Before she was the reason I don’t let my children play in the yard after sundown she was our friend.
Even though we moved out to suburbia for a calmer life, three years of interacting with people that were about as interesting as slowly drying paint was starting to take its toll on us. Yes, the house was a great investment. Yes, waking up to a life free of shitty landlords made the morning coffee taste better. Sure, the school district we had moved to would be great for our slowly toothing children. But my wife and me lived an existence about as exciting as our neighbors, which is to say not at all.
When Elizabeth moved into the house opposite ours our life blossomed.
In the morning we noticed moving trucks parked in front of the house across the street. By sundown she was standing at our doorstep with a bottle of wine. She had the dress sense of a college freshman on laundry day, yet along with her youth camp hoodie and pineapple patterned sweatpants Elizabeth rocked an expensive assortment of jewelry. Small runes studded in emerald hung from her earlobes and an intricately carved silver medallion dangled off her neck. An excited fire for conversation burned in her eyes.
She was the type of eccentric that we didn’t want to raise kids around back in the city.
She was the type of eccentric that we so sorely missed in suburbia.
Linda put the kids to bed, I pulled some chairs out on the porch and we opened up Elizabeth’s bottle of red. Soon enough I was fetching another bottle of wine out of the house and looking for something that could double as an ash-tray for our chatty house guest. The more we drank the less me and my wife felt like Mom and Dad, as we swapped eerie stories with our new neighbor bits and pieces of our past started to reemerge. We were still Greg and Linda, functioning adults, but we were also the same Greg and Linda who ate way too many mushrooms at a Russian psy-trance festival less than a decade ago.
After we finished the second bottle of wine I grabbed a couple of beers out of the garage and fished out some weed I had stashed away for a rainy day. In an effort to be eco-friendly the street lamps in our neighborhood never stayed on past midnight. We drank until the only thing cutting through the darkness was the porch light and the night sky.
Halfway through the joint Linda started falling asleep. She excused herself and went to bed. I would have followed my wife, but it felt like a shame to waste half a joint. I bid her goodnight and hoped she would still be up by the time I would get to the bedroom.
“Ever notice anything weird ever happen with my house?” Elizabeth broke the stoned silence we were indulging in. “Like, flashing lights, strange sounds in the middle of the night, spooky stuff.”
The neighborhood was a dark silhouette of repeating architecture, a sky chaotically littered with stars shined above us. I was way too stoned to understand her question.
She passed me the joint. I shook my head.
“Can I let you in on a little secret Greg?” She asked.
“I’ll have to run that by my wife,” I replied.
“Oh, you can tell her, she’s cool,” Elizabeth replied quickly, “Just, I don’t know, if you do end up talking to the neighbors maybe don’t mention it. You guys get it, you’ve spent time around artists. Don’t know if the rest of the neighborhood would be so understanding.”
Thoughts of my cool wife lying in bed upstairs were tugging at my brain but Elizabeth’s hushed tone stirred my interest.
“Alright, as long as it’s not a murder or something then your secret is safe with me and Linda.”
She passed me the joint again. I shook my head again.
“I mean, the secret is concerning murders, multiple murders actually.” She let her words ring out for dramatic effect, enough to send a shiver of discomfort down my spine. “I didn’t kill anyone, but like, four homicides happened in my house,” she added with another puff of smoke.
The shadowy outline of her home looked no different than any of the other houses on the street. “Really?” I asked.
“Yep. 1954, 1982, 1984, 1988. Murder suicides, each one of them.”
“Sounds like the 80s were rough.” I found myself saying.
Elizabeth smiled. “When my pare- When I bought this house I did a bit of research. Murder houses go for cheaper, plus, I figured a murder house could have an interesting vibe for my art.”
I consumed the new information. It was nice to be speaking to someone who wasn’t aggressively boring, but the conversation was getting into the spirit of the 4AM bar-chat that makes hangovers more punishing. I yawned and started to get off my chair. If I didn’t join my wife soon Elizabeth would ramble my ear off about something that was way too eccentric for my tastes.
“Do you believe in places having souls Greg?” she asked before I could make my escape. Linda was always good at leaving parties before the pretentious psychobabble reared its head.
“Nope,” I said, trying to give off a vibe Elizabeth wasn’t catching.
