Some people swore that the house was haunted. We never believed it but we were happy to let others think so.
The house’s appearance helped. It was right out of the props department of a movie studio. A tall, narrow, wooden house with shutters hanging by a corner, swinging and slamming in the slightest breeze, slats missing, standing alone on a treeless hill at the end of a street. Rotten steps leading to a front door that was missing most of its paint. Broken windows, loose trim, odd sounds and smells. Some said there had been trees near it at at one time but they got scared away.
OK. Not all of that was done by supernatural forces. Unless you count teenage boys and girls. The windows were broken as far back as I remember. And the strange smells could be from garbage — or worse — thrown through those windows. We never figured out where the sounds came from but we never looked that hard. No one I knew ever went into the old place.
The history of the old place went back a few generations, with the usual story of well-heeled gentry building a house to match their status followed by the family slowly slipping down the ladder of respectability. Throw in a few cases of madness and it’s a cliched pulp novel. But this family didn’t dwindle into obscurity. They just vanished. They had been seen out and about in the town one day, with dinner and some shopping in the evening, and the next day they disappeared. No wagon came for them, their own carriages and horses stood waiting. The servants came to an empty house that morning but never returned, not even to collect their wages.
There it stood for years, decades even, brooding and deteriorating on its empty hillside, its only companions bats, pigeons, stray cats, bored teenagers.
Then one day a car drove up to the old house, an old car no one could recall seeing or even identify, long, black, curved, with wire wheels. It drove slowly through the town, whining in the wrong gear as it were being punished for wanting to go faster, and turned down the road to the house. We followed as closely as we dared, on foot, on bicycles, wondering what this was about.
We waited at the end of the drive, sitting, squatting, hiding behind our bicycles and each other. The car lurched to a halt and backfired, so loud we could hear it echo. The driver got out, so tall he unfolded as he came, and turned to open the rear door. After a pause, he closed it again, straightened his coat, and walked up the steps, his hands folded behind his back. The front door opened as he was halfway up the stairs and he walked in, closing it behind him.
Half the watchers left, as fast as they could go, mumbling to themselves and waving away things only they could see.As the rest of us watched, the house seemed to shimmer and blur ever so slightly, and as we looked it got straighter, taller, less slumped. Windows were opened and were once again windows with unbroken glass. Lamps were lit, and loud thumps and deep vibrating hums came from the earth under and around the house.
When we saw the trees slowly walking across the hillside, slumped as if in shame at their faithlessness, we all backed up slowly and made our way back to town, never once turning our backs on the house.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.