10.17.10
doublehaunted by the superdevil: the lesson of blue house
So there I was, staring down the barrel of my own gun.
In the harsh, orange light, I could just barely make out the small grooves of the pistol’s rifling pattern. I turned the barrel toward the single tungsten light hanging from the ceiling. I could see flecks of dust, and unburnt powder resting on the polished chrome interior. Behind me, on an aged and abused old mattress, lay the handgun’s frame and slide, along with its recoil spring and magazine. In the center of the room, my friend Davis was attempting futilely to attach his PlayStation to an uncooperative television, his cursing muffled by the wall-to-wall curtains meant to conceal a particularly disconcerting black and white patterned wallpaper. I shivered in the cold autumn air that leaked through the cracks in the walls and blew the dust out of the barrel, then placed it back into the slide assembly along with the recoil spring, and reattached it to the frame of the gun. With a fairly audible click, I depressed the button that decocked the striker mechanism in the gun, increasing the trigger pull and decreasing the chance of a stress-induced negligent discharge. Satisfied with my half-finished cleaning job, I re-holstered my weapon, its weight against my hip at once disconcerting and oddly comforting.
I looked around the room. Davis had gotten nowhere in his endeavors.
I sighed.
I fucking hated this house.
Around the University lay a colorful swath of old turn-of-the-century housing that was constantly being parceled out to new, optimistic college tenants while the old ones packed up and left to forge their own lives. As property ownership in the area was constantly in a state of flux, the quality of any given tract of housing was always variable. Occasionally you’d see a house with a pristinely kept lawn and front façade, meticulously maintained by tenants with a modicum of good taste. But more often than not, you’d find a house like the one standing on the southwest corner of Bernard and Highland.
It was collectively and uncreatively known as “blue house,” thanks to the faded baby-blue paint that lined its ancient wood panel walls. It sat on a minor incline, the dirt driveway having been forcefully carved out of the ground to theoretically allow level parking for its residents. From the outside, it was actually a rather pretty example of turn-of-the-century housing in Denton, with a fairly large patio overlooking a considerable amount of lawn. There was a porch swing and an aged water feature, and a single large tree providing an ample amount of shade. To any regular passers-by, it was almost inviting.
The masquerade was ruined the closer you got, though. The water feature was powerless and eroded, the cupid statue having long lost most of its limbs. The lawn was overgrown with weeds, and where it wasn’t, there were dead, blasted patches of dirt and rocks. The patio’s wood floor looked liable to rot away at any time, and a lone upright piano, missing half of its keys and covered in empty liquor bottles, stood by itself as the sole piece of decoration on the deck.
The setting got worse as you moved around back. An ancient, mildewy couch covered in holes bored by god knows what sat around a pot-metal fire pit. Behind that was a crude sculpture known as “the rocketship,” as it vaguely resembled a playground fixture in the shape of a rocket. There was also a back entrance that led to the house’s storage room, but it was rendered inaccessible by the detritus. Not that there was any real reason to go into the storage room to begin with; the floor was littered with junk from the previous owners, and there was a small alcove that was continually referred to as “Sarah’s room,” ostensibly after the ghost of one of the previous residents.
We didn’t actually know if there ever was a Sarah living in the house, but it sounded about right.
The first time I went into Sarah’s room, I noticed a shelf full of jars, their contents obscured by the dim light and decades worth of dust and grime. I made a wild guess that one of the jars was filled with nothing but rusted nails. I was right. That should give you an idea of what the house was like.
There wasn’t anything logical about the way the interior was laid out. Everything about the rooms suggested either the work of a paranoid schizophrenic or just that almost a century of constantly shifting tenants had taken its toll on interior consistency. The latter was far more likely, but the former always lingered in the back of my head whenever I visited.
For example, the room in which I was cleaning my Walther and Davis was cursing at a television was covered for the most part in wall-to-wall curtains. This not only had the effect of making the room seem slightly bigger than it actually was, but helped distract from the horrid wallpaper that lined the walls. It was a black and white pattern, complex and repeating, that reminded me of either an elaborate optical illusion, one of those “magic eye” books where if you crossed your eyes and squinted you’d be able to make out a dolphin amidst an explosion of color, or what MC Escher’s desktop background would look like if he used Windows 3.1. Whatever it was, it was literally painful to look at, and whoever put the curtains up prior to my friends moving in knew what he was doing.
The rest of the living spaces were, for the most part, relatively normal, the only visual discontinuity being the ordinary day-to-day rubble of people who are in the stage of life where it isn’t entirely necessary to clean up after yourself. One closet had an entire mattress jammed in sideways, which was used as an impromptu coat rack by some. There was always a vague smell of urine when the door was opened.
