I get shot at a lot, but that isn't what scares me about this
job. When I arrive at a home and see someone burst out of the
front door clutching a rifle, I know what to expect. They have something
to lose, They're scared, and they don't know what to do. So
I tell them I give them resources and fighting back. I refer them to
law firms who do pro bone or work, government bodies and charities that can
help them get back on their feet. I speak calmly and with empathy,
and people listen. Some even thank me as they pack their things up and
drive away. People ending themselves are harder to deal with. I get at
least three or four a year, and people who do it out of spite
really go all out on the spectacle. The harder it is for the bank
to clean up, the better. And people assume the bank puts their house
in the market the second it ceased. But a house can sit forgotten for
years before I'm sent to look it over. Lone bodies swinging in empty living
rooms, flesh like melted candlewax from all that time left in open air.
I find it profoundly sad. These people lay themselves out like a spiteful diorama,
and then no one turns up. They slit their throats while clutching eviction
notices, and by the time I arrive, the blood is dried and the
ink has faded. The worst ones don't just hurt themselves, but they're loved
ones too. Packs are more common with the elderly, but it isn't always
octagenarians families too. It's rare, but it does happen. A sun baked
house with drawn curtains so much time passed them dry autumn heat that the skin
and paper thin, receding lips black toothless gums born in a rictus grin hell
of a thing to see staring out of a crib. Each house is its
own apocalypse, its own ruined city for me to wander, whiskey in the
toilet, cistern, ventanel under the bed, bills past two. And it
doesn't just end with the people we kick out. These places are empty so
long you will often get squatters, usually harmless, not always. Some have
the potential to be thoroughly lethal, stringing men and women with flinty eyes and
missing teeth who come bursting out of the multi blankets and indoor tents, slashing
box cutters wildly in the air. You could play tic tac toe on my
forearm from all the defensive wounds. Even when they moved on. The things
they leave behind aren't exactly safe. Fumes from homemade labs can rout your lungs
and disease positive needles stuff down the sides of old sofa cushions way to prick
curious fingers, and the cooks get real paranoid about being robbed, so they
like to rig their homes with traps. They get inventive with whatever's lying around.
Shots of glass on spring loaded broom handles, trick floorboards over boxes of
razor blades, infections, smeared knives hidden beneath false window sills. Every now
and again I find a trap that's been set off, a baseball back rigged,
a lash out, and anyone entering the kitchen blood and hair dripping from
the bent nails hammered into the wood. No sign of the poor guy who
set it off, just the grizzly trail of gore leading out of the house
and into the nearby woods. Most likely candidate is the guy who set the
trap. These addicts can stay out for days and pass out, and when
they wake up, the first thing they do is head for their stash,
not remembering what they left behind. One time I found the guy lying a
few feet away from his own trap. He kept his money in this old
metal lunchbox at the back of a cupboard, and he'd rigged it so anyone
reaching in would get a hell of a surprise. The blade went in at
his elbow and left just below the knuckle on his thumb. No helping him
after that. He died bleeding out and his late grandmother's called Lilonium. What
a god awful way to go, and his little lunchbox on the ground and
empty of everything worth taking. Police reckoned. Someone was with him when it
happened. Must have gotten scared, so they took the cash and left him
to die. It'd take a full month before I found him, and no
one even reported him missing. In the interim, you think the kid would
be angry, but he wasn't. He just looked like he was scared.
Nineteen, going through withdrawal and dying slowly, curled up like a baby,
one hand gripping his open wrist. You can't trap the ocean in your fist,
it leaks through the fingers. That kid knew what was coming. I
could see it in his eyes, terrified. Meth is a hell of a
drug. These poor guys fry their brains out in the middle of nowhere.
I can't even begin to imagine what they think they see out there, what
visits them in the dark. Found this trailer once that had been rigged with
damn near a hundred traps. They weren't particularly sophisticated, but they were numerous,
and vicious and desperate. They circled the lone motor home out in the
middle of the desert like an invading army, made of knives and bear traps
and stolen guns and even a few hastily made IDs. Took me in a
bomb squad a week just to get to the front door, and by the
time we opened it, we were all fairly certain of one simple fact.