“Well, I do. I think that whatever happens in a specific corner of the world stays with that specific corner of the world for a long time. Ever walked down an old lover’s lane? Or, like, an old battlefield? There’s energy in those places. You can feel it in the air, you walk where others have once walked and feel past lives lived, lost, experienced. The history that tales of human tragedy and love and pain and – oh my god I’m rambling.” She handed me the joint. “Sorry, I haven’t had a proper drink since I came back from Vietnam. Didn’t mean to get all artsy on you.”
“It’s fine, I’m used to it.”
“I can tell,” she said, getting up, “Anywho, if you ever see something eerie going on with the house please do give me a heads up. I think I could really work the spirit of the house into my art.”
“Yeah, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out,” I said, knowing that I wasn’t going to.
Over the next couple of months Elizabeth became a regular visitor at our house. She had zero interest in holding our son and would squirm in discomfort whenever our daughter tried talking to her, but what Elizabeth lacked in child skills she made up for in storytelling finesse. Every week or two she would drop by our porch and we would drink and smoke and talk the night away.
She told us about weird hiking trips she took during her gap year, the motorcycle trip through Afghanistan that her and an ex boyfriend took together, and a variety of other drug hazed tales of exotic lands. Linda and me also found ourselves reminiscing about a more carefree time of our relationships. Those nights always brought a spark of excitement into our routine lives.
But every drunken night had a topic of discussion that made my eyes roll back in my head.
Every time that Elizabeth came over she wanted to talk about the ‘Murder House’. Elizabeth was in love with the name, she was in love with the idea of being surrounded by ghosts of murderers and victims. She was in love with talking about it. I hated that part of the night.
Back then I didn’t believe in ghosts. I just presumed that anything she said about floors creaking when she was home alone or the lights in the kitchen mysteriously turning on in the middle of the night was a flight of her eccentric imagination. I thought she was making stuff up.
Yet Elizabeth’s rants about hearing voices crying through the halls and sensing the energy of the family that was chopped apart by a crazy man with an axe in 1984 were simply sour punctuation on a dwindling night. As soon as she would start talking about spirits Linda and me would yawn and start talking about breakfast.
As unhinged as her rants would get, Elizabeth was very self-aware. She was just fascinated by the whole ghostly aura of her home. Once she would catch herself ranting she would stop, remind us to keep an eye out on the house, and bid us a good night.
I never really paid attention to her rants, I just took Elizabeth’s obsession as a personality quirk that I could handle in weekly bursts. I never considered there might actually be something up with the house.
But one horrible moment changed that.
It was a dark school night. Linda and me had gone overboard with bedtime stories and ended up reading our kids seven chapters of Harry Potter. We were doing voices, milking dramatic pauses, really driving the story home, but we got so into producing our little parental audiobook that we didn’t notice our children had already passed out two chapters ago.
Linda fell asleep quickly that night. I wanted to get some rest too, even attempted counting sheep, but there was something scratching at the back of my chest. It took me a while to admit it to myself, but eventually I accepted that my constant bumming of cigarettes from Elizabeth had developed a nicotine habit in my lungs.
I went outside for a cigarette.
The street lamps were long dark, only silhouettes of suburbia and the night sky remained. From the dim light of my porch I blew puffs of guilty smoke into the abyss and enjoyed the stillness of the night.
A creaking groan cut through that stillness.
A sound of strained wood, a wholly inhuman product, but as the noise crawled into the night I could hear a soft voice beneath it.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to do this…” Elizabeth whispered out of the dark, “The house, the murder house, it’s making me do this…”
Another wooden strain, but this one was answered by a burst of light. Every window in the house lit up, bringing forth a haggard looking Elizabeth. She was standing at the edge of her front lawn wearing an oversized t-shirt and basketball shorts, her shaking hands pressed behind her back.
“I’m sorry Greg, it’s the murder house, the murder house is making me do this.” Her teeth were chattering. She was barefoot and terrified.
I opened my mouth to say something but my voice got caught in the back of my throat. The light coming from the house took on a fiery quality and burst out into the night with blinding force.
“I’m sorry. The murder house is doing this.” She said, taking a handgun out of the back of her shorts. The nuzzle shook, for a second she aimed the weapon in my direction but then, as if fighting a force inside of her, she pulled the gun back. She placed it in her mouth.
There was another flash of light.
