Yes, okay, I bought it off Facebook Marketplace for an absolute steal. No, I hadn’t actually seen it in real life. In my defense, the seller was desperate and frankly, I was too. I mean, have you seen the real estate market? I thought I’d feel worse about draining my savings, but my subconscious had spoken: You’re a homeowner. Retire in your 30s. Get out of the rat race.
There was no going back. I packed my meager life into a U-Haul and convinced my brother, Alex, to help move over Labor Day. At the last minute I organized a housewarming renovation party with all my friends. I didn’t know how decrepit my mansion would be, but I operated on the assumption that before the weekend was done, I’d need power, water, heat, and a working kitchen.
The place was huge. Like, ginormous. Two stories plus an attic with two long wings arranged in a horseshoe around a central courtyard. The ground floor had been ambitiously constructed from black stone but by the second story the builder had either lost the will to live or run out of material. Either way, the boarded up second floor was finished in plain clapboard siding. At one time it must have been a two-family home judging by the rickety iron staircase that clung like a leg-brace to a door on the second floor.
I let the U-Haul idle and nudged Alex awake. “Ooof. That could fit a hundred cats at least”, he said. Alex thought I’d soon be knitting cat hair sweaters and selling them at the farmers market, but he was dead wrong. There wasn’t a hipster market or even a town for fifty miles. That was the appeal.
The front door wouldn’t budge, so we hacked our way along an overgrown path through the brambles and past a muddy shallow that might once have been a pond. A school of fish squirmed uselessly in the slime. Poor things. They wouldn’t last long. In the courtyard between the two wings was a banquet table cobbled together from offcuts of the same dark stone. The builder must have been a stone mason. I ran my hand along the rough edge. Engraved in the surface were snatches of names, dates and words. Beloved. Departed. Peacefully. Alex looked over my shoulder. “They’re offcuts from gravestones,” he pointed out. “The words are full of typos.”
“Creepy and kind of careless,” I replied. “‘Measure twice, cut once,’ as they say.”
An awning over the only functioning door was booby-trapped with years-worth of bird shit. “This has to come down right now,” said Alex, trying to figure out the best way to remove the bracket. He didn’t mind eating off gravestones, but there was no way in hell he’d let bird shit fall in his food. “How many workers are we expecting?” he asked, as if being first to arrive promoted him to foreman. “Thirty?”
I smiled apologetically. Not including us, I explained, there would be three: Bridget, Leon and Kumar.
“But she hates me,” he whined, peeling moss from the table.
“Bridget doesn’t hate you”, I reassured him. That much was true. She just thought he was useless.
“Well, just don’t put her bedroom anywhere near mine.” He returned his attention to the awning, more determined than ever to prove his worth. “Give her a whole wing to herself.”
I slipped past him and into the cool dark to explore my starter mansion. The previous owner had been stingy when it came to specifics, and you don’t get to ask a lot of questions when you buy a house for fifteen grand. There was a kitchen with two stoves and four sinks, an enormous dining room and a fireplace so tall you could stand in it. There were two adjoining sitting rooms and even a ballroom. To put it in perspective, the maid’s quarters next to the kitchen was larger than my old apartment. I had won the jackpot. My subconscious: this is too good to be true.
Only some of the lights worked and the whole place smelled of mold, but the bones were good. I climbed the serpentine staircase to the second floor where needles of sunshine pierced the edges of the boarded-up windows. The previous owner claimed she had left new bedding. That turned out to be true, but the sheets on the unmade beds appeared to have been crushed under a heavy weight like flowers pressed in a book. Leave now, whispered my subconscious.
Downstairs, Alex struggled with the awning. He had successfully skinned his knuckles and rounded the rusty bolts and was pointlessly hammering at the bracket, sending drifts of bird shit sifting into the courtyard. Bridget was right: he really was useless.
The knock at the front door had Bridget’s trademark swagger. I hollered for her to follow the path around back, reminding myself not to act too desperate. She was a friend of a friend but, more importantly, Bridget owned Tomboy, a hardware store catering to people like herself: butch lesbians who like to make men feel inferior. She didn’t go anywhere without her truck full of tools in case some dude needed cutting down to size.
Bridget emerged from the overgrown path, already mumbling her appraisal to Leon, my ex-boyfriend from many moons ago, who’d arrived at the same time. “How many bodies you got to throw at this?” she asked, by way of a greeting. “Thousand manhours just to make a dent.”
“This is us,” I replied, even more defensively. “Plus Kumar. He’s good with his hands.”
She rolled her eyes and returned to the truck to unload her tools.
“Jesus Christ, you lucked out,” gushed Leon. He scanned me for grime before embracing me in a hug. “I can say this because I love you but, I can’t believe your complete lack of due diligence actually paid off this time. I mean, good for you.”
He was one to talk. Before he fell into tech-world he had been a surf bum out at Far Rockaway. Impulsive was totally his M.O., but it just happened to suit his newfound career. He never took anything seriously, including our relationship. Did I mention he was my ex-boyfriend? I changed the subject, asking him if the fish in the muddy pond were dead. He looked at me quizzically. “You mean the eels? Living their best life. They’re shredding something alive.”
I could have sworn they were carp, but I let it slide. It had only been two minutes but already Leon had a better plan for my new life: demolish the mansion and build cabins by the creek – rake in the big bucks. His plans were always big, always the opposite of what you wanted to do, and always a little bit correct – that was if you shared his newfound ethos of “buy logic; sell emotion.” I had given enough to the gods of late-stage capitalism. This was my time to preserve something.
And there was Kumar. He had arrived silently, almost stealthily, and was patiently standing near the death-table balancing a broken air fryer on his head. He declared it to be a housewarming present, a curbside trash find that just needed a door. I tried to seem grateful even though my mansion already had two stoves, but my face must have given me away. “Seriously, girl?” he said. “You’ll renovate an entire mansion but you won’t put a door on an air fryer?”