This place hadn't been rigged to keep thieves out. Whoever had said the traps
had been scared of something, leaving probably just drug fueled paranoia on behalf of
whoever said them. But I think the idea that something was in there waiting
for us got under our skin anyway. During the operation. We'd sometimes get
shouted reports of someone moving around in the trailer, and the hall site would
go to hell. Armed men and women lying in their bellies, iron sights
lined up on the front door, handshaking. I guess we kept asking ourselves
over and over, what's in there that had someone so scared? They said,
all these traps. When we finally got our answer, the first thing
we found was a meth lab, pretty par for the course, less normal
was a body that had been torn to pieces, halfway to dust after all
that time in that heated past, but it was strewn all over the interior
walls, floor, ceiling. Couldn't argue who was a natural death or a
product of scavengers, not unless coyotes can work a lock and key. Or
was left of his head? And torso looked like he'd gone through hell.
I'm hardly a friends of expert, but it had looked to me like he
died slowly and painfully, missing fingers teeth when I plucked out torture is what
it made me think of. Even stranger than all of that, though,
was what we found sat on the kitchen counter, next to all those broken
beakers and stained chemistry equipment, A doll not like a kid's doll, porcelain
like a collector's item that had seemed better days, scared the hell out of
me given the circumstances, and all couldn't shake the feeling whoever had made all
those traps had done so with that thing in mind, which begged the question,
who is the poor guy stuck inside the trailer and what had happened to
him? Cops wrote it off. Meth is a hell of a drug,
so they say, we all knew that, Only I wasn't so sure.
I've seen a lot of weird stuff. Who knows what visited that poor guy
out in the wild, so far from civilization. A lot of life gets
lived out in the world, out in the plains or in the forests and
amongst hills, far from prying eyes. You get a sense of it in
my job. The sheer quantity of untold stories, failed dreams, great triumphs,
abandoned canvasses, well worn guitars, heydays that came and went or simply
never came at all. Most stories follow rhythm. Most some, like that
doll, raised profound questions. Others aren't really stories at all, so much
as nightmares, just waiting for the next victim. This world is full of
hidden needles waiting for probing hands. There are rare occasions where I'll advise the
bank not to sell a property. They become part of a kind of Nogo
zone. The government is set up around the country. I only see bits
of this machinery at work. Whatever bureaucracy manages it is way over my paygrade.
But there is a system in place for managing the worst of the worst.
I'm not talking ghosts either. None of the examples I've given so far
would be candidates. Sounds messed up, I know. Scrub the blood,
scrape the brains, pick the shock and pellets out of the plaster. If
the next family who move in have to contend with the ghosts of a few
clumsy methods or disgruntled former owners, well so be it. No for a
place to be deemed and no go it has to be beyond recovery and an
active threat to life. I'm talking factories with bottomless holes that pump out enough
radiation the government has to build a nuclear dumpsite just to make a convincing cover.
Although that is a bit of an extreme example. Most of the time
we just blame it on radon or meth fumes and condemn it. At this
one place, a farmhouse where a family of five had lived for nearly sixty
years. By the time I got there, the kids for adults, and
the parents had been dead for a while. The children had resisted selling the
family home, tried to keep up with the payments, but they had their
own debts, and in the end the bank got its pound of flesh.
At a glance, the house didn't look too bad. A bit run down,
sure, but my standards are low. Cracked in low, windows are
intact, no graffiti, roof hadn't been stripped, Satellite dish was still up.
From where I sat in my car gulping down a lukewarm bottle of water
that had spent the drive tunneling around the passenger footwell, the house was relatively
untouched by anything except nature and time. Something about that gave me pause.
Shame I didn't listen to the good feeling telling me it was all sorts of
weird that an isolated house had gone undecayed for so long. I grabbed the
keys the sheriff had given me and went inside, hoping for an easy gig.
Three hours later, and I was crawling out a kitchen window. I'd
smashed the shirt and skin in my back cut to ribbons. I stumbled to
my car, chest near bursting from the pounding of my heart, and my
eyes fixed on the empty window frame. I had just escaped a lone figure,
barely visible with the bright sun in my eyes, but still too substantial
to be a mere ghost. My wounds were a testament to that. Once
the doctor had finished patching me up, I sat in the waiting room and
tried calling the former owners, the siblings, one after the I wanted to
know what had attacked me. If anyone knew what I was walking into,
they'd be hell to pay. If so. The oldest son was the first
to answer. I didn't go all in straight away. I asked probing questions,
took my time before I mentioned the basement. The guy laughed when I
brought it up, told me he hated going down there as a kid because
he'd heard the weirdest noises, like someone moaning. They all thought a ghost
lived down there in the dark, and to keep them from hurting themselves or
playing around with stuff they shouldn't, their father had embellished this ghost given it
a name. Marian lived in the basement, hiding amongst the crates of old
photos and clothes. She lurked behind the half disassembled lawnmower, scuttling away to
the dark places at the very edge of your eyesight. Marian had long fingernails
and a haggard flower sack dress. She had dark lips and a pointed nose,
and a warp the size of your thumb. Marion eight children, their
dad had told them with glee. And if Marian knew there were three bite
sized kids living just above her, she'd come out of the basement and come
crawling up the stairs with arms as long as a body, and she'd slink
away into their bedrooms using the shadows cover, and she'd start by taking tiny
little bites out of any bare feet that lay dangling in the cold. What
about that freezer did you ever use her? I asked, Oh God,
no, he said, even now, that basement gives me the creeps.
