The House, Part Two.

by Lori Dwyer on January 27, 2012 · 21 comments

Continued from yesterday. Come on in… this place is eerie.

Enter the house and it’s almost enough to jarr your brain. One room is newspapers, stacks and stacks of them piled neatly and orderly– or once, they were, before the weather and the rats and time itself took to them.

Weather, and rats, and time. There is no graffiti on the walls, no fires set, no coke cans and chip packets to give squatters away. It feels as if no one has breathed the air of this house in, quite literally, years.

The newspapers go back for years. I find one dated 1940.

In the front hall is a drift of unopened mail– five hundred letters, maybe more. I open one and the date is 1971 and I feel like an intruder for the first time, a thief of memories and a breaker of sealed tombs.

This house is unsettling, strange and quite crew and so fascinating. The light is fading, but that is not the source of my frustration– I wish my eyes were bigger, to take more in.

The kitchens still holds a refrigerator, a stove, pots and pans and cooking utensils on the walls. There are jars with labels still attached, and I want one to take home with me but the roof has fallen in across the entry to the kitchen, long splintered wooden boards creating a huge diagonal gate across the doorway.

Another room is art supplies. There are shelves all around the walls, stacked with canvases and paint and brushes and palettes and easels. The floor is knee deep in paper– journals and diaries and notebooks with nothing special in them I can see, just names and dates and the occasional phone number. There is paperwork here of all kinds– loan statements with tiny paper stubs filled in by hand when a payment was made, letters to and from various organizations, dockets and shopping lists. A calendar on the wall has been frozen still in the 1960′s. The only thing I don’t see is artwork.

*Ahem* Obviously, the yellow is added by me.

In fact, the only artwork in the house I miss entirely the first time I am there– is it too dark to see the room, once, I think, a living room, that he stands in.

It’s when I come back a second time I discover him, and then only by the flash of my camera, the day is so overcast. He stands in the lounge room, along with a piano that was literally terrifying when I tried it, the sound of untuned keys that hadn’t been touched in years echoing in this strange house.

This house– that standing statue man in particular– are all kinds of weird and, to be honest, so fucking strange.

Clothes seem out of date with utensils, which seem out of date with all that paperwork, which is out of date to the letters in the hallway. It’s as if some massive, silent clock has stopped ticking… But in different rooms, at different times.

Yesterdays orb, close up… quite possibly a raindrop. And not nearly as impressive as the last orb.

I went back only once, to take photos, and felt unsafe without my dog. In fact, I felt damn unwelcome… call me all the crazy you want, but that house has a very stale, very bad vibe.

And I know where I’m not wanted. I try not to tempt fate, when it’s already bitten me once.

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