I delegated our motley crew of five to their rooms, as far away from each other’s petty aggravations as possible: Leon in a fancy, raised turret bedroom at the far end of the east wing, Bridget in the middle, Kumar on the corner, and Alex and I, sole occupants of the west wing. Even with a house this big, there was no way to please everyone. Leon couldn’t understand why Kumar had been given an ensuite bathroom. They all had bathrooms, I assured him, but when he insisted on showing me, I had to eat my words. What I was sure was a bathroom turned out to be a closet. You put towels in this bathroom, said my subconscious. You know you did.
Leon didn’t want to give up his tower bedroom. He just wanted to be right. After leaving him to his disco nap (he worked smart not hard, as he always liked to remind us), I returned to the courtyard to find Alex and Bridget standing over the awning, which was now lying on the ground. “Well done,” I said, “You got it off.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it off,” said Alex, before inflating with unearned pride. “Well done me.”
With the awning gone, sunlight flooded the kitchen, glinting off the enormous pots hanging over the island bench. Everyone gathered and I gave them the grand tour, finishing with the big reveal of the ballroom, an entire wall lined with mirrors. Leon extended a hand, inviting me to dance. When I took it, a cramp torqued my foot. Instead of a waltz we limped back to the staircase where Leon massaged my foot with his strong surfer hands. He instantly dropped my foot when he saw what was under the stairs. A safe, the size of a refrigerator. “Ow,” I said, rubbing my stricken foot. Leon ignored me, too busy rattling the door. It was locked up tight.
“No one locks a safe unless there’s something valuable inside,” he said, eyes aglow with visions of treasure.
“I bet I know the combination,” commented Bridget, who’d come over to see what the fuss was about. She dumped a new load of tools and flexed her biceps. “Tomboy-muscle plus twenty-pound sledgehammer equals open sesame.”
I shooed them both away.
I hadn’t brought a whole lot of food but what I did have was enough booze to celebrate all weekend. I hobbled to the kitchen, holding a bottle aloft. “My best champagne to whoever goes in the cellar and starts the furnace.” Call me devious but I wasn’t about to be first to venture into the cellar. I’ve seen enough horror movies.
“Does a girl have to do everything?” said Bridget, a brazen challenge to the useless men in the room. (Which in her opinion was all of them.)
“Fine. I’ll go,” said Kumar, heaving a weary sigh. “You idiots would just electrocute yourself anyway.”
He opened the cellar door and vanished into the void. A dank cloud drifted up the stairs. “Oof! That’s nasty,” said Leon, recoiling. “No wonder it was so cheap. Place is cancerous with mold. Here’s what you do. Gut the house of the good stuff … doorknobs, chandeliers, whatever … sell the lot to Restoration Hardware. Bulldoze the rest and build back better.”
“I’m not demolishing my first mansion,” I insisted, the arch of my foot beginning to twinge. “Second mansion, maybe. Besides, the old girl wants to be restored to her former –”
Bang!
Half the lights blew. Sparks gushed from the outlets. In the hall, a precious chandelier crashed to the floor and scattered into a thousand pieces.
“Kumar!” I called, into the dark. “Kumar! Talk to me!”
“Fuse box is a piece of crap,” he said, appearing in the doorway looking spooked, tendrils of spider’s webs in his hair. “Furnace is busted but you’ll have to go down there eventually. That’s where the laundry is. There’s, like, six ancient washing machines.”
The chandelier lay broken on the boards, baubles everywhere. The glass had an oily sheen, lead perhaps, some ancient way of making things. I put a bauble to my eye and watched Kumar collect the pieces. He had a halo around him. Not a rainbow exactly. Eerie, like the northern lights.
“Check this out,” I said, giving the bauble to Leon. “The glass gives everyone a halo.”
He looked through the bauble and turned his gaze to the others. Even Bridget had a double halo.
“They don’t make glass like this anymore. Worth a mint.” Leon trained the bauble-monocle on me. Then he stared. They all did.
“What?” I asked. “What?”
Leon and the others lowered their baubles.
“That’s weird,” said Alex. “You don’t have a halo.”
Even when I traded places with him and stood against the window my halo didn’t materialize. I pocketed the bauble to use as a key ring.
“Aaaaaa!” shouted Alex, and we all jumped. “Choo.” His legendarily sneezing fits started as a shout and ended as a groan and gave the impression of a seizure.
“I bet it’s the ink in that ugly wallpaper,” declared Kumar. “That’s what’s causing the halos.” His theory was that the pigment in the ancient green wallpaper was off-gassing in the humid air. I wasn’t convinced, and neither was my subconscious.
“Let the renovations begin,” announced Bridget, unclipping a hard plastic case to reveal a gas-powered circular saw. “Ain’t nothing built that can’t be unbuilt.”
The circular saw was a marvel of modern weaponry. A smooth disk of surgical steel with shark teeth. It gave me chills. “No. Absolutely not. That is never going to be used in this house,” I told her. She sulkily set it down on the box, but I noticed she didn’t pack it away.
“Well, I’m getting rid of that wallpaper,” said Alex, with determination. I guess he felt he had to achieve something before his contribution was upstaged by Bridget. He set about with a bucket of stripper and a palate knife, scraping away the green wallpaper.
The shadows were getting long and the mansion was too big to go unheated. So, I went to find Kumar to enquire about the furnace.
I found him at the fireplace. “No, don’t!” He had piled a forest’s worth of logs in the grate and was one flick away from setting it ablaze. I explained that the chimney was blocked—the previous owner had mentioned it— and went to scavenge a broom and a ladder. I returned, grimly determined to climb into the sooty chamber.
It smelled like bacon and grilled shrimp, and there were scuff marks in the sooty walls where someone else had tried to clean it out. Is that really what bacon smells like, though? inquired my subconscious. Then I saw a hand-print in the soot – a woman’s hand. Smaller than my own and so perfectly printed I could see the scratch from the wedding ring. I guess some lady had once tried to do this same job, and just like me, had forgotten to take her rings off. I blindly jabbed a broom into the chimney as far as I could, and something budged. Then I heard a scratching up there in the darkness. Nails against chalk.
Thump.
I swallowed a scream as a tangle of branches grazed my face and skittered against the stone. My hands flew to my cheek. When I climbed down, Kumar was holding a dislodged bird’s nest. The owl was little more than bones and feathers, but her talons clung on for dear life. Trapped beneath the thicket of bones were four eggs – a fifth having been dislodged in the fall and broken on the floor. It wasn’t the sight of the needle-boned chick inside the egg that was so disturbing. It was the fact the shell measured a quarter inch thick.