And that freezer was where Marian lived, or so he figured. As kids,
so we stayed the hell away from it. It was just always there
in the back, looking old and forgotten. I think Dad used to go
hunting when we were little, and that's where he kept the meat. But
he phased all that out before I turned five. He seems so sincere that
I didn't tell him what I'd found in that house at the end of my
inspection. He didn't know that behind that freezer was a false wall, and
behind that false wall basement number two homemade. God knows how the father managed
it with no one noticing, but he dug it out and made a private
soundproof space, hollered out a room about the size of your typical jail cell.
The furniture was threadbare, deliberately so, a single mattress propped up against
one wall, an iron shackle bolted into the foundation, a dentist's chair modified
with restraints, and a stain, a vague raw shack blob of ancient brown
in almost greens that pulled outwards from a patch in the corner. It had
texture. I knew that stain. I'd seen it before, residue left behind
after the professionals had finished peeling her desiccated corpse of a hard surface. At
first, I assumed someone had moved the source of that stain. They were
even footprints, but they didn't look right. Something about them made me queasy.
They had not been left in the residue, they were made of it.
Something or someone covered in that stuff had been stomping around down there until
that moment. The inspection had been mundane and boring. But it isn't every
day you stumble across a hidden dungeon. Now, I was suddenly presented with
a hell of a family secret, and one that didn't quite make sense.
I stood there for a good minute, trying to make the piece of that
puzzle fit. Had someone moved a corpse and got un covered in rotten flesh,
then walked around leaving a trail? If so, why the hell had
they done it barefoot? And why not clean up afterwards? And how had
they been so clumsy yet so clean as well? There were no drag marks.
I took another look of those prints, and something inside my gut soured.
Small feet a woman's We all know the story. Don't make me go
over it. Basement out in the middle of nowhere restraints a family man that
no one suspects he'd hunted all right, sicko. So who had died that
basement and who had left those prints? Not all of them were on the
floor either. With an increasingly shaky hand. I tracked a few to the
wall where they mounted the vertical surface and continued upwards and onto the ceiling.
Just like that, A cold sweat gathered on the back of my neck.
In a powerful sense of the uncanny ran over me like icy water. Somewhere
overhead, the wind blew, and the bows of trees groaned in the yard,
sounds of another world. I could see it in my mind, up
there, not far away, my car sitting in the shade. Those images
felt like they belonged to another world, though I desperately wanted to rejoin it,
to leave the squalid little hole behind. All I had to do was
walk out of that basement and make it for my are Only I wasn't so
sure I wanted to move at all. I felt like I might break something
brittle. The notion that the creeping dread I felt was all in my head,
a product of an overactive imagination, nothing more. And yet I got
this feeling that if I tried to run, the nightmare would spill out into
the real world and give chase. I even tried telling myself I didn't know
what happened in that room, not for sure. It could have been a
game one played between him and the wife. But then I looked at the
chair again, at the cracked and frayed leather of ancient straps. There were
teeth marks on some of them. I took a deep breath and regained control
of my legs. Unless I saw something alive down there, I had to
assume I really was alone. So I turned and began to walk, eyes
forward. Mine steeled against the myriad of little groans and creeks that felt as
if they followed me, going from shadow to shadow. I couldn't stop myself
from filling in the blanks of that basement's history, even as I told myself
to stop. Maybe she died first. Maybe he did. Maybe he got
bored and left it the staff, or maybe he nearly got caught and decided
to put an end to it all. Maybe she snuck something sharp and did
it herself. But she died for sure, and she stayed dead a long
time, at least a couple of months. With that kind of liquefaction,
she lost a lot of cohesion, skin, muscle, blood, like the
plug of mold that forms on top of forgotten coffee. I could see it
in my head, her collapse, the claimation, time laps, a riot
of colors. Only somehow the natural cycle broke. She didn't go away completely,
and no one came to take her away. Those were her prints on
the floor and walls and ceiling, weren't they. She laid down, she
died, and then somehow she got back up. By the time I reached
the top of the basement steps, I'd scared myself so bad that sweat was
