Nowhereville

Eventually, I started moving slowly, reluctantly towards no. 34. I opened the gate ever so slowly, and then took my time walking up the steps of the dark, menacing-looking house. It resembled all the other houses on the street, with the exception that all its windows were still intact. I fumbled for the key before I managed to find it in a pocket of my messenger bag, along with the piece of paper on which my dad had written down the address.

It was folded in half. For a while, I didn’t open it, making my mind concentrate on the single ray of hope that maybe I had remembered the name wrong; maybe, just maybe, that awful girl, Kari, had been merely joking, wanting to scare me. I unfolded the piece of paper and stared at it for a few long seconds. There was no mistaking, even in spite of my dad’s untidy handwriting; it was there, black on white: no. 34. I sighed deeply and took another step towards the door.

I put the key in the old lock, hoping against hope that somehow the key might not work. However, the key turned smoothly in the lock and the door opened with a creak. I stepped into the dark entrance hall and I felt across the wall for the light switch, praying to God that electricity hadn’t been cut off since the old woman’s death. I found it gladly, and pushed it. The light almost hurt my eyes, which were used to the semi darkness outside. I blinked twice to adjust to the change and looked around me. The hall, which had felt very big when I had first stepped inside the house, was only a few feet long. On my right, there was a long wooden table, covered almost completely in newspapers in different stages of decay. Most of them were old and yellowed with age. The most recent one I could find was dated three weeks ago. Further down there was a hat stand, covered with all sorts of clothes and a rather impressive number of umbrellas. I couldn’t imagine why my late grandmother could have used umbrellas for, in the goddamn middle of the Mojave desert. Moldy shoes and wellington boots were crammed into a corner, all dirty and mismatched.

My gaze shifted toward the closed door at the end of the entrance hall. I opened it, with my heart beating at an unusual pace. I found myself in yet another hall, larger this time. On my left there was a broad wooden staircase that led to the upper level. On my right, there were three doors. The walls of this hall were covered in old photographs; some of them in color, some of them in black and white. I made a mental note to study each of these photos later, so that maybe I could find out more about my distant family’s past. I walked straight ahead, because there the hall opened up into a larger room, which I guessed was the living room. As I walked, I felt as if all the eyes of the people in the pictures on the walls were watching me intently. The room was rather large and as far as I could see, it had served as both living room and dining room, for there was a long, polished mahogany table in the far end. Six chairs were neatly placed around the table. All of the furniture in the room looked strangely new and shiny, as if the owners of the house had just gone out for a few hours and were due back at any moment. Everything in the house seemed awaiting their return.

I gave a start when I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned around, I realized that it was only a big mirror that was sitting over the mantelpiece. Again I tried to shake off my fears, trying to reason with myself that there was no need whatsoever to feel scared. I had been experiencing a vexing feeling of apprehension ever since I had set foot in this town. Just a big old house that’s had more than its fair share of memories, I thought. Nothing to be scared of. But then I saw the image of that girl’s face in my head, vivid and clear as if she was standing right in front of me. And at the same time I smelled again that putrid sweetness of hers. She gave me the creeps.

I chased away the phantasm and walked out of the living room, across the hall, and up the broad wooden staircase. Here, the walls were again covered in old photographs. This time, curiosity got the better of me and I stopped to look at some of them. One of them was a large family photo. It was in black and white. At the top of the picture there were two adults – one of them, the woman, I recognized to be none other than Grandma Faye. The man next to her was probably her husband, judging by his arm that was wrapped around her waist. In front of them, grinning, I could see a pair of dark-haired twins. Captured in black and white, all those years ago, was my dad’s face, smiling mischievously. It was so very different from the tired old face that I was so used to. In the picture, his eyes were alive with joy, lit up by the excitement of a long forgotten joke. I could tell my dad from my uncle, because even then he had that long scar on his left cheek – he said that he had got it when he was four, after running into a barbwire fence. The picture must have been taken after that accident. Next to dad there was a girl with two long, dark ponytails, with a stern look on her face. She looked almost too grave for a child. She looked a year or two older than dad and uncle Mervin. Next to her there was another girl, the youngest of the six children in the photograph. This girl looked sickly pale and had a look of malcontent on her face, as if she had suffered from a very powerful stomachache at the time when the picture had been taken. I concentrated on the other side of the picture. Next to uncle Mervin there were two boys, well older than the rest of the children. They were probably in their teens, one about 15 and the other maybe a year older. Their faces didn’t express anything; they were just smiling for the camera. All of them looked very much alike, and I couldn’t help but smile at the fact that they all had my nose – the same crooked, abnormally large nose. This resemblance made me feel peculiarly close to them, although they were just a bunch of people in an old photograph.

