“I’m just afraid there’s someone hiding in there. A thief, someone like that.”
My brother wanted to know more, but my mother didn’t have much more to say. The house had been abandoned since before my parents came to the neighborhood, before Pablo was born. She knew that just months before they’d arrived, the owners, an old married couple, had died. “Did they die together?” Pablo wanted to know. “You’re getting morbid, sweetheart. I’m going to stop letting you watch those movies. No, they died one after the other. That happens to old couples sometimes; when one dies the other just fades away. And ever since then, their kids have been fighting over the estate.”
“What’s an estate?” I wanted to know.
“It’s the inheritance,” said my mother. “They’re fighting over who gets to keep the house.”
“But the house can’t be worth balls,” said Pablo, and my mother scolded him for using a bad word.
“What bad word?”
“You know perfectly well. I’m not going to repeat it.”
“Balls isn’t a bad word.”
“Pablo, please.”
“Fine. But I mean, the house is falling down, Mom.”
“What do I know, dear, maybe they want the land. It’s the family’s problem.”
“I bet it’s haunted.”
“Those movies are a bad influence on you!”
I thought they weren’t going to let him watch horror movies anymore, but my mother didn’t mention the subject again. And, the next day, my brother told Adela about the house. She was thrilled: a haunted house so close, right there in our neighborhood, barely two blocks away, it was pure joy. “Let’s go see it,” she said, and the three of us went running out the door, shouting as we ran down the wooden chalet stairs, so pretty (on one side they had stained-glass windows—green, yellow, and red—and the steps were carpeted). Adela ran more slowly than us and leaned a little to one side because of her missing arm, but she ran fast. That afternoon she was wearing a white dress with straps; I remember how when she ran, the left strap fell down over the stump of her arm and she adjusted it automatically, as if brushing a lock of hair from her face.
At first glance there was nothing special about the house, but if you paid a little attention there were some unsettling details. The windows were completely bricked up. “To keep someone from getting in, or something from getting out?” The iron front door was painted dark brown. “It looks like dried blood,” said Adela.
“You’re such a drama queen,” I dared to say. She just smiled at me. She had yellow teeth. Now that did disgust me—not her arm, or lack of one. I don’t think she brushed her teeth, and her pale, translucent skin was like a geisha’s makeup, making the sickly color stand out even more. She went into the house’s tiny front yard. She stood on the walkway that led to the door, turned around, and said:
“Did you notice?”
She didn’t wait for our reply.
“It’s so weird, how can the grass be this short?”
My brother followed her into the yard, and as if he were afraid, he also stayed on the stone walkway that led from the sidewalk to the front door.
“It’s true,” he said. “The grass should be really high. Look, Clara, come here.”
I went in. Entering through the rusty gate was horrible. I don’t remember it that way just because of what happened later. I’m sure of what I felt then, at that precise moment. It was cold in the yard. And the grass looked burned. Razed. It was yellow and short: not one green weed. Not a single plant. There was an infernal drought in that yard, and it was also winter there. And the house buzzed; it buzzed like a hoarse mosquito, like a fat fly. It vibrated. I didn’t run away because I didn’t want my brother and Adela to make fun of me, but I felt like fleeing home, to my mother, to tell her: Yes, you’re right, that house is an evil mask and it’s not thieves behind it, there’s a shuddering creature there. Something is hiding there that must not come out.
—
Adela and Pablo talked of nothing but the house. The house was everything. They even asked around in the neighborhood about it. They asked the newsstand vendor and at the social club; they asked Don Justo, who sat in the doorway of his house waiting for sunset; they asked the Galicians at the corner shop, and the vegetable vendor. No one had anything meaningful to tell them. But several people agreed that the house’s strange, bricked-up windows and dried-up yard gave them the creeps too, or made them sad, sometimes afraid, especially afraid at night. Many of them remembered the old couple: they were Russian or Lithuanian, very sweet, very quiet. And the children? Some people said they were fighting over the inheritance. Others said they’d never visited their parents, not even when they got sick. No one had seen them, ever. The children, if they existed, were a mystery.
“Someone had to brick up the windows,” my brother said to Don Justo.
“Sure they did. But some masons came and did it, not the kids.”
“Maybe the masons were the kids.”
“I’m sure they weren’t. The bricklayers were dark-skinned, and the old couple were blond, translucent. Like you and Adela, like your mom. Polish, they must’ve been. Something like that.”
The idea of going inside the house was my brother’s. He suggested it to me first. I told him he was crazy. And he was, he was obsessed. He needed to know what had happened in that house, what was inside. He wanted it with a fervor that was strange to see in an eleven-year-old boy. I don’t understand, I could never understand what the house did to him, how it drew him in like that. Because it drew him to it, first. And then he infected Adela.
They sat on the little walkway of yellow and pink paving stones that cut the yard in half. The rusty iron gate was always open, beckoning them in. I went with them, but I stayed outside, on the sidewalk. They stared at the front door as if they thought they could open it with their minds. They spent hours sitting there like that, silent. The people who went by on the sidewalk, our neighbors, didn’t pay any attention to them. They didn’t think it was strange, or maybe they didn’t see them. I didn’t dare tell my mother anything.
Or maybe the house wouldn’t let me talk. The house didn’t want me to save them.
We went on meeting in the living room of Adela’s house, but we no longer talked about movies. Now Pablo and Adela—but especially Adela—told stories about the house. “Where do you get them?” I asked one afternoon, and they glanced at each other in surprise.
“The house tells us the stories. You don’t hear it?”
“Poor thing,” said Pablo. “She doesn’t hear the house’s voice.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Adela. “We’ll tell her.”
And they told me.
About the old woman, whose eyes had no pupils but who wasn’t blind.
About the old man, who burned medical books out by the empty chicken coop, in the backyard.
About the backyard, just as dry and dead as the front, full of little holes like the dens of rats.
About a faucet that never stopped dripping, because the thing that lived in the house needed water.