“Some kind of deformity do you think,” asked Kumar. “Too much calcium in the water?”
Upstairs, in the east wing, Bridget’s saw sprang to life. “Shit,” I said, thrusting the egg into Kumar’s hands. Bridget was a sucker for an audience and waited until I came running before making her first incision. She flashed me a grin and forced the blade against the boarded-up window, carving out a deep gouge and raising a plume of sawdust. But the saw screeched hideously and refused to cut. She tried a different spot, gouging another slash in the wood. Beaten and bewildered, she set the saw on the ground. I winced as it nicked the boards.
“Just wanted to let in a bit of daylight, but sum’bitch ain’t wood,” she said, blowing sawdust from the gouge to reveal a gleaming silver stripe beneath. “Looks like they boarded up the windows then covered it all up with steel plate.” My first thought was that maybe the bedrooms had been a warehouse, but my subconscious knew: This wasn’t for keeping people out.
I’d noticed initially that each wing had eight doors on either side but on my way back I counted only seven. Maybe Kumar was right: the wallpaper was sending us all a little crazy. The sooner it was gone the better. In the entrance, Alex had lost his initial burst of energy. He was in a trance watching the wallpaper blister under a fresh coat of paint stripper to reveal the layer beneath. The putty knife dripped a toxic mucus onto his shoe.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked, almost dreamily. “Whole wall covered in kid’s drawings.”
It wasn’t the scale of the kid’s drawings or the fact that they depicted a stick figure family all crammed into a fifth-floor walk-up. The disconcerting thing was, I recognized the penmanship as mine. The wallpaper appeared to be the exact pictures I had obsessively drawn as a child, plastering our apartment with so much tape that we never got our deposit back.
“Nope, just wallpaper.” I snatched up a putty knife and gouged through the paper before the illusion could fully take hold. “It all has to go.”
It was enough to jolt Alex back into action.
“Decorating, yep,” he said, scraping furiously and talking nonsense to keep from being spooked. “This is my thing. I mean, anyone can hack away with a saw. Have you seen Bridget’s apartment? She has zero finesse. It looks like The Container Store. And given that I’m the only one who will actually visit you here in the boonies, I get to decorate a room all for myself. Dibs on door number eight, right down the end.”
“Seven,” I corrected him. “Each wing has seven doors.”
Something slithered against my foot. I leapt back. An eel. A slimy little trespasser from the mud pond must have found a crack under the front door. “I hope that’s not a thing,” I said, hand to my thumping heart. “Eel superhighway.”
Alex yelped with pain. With the shock of the eel, he had upset the container of paint stripper all down his arm. “Quick!” I yelled. “The kitchen! Wash it off. That way.” I pointed toward the kitchen door, but my finger was pointing at a blank wall. “Oh, shit, the other door.”
The hair on Alex’s arm stank of burning chemicals. We dashed through the maid’s quarters into the kitchen and turned the faucet on full. Nothing, not a drop. Kumar must have been in the basement fixing the boiler.
“It’s fine,” said Alex, through gritted teeth. “Not a big deal.”
I looked around, my gaze landing on the box of booze - it would have to do. I sabered the cork with the palate knife and aimed a panicky stream of champagne at Alex’s arm. Shocked out of his stoicism, he jumped back, clutching his arm. “Fucking ouch! That’s way worse!” The ruckus brought the others running. Their faces contorted with disgust when they saw Alex’s arm, all puckered and red from the paint stripper.
“Grab my suitcase,” I ordered Leon. “It’s by the stairs,”. My carry-on always had a first aid kit. Well, almost always. Rummaging through it, I was weirded out to see the contents appeared to have been bludgeoned by a baggage handler or even run over on the tarmac, although the case had never been out of my sight. My favorite high heels had been cracked across the arch, bent back until they broke. I felt a little shiver.
“Don’t look at me,” said Bridget smugly. “Timberlands for life.”
Don’t look at her, agreed my subconscious.
“I’ve got a first aid kit in the car,” said Kumar, dashing away and rattling the front door handle before returning with a worried expression. “Guys. We’re locked in.”
“Stop trying to freak me out,” said Alex, gingerly touching his arm. “I’ll be fine. It’s not that bad. I just need some fresh air.” He grabbed a bottle of wine with his good hand and marched up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I asked, still holding my mutilated shoe.
“Second floor door,” he called down. “It’s not locked. I had a cigarette on the landing when we arrived. Seriously, I’m fine.”
We all followed in a great stampede. Fresh air. Good idea. We could regroup and relax and map out the weekend. All work and no play etc, etc. I couldn’t risk being left with an unlivable mansion. Alex strode ahead, a cigarette already dangling from his lips.
“The fire escape might look a little rickety but it’s pretty solid,” he called over his shoulder before flinging open the door. It wasn’t locked—that was true. But, beyond it, the thick metal barricade certainly was. “Wait, this wasn’t here before.” He gave it a shove. “Wind must have blown it shut.”
“Front or back. Pick a door you want to keep,” said Bridget, cracking her neck and storming off towards the landing with gleeful purpose. “Because I’m going to slice the shit out of the other. Hot knife through butter.”
I chased after her, not wanting to lose anything ornate to that crude saw. If push came to shove, surely we could ever-so-carefully remove a window. She barreled down the staircase and didn’t have time to stop, mostly because she didn’t expect she needed to. Smack! Bridget slammed into a wall. It was a wall that wasn’t there when we walked up two minutes ago. She fell to the ground clutching her bleeding nose.
“What the hell?” I carefully approached. It looked solid and weathered, as if the house had always been built with a wall just one foot from the grand staircase. I squeezed past the balustrade. The entrance hall was gone, and with it, Bridget’s ghastly circular saw.
“You bought a haunted house, you idiot!” The unlit cigarette bobbed furiously on Alex’s lip.
“I didn’t know,” I protested. “I just thought it was cheap.” My subconscious: you knew all along.
