Author's Note: Hi again, thanks for reading :)
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Two: Is This a Joke?
I was now the disgruntled owner of my very first home.
Seriously.
It was my grandmother's house; she'd left it to my mother and now my mother had left it to me. I had forgotten the place even existed. It was in Washington, close enough to where I lived that if I wanted to move into it I could without completely uprooting my life. The house itself sat empty and had been so for the past several years. It included three acres of waterfront property and an occupied guest house. The tenant was also the caretaker, but no one had been able to get a hold of him to let him know the deed was being transferred.
I suppose most people would be, while not exactly happy about the situation, at least…I don't know…feeling something other than the absolute dread I had in the pit of my stomach. When I finally admitted it was something other than indigestion, my friends started making suggestions. I could sell it, rent it out, or something else that I'd heard and already forgotten. But all of that felt wrong; my mom had left it to me. And I highly doubted she did so just so I could turn around and sell it to the highest bidder. That knowledge, unfortunately, did not come with any further enlightenment.
So Alice, Rose, and I packed into my baby, a red 1955 Aston Martin. My father liked to joke that I would never drive a vehicle made after 1960. I had fixed it up from barely a shell and now she was my pride and joy. Ok, correction – a friend of my family fixed it up from barely a shell. Anyway, do you ever just drive to drive? Well, once she was finished, I liked to drive for no reason, pretending my bleak moss green and grey home town was actually the English countryside. Sometimes I think my life is filled with more daydreams than actual fact. Nonetheless when I was alone I drove, a copy of Pride and Prejudice taking up primary position on my passenger seat.
"I think…," Alice said, staring at the GPS on her cell phone, "it should be up here on the right." She didn't sound too sure.
"Please God, let this be it," Rose commented. Why she had chosen to fold her long body into my tiny backseat, I didn't know. But I had a feeling this was a first and a last for her. "There!" She pointed randomly into the trees.
I slowed down; to a passerby it probably looked like I was casing the neighborhood. I didn't see anything. "Where?"
"Oh, I see it, through the trees," Alice paused, "look, there's the driveway."
"You mean that dirt road?" I asked, that peach pit of dread growing. Everything was so green, there were trees everywhere, you could just barely see any homes from the road. I couldn't believe this all was just a few minutes from town. I turned onto the narrow drive and the house came into view almost out of nowhere. It was green, like everything else. And big, really big. I stopped when the driveway split, the left fork heading down to the guest house that I assumed must have been closer to the water.
We all stared up at the monstrosity.
"Is it just me…or does that look like…," Rose trailed off, craning her neck to see the third story.
"A haunted house," I finished. "My mother left me a haunted house." I stepped out of the car, hoping my windows had somehow disfigured the image.
More precisely, it was a Victorian, an original in fact. Or so I had been told by the lawyer. Why couldn't I remember ever visiting this place? The third story looked to be an attic and above that, on the roof, was a widow's walk. I had a sudden image of pacing it, waiting for my husband's return, not that this house was near any large bodies of water. The "waterfront" was actually a rather large pond, sizable enough to swim or put a canoe in, but nothing more extravagant.
The girls got out and inspected it more closely. "You know, it's actually a beautiful house; I bet you could get historical landmark status," Rose remarked, the architectural expert in our little group.
"Great," I quipped, stepping around the car toward the front door. I walked up the steps and took note of the badly chipping paint; I shuddered to think what might be waiting beyond the door. I took the oversize key from my pocket; it slid with some difficulty into the lock and opened with an ominous groan.
Alice grabbed my arm. "This is the part where Leatherface comes out with his chainsaw, be careful." I shook her off while Rose spoke up.
"I think their house was more plantation style."
"Thanks," I said sarcastically, but still, I crept in as quietly as possible lest I disturb a family of psychotic serial killers. It was completely dark if you didn't count the waning light from the open door; long heavy curtains were pulled across all the windows and all the furniture was covered to protect it from dust. "If one of those cloths moves, I'm out of here." I inched over to the nearest window and threw open the curtains, raising a cloud of dust in their wake. I sneezed.
"Nice floors, gorgeous crown molding, not bad," Rose's hand swept over the banister in examination. "Careful on the stairs, this is a little loose."
"So are you," I could see Alice's Cheshire grin.
Rose looked at her with un-offended surprise. "Touché."
We moved around the first floor pulling back curtains; at the back of the house you could just barely see the pond and right next to the shore, the guest house.
"So, who do you think lives there?" Alice peeked out a window in what appeared to be the library, "think Leatherface finally got out of Texas?"
