Familiar

It was scary how much effort my friends put into trying to make me believe in ghosts. Afterwards they told me it was my fault. On a rainy, February day in New Orleans -- not really cold so much as Unpleasant, the kind of day where you can imagine what it's like to be a forgotten sock on a damp, cement basement floor, growing and being eaten by mold -- we were talking about faith. Just M, B, G, and I.

G was explaining that she was having trouble finding a church because all of them were so Different. They weren't at all like the calm, contemplative congregations she was raised in farther north. B, ever the anthropologist, said Everything was Different down here. It was a hodge podge of faiths and practices that got together for a party and woke up the next morning having no idea how to get home, so they did the responsible adult thing, had a shotgun wedding and raised the kids as best they knew how.

Anyway, I said something about how disappointed I was that I hadn't met a single vampire or ghost since moving to New Orleans. That was all the inspiration they needed, apparently.

Working in the office, I didn't get to go out much, but one of my duties was to go and visit homeowners and interview them. B was working on this particular sight where one Mr. Breaux lived and one day, the first day after B went to the sight she and I were at a coffee shop with M (B was a teetotaler).

"I don't know, something about that house, man..." she said, stirring honey into her tea.

"What about it? Did you find a closet full of pornographic magazines and assault rifles?" M asked.

"No!" B snapped.

"That would be funny if it hadn't happened once," M said.

"Really?" I asked.

"Oh yeah--"

"The point, M, is that people died in the house," B said.

M shrugged. "So, it's New Orleans. Lots of people die in their houses where their mothers and fathers and ancestors died before them. It's tradition. They're big on tradition here."

"The guys whole family drowned in the house during the flood," B said.

"And he wants to live there?"

"To be close," B said.

Strange Things got passed around the work site, then the warehouses, and finally, as these Things go, got to us in the office. B found the tools rearranged in the morning when she got to the site and no sign of a break-in. Every time the framers tried to put up a wall where there wasn't one before, the nails would bend and it took hours of frustrating work to get everything level. B was working late one night and her foot went through the rotten wood and she swore that as she struggled she felt a hand pull her out. People found mysterious trinkets.

"The weirdest thing," B said one night when we were all out at Tipitina's and she was taking a break from dancing manically. "Every morning there's food there. I mean, like, a bag of beignets and coffee. Sometimes even a crockpot full of gumbo. I always thought it was Mr. Breaux coming by before work, but I asked him about it today and he said he had no idea what I was talking about. I think he's pulling my leg, but..."

She let that hang there, then shrugged and darted off back into the fray. Rebirth was playing that night and so there was a full crowd and Stasi-like dudes standing by the door checking IDs. I didn't feel like dancing. I never feel like dancing, actually. People shoved into me while I stood by the second floor railing, contemplating the crowd below while the brass band blared. Vibrations up and down the skin. It felt like a rough caress, if sandpaper could be soft.

This was two days before I had to go visit Mr. Breaux. On a Monday, mid-morning, we agreed to go and meet him, G and I. We worked as partners, typically. She would take pictures while I would talk to our clients, writing down their tragedies, hopes, and disappointments and trying to make a three-paragraph story out of it. I'd argued with my boss over the length of the biographies, but, as always, I lost and so they were always three paragraphs. I had to break down every single person's life that way: what they did before Katrina, what happened to them during the Tragedy, and what happened to them afterward. I wondered if someone dissected  my life, where they would make the incisions.

The house wasn't far from where IB lived. Just around the corner, in fact, somewhere in Treme near a large, institutional-looking building that I was never sure if it was a school or a penitentiary. B was waiting for us in the front, right on the street. It had been raining and it was that uncomfortable, wet-cold so unusual for a Midwesterner.

As we were driving, G wouldn't look at me. This was unusual since she was generally chipper no matter what the atrocious circumstances. But that day she and I drove silently to and from the office and toward our destination for our semi-exploitative endeavors. Finally, when we were only a few blocks away, she said, "I had a few nightmares last night..."

"More than one," I asked.

"Yeah. More than one. The first one I dreamed that I was drowning. I've heard that's one of the most common nightmares, after having all your teeth fall out. It makes sense that that would be one of the most common fears. So I woke up from that and I brushed my teeth. When I went back to bed I had this dream that I was in a house filled with everyone I knew and they were all saying 'I'm sorry' over and over again, but nobody would tell me why they were so sorry. Finally, I got up from my chair and they all looked away. Someone knocked at the door and I went to answer it and there was my grandpa and grandma, they're dead, and you, waiting at the door. You asked me to go with you..."

She drew the Parallel between me and the Dead right as we pulled up to the house and got out without another word. She took her time getting her camera.

