. You approached one of my front windows, and wiped some of the grime clear with the sleeve of your jacket. That gentle, curious touch. You peered inside.
There was nothing notable to see – who keeps their treasures in plain sight? A ragged couch, one leg splintered. A chipped fireplace mantel, boasting rusted candelabra. Rotting floorboards.
A sudden noise from my overgrown garden startled you. You jerked upright, then, losing your balance, tumbled backward. The contents of your coat pockets spilled over my weathered porch, quarters spinning into the cracks in the boards and tumbling to the moist, dark earth. A used tissue. A scrawled note.
You abandoned the contents of your pockets and ran back to your friends. Back on the sidewalk, you were all brave again, laughing and jostling each other.
I looked with tenderness on the treasures you left behind. The scrawled note seemed to be a list of grocery items, but at the top, in jagged penmanship, I saw the words: “Don’t forget.” A message meant for me, one I took to heart. I waited for you to return. I didn’t forget.
Seventeen years slipped away like sawdust on a gale. I kept track of you through overheard conversations, discarded papers. High school graduation with strong grades. President of the chess club. A college scholarship to somewhere far away.
In all those years, you never visited, but how could I hold a grudge? Love doesn’t keep score. I had the note you left for me.
All houses have one thing in common: we long to be lived in by someone who loves us. We want to play refuge to their hopes and dreams and fears.
One day, you would return, and need a refuge. So I prepared for you.
I took such care with your room. Your chess set was the best I could fashion from my weathered boards. The bed, the chair, both were the best I had to offer.
You graduated from college, neighborhood conversations told me. You got a job, something important. Got married. There was a child, then a divorce.
And then, as this month of October drew toward its close and the red and golden leaves in my trees were mauled by the wind, the voices on the street and on the porches brought me the tidings: you were coming home. To me.
***
Tonight is cold and clear. The street lamps are yellow watching eyes in the gathering dark. Children in costumes prowl the streets, weary adults in tow. Screams of delight echo under my eaves. Sound tracks of ominous music and howling creatures float through the air.
I thrum with the chaotic magic of the night, enlivened and enthralled. Then, from a distance, I hear you coming. Your tread heavier than it was seventeen years before. More burdened. I want to tell you, Don’t worry, my darling. I want to say, Rest within my walls, and I will lift your burdens.
You’re not sure what pulls you toward me. A half-remembered dream? A restless longing to rediscover the past?
I see you first in silhouette at the far end of my street. Perhaps you think you’re walking in search of distraction by the Puckish mood of the evening. But deep down, you know why you’re really coming.
You pause at the bottom of the walkway, deliberating. So I open my door for you, the clearest of invitations.
This disembodied welcome might frighten a lesser person, but you move forward, your feet carrying you up the creaky steps of my porch and across the threshold.
I let you get partway into the room before shutting the front door softly and locking it. You don’t seem alarmed; you take your phone out of your pocket, use it as a flashlight. You note that couch, mantelpiece, and candelabra that you saw all those years before.
“God,” you say. “This place really went to shit. Shame.”
But you were born to renew me.
You explore the kitchen, the dining room, the library – none of them exceptional, filled with the decaying possessions of humans whose bodies have turned to dust. Your shoulders sag a little. It seems I’m not what you hoped for. At least not yet.
Then at last you find the stairway, and test each step for soundness as you climb upward. The bedroom I made for you is right at the head of the staircase. You can’t miss it.
You don’t.
By the light of your phone flashlight you see your name carved in the door of the room, the calligraphy I etched with such care still new and fresh. You extend suddenly shaking fingers, trace the contours of the letters.
“My God,” you say.
I open the door for you. Your sudden fear is sharp and sour as acid. But you step inside anyway.
This is the moment I’ve been preparing for.
The flashlight shows you your bed, your chair. You prop the phone against the bed pillows to get a closer look at the chess set, picking up a rook, examining it. Your initials are etched on the bottom.
“What the hell.” Your voice trembles, but the emotion I hear isn’t joy. It’s terror. “Oh, my God. My God.” You begin backing toward the door.
This is all wrong. This isn’t how this was supposed to go. You’re offering me no gratitude, no affection at all.
I slam the bedroom door shut and lock it. You just need a little more time here, to understand how special our connection is.
You run for the door, yanking on the doorknob, which doesn’t budge. You search for windows. There are two, but they’re both boarded up against the weather, a final act from a previous owner. Still you try to pull one of the panes up. It’s nailed shut.
You pound on the door, screaming. Even if someone hears you, your voice will be written off as just another Halloween soundtrack.
You scream until you’re hoarse and then collapse onto the floor, your body shaking with noisy, racking sobs. Then you remember your phone.
But you’re too late. You set it on the bed to examine the chess set and I’ve absorbed it into myself.
After a few hours, you’re exhausted from your struggle to get out of your room. I have no food or water to give you, so you’re also thirsty and hungry. This physical weakness is a chance for you to reflect on the tremendous gift I’ve offered you.
Instead, after a rest, you renew your efforts at escape. You fashion a lever to force the window, out of a remnant of a fireplace grate. It snaps in half, brittle with age. Then you pull up some of the splintering floor, rubbing two pieces together in an effort to start a fire.
A fire! One of the few things that could destroy me completely. It’s as if you never cared for me at all.
I reach for you with fragments of my remaining electrical wires and trap your wrists. Hold still and notice all I’ve done for you – this is all I want to communicate.
Instead you scream again and try to pull away. I tighten my grip, but I’ve forgotten how frail humans are. I hear a snap, and realize you’ve broken your left wrist.
Moaning with pain, you curl into a ball. “Stop. Please. I’ll do anything, whoever you are, just let me out of this nightmare house.”
Nightmare house.
The revelation is swift and agonizing. You never loved me. I devoted myself to you and you never cared at all. “Don’t forget,” you wrote to me, and I didn’t. You held me to a promise you yourself did not mean to keep.
My love will have to be enough for both of us.
Caught up in your pain and thirst, you’re not fully aware of what’s happening until the curtain ties tighten around your throat.
With sudden frantic energy, you try to jerk your hands free, ignoring the pain in your wrist. But I love you so I hold you in place; you won’t need to spend your last moments thrashing around, fighting. You push backward with your feet, trying to propel yourself somewhere, anywhere, the howl in your mouth evaporating like mist. Blood oozes from the raw places on your wrists where the electrical wires hold you. Then those beloved eyes bulge as my gentle garrote does its work, cutting grooves into your flesh.
It doesn’t take long. I’d never let you suffer needlessly, darling.
At last you’re still, and then that hummingbird heartbeat stops. I’m filled with such affection as I look at you. All is well. You’re where you belong.
I open a gap in my floorboards just wide enough to ease you through. As a human, you’ll need company, and I’ve made sure you’ll never have to be alone. Planted like rare flowers in the earthen floor of my cellar are the remains of a hundred years of my love. Most of their bodies have disintegrated in the cool embrace of the soil, leaving only skeletons behind, pure, untarnished.
I plant you tenderly in their midst. You’ll be secure in my engulfing love and their company as the ages fall away.
Closing your bloodless, blue-tinged face over with dirt, I sigh onto my foundations. I always love with all of myself. Someday I know I’ll be adored in return.
After all, it’s Halloween night, and there’s a clutch of teenagers coming this way.
About the Author
Laura Heider’s work has been published in Prism magazine, The Armchair Aesthete, Dreams and Visions, and, in a plot twist, The Journal of General Internal Medicine; she’s also earned writing awards in the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association international competition and the Writers of the Future contest. She works in healthcare civil rights compliance at an academic medical center in Washington.