I didn’t tell anyone exactly what happened that night. Elizabeth shooting herself on the front lawn was enough of a shock to begin with. The other details made me doubt my sanity enough to keep them to myself.
Linda had some background in mental health from a couple of certification courses she took back in university. To deal with the trauma of losing her friend to what she thought was suicide, my wife took on a part-time placement in a crisis hotline. I dealt with the shock of Elizabeth’s passing in a less productive fashion. I started smoking.
Every night, after the lights of the neighborhood would die down, I would stand outside and smoke with my eyes focused on that cursed house.
At first I didn’t notice anything, it was as if whatever I saw the night of Elizabeth’s death was a shock induced terror dream, but as the nights went on and my focus on the dark building sharpened I could see inklings of the supernatural.
The faintest of lights would burn in the rooms if you would stare out into the night for long enough. Suggestions of barely visible silhouettes could be seen moving around behind the pulled curtains. The visions were one thing, but what truly terrified me, what made me purchase a baseball bat for our porch, were the sounds. Every couple of nights, if the air was still and I listened closely enough I could hear it.
A faint echo of a gunshot would cut through the calm night. Sometimes among the quiet ripples of sounds there were also whispered screams and the crackling of wood being split, but it was the echo gunshot that truly gripped my mind. I recognized the sound far too well.
For a couple of weeks I considered suggesting a move to Linda, or at least telling her about the details Elizabeth’s death, but as the weeks of observing the house turned into months I gave up on the idea.
The house across the street made me uncomfortable, there was definitely something wrong with it, but it seemed to keep its terror to itself. Instead of throwing away the investment we had made I simply consigned myself to keeping an eye on the house with a baseball bat and a cigarette. As long as my family would stay away from the house our mortgage and lives would presumably be safe.
For years I watched the house and nothing changed.
Then, one day, we got a knock on the door.
“Hello!” a friendly face with a backpack stood on my porch, “Me and my boyfriend are backpacking throughout the country and we were wondering whether we could camp out in your back yard. Promise we won’t leave a mess!”
A memory of Elizabeth telling us about how she traveled the country with a tent and some friends roared to life with the intensity of a portable pressure cooker. I was about to say yes and honor the memory of our dead neighbor, but then I saw the backpacker’s “boyfriend”.
“Is that… your boyfriend?” I asked. Linda peeked her head out of the door, saw the man limping down the street and shot me a concerned look.
The guy looked to be a hundred. A stringy mess of white hair covered a roughly shaven face that looked back at us with tired dark eyes. Even though it was jacket weather outside, the man stood on the street shirtless, revealing the strange tribal tattoos on his saggy skin.
“That’s him!” the backpacker said as we looked at the jagged skeleton man. “He might look old but he’s very full of life.”
“What’s the wood for?” Linda asked.
Behind him, the old man was dragging a pile of sloppily chopped wood on a sled.
“Oh that’s just some driftwood we carry around. My boyfriend is a shaman, sometimes he forces spirits out of places,” she said. “But don’t worry, we aren’t going to be making any fires on your front lawn, we’re just looking for a place to set up our tent for the night,” she quickly added with a nervous chuckle.
“Definitely not.” Linda said in a tone that could sharpen steel.
“Yeah,” I added.
The backpacker shrugged good-heartedly. “Ah well, do you guys know if any of the other neighbors would be willing to let us camp out?”
I knew of one neighbor who would have definitely let them set up a tent if she wasn’t dead.
“No. Goodbye.” Linda slammed the door. The years since Elizabeth’s passing had turned her bitter. Watching the shaman drag his sled of wood over to our neighbors made me think about how sometimes we get bitter for a reason. The guy looked like something out of a dungeon. We were way too old to be letting hundred-year-old hippies sleep on our front lawn.
The thoughts of those protruding ribs, those weird tattoos and empty eyes, they made the craving for nicotine announce itself with more force than usual that night. I was out on the porch smoking one cigarette after another, trying to get that strange face out of my mind. That’s when I heard him.
Out from the darkness came a groan. A human groan.
I tried to convince myself I was just hearing a particularly loud neighbor going through a medical emergency but another strained groan made the fact that there was someone across the street undeniable.
A match flared out of the darkness. The old man’s face glowed into existence. Even from the distance of my porch I could see his mad expression. He groaned again, and threw the match to the ground. A bright flash erupted. Elizabeth’s front lawn lit up with a bonfire. The shaman’s wood burnt bright.
