Haunted House

You walk up to the house a few hours after dark and see someone has left a light on in the bedroom. Either you’ve watched too many horror movies, or you’re too stressed out by the last few months, but you wonder if there’s somebody still in the house. They told you they were gone and the keys were in the mailbox where they promised, but you still feel uneasy.

 

In the living room you see their cracked and ruined leather couch, half-used bottles of mustard still on it. There are disassembled coffee tables, a desk with scattered papers, speakers unconnected to anything, a portable heater, and decorative mirrors on the wall. There is a clock still set to the manufacturer’s time of 10:10, as if they’d never had the heart to set it. Cleaning products are scattered around the room—though none used on the hardwood floor, which has a sticky black goop all over it.

 

The empty packing boxes give it away. The same boxes were there two months ago when you were here last. They just took off and left their stuff behind for you to clean up. It’s all abandoned furniture and plastic bags full of crap.

 

What else did they leave behind? It’s late and you’re afraid to go down the basement—too many horror movies. You calm your heartbeat and walk down the stairs, unable to see what is around the corner until you get to the bottom.

 

There’s no demon or vampire or dead body or vengeful tenant to greet you. Just the more ordinary horrors people leave behind. Ruined exercise equipment and luggage. Bags of clothes. Unwanted hardbacks, books on languages, and school materials. An overturned wooded box spills out tiny earrings and baubles. Then you spot dogshit smeared on the basement floor, and your sadness and pity begin to curdle into anger.

 

Something tells you to look in the fridge. It’s room temperature inside and who knows how long it’s been that way. Inside it’s crammed with spoiled food. It’s almost-full bottles of salad dressing, sriracha sauce, wedges of fancy cheese, whipped cream, and a tray topped with aluminum foil that you couldn’t be paid to unpeel and look at. On the counter is a carton of Ben and Jerry’s. Just left there.

 

The fridge must have died and rather than tell you, they must have closed it for all time like a tomb. Your anger rises and rises. The next morning, you will throw it all in trash bags and stomp down to the curb with them. One bag will drip something unspeakable onto the kitchen floor and another bag will break in the driveway. And you will curse these filthy, inconsiderate pigs.

 

Upstairs, you find that of course nobody is still in the house. Somebody just left a lamp on with the shade askew. The bed and furniture are all still there, sheets still on the mattress. More furniture in the other bedrooms. On the floor is more black stuff that may or may not be able to be cleaned.

 

So they’re finally gone. Nobody is still in the house but you’re still unaccountably creeped out. You almost think you hear sounds, like someone moving in another room. It’s probably just the neighbors or the house settling. It can’t be ghosts, right? That would be ridiculous.

 

But there are always ghosts in one form or another, aren’t there? The ghost of us whiling away an ordinary evening watching TV while a cat purred on one of our laps. The ghost of everyone gathered near the light of the Christmas tree while the windows fogged with the steam from a crock pot and the warmth of us all together. The ghost of sitting on the deck watching a thunderstorm roll in from the west, planning and hoping we’d someday have a better view out back than power lines and a stray shopping cart.

 

And there is always something to haunt us. If you’d done something different, would this not have ended in squalor and chaos? Should you have been more vigilant? This whole house—this septic wound—could haunt you and drag you down with it if you let it.

 

So you will not. You will take dripping bags of trash out to the curb. You will scrub the floor on hands and knees. You will make the calls and deals you need to make. You will fix what you had neglected. You will give the next person the keys and walk away with something and plan bigger and better things in the place that really matters.