The room immediately next to the patio (but having no direct entrance outside, drunken window entrances notwithstanding) was where we spent most of our time. There was a desk with a laptop, an old antique couch that was not nearly as cared for as the caretaker of the property would’ve liked, a television with a basic cable hookup, and an Xbox. Outside was the kitchen, which was covered in unread mail and empty bottles. The fridge was almost permanently stocked with cheap booze and frozen food.
All the necessities of modern life.
The house was being rented out by a man who was serving time in prison for either the possession or distribution of child pornography, neither of which was very comforting to anyone who asked. He was also the owner of at least two more properties in town which were also being rented out to young college twenty-somethings, and we would occasionally discuss the fact that not only was he getting food and shelter on taxpayers’ dimes, but he’d also be richer than all of us combined when he got out of prison. We came to the conclusion that he was either a genius or an asshole.
The current slate of tenants was a motley crew of almost stereotypical college slackers. Most were gathered under that roof by Wheeler, a freeloading dime-store philosopher who had the aura of a permanent student. He had lived in the house prior to that semester, and had convinced some of his friends to share the rent for that cycle on the premise that it would be incredibly cheap. There was Davis, whom I had met a year prior in a beginners Chinese course; I had noticed he was drawing elaborate skeletons and he had noticed that I was drawing guntars (a guitar that doubles as a rifle). He was an artist type with no real direction in his life, so we got along swimmingly. There was Colby, the youngest of the bunch. He always seemed to be a ball of energy, never really pausing between obscene jokes and songs with the lyrics changed so that they would be mostly about penises, and he had the uncanny ability to very quickly diffuse tense situations with fart jokes. And finally, there was Troy, who never really seemed to be around that much, always shuffling between the house and his hometown due to family health issues. When he was around, he was mostly quiet, but he was a good conversationalist and he had a hell of a birthday party later in the year.
Then there was me, of course. I didn’t actually live in the house; I stayed in a single-occupancy dorm on the far side of campus because it was affordable, but boring. I didn’t quite enjoy visiting the house at first, but as the weather got cooler, the lure of long afternoons on the patio in the autumn breeze saw me at blue house for longer periods of time. It helped that along with Wheeler, we were the only two people in that immediate circle who were old enough to legally acquire alcoholic beverages, and so I would constantly be called over to purchase some college ambrosia. I didn’t mind; I loved drinking as much as the next person, so I would take any excuse to grab some boozeahol and spend the evenings talking about anything under the sun. Most of the time, our conversations would inevitably turn to the fact that blue house was haunted as fuck.
The architecture was certainly malignant enough to lend credence to this theory, and there were other things that suggested paranormal activity. The tenants came up with little pet names for the ghosts they swore inhabited the house, like the previously mentioned Sarah, or Rapey the rape ghost. Little subtle things, of course; bumps in the night, doors inexplicably opening or closing, those kinds of things.
The things that could just as easily be chalked up to drunken stumbling as it could be spooks.
It wasn’t just that, though. There was an air of malevolence about the entire building. Negative thoughts wandered the halls, barely noticeable, but there. If you went up to the attic, you could almost feel it, just slightly out of reach. Not that you ever really wanted to go up to the attic.
The ceiling had been lowered sometime in the fifties or so, and the original ceiling had been left in place, presumably out of laziness. This led to about two and a half feet or so worth of crawlspace between the floor of the attic and the top of the rooms below. One of these spaces was accessible through the permanently deployed collapsible stairs leading to the attic. It appeared to have been used as an impromptu storage space for anything under the sun; when we went to take a look around, we found some old blankets, a dirt-covered mug, and a child’s car seat. The attic itself wasn’t much better. In the main antechamber was a sizable collection of plug-in fans and mirrors, along with some paintings that appeared to be both by local artists and people with brain damage. One reminded me of sea foam, if the sea was dark purple and made of broken dreams.
There was a television antenna that didn’t really seem to be connected to anything, and the hastily laid down planks provided an uneasy footing that seemed liable to collapse at any moment. If you look underneath the planks of the attic floor today, you’ll find a chest suspended by a small rope.
I wouldn’t open it.
We wouldn’t refer to the house as “haunted,” that phrase was too tame. It was doublehaunted, by something so malevolent that it could only possibly be the superdevil, which (depending on the mood at the time) may or may not have been Mickey, the child pornographer/landlord. We talked at length about how the house had its horrible black tentacles in each of us; that in fifteen years, when we’re all married and holding down jobs, we would wake up one day and find ourselves in the house, forever. It was good for a laugh. But sometimes, something would happen that would make that sentiment ring just a little bit true.
Davis was starting treatment for general depression, something that I was still technically on medication for. I tried to help him as best as I could, having fully experienced the sting of relying on medication to keep your darker bits under control. His family lent him a cat as well, hoping it would at least keep him company.
