The Murder House
The Porsche pulls into the driveway, spinning its wheels. Jim had driven fast and hard. Even worse than usual. Susan and Kyle both were uncomfortable with Jim’s vehicular aggression, and Kyle kept noticing how his dad’s eyes looked unusually sunken and vacant. Throughout the drive, Kyle and his mom shifted nervously, clutched their seats, and Susan had almost spoken up and asked Jim to cool out on the NASCAR stuff. But, predictably, Susan had stiffened, held her tongue.
At least their car was bigger and better made than most of the others on the road. Certainly an advantage of an SUV. That’d long given Susan some semblance of solace as Jim, snarling and squinting, would weave his way furiously through traffic…
Mia and Lisa are waiting in the driveway. Mia is scrolling on her phone and looks up smiling widely, upon seeing her parents roll in. Lisa looks positively giddy. She’s animated, a whirlwind of movement. She’s pointing her phone at the house and its environs, snapping photos like a screaming schoolgirl at a boyband concert.
Jim, Susan, and Kyle hop out of the car, press the doors shut. Mia and Kyle, Mia and Jim nod hello, exchange brief, awkward hugs. Then Susan and Mia hug tightly and Susan hugs Lisa too and the ladies make the typical sounds people make and say the typical things people say when they haven’t seen each other in a while.
Kyle thinks he’s going to have another panic attack. A stream of cold sweat runs down his back. The house… It looks so sinister, with its jutting spires and church-like structure. The big, horrific antique house, with its twin turrets, looks like a castle, a dark gothic building from Transylvania. He can picture a vampire in it, sucking blood, sleeping in a coffin. The whole place just has a choking ugliness and cold touch of evil to it.
Kyle’s body quivers. His breath skips. Then he’s breathing as if he’d just run a race, his chest rising and falling in deep heaves. His anxiety claws from within, bares its fangs. It leaps like the spring of a beast. He then reaches into his jean pocket, plucks out a bottle of pills. He has 3 different prescriptions. These are for the panic attacks, if a severe one strikes. If he can’t breathe. Like now.
His family oblivious, Kyle stops in his tracks. He shakes a couple pink pills into his cupped hand and swallows them down. The dose is supposed to be one- but fuck that. He wants instant relief. The pills take a couple minutes to kick in, but when they fall in his mouth and he tastes their bitter flavor, when he feels them slug down his esophagus, he instantly feels better, knowing relief is on its way.
The five walk towards the front porch. They trudge up the curiously steep front steps.
Opening the door, it’d be hard to imagine this was once a crime scene. There are no bloodstains. There’s no yellow tape. Despite its creepy exterior, the house’s interior looks, well, normal. But to Kyle, it still doesn’t seem right. He senses something in the air. A heaviness. And his nose crinkles at the strong smell of cleaning fluid, an overly sterile, antiseptic scent that reminds him of a hospital.
Lisa, who’d been giddy and excited, quiets down too. She folds her arms over her chest, seemingly awestruck by the house’s grandiosity. Inside, the house appears cavernous, endless, in a way, almost like a desert.
Entering inside, Susan’s heels click on the hardwood, then click to an abrupt stop. Susan, Mia, Lisa, and Kyle freeze in fear. The four are on tenterhooks, nervous wrecks, and they pan their gazes, furtively, every which direction. To them, there’s a gravity, a pull, a weight. They feel 100 pounds heavier.
Only Jim doesn’t feel it. Only Jim plods in, dragging his gnarled leg, as he does, and grunts something barely intelligible as he lurches forward.
The others remain frozen stiff, in the anteroom. They just stand there, looking around, their eyes full of anticipation. As if they think perhaps a ghost might jump out, or a reanimated corpse, forgotten somehow, might burst and claw up from the floorboards, a hungry zombie chomping on their limbs, the whole scene turning into the Walking Dead.
But nothing. It’s so quiet in there. Far quieter than the bustling city they’d just left, with its car horns, construction noises, the jackhammer next to them doing roadwork on the highway. That damn jackhammer happily drowning out Korn, but also overpowering Kyle’s “uplifting thoughts” meditation music of Tibetan harps and chimes and winding, dreamy synths.
None of that now. The house is quiet. Quiet as the dead. Quiet as Kyle hopes the dead would remain.
Realizing the apocalypse isn’t upon them, Mia and Lisa’s postures slacken and the two exhale deeply, pan their gazes one last time, and then walk up the stairs, to Mia’s room, Lisa resuming her photo snapping, pressing her long red fingernails to her phone. Lisa is again electric, preening and posing like a schoolgirl, smiling for selfies.
Kyle follows behind them. Lisa hangs her head over her shoulder and gazes down at him, flirtatiously, flashes him an inviting smile and flutters her heavy lashes his way. She likes his long hair, boyish looks, and thinks he has that quiet, mass shooter vibe. It turns her on. But, unlike most men, he pays her no mind.
She’s surprised and intrigued not to have her honey eyes reciprocated. She’s always liked guys who ignore her…
“…”
Susan clicks toward the kitchen, hanging her head to her phone, scrolling through her Facebook. Even when being a phone zombie, she still steps with that confident, catwalk-type strut she’d picked up from her earlier modeling and cheerleading work.
But she stops in her tracks when her phone’s screen flashes red and freezes. She thumbs at her phone a couple times, shakes it, but nothing. Sighing, she mutters, “Oh, well fuck you, too, Mark Zuckerberg!” and slips the phone into the front pocket of her blouse.
Then, lifting her head, her heart skips a beat. She gasps and claps her hands to her face when she sees the kitchen island covered in splattered blood; below the island, on the floor, lies a woman, approximately her age, wearing a white robe that’s stained with big red blotches, the woman appearing riddled with gunshots, her face twisted in terror.
Susan screams. A loud, exploding, shrill scream. Once the sound hits the air, the scene vanishes, like a TV screen clicked off, and the kitchen is empty, white and clean, sparkling new.
Mia rushes in.
“Mom, oh my God, are you okay? What… What happened?” Mia stutters and grabs hold of her mom, hugging her closely and swinging her gaze around the room, cautiously, her eyebrows upturned.
“Nothing, I just thought I… It’s nothing…” Susan repeats. She knew she shouldn’t have snooped online and looked at the crime scene photos. This was where…
Lisa rushes in, her breath stertorous, her eyes leaping from her skull. She yells between heavy breaths, “Hey, what is it?! I was in the bathroom. Are you guys okay?”
The two look toward Lisa. Both have pursed lips and blanched faces. They nod, silently.
Lisa hurries past them, points her phone and snaps a picture of the kitchen island.
“Like, you guys, you, you know… this is where the kid saw his mother and then…”
“Yes. Yes, we know,” Susan cuts in, speaking in a tone that implies this wasn’t a discussion she wanted to have.
