House The Dark Magazine

House does not want you here. Does not want your laughter in its halls. Does not want your gentle breathing at night. Your cheerful demeanor. Your smiling brood. It does not want your hopeful words to echo off its walls. Your quiet murmurs. Your awkward silence. Your profanities, inanities, the slickness of your sex. Your steps are clumsy when you have drunk too much. Your bickering too comfortable. House does not want the smells of your dinners, your candles, your biological functions. It does not want your spills and scratches, your shattered glasses, your furniture scrapes. Most of all House does not want your lamentations, your soft weeping in the middle of the night, your profound regrets. You may try to hide them in your pillow where your children will not find them, but House will. House knows where you hide all your things. It would tell you this, but it cannot. It is just a house.

House has grown to dread the sound of heavy, heavy steps. If it had eyes to close it would still hear the virile grunts and clumsy thumps, cumbersome shuffles against shifting wood. Would still smell the fresh air coming through its propped open front door. Would still feel boots against its grain, wrapped edges wedged against corners and frames. Fresh weight slowly dispersed throughout its halls.

A helpless electricity courses through House upon the arrival of strangers. Not the electricity of the old cloth wiring still secreted in some of its cavities. An energy that only comes when the people approach with their boxes and bundles, their trucks and their vans. Each time there is a moment, a moment when House believes. This moment is filled with warm light and clinking glass and a nameless wish. Maybe this time, it thinks, even as it shudders from beneath. House knows hope is a hollow thing, like the space above its mortar bed.

House wonders how you never feel it. When you come with your three sons and expectant, huffing wife. When you come with your crippled daughter and timid husband and loud, aggressive dog. When you come with your chittering sisters and ailing mother-in-law. When you come with your third wife and her fourth cat. Your happy family and your happy family and your happy family. When you first arrive by horse and buggy. When you park your Edsel out in front. When you walk the mile from depot to door. When you rattle in by pickup truck. By finned Chevy. By station wagon. And minivan. And minivan. By electric automobile. When you stand out front and drink it in and feel the trees and inhale the day and toe the ground and examine the siding and smile at your family and shrug your shoulders and imagine the moments and caress the railing and walk up and in and in and in and all around. Are you so pregnant with curiosity, with excitement, so filled with glowing light that you do not sense the darkness?

Your desire to imprint yourself on House is immediate. It is built into you like the lime mortar and floor joists and concrete plinths built into it. And so you change things, even when there is no good reason to. Does the kitchen not service your needs? Can you not boil water, warm soup, bake bread? Is the bedroom not conducive to rest? The parlor not spacious enough for your festivities? Will knocking a hole in that wall repair the hole in your heart? Will a new floor make you steadier on your feet? Will conjuring new spaces from thin air and drywall and plywood affect the lives that live within? You perform alchemy by turning money you’ve spent into money you’re leant. It is worth it, you say. You are adding value, you say. You finished the attic, as though it were incomplete. You subtracted walls and added space. You pulled out the windows and ripped up the floors and rerouted the chimney and switched every knob and handle. You did not like the baseboards, so you replaced them. Same for the chair rail. You peeled off every tattered inch of wallpaper. So much of what made House House has disappeared,