The old house has been gutted, its walls scraped bare, its innards strewn about the yard to rot. The door hangs off its hinges, cobwebs wriggle and tear like ragged gums. Even the rats have abandoned the old house, even the spiders. The old house is without life.
‘‘The Old House Bakery’ is a pleasant place to stop for coffee, a place for well-baked bread and quiet conversations. They serve an array of hot beverages and a rotating selection of cakes and pastries. Given a day’s notice, they are happy to accept special orders and offer reasonable quotes over the phone.
Located in a county rampant with methamphetamine abuse and petty crime, it is easy to overlook the darkened circle on a crime map, the circle that deepens red just as it closes in around ‘The Old House.’ There are murders, here, more murders in the half mile radius around the bakery than anywhere else in the state. As such, it may be prudent to ask whether ‘The Old House Bakery,’ which has seen no crime directly on its premises, is a haven or the bait of some sinister trap.’
The floor of the old house remembers a kitchen, the faded imprints of an oven, an industrial freezer. There are long, deep scrapes in the wood where chairs and tables once slid, oil stains on the ceiling and the gray apparitions of old hands on the glass. Cool air rushes in the back door and, finding it empty, rushes out the front again, pausing only to whip around the unzipped flaps of my jacket.
I wait for something to happen and, when the waiting gets too long, I piss in a room that was probably a bathroom once.
It is, while pissing, that I spot a silhouette in the trees outside, far enough away to be a shadow cast by the setting sun but standing at odds with the wind. Through the frosted glass of the once-bathroom it could be the size and shape of a person or, just as easily, the size and shape of some broken stump. When I check again from the once-kitchen there is nothing.
Just like that, as night begins to thicken, the thing that haunts the old house begins to haunt me. It taps on the windows and scratches at the walls. It pulls the front door from its remaining hinge and places it high up in a tree outside when I’m not looking. For a long period, for nearly three hours, it walks slowly back and forth across the roof. It seems to know what room I inhabit no matter my means of hiding.
I consider leaving many times but I remember the deep red circle around the old house and I stay put through the night.
Even after the thing leaves an old pair of empty boots on the porch.
Even after it covers the windows in mud so that it’s impossible to see outside.
Even after it begins to send crumpled sheets of paper through the old house on its airstream, a novel in wet, black symbols.
I leave cautiously long after the sun has risen and I step out of the door and off the porch and I’m so worried about the thing that I trip and fall on my fucking face in the dust and dirt.
There is something buried in front of the old house, an old iron knife exposed by the wind, caught up in the curled laces of my boots. It pulls from the ground, dull and heavy with rust.
Distracted by my find, I might have missed the thing that has emerged from the trees. There may be a person there, or something shaped like a person, but all I see of that hunched form is a great mass of rotting leaves and ancient pelts. It pays me no attention as it shambles past and struggles up the stairs to the old house. It disappears inside and, after a moment, I hear the wrenching of wood.
The old house shudders and lets out a great, dusty sigh.
I take a minute to replace the knife in the ground, considering the very slim chance that whatever kept the thing outside the old house might work in reverse to keep it in.
I leave the old house with my hands rusted red.
-traveler