“Aren’t there, like, disclosure laws or something?” Kumar was always Mister Practical when you didn’t need it.
Leon was already shaking his head with absolute authority. “Yeah, nah, in the state of New York, you only need to disclose death on property within the past three years,” he said, as if the whole sale suddenly made sense. “Still, good deal if you ask me.”
“Really?” said Alex, trying to mask his anger with sarcasm. “In today’s hot market what’s a good price for demonic possession, do you think?”
Leon’s ego wouldn’t back down. “On Zillow I’d say anything in the cheapest five percent has a good chance of a meaningful encumbrance. Liens, title issues … you know, hauntings I guess. It’s pretty common knowledge.”
“We’re not doing anything bad, right?” I said, flipping into PR damage control mode. “We’re here to help.” I tried to think through our options. “Just here to help!” I shouted to the house, so the spirits could hear us. “I mean haunted doesn’t necessarily mean horror, right? It means sentient and maybe a little scared. We come barging in with buzz-saws and paint stripper. We freaked the house out, right? It’s been a long time since she’s had a makeover. We just need to prove we mean well.”
“But how?” They were a chorus of non-believers.
“We renovate,” I said. “Decorate a little. You know … to gain her trust.”
“Wait, you mean like when I decorate,” asked Alex, all suspicious. “Or like when Bridget does?”
“Like when I decorate,” I said, eager to keep the peace. “My mansion, my rules.”
“Thing is,” said Bridget, holding a sock to her bleeding nose and rolling the insult around in her mouth before letting it go. “Maybe you’re the problem. You’re too … I don’t know, girly.”
“Bridget, I respect your opinion,” I began, but my subconscious said, screw it. “Actually, I don’t respect your opinion. You have zero style. This is my mansion and I don’t know if it’s haunted or off-gassing or exhaustion or what. But I’m not renovating this house like a Red Hook lesbian. And that’s my sock.”
“And I’m not going die in a haunted house because of your obsession with rose gold,” she countered, tossing the bloody sock at me. It hurt, that one. I hadn’t realized I had a problem with rose gold, but when I thought about all the lamps and tables and cutlery and all the tchotchkes out in the truck, I had to admit there was a lot.
“Nothing wrong with rose gold,” said Kumar sulkily.
“You would say that,” sneered Bridget, stepping into one of the drawing rooms. “We do it this way. You decorate your room. I decorate my room. We’ll see whose style the house prefers.”
Bridget collected a roller and a bucket of white paint while Kumar and Alex scrambled to snatch up the remaining painting materials. “Always hated rose gold,” said Leon, joining Bridget. Before he closed the door he added cheekily, “No peeking.”
Working hard helped me suppress the idea that the house was haunted. We were just busy little beavers, renovating like I planned. If the house had a beef with anyone, it was surely buzz-saw Bridget or demolition Leon. An hour later, our room looked great. I had gone with a sea-mist green over jade-green with a cream wainscotting. Very pleasing. Very calming. Even the undead couldn’t argue with it, surely. I knew clients like this. All they needed was proof of concept and they’d leave you alone. You’re not alone, said my subconscious.
In our flurry of activity, it took us a while to notice that the door joining the two rooms had been replaced by a smooth wall. On the other side of the wall, Bridget wasn’t taking it well. We could hear complaining and a mighty clanging of tools. Seconds later, a sledgehammer burst through the new wall, showering me with dust and splintered wood. Through the ragged hole poked Bridget’s smiling face. She wore a beard of patchy white paint smeared with blood and didn’t look particularly sane. “Telling you, this house is a dude,” she said with a cackle. “Always getting in the way. Building shit you don’t need.” She surveyed my tasteful paint job, shrugged her shoulders, and offered a one-word appraisal: “Predictable.”
We stepped through the demolished entrance into Bridget and Leon’s masterpiece. The walls were slathered with white paint. Bridget had used her nosebleed as ink, pressing red handprints against every surface. She had also pressed her face against the wall, dozens of little angry Bridget masks. I didn’t know what scared me more, the haunted mansion or my increasingly psychotic friend-of-a-friend. I tried not to look at her. Behind me, the entire wall had been neatly erased as if it never existed, and nowboth spaces were joined. Somehow, one of us had pleased the house. We just didn’t know who.
“See, you’re too girly,” said Bridget, smiling a blood-stained toothy grin. Part of the entrance hall had also re-appeared, and there was Bridget’s circular saw. She snatched it up, cradling it like a lost puppy.
“We’re happy, you’re happy, house is happy, problem solved,” said Leon, dashing up the stairs to his room. “Gotta make some calls.”
There were still no windows or doors to the outside world, but an emboldened Bridget was determined to carve out her own exit. She fired up the saw.
“You’re just making her angry,” I yelled over the cacophony.
“Telling you, it ain’t a her,” she shouted back. “This house has very masculine energy.”
Bridget revved the saw and turned her back. It was clear she would only listen to reason from Leon, so I mounted the stairs to chase after him. As I dashed down the hall and rounded the corner, my legs expected a sprint to Leon’s turret at the end of the east wing. I skidded to an ungainly stop. It was no longer one hundred feet long with eight bedrooms on either side. Kumar’s corner bedroom was both first and last. The east wing had been clipped, ending after barely eight feet at the same rickety fire escape behind the steel door. I put my eye to a rusted rivet hole just large enough to see through. Leon’s bedroom hadn’t moved but all the rooms in between had disappeared, sealing him into his turret. No way in or out.
I felt sick. But then, a flicker of hope. Maybe the fact that Leon had dashed to his room just as the house was transforming had prevented it from disappearing. Could it be that the house didn’t want us dead after all? “Leon! Stay there!” He’s not going anywhere, said my subconscious. “We’ll get you out.”
“No worries,” came a faint reply. “I think I’ve found something.”
I hurried downstairs to tell the others.
In my absence, Bridget had sliced through the wainscotting and was ripping into the joists with ferocious speed. Her white-painted face was a mask of repulsion as the plume from the saw spread a vile-smelling dust. She let the saw wind down and wiped the grime from her face. “This back on to a pantry or something?” she asked. “Enough Spam here to last a lifetime.” Not Spam, said my subconscious, as a section of plaster fell away. Inside, I glimpsed an unspeakable fleshy mess inside the wall cavity. Each corpse merged into the other in a solid block of broken bones as if crushed in a hydraulic press.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” cried Kumar, jumping back and frantically scrubbing his face on his shirt.