I balanced the cigarette between my lips, one hand was trying to unlock my phone and the other was gripping the baseball bat. The man groaned again, louder, but this time the groan dragged, dipped and turned into a note. The shaman started throat singing and dancing in the light of the fire.
It wasn’t until his decrepit body started bouncing around with energy that I noticed that he was stark naked. For a moment I considered how cruel of a mistress gravity is, then I considered dialing the police, but before I could make my way to the phone app something else grabbed my attention. All the lights in Elizabeth’s house were on, a crowd of silhouettes stood behind the curtains.
The old man kept on dancing around the fire. With each moment his steps grew more frantic, with every bounce of his withered body his song grew louder. But soon it was drowned out.
The sound of groaning wood, the screams, the gunshots that I have heard so many nights before, they were back. But they were no longer memories of noise floating on the night wind, no, the sounds were deafening enough to overpower the shaman’s singing.
Yet he persevered. The throaty tone which the old man was producing kept on growing louder regardless of the resistance that it was getting, his eyes bulged with effort but the timber of his song remained calculated. His body started to match the motion of the flames, as they grasped at oxygen the man threw himself from side to side, crashing down into the lawn only to bounce back up for another jump.
I watched with fascination, trying to remind myself that I should call the police on the nude arsonist in my dead neighbor’s front yard, but then my attention was grappled away once more. The silhouettes behind the curtains, they started to bob their heads. The figures were starting to dance along with the shaman. As they danced the sharp sounds of gunshots and suffering eased until there were none at all. The old man’s song took control of the night.
The door of the murder house burst open and a procession of shadows made their way out towards the fire. Even as they danced closer to the light no discernable features presented themselves, the figures were simply dark outlines of human bodies. They surrounded the fire and danced along with the shaman, but they didn’t dance for long. After making a couple of rounds around the bonfire, they started to jump into the flames.
Each of the shadow folk’s arrival into the fire was followed by a burst of light and a high-pitched yelp that would punctuate the shaman’s throat song. They all jumped in one by one without hesitation, almost as if they had spent all of eternity waiting to set themselves on fire. Yet the final shadow hesitated. The silhouette on the other side of the road faced my direction. She waved.
I let go of the baseball bat and waved back.
When her figure hit the fire the neighborhood was enveloped in another powerful burst of light and the shaman’s shriek reached a pitch that dragged into the night like a stopping freight train. As the screech reached its final breath the nude shaman laid down by the fire, let out a tired groan and promptly fell into snore filled sleep.
I put away my phone. This man was not dangerous. I wasn’t going to call the cops. My moral decision to leave the shaman to his mysterious ways made my stomach warm for a little while, but my neighbors were considerably less accepting of nude eccentrics than I was. A police station worth of cruisers arrived, yelled at the old naked man, tazered him and chucked him off to the station.
The man was probably being charged for a series of crimes, but as I stood there in the cool fall wind, looking at the silhouettes of identical homes, I couldn’t help but wonder whether he didn’t do something good. The house across the street seemed to be at peace. It never glowed again.
A couple months later my son decided to hide my pack of cigarettes because they’re apparently bad for my health and he doesn’t want me to die. He hid them inside of his toy box, so they weren’t too hard to find, but I played along for a couple of weeks. I let him keep my pack of smokes next to his race cars as long as he didn’t mind me bumming one by the time his bed-time story was finished. It’s not like I smoked heavily – just a single cigarette to occupy me while I looked out at Elizabeth’s house.
After the insane man’s bonfire the ‘Murder House’ had just become a regular two-story on a block of two-stories. Even though the shaman’s life was probably filled with court cases and chaos, the result of his work was utter tranquility.
I started rationing the cigarettes when I got down to my last ten. Once I got to my last five, I made my smoking a bi-monthly activity. There’s a pack with a single cigarette left in my son’s toy box and I’m pretty sure it’ll stay there until I start getting worried about him smoking it. My lungs no longer make demands and the house across the street doesn’t require my attention anymore.
I just hope that whatever the shaman did is a permanent solution to the problem of the ‘Murder House’. I also hope that wherever Elizabeth is, she’s happy and surrounded by people who like having four in the morning eccentric conversations about spirits.