The weary house stood in the shadow of an overgrown maple, its dense leaf canopy burying it in perpetual darkness. Rot had formed in the window corners, and a scaly moss blanketed the roof’s cracked shingles like a spreading disease. The dwelling remained partially visible from the main drag, but if you hiked along Barnard Street, past the broken-down service station and abandoned strip mall, you could see it resting at the edge of the crumbling parking lot.
The building emerged from the postwar housing boom when one-family residences had popped up like dandelions across America’s landscape. Families had once lived there, celebrated Christmases, birthdays, job promotions, and graduations. Children had run through backyard sprinklers while parents kept an eye on them from plastic lawn chairs and sipped iced tea in the hazy New England heat.
Time passed. People moved away. But no one came back to visit Barnard Street.
No one stood at the edge of the parking lot and reminisced about his childhood, wondering what the inside looked like now or who lived there. No one dug into the attic’s moldy boxes to retrieve family photos depicting days on Barnard Street. In fact, most residents had abandoned the dwelling in haste, leaving belongings and haunted nightmares behind. For those who had passed through its hungry walls, the house held a legacy of misfortune, death, and misery. Barnard Street travelers could sense the house’s deadly aura, gripping their children’s hands tighter and quickening their pace as they passed, as if the living structure might come alive and snatch them.
The town of Chatham had tried to raze the structure after it had taken Marcus Bailey’s young bride in the spring of ’49, just days after the wedding. But when the city’s excavator leveled its boom against the clapboard siding and pushed, the bucket somehow dislodged an electrical wire, sending it snaking into the cab and electrocuting the operator. After that, no one accepted the demolition contract, and the Barnard Street house remained.
The property stands vacant most of the time, but tonight a light burned in a smudged window.
A man stared through the dirt-caked, wavy glass into the world’s bleak darkness, relieved he had finally found an out-of-the-way place to lay low. Why the house sat vacant, he didn’t care. It had a roof. It provided a place to conduct his business, get back on his feet again. Propped against the wall, he tugged the boots from his aching feet and blew out a breath. As his eyelids slipped down over his burning eyes, he caught movement in the hallway. The walls shimmered as a thick, crimson fluid oozed from the drywall and clotted in pools along the floorboards’ edges. A throbbing from beneath the man’s feet pulsed like a heartbeat through his core, as if the musty house breathed with him, its stale air wafting over him with a metallic-iron blood odor. The man pressed his fists to his eyes, attempting to dispel the images as a shaft of glimmering light pierced the darkness from the back-bedroom keyhole. It grew like a beacon as the door swung open on its hinge.
The man stepped toward the glowing light, the soothing radiance beckoning him…inviting him in.
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