“Please, please,” pleaded Alex. “Say it’s a dream.”
“You don’t scare me, you asshole,” Bridget cussed at the house. She revved the saw and adjusted her grip. “I’m going to cut through your load-bearing walls.”
“Put that freaking saw down!” I shouted at her. “The house doesn’t want to kill us but if you keep hacking away, she’s sure as hell going to change her mind. Follow me and I’ll show you why.”
At the second-floor door we each took turns pressing our eyes to the rivet hole. When Bridget saw the turret, she didn’t know what to say. The house was perfectly capable of transforming itself. If Bridget sliced through a supporting wall, it would simply erect another. “The hell’s my room?” asked Bridget, measuring the empty space to Leon’s turret.
“I don’t know how, but I think the house can vanish rooms at will. And put up new walls. The rooms we’ve been in have stayed. The ones we haven’t used have vanished.”
“But where’s my room,” she repeated.
“Are you not listening?” I was getting frustrated all over again. “You never even went to your bedroom. All your stuff is still downstairs. You don’t have a presence in a bedroom so the house got rid of it.” She shrugged, not entirely convinced. I forged on. “If we’re going to save Leon, we need to create a presence in every room.”
“I’ll start by creating a big presence in your bathroom,” Alex told Kumar, already halfway there. “Come on, dude. Have some compassion. I’m bursting and I’m right down the other end.”
I had to check if my theory held true. Kumar and Bridget followed me to the west wing, only to find that it too had vanished. My room on the corner was the only one left. I scanned every inch to see if it had been altered but it was exactly as I had left it. My bathroom was still in the same place but there was a small voice coming from the air vent: Alex’s voice.
“Help! Anyone! Help!” His voice was distorted into a yodel by the vent.
“Where are you,” I called, while Kumar went to check his room. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the air fryer,” came his distant voice. “It won’t turn off.”
“Why did you turn it on?”
“To dry my hands,” he said, a little defensively. “But then the wall with the outlet vanished and I don’t have a door and I can’t get out. It’s turning the whole bathroom into an oven.”
Kumar returned, shaking his head with defeat. My theory was looking less likely by the minute. The house didn’t care if we had a presence in each room. It was popping rooms randomly like bubbles. But why had my room been spared? Why was everything exactly like it was when I first arrived? Then it dawned on me. I owned this place.
“We’re going to get you out, but I need you to try something,” I called to Alex, removing the vent and pulling out the useless exhaust fan. “I’m going to sell you the house.”
The silence was long enough that I thought the house had transformed again, cutting off the ventilation shaft forever. Then he spoke: “But I don’t want it.”
“Don’t matter if you want it,” shouted Bridget. “She’s trying to save your dumb ass.”
“I’m selling you the house,” I said, trying to get the negotiations back on track.
“I’m kind of broke,” he replied.
“It doesn’t have to be for money,” I reassured him. “It just needs to be something you own … a watch … anything personal. What have you got in there?”
“A shoe?”
“Needs to fit through the damn vent,” added Bridget.
“Come on, sis, it’s getting really hot,” he pleaded. “I’m feeling faint.”
Kumar has dental floss in there, right?” I was looking at Kumar who was already nodding. “Tie something to the floss and send it through the vent. You got me?”
“Okay.”
The ventilation tube between the two bathrooms sloped up to hump where a shaft went to the roof. I could hear Alex throwing something small into the shaft. Every time he did, it rolled back towards him. He tried again, and again, and again. Then a grunt and the rattling grew louder. It was rolling my way. I reached in and pulled out a golden ring.
“What is it?” asked Bridget.
“I need to say what it is,” I called into the vent. Alex was never one for jewelry. He didn’t have any piercings that I knew of. “For the contract.”
“Jewelry, for the body,” came Alex’s sheepish reply. “Lower body.”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed for both of us.
I wrote body jewelry on the hastily drafted contract and tied it to the dental floss and Alex reeled it in. By the time we reached Kumar’s room Alex was already flinging himself through the newly appeared door. He was dripping with sweat and gasping for breath. He demanded his jewelry but I couldn’t risk giving it to him. It was mine now. The house was his. To confirm my suspicion, I retrieved the glass bauble from my pocket and put it to my eye. Alex no longer had a halo.
“The house protects the owner,” parroted Bridget, apparently fully on board now.
A banging came from Leon’s turret. “I think the house likes me,” came his eager far away voice. “That closet has turned into an ensuite and something even better.”
How could Leon be so calm about this? But then I remembered: this was the same guy who surfed with sharks, the same ex-boyfriend who once not only talked his way out of a mugging but managed to get his attacker a job at the local Starbucks. Danger schmanger. Also, he hadn’t seen whatever was jammed into the wall downstairs.
“There are numbers scratched on the bathroom wall,” said Leon. “I bet it’s the code to the safe. I’ll tell you what they are on one condition. I get half of whatever’s in there. Half of everything, right?”
I didn’t want to look in that safe, I just wanted to get out. But it also seemed possible that it was some puzzle or test of our resourcefulness. Like an escape room. Maybe cracking the code would set us free. “Half of everything,” I agreed.
“Thirty-seven, sixty-five, thirty-four,” he called back. “Don’t stiff me on this.”
I dashed to the safe, mumbling the combination over and over. With trembling hands, I rotated the dial – thirty-seven, sixty-five, thirty-four – and tugged at the heavy handle. It creaked open. I struggled, at first, to comprehend what I was looking at. Was it bundles of money or, oh god … clothing? The man inside was a jumble of bones squatting at the bottom of the safe. He looked ancient and dry like beef jerky.
“I can’t look, I can’t look,” said Kumar, facing the wall. “Make him go away.”
