The dark house, p.1
The Dark House, page 1
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There was nothing remarkable about the photograph, no reason it should be the first to catch my eye. Because it was a palladium print, it made the house into a kind of medium gray that looked almost silky, the way certain black-and-white pictures do. The label beside it on the gallery wall read The Dark House, 1975.
An evocative title, but the mystery was immediately ruined by the accompanying explanation. The house belonged to the photographer, Roger Benson. He’d used it exclusively to develop and display his photographs, hence locals started calling it the Dark House, like a darkroom, but a whole building.
Even with that explanation though, something unsettled me about the house without it being overtly strange. And once I’d noticed the house, I saw it everywhere, scattered throughout the exhibition next to Benson’s photographs of trees, desert landscapes, portraits of women in flowery dresses, old men with cigarettes in their hands. A few photographs in color showed that the house was in fact yellow. A yellow that when transformed into black-and-white took on the tone of lowering storm clouds.
One other photograph of the house caught my eye in particular, tucked away near the gallery’s exit like an afterthought. This one wasn’t shot by Benson; it was an archival print of the house from 1939, long before Benson owned it but noted in the accompanying text as the first year he’d visited it and showing that the house had been a fixture in Benson’s neighborhood when he was a child.
Back then, the Dark House was at once vastly different and undeniably the same. It was smaller, scarcely more than a single-room shack. At the same time, the seams were visible, the place where the addition would be grafted on to grow the house into the one Benson had obsessively photographed. The outline of the later house was already there to my eye, visible long before it had ever been conceived. The house in 1939 was the skull, and the extension Benson had built was the skin around it.
Furthering the comparison, the house had been bone-white then, an un-pristine color like ivory or old lace. The roof was cedar shingle, and the whole building looked worn, leaning, as though the house was already tired, already old—youth carrying the seeds of age. It had been built sometime around 1910 or 1911, it seemed, though the precise date was uncertain.
It didn’t help that darkness crowded the edges of the photograph, smudged, like thousands of fingerprints marring the picture over the years. I would have blamed the quality of the reproduction, except the shadows gathered in the windows too. They didn’t reflect light so much as hold it at bay.
“Isn’t that weird?” I asked Russ next time he circled past me in the gallery.
“Is it?” Russ shrugged.
Likely he was already thinking about the lunch I’d promised him in order to lure him to the museum galleries. Photography wasn’t really his thing. He was much more into works on paper, and I could tell he was getting restless. I’d known nothing about Benson before visiting the exhibition, only that the Contemporary’s photography exhibitions had impressed me in the past, and I had an afternoon to kill. Now I felt like I knew Benson too intimately, or one part of him at least—an obsessive part that left me unsettled.
But was it weird? I couldn’t explain it to myself, let alone to Russ. Lots of artists fixated on a single subject and represented it over and over in their work. Why, then, did I think Benson’s obsession with the house was strange? Was it just that the title had caught me, suggesting mystery, before it was easily explained?
I had a feeling talking would only make it worse, either entrenching me further in the sense of wrongness or making me see that my unease was flimsy. Plus, now that I’d thought of it, I was getting hungry too. I let Russ’s question go and steered us toward the exit.
* * *
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Russ was the one to bring the Dark House up again a week later. We were at his apartment, Russ sprawled on the overstuffed couch that looked like it had survived a war, and me perched on the beanbag opposite. A low coffee table covered with Styrofoam and cardboard takeout containers separated us. Russ didn’t own a TV. The whole room was dedicated to mismatched furniture, as if he’d designed the space with the lofty goal of hosting intellectual discussions, like an old-time salon.
Russ and I had roomed together in college, but we’d mutually agreed we were much better off as friends if we weren’t living together. His design aesthetic was only one of our points of divergence. Another being that any leftovers, even ones clearly labeled, inevitably ended up devoured the second I left them unattended.
“I did some digging.” Russ stabbed his chopsticks into a container of noodles and spoke with his mouth full. “On your photographer friend.”
It wasn’t just Russ’s stomach that was insatiable. He had an endless appetite for knowledge too. He loved research, regardless of the subject, and could fall down internet rabbit holes with the best of them. Back in college, he’d spent more time in the stacks than attending classes, which is probably why it’d taken him twice as long as me to graduate.
“The house you’re so interested in is in Providence, Rhode Island.” I vaguely recalled as much from one of the labels and nodded along, sliding my carton of beef and broccoli in among its gutted compatriots.
“Benson bought the house in the late ’60s and renovated it. He used the large front room as a gallery space and set up the back for his darkroom processing.”
So far, nothing that I hadn’t already read on the gallery walls.
