Every town has that one house. The one that makes you cross the road instead of walking past it. The one the kids call the witches house and dare each other to go through the gate. Sometimes its the murder house. Everyone knows there was a murder there. Several, sometimes.
There was a house like that where I grew up. It was around the corner from my childhood home, in fact. Set on a large property, it sat back from the road, hidden in the overgrown front yard – the scariest part to my ten year old brain. It had three stories; I remember that. There was the ground floor, and you could see the front door in if you peered through the overgrown plants. There was the middle floor, with its boarded up windows and flaking paint. And then, in the eaves of the roof, there was an attic level. With its one circular window, still with its glass. I used to imagine all kinds of creepy people behind that window. They were magic too, because what else could keep that window in one piece while all the others broke? I had to walk past it every day to get to school and I would walk down the middle of the road because there was a great big barking dog on the other side.
Eventually, though, that old house was torn down. A block of flats was erected there in its place and while the inhabitants of those units were old and never friendly, the fear was gone. As if it was a part of the structure itself. That, somehow, when the house was torn down, my fear was torn down with it. I wasnt scared of the old house anymore, even the memory of it was benign and bland. I wasnt even scared of the dog across the road either. Even when it escaped and came bounding over to me, I didnt cower or scream or run. I just stood there. And it licked me. It let me pat it and it rolled over to show its belly as its owner came running out in her dressing gown to cajole it back inside, apologising while trying to keep her robe shut.
I tell you all this because my kids, twins, a girl and a boy, Cecilia, or Cece, and Max, just turned 8 years old, came running into the living room, pale as sheets, almost in tears talking over each other about the bad house. About how there are ghosts and all kinds of other creepy things living there and it was very close to their school. They had to see it every day as they walked past. All the other kids were scared of it too and they didnt want to be.
I nodded and made all the right noises as they told me their story. The act of listening, as you all should be well aware, helps the little ones calm down. If theyre being taken seriously, they let their own fear go because they know youll protect them.
I told them I know how to make them feel better. I told them that if they drunk their bottles of water until they were empty, it would be like magic. Everything would be right again. Then I told them about the house around the corner from where I grew up when I was their age. I told them how there were all these stories about kids going missing after going in there. How a witch lived there. Or how when you threw a stone at it from the road, you never heard it hit anything.
And then I told them that it was all made up. Scary stories that kids told each other. I told them that their bad house was exactly the same. That it was just stories that the older kids told to scare the younger ones. I told them that there was a house like this in every town and there were kids like that in every town. I told them that the fear was all in their heads. And if they really wanted to show the older kids, they should walk past the house and laugh at it. They should say things like ‘this house isnt scary, but it has a big garden’ or things like that.
It worked too. The water helped them feel better, as it always, always does and me telling them they shouldnt be afraid of the bad house helped them understand that there was nothing to be afraid of. That they shouldnt let the older kids scare them so easily. They ran off to have fun or do their homework or whatever it is that 8 year olds do on a Tuesday evening. I leant back in my armchair and thought that maybe it wasnt so bad being a father after all. Maybe I could hack it.
The call came in on Friday night. The twins were missing. They had been at their friends place, at a sleepover for a birthday party. According to the parents, they were all in the basement playing video games and telling each other scary stories. They had taken snacks and drinks down to them a little after 7pm and they were all still there, having fun – twins included. Then at 10, when they came down to turn the lights out, the twins had gone. The other kids swore up and down that they didnt know where or when they had gone. But an open window into the back yard and a poorly stacked series of objects made into a staircase to said window brought their lies down cold. The other kids at the party said what I already knew they were going to: the twins were going to the bad house to prove it was nothing to be scared of.
Myself and the host of the sleepover, a woman named Marian, jumped in her car and sped over towards the house. The kids told us where it was and with an exasperated sigh – obviously well versed with the myth and lore of this place – Marian said she knew where it was and drove us over. We didnt speak at all on the drive and parked the car haphazardly on the footpath as the two of us leapt out and pushed through the wooden gate that had recently been forced open.
I looked around and, as much as I could in the dim light, nodded. It was exactly the same as the house I grew up near. I commented this to Marian as we walked towards the house, set way back from the road. She looked a bit confused, surprised even, and said she was thinking the same thing. I told her that every town had a house like this. Kids always found one, adults gossiped about them. It was almost built into every town.
She shook her head at me as we arrived at the front door, ajar and welcoming almost. She said thats not what she meant. She said that this house, specifically, was the murder house where she grew up. She recognised it immediately because she had done the same thing as the twins had. Broke into it at night. Only it wasnt uninhabited.
I didnt catch what she said next because, now that she had said it, and now that I looked closer, with the full moon emerging from some clouds, this front door did look very familiar and, from some locked vault, hidden and secured at the back of my brain for more than 30 years, a fear grew at the base of my gut. A primal and instinctive fear. I could almost hear the dog barking, feel its anger as it tried to force its way through the thin slats of the wooden fence it was behind.
I stopped and leaned against the frame of the door. Where had that come from? This was a town literally in a different country to the town I grew up in. The house I was afraid of was long since destroyed. Proving, once and for all, that it wasnt a witches house, or a murder house, or a bad house. It was just a house and it was gone.
Yet the paint was the same colour. The door had the same pattern on it that you could see through the trees. I looked back at the overgrown garden. I couldnt tell from here, because it was so dark, but I felt it in my gut as that fear grew. It was the same garden. The same strange plants that kids would say ate children. The same tree branches that looked like the best Halloween decorations when they made their shadows. It was the same. Down to the last. I didnt look, but I knew, I just knew, that there would be a solid pane of glass in the attic window; the only one in the whole house.
I heard Marian call for me from further inside and I swallowed my fear and followed her voice. Something I wasnt going to think about crunched under my shoes as I heard the woman ahead of me call for Cece and Max. I imagined her as an 8 year old, standing in front of her murder house, with her friends egging her on to push on the gate or to throw a rock into the garden to see if any weird witch creatures were living in it.
I imagined her scared out of her mind, shaking her head, almost crying, saying no no no I dont want to as her friends pushed her towards the house. She tripped on something and fell into the road, a car coming around the corner narrowly missing her and the driver yelling out the window at the kids to get off the damn road.
He imagined her with a split lip and a now loose tooth, running home to her parents crying, bleeding, while her friends laughed behind her. Calling her all kinds of mean names.
Except. He had caught up to Marian now and she was as white as the twins had been when they came to tell me about this place. She was looking at me with fear and pity and sympathy. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes as she hugged me. I hugged her back and in that moment, I knew that I hadnt been imagining things. I had been seeing her memories. An actual event that had happened to her. And that she had seen mine. My most shameful moment as a small boy. For a second that lasted a little too long, we embraced. We let go and looked around. Blushing, embarrassed, as we continued to look for the twins. For a small while, the fear that had been growing ebbed.
And then, from above us, a noise. Like a box landing on the floorboards. It had to be the twins, right? We looked at each other and nodded. I asked her if she should call her husband, or my wife, and tell her where we were. She looked blankly at me for a second and then shook her head. I looked back at her. They would know we were here, right? Everyone knew where the bad house was.