The good news was, the entrance hall had returned. The ground floor was back to its original splendor. But the man in the safe could have it all to himself. The musty smell combined with the rotten old bodies was sickening. Suffocating. We had to save our own skin. I was positively gleeful when Bridget started that circular saw. I would have wielded it myself if I knew how. We approached the front door, ready to make a run for it as soon as she sliced it. Wait. What the hell? Something was oozing from the letter box. It pressed from the edges like rancid cream from an Oreo. I reached out gingerly to touch it, rubbed the substance between my fingers. Mud.
I turned the door handle. The previously immovable door opened with a great sucking sound. Bridget’s hand fell from the saw and it spluttered and died. At first, I thought someone must have dumped a ton of mud on our stoop as a practical joke, but this wasn’t mud at all. It was earth. The boulders at the bottom were close enough together to be almost bedrock. Above, the stones were smaller and more scattered among the rich soil. The upper level was riddled with burrows and bugs, all scurrying away from the fresh wound. A tangle of worms fell from the soil and squirmed feverishly on the floor. Above that, blades of grass. And moonlight.
“This is bad,” said Kumar, still facing the wall. “This is real bad.”
“Kumar!” I snapped. “We don’t have time to keep freaking out about the dude in the safe. Snap out of it!”
Kumar traced a finger along the scraped wallpaper. Beneath it was newspaper. “Which dude?” he said distractedly. He slowly read out a headline from the paper. “Mudslide buries mansion.” Then he turned around and saw the wall of earth.
“Dig! Dig!” I yelled to Kumar, Bridget and Alex. “Grab something and dig!”
We hacked frantically at the soil with anything that worked. But the doorway was high and standing on chairs wouldn’t reach. I grabbed the ladder from the fireplace and by the time I returned, the grass and the moonlight were gone. We were sinking. Alex climbed the ladder and dug towards the surface, snatching at blades of grass. Then a great subsidence shook the whole house. He snatched his arm back just as the hole closed over for good.
“It almost had my arm,” marveled Alex.
“The house protects the owner,” Bridget told him, a great realization suddenly dawning. “This house isn’t keeping us here. You are.”
She turned on Alex, revving the saw to life and slashing at him in one swift movement. He squealed but remained rooted to the ground as if his own feet were stuck in the mud. I yanked his arm and bolted through the house, Kumar passing us like a shot. Behind, Bridget, lumbered towards us, her heavy machine clanging against her tool belt with every thundering step.
“Quick, the ballroom,” I hissed, and we skidded on muddy feet into the giant space. The door was heavy and slow to move and Bridget slammed into it just as we threw the bolts across. We backed away into the cavernous space while she revved the saw on the other side. Soon it bit hungrily into the wood, the silver disk spitting black dust. As she forced the saw a second time it spluttered and gasped then fell quiet. No gas. Just the sound of Bridget pulling the starter cable again and again.
“We’re safe. We’re good,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Alex is the owner. The house won’t harm the owner.” The three of us had only done good things to the house. It had imprisoned Leon for talking about demolition, so surely it would stop Bridget trying to kill the owner.
“I didn’t even want the stupid house,” said Alex, his focus fixed on Bridget, who was now tinkering with tools with the patience of a dentist about to inflict a root canal. “My apartment is rent controlled.”
A drill whirred to life and the heavy door vibrated with the bite of the bit. But the wood was old and hard and the drill struggled, groaning and straining until the tip punched through, filling the room with the scent of burnt wood. No gas, no battery. We were safe. Bridget blew sawdust from the hole and peered at us.
“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” she said, pursing her lips to speak through the hole. “Alex has to take one for the team. It’s the only way any of us get out.”
“Bridget, no!”
“Suit yourself.”
Something hard scraped against the other side. A whooshing sound and then Kumar fell to the ground clutching his leg, a four-inch nail embedded in his thigh. Two more nails flew past, one grazing Alex’s ribs and lodging in his shirt, the other hitting me side-on. Under the hail of the nail gun we dragged Kumar out of range until the nails fell uselessly at our feet. As long as we stayed at the far end of the ballroom Bridget couldn’t reach us. A mirror smashed behind us. OK, so there went that theory. When another mirror shattered, even more forcefully, I realized why: the room was compacting behind us like an accordion, shattering mirrors and spraying the floor with glass.
“Run!” shouted Alex.
We sprinted toward the door, ducking and weaving, the whole room turned into a human shooting gallery. We slammed breathlessly into the wall and assessed the damage. A nail had taken a chunk from my ear but no one else had been hit. The angle was too acute for Bridget to aim but we had maybe two-minutes before the room crushed us flat, pressing us into the walls.
“I don’t like owning a house,” yelled Alex. “I think it’s time to sell!” He looked pointedly to Kumar, who wouldn’t even meet his gaze.
“I’m very happy living with my Mom, thank you very much,” he said, before adding, “Fine, so we put it back on Facebook Marketplace.”
“How the hell do we do that,” whisper-shouted Alex, trying to avoid revealing our plan to Bridget on the other side of the door. “There’s no signal. We’re underground.”
“We climb,” I said, pointing to the attic. The boys cast nervous glances toward the door and the beast that was Bridget. “Look, she knows we have to open the door sometime. If we leave it too long we lose the element of surp–.”
Bang!
Another mirror exploded. Glass shards stabbed into the floorboards.
Alex had already pulled back the bolt. He stood in the open door, catching even Bridget flat footed. She stared at Alex for a long moment as if he was a pizza she hadn’t ordered. Then Alex bolted. He made it six feet before she grabbed him by the collar and wrestled him to the ground. I pounced and so did Kumar, but it was no use: Bridget was strong and determined and we hung from her like empty saddle bags. Alex twisted away, attempting to wriggle out of her grasp, but his shirt twisted around his neck, choking him. Bridget reached calmly for the nail gun, put her knee on Alex’s neck, and aimed the weapon at his temple. As soon as she found the trigger, I dropped from around her shoulders, aimed that nail gun at her foot, and slammed three nails in quick succession.
She roared with pain. I felt momentarily bad about nailing her foot to the floor, but in my defense, she was trying to murder my brother. We struggled from her grasp and fled to the attic. The room was dark and I stumbled around on the slippery floor holding my cell aloft. Zero bars. Something wet dripped on my face. Never good. I hit the flashlight and trained it on the ceiling. Mud was oozing past the tiles and through the boards. I flashed my phone to the others. “Guys? We’re too late. The house is completely underground. Submerged. I’ve got no bars.”
