The Vanishing House

I stared at the ground while everything processed through my head. I was going on a journey with Benton. I was leaving behind my family and friends. I was sacrificing so much for a boy I hardly knew.

I was torn between a ferocious need to help him, and the overwhelming notion that all of this was horribly perverse. I had to question whether or not it was worth it. I thought I was doing the right thing, only to doubt myself a second later. When I thought I should go with Benton, I felt like I was betraying my family, and vice versa. All the while, I knew I shouldn't even have felt such an emotional attachment to Benton. I think it came down to the fact that, no matter what, when someone or something looks at you so helplessly, you can't refuse their desperate need for you.

Thoughts of Benton kept me awake. My eyes were frozen, staring at the ceiling. We decided to leave in the morning. I had only enough time to pack essentials, figure out my good-byes, and doubt my decision over and over again. I felt as though I was going to be swallowed by guilt; no matter what, I was going to hurt someone. I just didn't know which hurt would be worse.

It took me a while to work through proper goodbyes. Letters seemed cold and wretched. Silence was unbearable. I settled on notes scattered around the house, like a little scavenger hunt to find fading pieces of my departure. It began with the letter I would leave on my bed, telling my family that I was gone and would come back. The rest were hidden in places of remembrance. I knew Tanya would find my note for her buried in my wardrobe. Denny would see his note in the garden we started outside his windowsill. Ma and Pa would find theirs underneath my favorite pastry cutter.

I was in my own little world of troubles, but the clock kept ticking, each twitch of an arm bringing me closer to the journey I was only half prepared for. My anxieties kept doubling. What would we eat? How would we sleep? What would happen to the Vanishing House once Benton closed its door? I had the strangest feeling that the house would collapse. Or maybe the house wasn't the thing that was collapsing. Maybe it was just my life.
I must have fallen asleep eventually, though it seemed impossible to do so. The world was pale when I awoke; placid and pallid; at a glance, too innocent to bear the horrors that Benton faced, that Benton and I might face. It was funny how my world was suddenly in relation to Benton.

As I left my home, who knew for how long, I couldn't bear to look behind me. I couldn't bear to look in front of me toward the Vanishing House, nor behind me to the town that raised me, the town that I was abandoning. So I looked up - the only place left untainted by memories or burdens or guilt. The stars were fading like washing stains out of linen. Fogs and blues bled together in a murky splendor. As I gazed upward, I thought myself a cloud: travelling, changing form, changing mind at every doubt. No destination. Just a journey through space. A lonely metaphor.

My legs carried me the impossible distance toward Benton. I couldn't attribute the action to my brain. I felt so strange and hollow. Ready for change, yet not ready to make the first step toward it. When I got to the Vanishing House, Benton was already standing in the doorway. The house looked dilapidated, crumbling under his hand resting on the door frame. Its white paint peeled back almost in horror of the world it saw. It looked like such a sad house, like it knew Benton was leaving, possibly for good. My eyes then flickered over Benton. He looked like he hadn’t received much sleep, either. He had an unhealthy, sallow look about him. His eyes, the color of a disturbed, corrugated sea, had an uneasy, skittish look about them. He was just as scared as I was. He hoisted a bulging burlap sack across his back and gripped another thick bag with his right hand.

And then he stepped over the doorway.

The structure creaked like the popping bones of an old person, and a light wind brushed over us, as though the house was sighing. I could not say with certainty that anything changed, but it felt like the house was hunching its shoulders in sadness. I walked past Benton, not really knowing why until the words came out of my mouth.

“Thank you,” I whispered to the house. “Thank you for letting him go, for letting us do this. I have a feeling in my bones that we need to do this.”

Benton shot me a quizzical look when I turned back to face him, but I just walked past him. My journey started as soon as that last word was spoken. I was no longer needed in Fairfax.

I walked northwest toward the gap in the mountains that engulfed my town in a semi-circle. The forest didn’t touch this gap, and it was the only way possible way to enter or exit Fairfax from the north. But no one ever travelled it. Before, it was used by wanderers and gypsy and witches and anything magic. But, after the arrival of the Vanishing House and my town’s hatred of magic, the magical people must have sensed that there was no use in coming to Fairfax anymore. The pathway through the gap was now overgrown and abused by the untamed foliage.

Benton and I didn’t speak until well past the gap and into the thick woods beyond the mountains. It was I who spoke first.

“I thought the house would collapse,” I confessed.

“Yeah, well, she’s a good old thing,” he replied. “She’s survived a lot. I’ll miss her.”

“She? You’re really fond of it.”

“Couldn’t you sense it? Couldn’t you feel the magic in her? That wasn’t just a house. She was much more than that, Nell. Much, much more.”

The seriousness in his voice made prevented me from asking any questions, though I didn’t understand what he meant. I just imagined he meant that the house was special, having to carry the burden of a broken family, having to nurture a broken boy. Benton spoke next, after several heavy moments of silence.

“Do you have a destination in mind?” he asked tentatively.

“No,” I said. I was scared of that answer, but also thrilled by it. In mere hours, I defied my hometown, left my birthplace, and began a near purposeless and certainly impossible journey with a stranger. I wondered who would look for me, if anyone. I wondered if my strength to leave everything I knew would last past the day. This seemed fleeting and transient, but full of power, energy, and importance. I felt significant.

Though I had no destination in mind, I felt certain that were were going in the direction we needed. It had not escaped my notice that Maday, Simon Aldebaran’s birthplace, was in the direction we were heading, albeit far away. I didn’t want to admit to Benton that I had no idea where to begin our search for Hedva, but I also didn’t want to admit that I thought we should visit Maday and Sehyr, in case he should find the idea of retracing his parents’ footsteps fruitless. Moreover, what if Statesman Taphir discovered us? Would he want to destroy any remainder of Izdihar’s renegade life? Or would he seek vengeance for the daughter he lost to cruel Hedva?

I kept silent and continued the walk, with the sky darkening ever-so slowly and the woods growing around us.