“I would say it was weird that a struggling artist could afford to buy a house he never intended to live in, but it was basically a shack on the worst street in the poorest neighborhood, and it’d been empty for years by the time Benson bought it. Bad vibes, the kind of place that refused to sell.”
Russ reached forward, claiming my abandoned beef and broccoli, then held up his chopsticks to illustrate his point.
“Here’s weird thing number one. He never sold a single piece from the house gallery, by design. Even though he wasn’t exactly rolling in money, he insisted that the works shown in the Dark House were for display only.”
Russ paused for another bite before continuing.
“Weird thing number three.”
“What happened to two?”
“I’m getting to that.” Russ waved my question away. “It’s more dramatic in this order.”
“Then why not make this two and the other thing three?”
“Reverse chronology,” Russ deadpanned, as if that explained everything. I shut up to listen.
“Benson committed suicide in the house in 1989.”
“Fuck.” I rolled my shoulders, realizing I was suddenly holding them tense.
“Maybe that’s just sad, not weird. But thing number two is definitely weird. Also obscure and not something that can be confirmed.”
“Well?” I leaned forward; Russ’s sense of showmanship was beginning to wear on me.
“Benson used to play in the house with a group of friends when he was a kid.” My expression must have been gratifying because Russ’s grin widened. “And I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.”
“Where did you find all this?”
“In an interview Benson gave in 1987. He only talked about the incident once. Anyway, shush. So Benson and his friends had been hanging out in this abandoned house pretty much every day that summer. Then, out of the blue, one day they suddenly freaked out, all at once. They didn’t even talk about it, they just jumped up and ran for the door without knowing why. Nothing else was different, but a feeling came over them, Benson said.
“Benson was the last one out, and as he got to the door, he heard a girl’s voice behind him. She said, ‘Don’t leave me,’ or something like that. The house was basically only one room back then, so there wasn’t anywhere for anyone to hide, and he swore the voice didn’t belong to any of his friends. Besides, when he got outside, they were already out there waiting for him. There wasn’t anyone in the house behind him.”
Russ leaned back, looking satisfied.
“So was it a ghost?” I tried for scoffing, but it didn’t quite land. The same feeling that struck me when seeing Benson’s first photograph—an unnamed and unsettled feeling—crept up the back of my neck.
“Why not? Makes perfect sense.” I jumped as a third voice entered our conversation.
I’d completely forgotten Russ’s roommate Jared was there, even though I could see every part of the room.
“There are some places where bad things always happe
Nothing about Jared should have let him disappear, but he had an uncanny ability to make people forget his presence until he had something to say. Six foot three, broad shoulders, a bit of a beer belly, a massive caramel-colored beard with a full head of hair to match, and a wardrobe that consisted entirely of Hawaiian shirts in the brightest colors known to man. Not exactly the kind of presence that should fade into the background, yet Jared managed it every single time.
“What?” I twisted to look at him, trying to hide that I’d literally jumped at his sudden interjection.
“There are places,” Jared said, taking another hit, breathing more smoke in a way that made me wonder whether I was getting a contact high or whether it was just Jared’s presence that always left me feeling like I’d fallen out of sync with reality, “where time is circular. There’s no beginning or end, events just happen, like the turn of a wheel. Something bad happens, then it happens again. Or something else bad happens, but it’s all part of the same thing. The cyclical nature of horror, you know?”
He spoke like everything he was saying made perfect sense, explaining a known pattern of the universe, an agreed-upon and established reality. Like a film student offering up a lofty explanation for why the masked killer returned for the sequel despite being killed at the end of the previous movie that didn’t rest on the simpler reason of the studio seeing an opportunity to make more money. It left me feeling even more off-balance than before. I glanced to Russ for support, but he was busy inspecting the containers on the table, picking bites from each where food remained.
“A bad thing happened before Benson got to the house, or after, or during. It’s still happening. He brushed up against one edge of the wheel and boom.” Jared mimed a gun, brains blown out, suicide.
Russ hadn’t elaborated on how Benson killed himself. But a shotgun barrel stretching his mouth, bullet through the soft palate and out the top of his skull, felt right somehow. As though Jared naming it had made it so, fixing it in time from his vantage point in the future.
“You can go to the house, you know,” Jared said.
His tone was casual, conversational, but then he met my eyes with an intensity that felt wholly out of place given how long he’d spent quietly smoking while Russ and I talked.
“Like a museum?” My tongue felt too big for my mouth, weirdly numb.
“No, but it’s still there, and no one lives there.” Was he a research freak like Russ? An expert on little-known twentieth-century photographers? His expression gave nothing away.