“Listen,” said Kumar. Bridget must have found a blade in her tool belt and was hacking away at the wood to release her foot. I tried to put myself in the mindset of someone nailed to the floor. How long did we have—five minutes? Ten? “No, listen,” said Kumar. Beyond the sawing, a low whistling was coming and going like someone blowing across the top of a bottle. A breeze wheezing through the chimney. “The wind.”
“You saw, it’s too narrow,” I said. “And it’s got chimney pots.”
“Not talking about getting out,” said Kumar. “Talking about getting bars. All we have to do is run a wire up that chimney and attach it to the circuit board of the phone.”
“Is that all?” I said, sarcastically.
“Look, Bridget knows we came to the attic so this is the first place she’s going to look,” he said, his eyes pleading. “Plus, we’ve got plenty of wire.”
I didn’t know if his makeshift antenna plan would work, but I did know this: if we stayed in the attic we were dead. Kumar led the way, sneaking back down the creaky stairs. When we reached the ground floor he poked his head around the corner to check on Bridget’s progress. She was grimacing in pain and hacking away at the floorboard.
We tiptoed across the hall and quietly set the ladder in the fireplace. Kumar unspooled a length of wire and tied it to a bolt. He tossed it up the chimney but it rattled down, bringing a shower of soot. He tossed it again, and again it fell uselessly to the ground. When he tossed it a third time, it stuck. He tugged confidently at the wire and down came a foot in a shoe, with the arch broken just like mine. We both yelped and jumped back. But he was right. A bead of light filtered past the remains of the last person who thought escaping through the chimney was a good idea. There was no way we could get the antenna up without pulling the entire corpse down on our heads and alerting Bridget to our presence.
Just then Bridget roared with triumph. She made her way down the hall, her foot still nailed to a section of board like a broken ski and using a sledgehammer as a walking cane. We both squeezed inside the fireplace as she lumbered up the stairs. Alex and I spotted the nail gun at the same time. He skidded across the floor to retrieve it while Kumar stripped the wire with his teeth. He attached the wire to the nail and I aimed at the clear patch of night sky, just to the left of the smoked corpse. I had never wanted to see the moon and stars more. The nail zinged into the night with the wire attached. Success! We high-fived silently then snuck away to the maid’s quarters while Bridget thumped around in the attic in search of us.
Alex listened at the door while Kumar pulled apart my cell. “That part is the antenna,” he explained, exposing the circuit board. “Hold these wires right there. Don’t short it out.”
With a shaky hand, I pressed the wire to the terminal and carefully turned the phone over. Two bars. It wasn’t much but it was enough.
“Go to Facebook and write the ad,” said Alex. “Quick.”
“What do I say?” I asked. I couldn’t wrap my head around doing something so menial while we were being hunted by a friend of a friend. “I mean literally, what does this stupid ad say?”
“You’re the one who works in advertising,” said Kumar.
“PR,” I corrected him curtly.
“‘Mansion for sale. Best offer’,” said Kumar.
“Sounds desperate,” objected Alex.
“We are desperate,” I hissed.
“But we can’t sound desperate or it will seem like a scam,” said Alex. “Needs to sound like a plausible bargain. Make it look like the seller is a bit loopy. Spell mansion wrong –”
“What do we do about photos,” asked Kumar, suddenly panicking. “No one buys a mansion without photos?”
I felt inspiration strike. “We’re not selling a mansion, though. We’re selling a tiny home.”
“’Yes! Tiny home. Best offer. Motivated seller. Tall ceilings,’” said Kumar. “Done.”
I wrote the caption, hastily took the photos without any of us bothering to move out of shot and posted the ad. As we waited, we heard Bridget pacing the halls. Step-clunk, step-clunk, step-clunk. With the ballroom gone and—by the sounds of it the dining room too, she didn’t have to hobble far to work out where we were.
“Guys,” whispered Alex, urgently. “These ceilings aren’t as high as we said in the ad. They’re getting lower.”
He was right. The ceiling was closing in.
Bridget was outside the door. If only the door would vanish, but the house wasn’t so thoughtful this time. It didn’t take much for our former friend’s sledgehammer to find its mark. The wood splintered. Hinges rattled.
“Go, go!” I hustled everyone into the kitchen. Kumar spooled out the wire to keep the phone alive and we hid behind the stoves. Above us the hanging pots swayed gently as the ceiling pressed down. Surely the stone benches would hold it off. Right?
Ping! A message.
Him: Tiny home still for sale?
I mashed the keyboard.
Me: Yes. Keen to sell.
Him: Great. Few questions.
Just buy the thing, I said to the phone, close to hysteria now. We don’t have time for questions.
Bridget smashed her way into the maid’s quarters next door, shouting with anger at our absence. Please go, I prayed, watching the pots descend to the bench. It didn’t matter how quiet we were, the house itself was about to give away our hiding spot. The ceiling dumped the pots on the bench, crashing and banging. Beyond the locked door, Bridget laughed maniacally.
Him: How old? What is it made of? When did you buy it? On wheels? Capacity of fresh water? Same for the grey water? Systems built in? Location? Why selling?
The ceiling pressed the pots and pans flat like a trash compacter until their handles broke and they warped and split. The three of us cowered below, spare arms wrapped protectively around our heads. The maid’s quarters must have been at a similar height, because judging by Bridget’s grunting and groaning she was now lying on the ground using the sledgehammer as a battering ram.
Me, clammy fingers flying across the keyboard: Solidly built. Systems in good order. Not sure of water/greywater capacity. Upstate, 50 miles from Bovina. Selling bc need more space.
Him: Thanks. I’ll think about it.
Bridget smashed a strip from the door, her crazed face just feet away.
Him: Better price if I bring cash?
I groaned. We’d be dead before he arrived with his cash.
Me: Paypal only.
Him: Seems like a scam.
This guy was irritating but he was also right. I wish I had asked more questions when I bought the place.
Me: It’s a tax thing.
Him: I still have questions.
