The Empty House

A Short Story

There’s an empty house, way out in the middle of nowhere on an old road.

We live on the highway that snakes along the top of Rockwood Mountain, about a mile from the interstate, and that dirt track is hidden by the brush along the roadside, a left turn to nowhere that’s easy to miss. Turn down that road, and the forest stretches for twenty miles in every direction. Hunters drive past in the fall, looking for deer or black bear, but they never park in the overgrown yard. The house stays empty because the power line only runs for a quarter mile past the turnoff, so if you wanted to move in, you’d have to have candles and plenty of firewood. Nobody wants to live like that – and nobody wants to live among the dead.

My best friend Bobby once told me that there’s no such thing as ghosts, or zombies, or vampires, but all those monsters you see in the movies are ways of telling stories. They hide what really scares us, and they all mean the same thing – the dead. I believe him, because I’ve known about the dead since I was eight years old, when my Uncle Terry was killed in a car accident. Uncle Terry’s house was across the road from our trailer, a rickety two-story farmhouse a hundred years old, and I slipped inside one summer afternoon, using the key I stole from mama’s keyring. It was empty, the emptiest place I’ve ever seen, as if Uncle Terry took a piece of the world with him when he left. I didn’t see a thing, because you don’t see the dead – most of the time, at any rate – but you can hear them. I know because I walked past the living room that nobody uses, and into the old dining room where the staircase leads to the second floor, and every time I stopped to listen, I could hear them. Sometimes the dead make the floorboards creak, sometimes they skitter past like rats in a dark room, and sometimes you can hear them breathing, so quiet that you half-believe that your ears are playing tricks on you.

Last summer, just after I turned thirteen, Bobby dared me to go inside. The front door is padlocked to keep out vandals, but the back door is half-rotten, and I forced my way in with a couple of kicks to the latch. I wandered around for a bit, and when Bobby joined me, we carved our initials on the wall and smoked a couple of cigarettes that he got from his older brother. If the dead were watching us, they kept quiet, but that could have been because we were there in the middle of the day, and everybody knows that the dead won’t bother you when the sun is shining. I asked mama about it later, and she got uptight like she always does – “You ain’t got no business fooling around that old place” – but I don’t see the big deal. I didn’t tell her that we broke in and smoked cigarettes, just like I never told her when Dave Felsen and I split a can of beer, or that since my voice started changing, I can’t stop thinking about the girl who sits next to me in school. All I did was ask why nobody lives in the old house, and she went ballistic on me, so I had to get the story from the boys at school.

It happened the year of Uncle Terry’s death, to a girl so poor that her family couldn’t afford anything better than a broke-down house with no electricity. One morning, they found her in her bed, stiff and cold and bled out from the gash in her throat. Bobby says she was murdered by somebody who pulled off the interstate, and Dave Felsen claims she was killed by her brother – the brother went to prison for the crime, and the rest of the family moved away in shame.

I don’t believe either of those stories.

Not long after we broke in and smoked cigarettes and carved our initials into the wall, she started coming to me in my dreams. There was no knife, no brother who went to prison, no family hiding a scandal – just one of the dead who came to her window and asked to be let inside. I walked past the empty house last week, when the afternoon sun was low in the sky, and I could hear her breathing as she watched me from the far side of the window. Now I’ve forgotten the girl who sits by me in school, and when the sun went down this evening, I told mama that I was going to bed early. I slipped through my bedroom window and walked down the road, and now, the only sound that I hear is the crunching of gravel beneath my feet. I am even more afraid than I was during that terrible afternoon in Uncle Terry’s house, with its empty space and watching eyes, but she is calling, and I have to go to her.

The front door of the empty house is standing open.

She is waiting.