I bumped her with my elbow. "How many times have you seen that movie?" I looked out the window toward the house, wondering where my new tenant was and how well he knew my mother. Rose joined our spying, easily a head taller than either of us.
She shrugged, "he's probably some student that needed cheap housing." She was referring to the fact that we lived in a small university town; people everywhere rented out rooms above their garages or their basements to the starving student demographic. "What's his name?"
"Edward something; I don't think he's a student." The day I went to the will reading had passed in a strange blur of legal documentation; I had gotten the basic information on Edward, but couldn't recall much of it.
We lost interest and spent the small remainder of daylight exploring the house and trying to get a hold of people to get the water and power turned on. While I moved from room to room I noticed something strange on all the doors; someone, Edward I assumed, had put sticky notes on them. The one outside the library said Samantha Turley, outside the master bedroom was written the name Benjamin Canter. Each door had a different name, but no other information. I left them alone, wondering at their importance.
We learned during our wandering that the house was going to need more than a little work. I imagined dollar signs being flushed down a toilet. And I didn't have many of those to spare. Where Alice and I could really only see aesthetically what was going to need work, Rose filled us in on a few other details once the water was turned on. "Well, I don't know for sure, but my guess is the plumbing is going to need an overhaul," she sat on the top step at the back porch while Alice sat at the bottom and I was flat on my back in the grass. I noticed it hadn't been recently mowed, but looked fairly well kept; I wondered if that was one of Edward's regular jobs. I zoned out for the rest of Rose's speech, something about new pipes and the shower and rewiring, and stared at the sky through the trees. It was a dark grey, twilight, and about to rain; we'd have to go inside soon.
I sighed and sat up, "so much for airing out the house." We'd opened the windows in hopes of getting rid of even a tiny bit of that old dusty, closed up for too long, smell. But as the first rain drops dotted my hair, I knew that plan was out.
We went back inside and made another pass through the house, closing everything up. Alice called from an upstairs bedroom across the hall from where I was, "So, after this I think we should take off, yes?" For all the horror and suspense movies she obsessed over, Alice was easily frightened.
"I second that!" Rose called from I wasn't sure where.
I picked up a picture I hadn't noticed before off the uncovered nightstand. In it my mother and grandmother were sitting on the back porch, where the three of us had just been resting. They were wearing light, cotton dresses and holding glasses of something; I was sitting at their feet, almost out of view. I held a book that I was clearly too young to be able to read, but very focused on it nonetheless. My mother was laughing, her head tipped back; she looked so happy.
Alice cleared her throat from the doorway, "are you ready?"
I set the frame back down and shifted, not quite comfortable with where my new train of thought was taking me. "I think…I'm going to stay here tonight." What I was really thinking was, I think I'm going to live here. I looked at them, bracing for any reaction.
They both regarded me carefully; I thought maybe to see if I'd gone off the deep end. Alice caved first. "Well, it's Friday and all…it could be like camping." She was referring to the fact that while there was now running water the electricity could not be turned on until the next day, presumably just to irritate us. She looked at Rose expectantly, who had her arms crossed.
She was not a fan of being without basic utilities, but when Alice unleashed "the eyes" on her, she slouched. "Fine."
"Can we sleep in the same room though?" Alice asked. I think she was blushing.
After testing the one bed in the whole house, which felt worse than sleeping on pavement (I would imagine), we congregated in the living room with all the candles we could find which came out to two squat vanilla scented ones and three votives. "Lets try not to set fire to the house on the first day, ok?" Rose, always the practical one. She uncovered furniture in what looked to be a parlor room and threw the cloths in an empty corner. Alice found blankets that smelled a little like moth balls and dust and set them up in between a couple of small antique couches.
Undressing halfway, we were exhausted and admittedly, a little punch drunk. We settled down in a mass of fully grown limbs and thoughts of our many sleepovers, none of which had ever been quite this uncomfortable. I stretched, lucky enough not to be in the middle, and faced Alice, whose foot I could feel near my ankle. She grinned, "you didn't shave your legs."
"Hush, you." I closed my eyes.
"Do you guys feel a draft?" Rose asked from Alice's other side.
"It's because you're wearing a thong." She replied.
Rose tugged at the blanket in a huff. "Yeah well, at least I'm waxed."
I rolled away from them with a quiet "oh Jesus."
Alice mumbled next a few minutes later, half her face pressed into the blanket. "Does anyone else smell cake?"
"It's the candles," Rose replied, half asleep already.
"Are you sure?"
Rose answered with an equal mixture of tiredness and sarcasm. "No, I'm baking and just didn't tell you. Go check the kitchen."
"G'night," I interrupted, knowing they were just getting started.