“So,” he shrugged, slumping back in his chair like he’d already lost interest. “You can go.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. It was very like Jared to spout obscure information out of nowhere, but it still unnerved me, every single time, and I was in the mood to push for once.
“I know things about houses, Lilly.” Russ gave me his best Eastwood squint.
The impression, along with the character name, pinged something in the recesses of my brain; I recognized the quote, modified to suit the current conversation, from In the Line of Fire. A deep pull, and somehow it unnerved me even more, because Jared was just so damned weird. I’d never understood what Russ saw in him. Maybe he always paid his rent on time.
“Especially haunted ones.” Here, Jared allowed a particularly large lungful of smoke to trickle from his lips, leaving it to rise like a curtain blurring his features – an unsettling effect.
The absurd thought gripped me that Jared himself was a ghost, which would explain his uncanny ability to go unnoticed in a room. I wondered again about that contact high, then decided Jared and Russ must have talked about the house and now, for whatever reason, Jared was trying to get under my skin. Best to let it go, not give him the satisfaction of seeing me disturbed. Somehow, though, I was left with the feeling that Jared had scored some kind of victory. I was thrown off my game, and he’d already shrugged the whole conversation off, forgotten. His attention shifted to lighting a second blunt, or perhaps it was number three. He was already fading back into the décor of Russ’s room, another forgotten piece of furniture.
“How about it?” Russ asked, a glint in his eye as dread crawled up my spine.
I didn’t have to ask what he meant, or question what my answer would be. I could feel the road trip coming on, like a storm built up inside a bank of gray-yellow clouds.
“We could leave tomorrow,” I told Russ. “First thing.”
* * *
Dark House—1979
The artist leans over the developing tray, rocking it gently. Overhead, more prints hang to dry. A woman putting wash on a clothesline. A man and his teenage son loading crates of produce into the back of a pickup truck. A white clapboard church with its steeple pointing at the brightness of the sun.
They are timeless images that could belong anywhere or anywhen. Except, watching them develop, the artist knows—they only belong here; they belong to the Dark House. He knew even as he transferred the film from the camera, fingers sure in the complete blackness. He’d felt as if someone stood just behind his shoulder, waiting. And now his fear is confirmed. He won’t be able to sell them, he won’t even be able to show these.
Because she is there, in every single one.
Sometimes a girl, sometimes a woman, but always the same even when she changes. The hem of her dirty white nightgown peeks out from beneath the billow of fresh laundry. One pointed ear of a mask that sometimes looks like a rabbit and sometimes looks like a pig rises between the church pews. Her shadow falls against the side of the truck, even though there’s nothing visible to cast it.
Even in the pictures where he can’t see her, he knows she’s there.
Sometimes he can go months without her appearing. There’s never any way to tell, not until he’s in the darkroom, feeling the held-breath sensation of her presence, watching over his shoulder, waiting to know she is seen.
She wasn’t in the photographs when he took them. There’s only one place she is, ever. This house. This fucking house. If he developed the pictures elsewhere … But he never could.
He snatches the images from the line. He shreds them with trembling hands and lets the pieces fall. Fragments of a row of crops sprouting from the soil, scraps of an old woman’s shoes. And the girl. The woman. The rabbit. Whatever the hell she is. Always, always, her.
The artist buries his head in his hands. They smell faintly of developing chemicals, but that doesn’t stop him from scrubbing them over his skin.
What is he going to do?
What is there to do?
He will do what he always does. He will keep working. Keep taking pictures. And hope.
A board creaks somewhere deeper in the house. A sigh. Words, without breath, but words still.
I’m here, waiting for you. I’ll always be here, right here where you left me. Waiting.
* * *
In person, the house looked exactly the way it did in Benson’s photographs. Somehow, it looked the way it did in all his photographs, all at once.
I climbed out of the car, stretching, and my back cracked as I did. We’d left early and driven straight through, a roughly four-hour trip, with only one quick stop to refuel—Russ, not the car. It didn’t matter that he’d brought snacks with him. For as long as I’d known him, Russ always ate like he’d just spent a week starving, and he was as happy to sink his teeth into gas station beef jerky as filet mignon.
“So what now?” I squinted at the house, its pale, indefinable yellow.
I’d been thinking of nothing but the house for a week, and now that we stood across the street from it, I didn’t know how to proceed.
“This is your rodeo, man.” Russ slouched against the side of the car affably. “Knock? Walk in like you own the place?”
I wondered if we should have brought Jared, since he knew so much about the damned place. But then I imagined him slipping right out of the car like a hitchhiking ghost somewhere along the way, ceasing to exist the moment I ceased to notice him. I suspected his role was as the creepy foreteller of doom, sending other characters on their way with ominous warnings. His part in the story was done.