Still smiling, I climbed on, occasionally looking at the other photographs. There were a couple from Grandma Faye’s wedding to Grandpa Peter, a few of small children playing in the backyard and even some color pictures from someone’s graduation. I was eager to find more pictures of my dad and uncle, but there were none. It was almost as if they had been a dark blotch in the family’s history and Grandma had wanted to cover it up by removing all pictures of them except for the family portraits. My temporary happiness was washed away by a flood of anger. It was beyond cruel to try and hide all traces of someone who was your own flesh and blood.

When I reached the landing, I looked around me yet again, trying to take in each aspect of this house. The upper floor, I discovered, wasn’t very big. A narrow hallway started on the landing and ended in a curtained glass door that I guessed was opening into a balcony. Only a few doors were on this corridor. The first one on the left, I discovered, was the bathroom. It was wide, covered in tile that must have once been white, but now had a faint yellowish color. Inside it was rather dark; the light that crept in from the hallway through the open door made it look even more sinister. The tub was one of those old ones that you sometimes see in movies, set on what looked like lion paws. This too was yellowed with age, as were the sink and the toilet. Pipes were running along the walls, old and rusty. I guessed that the water had been shut down after my grandmother’s death, since I couldn’t hear the distinct sound of gurgling water.

I closed the door to the bathroom and went across the hall and opened another door. This led into a bedroom. There were two beds inside; they were unmade and the dirty, yellowed, and stained mattresses looked strangely sinister. There was no other piece of furniture except an armoire and an empty desk. The walls were bare; there was no clue whatsoever as to who might have inhabited this room. The bleakness of this room unsettled me, so I closed the door and moved further down the corridor. Another room that was almost an exact copy of the first opened on my right. The only difference was that this room had its walls painted in a dusty pink. This led me to believe that it had been the girls’ room. My guess was right, because on the door of the dresser there was pasted a picture, this time in color, of the two girls that I had seen in the family portrait earlier. Here the girls were several years older, but their depressing facial expressions hadn’t changed much. Apart from that, the room was just as bare and bleak as the last one.

I came out of this room and entered yet another one, looking very much like the first two. Again the beds, the desk and the armoire. However, the difference here there were several markings on the walls as if something had been torn off. I left this room and entered the last one on the corridor. This room was the largest one and the only one that looked as if it had been lived in recently. There was a double canopy bed that occupied most of the room. The bed was made with somber-looking bedspreads and the canopy was made of reddish-brown velvet curtains. The whole room smelled strongly of naphthalene, but it proved of no use; moths had wreaked havoc into the velvet of the canopy and the bedspreads anyway. The floor was covered with an oval rug that was thick with dust and the floorboards creaked, even more than in the rest of the house. In the corner, there was a large dresser; its doors were covered with old, stained mirrors. Next to the dresser there was a makeup table. There was a telephone on this table, among piles of papers. I started going through the papers, hoping that I would find something of importance here. Most of them were drafts for what looked like had been the old woman’s will. Indeed, among crumpled pieces of paper with only a few words written on them, I found another one that seemed more complete. I sat down and had to squint idly at the paper for a while, because Grandma Faye’s handwriting had been terrible. It was thin and slanting, written in ink that was, in some spots, blotched, as if teardrops had fallen on the paper while she was writing.

After a while, I began to comprehend the twisted letters that ran along the crumpled page. The will wasn’t long; it was only five lines long. I wondered for a while why someone would write so short a will, but then I thought about the fact that grandma didn’t have much to leave to her children besides this gloomy old house that looked as if it was about to fall any day now. However, what I read was beyond anything I had expected. It went like this: “To the only two children I have left, to the ones I shoved away from me, I leave everything I have. I leave them my house, for it is my only possession. This old house that has been both my prison and my shelter against the darkness, I pass on to them and the grandson that I never knew, John. I leave them this house because I want to leave behind something to remind them of me, although I know that their memories will not be pleasant. Otherwise, my last hope is that they never come to this cursed place to claim their inheritance.”