pouring off me. So far, the only things I'd seen on my way
were just old boxes and crates and ancient bids of crap weed whackers and leaf
blowers with cobwebs and defunct logos fading away. But that didn't mean I was
alone. There was something wrong with that place. I could feel it,
a radiant heat, a palpable aura of hatred, even in the absence of
anything seemingly real. It was so bad that as I opened the door,
I actually felt a moment of childlike relief, a little like how you might
feel racing back to bed after going to the toilet in the middle of the
night, convinced some ghosts was just inches behind you. I laughed, and
something cold and hard wrapped around my uncle. A hand had reached up between
the slats of the stairs, like it was reaching straight out of the world
of make belief and into this one where things are real. I stared down,
heartbeat like thunder in my ears, and slowly began to process what I
was seeing in bits and pieces. First was the hand, gnarled black like
a badly sketched shadow, visible only because it caught the light coming through the
open door, And then beneath it in the shadow a face like a skull
wrapped in a garbage bag, the plastic pulled tight so you could see the
suffocating outline of empty eyes and a gaping mouth. I'd expected something wetter,
something straight out of a bad horror movie. In reality, whatever was in
that basement had undergone a strange transformation. I only ever saw it in parts,
so I can't say for sure what all of it was like, but
it's sure as hell didn't look like a ghost or a corpse or anything else
I'd ever seen or thought i'd seen in life or movies. It looked like
a monster, the real deal, and I reacted like a child seeing the
Buggeyman. I made some weird, half muffled grown of fear and ripped my
leg away so quickly that I surprised myself and got free. Or whatever was
hiding under the stairs was quick. Before I had timed had taken another step,
it had left its hiding place, climbed the stairs. I was already
driving me to the ground. The last thing I saw before my chintz smashed
into the kitchen floor was that Marian really did where a flower sacked dress.
At the time, this strange detail passed over me without notice, But in
hindsight, the fact that the sun would later recount that particular item of clothing
convinced me his father had been the man responsible for that hidden basement. It
was nutlike it had been waiting undiscovered when the family moved in. And on
top of that, the father must have been a real piece of crap to
inject that sort of sickening detail into a story. He told his kids he'd
likely done it so if his prisoner ever escaped and his kids saw her,
their first instinct would be to screen for their lives and run. I didn't
know any of this at the time, of course, I had only vague
notions of what had attacked me. Something hateful, for sure, something that
had died in that awful room and come back to life. God, she
was so angry. She pinned me, knelt at my back, and howled
like a banshee that had been hit by a car. I was terrified at
the sound, at the feeling of helplessness, at the realization that this was
a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. She went to work on my back
with fingers I couldn't see, but could feel as white hot tattoo needle pain.
It lasted only a few seconds. The agony was enough to send me
spasms that knocked her off and onto the floor. The tiny moments of freedom
was all I needed. I crawled to my feet and jumped head first out
the nearest window. I didn't give a damn about any cuts I might acquire.
If you could have felt what I felt, you wouldn't have either.
These weren't scratches. Doctors compared my wounds to those left by box jellyfish,
the kind of thing that causes muscles beneath the wilt and whither after a million
of hypodermic needles have turned the flesh into porous sponge. I had to get
skin grafts. I had to get rid of my car because they couldn't scrub
what I'd left in my skin from their leather seats. Even now, my
back looks like I got run over by a mower. Still hurts when I
put my top on each morning. Somehow, they're not even the worst than
my wounds, just the biggest, the most visible. At least, those
scars made it easy to convince the bank not to sell. Normally it takes
a lot of effort, but they took one look of the doctor's reports and
agreed to condemn it thoroughly. Pass the land onto whatever strange governmental department handles
this kind of thing. That particular house had been left to crumble. No
piece of paper or deed or mortgage payment is taking it back from Marion.
We can only shut it off. The land is fenced, and every window
has been slapped with so many toxic gas signs that I can only hope no
one else is stupid enough to ever go back inside. Looking back, I
really should have listened to my instincts. Squatters don't leave a place alone without
good reason.