It went missing the day it got there.
He’d told me that he never liked that cat anyway. It was a bit of a sociopath, more so than cats usually are anyway, and it was afraid of everything (which begs the question of why his family thought it was a good idea to bring it down to this evil house). We spent the rest of that afternoon stomping around the immediate area looking for it, running into a group of very concerned looking girls looking for their lost dog. When asked if they had seen a cat while looking for their dog, they pointed us down the road and begged us to tell them if we found their dog along the way. I got the feeling that they had never seen the cat at all.
We gave up at around sunset, Davis half-relieved that he’d never have to see that cat again. He tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for his sister, who the cat was technically in the care of, but we all knew what had actually happened.
The house ate him.
We drank some, and then I left to go back to my place, probably to play PC games and not actually do any Chinese homework. The week went by uneventfully, and then Davis called me to tell me he had found his cat. I asked him if he was going to give it a proper burial or just let the city municipal trash services take care of it, and he told me it was alive.
That was a surprise. He told me that he was going through the dresser in his room looking for clean underwear, when he pulled open the bottom drawer. In it, along with a week’s worth of shit, was his cat, looking like the happiest cat in the world. Somehow, when none of us were looking, the cat had somehow gotten into the bottom drawer of a dresser and pulled it shut. His sister came by soon after that and took the cat with her, much to Davis’ relief. To this day, I’m not entirely sure whether or not she actually left with her cat, or just a simulacrum of a cat created by the forces at work within the house.
I figured the house out later, of course. That particular cycle of tenants only lasted one semester, after which everyone dispersed to find their own, better places to live. Later, as we drank on the porch of Davis’ new apartment, he told me how the new tenants had taken all the antique furniture out of the house and placed it on the lawn, with a sign that said something to the effect of “If you can haul it, it’s yours.” Of course, the caretaker flipped his shit, and Davis told me the girls who lived there now couldn’t figure out why anyone would get angry at them for giving away priceless antique furniture that they didn’t own. We chuckled. “The house already has them,” I said.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes your worst memories are the ones you cherish the most? The ones that stick out in your mind as being the best parts of your life, the ones that you suddenly realize you have very little chance of reliving; running around the playground with your best friends, collecting weird rocks and bugs; driving alone out into the night to a place where there are no artificial lights to wash away the sea of stars; the way she bumps into you on the way back home from dinner, the two of you laughing at a joke you’ve already forgotten; the sting of the ice on your exposed left hand as you try to build a giant nose in the snow with only one pair of gloves between you.
Those kinds of memories.
See, I have a theory: everything we do, everything we create, is composed of memories. Some of them good, some of them bad, most of them ambivalent. The crayon drawings that hang on the fridge, created out of the pulped memories of art class and throwing spitballs at girls when the teacher isn’t looking. The shoes on your feet the stitched together memories of a teenager in Indonesia, running home tired but content that his ten dollar wages for the eight hours worked that day will feed his ailing family.
I think these memories are infused in the things we own and the buildings we live in, the collective memories of anyone and everyone who ever came into contact with them. And I think that sometimes, just sometimes, under the right circumstances, these memories will make themselves extant. Not overtly, of course, but subtly. A building like a house, then, one from the turn of the century and filled with countless residents over the decades, painted baby blue and filled with artifacts from years of silent service to its occupants, would be like a grease trap for memories. A place where other peoples’ worst memories go to die.
And a place where your own worst memories are dredged up at the most inopportune moments.
That’s the handle, right there. I don’t think blue house was haunted, not in the traditional sense, not by ghosts or spirits or banshees or poltergeists. It was haunted by us, by the ghosts of our collective regrets, its hallways built from negative emotions built up over a century of loss and horror. The house’s machinations were not of the natural world, but then again, neither were ours, and they would continue to collide with each other until the inevitable flashpoint, that Amityville moment when you realize that you’re not alone in the building.
But that’s a story for later.
It’s autumn again, and the weather has grown pleasant while they days grow short. Sometimes I find myself walking outside, breathing in the cool air and thinking back to days spent on the patio of a house painted baby blue, talking about inconsequential things and dismissing our own potential futures for the carefree whims of the present. If you pass by the house today, you might find some decorations hung up, some new furniture on the patio, and the liquor piano long gone, the City of Denton having concluded that it was a fire hazard (to which we responded that the entire damn building was a fire hazard). It looks almost friendly, inviting. Maybe it is now.
Or maybe we’re all still there, trapped behind those walls forever, every action taken illusory. Maybe we all died in that house a long time ago, another set of victims for the superdevil, trapped wandering the halls of limbo for eternity with no Virgil to guide us.
Of course, that’s not true. But sometimes we like to pretend it is, to keep ourselves laughing, to remind ourselves that it always gets better. Hopefully.