The stone counter began to crumble, and drawers exploded. The noise was thought-obliterating. Bridget smashed away, enlarging her satanic doggie door. Kumar pointed toward the cellar and shouted in my ear: “There’s no slab in the cellar. It’s a dirt floor. If we outlast Bridget we can dig our way out.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a better idea. Kumar led the way, crawling on hands and knees while Alex spooled out the wire, keeping my phone connected to the idiot time waster on the other end. Gotta say, I had never been more grateful to enter a haunted basement as when I reached the bottom of those stairs and was able to stand upright. The weak glow of the lightbulb struggled to find the corners. I looked down at the phone.
Him: Decent price. Let me think about it.
Me: Cool. Someone else interested too.
As if anyone ever believes that old lie, but it was worth a try. Kumar grabbed a shovel from the shadows and dug frantically at the cellar floor. The gap at the door was barely eighteen inches tall. Somewhere in there, Bridget was no doubt crawling commando style through the ruined kitchen searching for us.
Him: Get back to you next week.
”No, no, no!” I yelled futilely at the phone. “Not next week. Buy it now. Now!”
Kumar kept digging frantically. Alex found a pick and joined him, hacking away at the ground.
“Guys,” I said. “Guys? You might want to move.”
Above them, the wooden boards warped and bowed. Alex and Kumar dropped their tools and dived out of the way just as the timber splintered and the safe crashed through the ceiling from the floor above. At the same time, Bridget’s face appeared at the top of the stairs. She slithered towards us but the ceiling pressed in, trapping the board her foot was nailed to. That would have been the time to do something … bloody. But none of us had the stomach for it. Besides, it looked like the house was determined to do it before we could.
“It’s me she’s after,” said Alex, running to the safe and grimacing as he pulled the corpse out with his bare hands. He crawled inside. “She doesn’t want to kill you.”
“I need to get in as well,” I said, clutching the safe door. “I’ve got to nail this sale.”
“But there isn’t room for three!” Kumar’s face had gone pale.
“Sorry, bud,” said Alex, pulling the door shut.
I pressed myself into the safe and pleaded with Kumar to close the door. I could see Bridget on the stairs still struggling with her trapped foot. I prayed the ceiling would keep her pinned until I could make a sale. But at that moment the board split and Bridget tumbled free, cascading down the stairs after the sledgehammer. The last thing I saw was Kumar slamming shut the safe while Bridget rose up behind him.
Alex and I were boxed up, limbs pressed to our chests, heads bowed, both our fingers wrapped around the phone. It was so tight in there we couldn’t both breathe in at the same time. The phone message lit the safe with an unearthly glow.
Him: Still interested.
Me: OK great.
Him: One question.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The safe rattled with every blow of Bridget’s sledgehammer. Guess she really did have the combination. She smashed the lock to smithereens.
Him: Need proof not scam. Send photo taken from outside in next two minutes. Go!
Me: Sure thing.
Him: Same people in photo.
Boom!
Boom!
“Fuck!” My voice sounded flat and eerie inside that tomb. The phone was sandwiched between our faces and bleeding hands.
“Let me swipe,” croaked Alex. “I’ll find a tiny home and Photoshop us in. Use that shot from Thanksgiving.”
Boom!
Boom!
The door was bending. I could feel it nudging persistently in my side. Alex swiped urgently through the images, past all the memes and the nudes, to Thanksgiving day.
“Wait. What time is it? Day or night? It has to match.”
My mind was blank for a moment. “There, dummy.” I pointed at the corner of the screen. 6 a.m. (Or whatever) Beyond all the mud and murderous rage, dawn was breaking. Alex scrolled through tiny homes until he found one at dawn. It was too modern to pretend the maid’s quarters was the interior. To be honest, it was completely unbelievable as the same house. The buyer would have to be an idiot to fall for it. With ten seconds left, my brother pasted us in, dropped a filter over the whole thing and showed me. We looked a million times happier and cleaner than the shots we’d taken in the maid’s quarters, but we had no choice. I hit send.
Boom!
Boom!
Him: You scrub up well.
Me: Sunday. Off to church.
Boom!
Boom!
Crunch!
We both screamed as the top hinge of the safe broke and the heavy door caved inwards, slamming me in the head. Through blurred vision, I saw a maniac with a sledgehammer glaring at me through the crack. In the impact I had dropped the phone, and the antenna wire was gone. Bridget peeled the metal away like a can of tuna and there we were ,fish in a barrel. She grabbed my arm and threw me aside to get to Alex. Kumar was splayed out on the ground, just regaining consciousness. Bridget raised the sledgehammer above her head, ready to deal Alex the final blow. The weapon caught in a beam of light. Dawn’s first rays.
I scrambled in the dirt for my phone. On screen was a message. Sold.
“Sold,” I shouted. “Sold!”
My phone pinged with the Paypal alert: You’ve got money.
Bridget blinked. Dust motes drifted in the light at the edge of the sledgehammer. The beam was coming from the cellar door, the one that led outside to the courtyard with the death table. Bridget swung the hammer past the safe and belted the cellar door open. Light flooded in. In a daze, we followed Bridget into the courtyard.
The house was exactly as it had been when we arrived. Even the awning was back where it was, covered in an avalanche of bird shit. Underneath the awning stood Leon, smiling smugly.
“Deal of the century,” he said, flashing his phone. The screen displayed the photo of the tiny home Alex and I had duped the new owner with. “I’ve always wanted a tiny home. So, what was in the safe? What do I win?”
Alex, Kumar, and I gaped at our unbelievably stupid friend. Even Bridget, now miraculously calm as if nothing had happened in that horror house back there, stared at him. At that moment, a pigeon landed on the awning. It cooed a few times then took flight again. As it lifted off, the awning collapsed and swung down, knocking Leon off his feet and sending him tumbling back into the mansion. The door creaked shut, sealing him inside.
It took a few days to sell the house again. By then, Leon had thoroughly changed his mind about demolishing the mansion and building back better. I don’t know who he sold it to. All I know is this: if you ever find a bargain-priced mansion advertised on Facebook Marketplace, get lots of photos. Ask lots of questions. Just saying: listen to your subconscious.