Mr. Breaux was much younger than I expected, maybe in his mid-thirties, and he looked haunted. He didn't actually look at me when we shook hands, but right past my shoulder. B nudged me unnecessarily to be polite. It took him several seconds of try-and-fail to find the correct key to let us into his house.

It was a two-story behemoth, the kind that most people associate with New Orleans. You could easily imagine gentry living there from the outside. After we walked through, though, it was all rotten wood and cobwebs, dust and pieces of a house.

"This is the entryway. Sorry I don't have a mat. There used to be a mat here," Mr. Breaux said. He nodded to himself and led us through the broken house. "This is the kitchen. Mom cooks a lot of good food here. Follow me... here is the living room. This is where my sister spends most of her time working on homework. Wave sister..."

He waved at some figure who wasn't there. I carefully did not look at G or B, but took careful notes and asked polite questions about his mother, sister, the history of the house, how FEMA had screwed him, where he was during the Deluge, and so on. When he started to lead us upstairs, G quietly excused herself and said that she was going to try to get better pictures of the downstairs.

As soon as we reached the top landing, Mr. Breaux stopped and stared up at the patchwork ceiling. "This... this is where I survived..." he said. I didn't say anything, but just waited for him to go on, pen poised, like I always did.

"I have to go..." Mr. Breaux said and then quickly went down the stairs. B looked at me and motioned for me to stay put, pursuing him.

So I stayed in the creepy old, gutted upstairs. Strange to think that I once didn't know what "gutted" meant. I asked the carpenters and they said that it's when a house has been stripped to the siding and framing. It's a skeleton, essentially -- gutted. B had warned me that there were a lot of dangerous spots in the upstairs, so I didn't wander, exactly. I just got bored and started to test the wood around me, inching one direction and then the next. It was a giant floor and I could see every room, all the bedrooms and single bathroom, or at least the bare shapes of them.

"I know you," said someone. I looked around and saw no one, but I could've sworn I had heard a voice.

"Hello?" I asked, but didn't move. I know how horror movies work.

"I know you," the voice said again.

That was enough for me. I walked slowly down the stairs and found B and Mr. Breaux talking quietly in the corner. G tapped me on the shoulder and I jumped forward. B laughed. I managed to finish the interview and then insisted that G and I leave as soon as we could.

That was it. Nothing more than that. I know you, the voice said. It wasn't until a month before I left, when we were all together at another bar that M admitted that he was hiding between the floorboards and talking to me. When I confronted B about it, she admitted that Mr. Breaux had played along. He was from New Orleans, but it wasn't his family's house and no one had died in it that anyone knew of.

I asked why they let the joke go after that. B admitted that it just wasn't funny after that point. I didn't seem scared enough.

Premise

It's only fair to admit that everyone warned me it was a bad idea to spend the week alone at the Body House.  But I have a deadline, I told them.  You're spending the week at a secluded, New England mansion where a family was murdered, among other things, and it's rumored to be haunted, they said.  They said, This is not the best way to meet a deadline.  You've never met my editor, I told them.

At first I was able to get a lot of work done and the house was quiet and peaceful.  It is my understanding that this is the way of things.  On the second day, though, on my walk through the woods I saw an apparition of a hanged man, eyes bulging, tongue lolling, swinging in the trail in front of me.  That was inconvenient.  I shrugged and decided that I'd have to skip the morning walks from now on.  It was more time to write, anyway.

The problem was I was out of ideas.  The story wasn't going anywhere.  For five months solid I'd been hammering out chapters about the Smith family tragedy.  They were losing the family farm, John was an alcoholic, Shawna was seized by wanderlust, Lydia was estranged, and Simon sat at the window all day drinking chamomile tea speaking to no one.  It's boring, they told me.  But I knew better.  Even so, the sixth month of the endeavor came and I hit a wall when Shawna asked for a divorce and John sat at the kitchen table speechless.  That's what I couldn't get past.  That was the trouble, the divorce.

That and the blood curdling screams from the basement that started at 10:37 exactly every night and lasted until dawn.  On the fourth day I improvised ear plugs from Q-tips, but that only helped so much.  I've never been a sound sleeper.

On the third day, no progress made, I started reading some old journals that the last occupant had left behind.  It all started out very normal, all about the life of a secluded heiress in New England.  The longer I read, though, the more intelligible the writing became and it was frequently interrupted by archaic symbols and abstract drawings of death and destruction.  Some of it was written in blood.  The diarist wrote of nightmares that haunted her through the day, of a Dark one that feeds on pain and anguish that would consume the world.  I wasn't impressed.  Clearly a wanna-be hack or cartoonist.  No Anne Frank's diary to be found in that house.

I made good progress on the fourth day.  John spoke up and told Shawna to leave and then went on a binge.  Lydia, the prodigal, finally revealed that while she was away in Europe she became romantically involved with a woman, had a breakdown due to her Christian upbringing, and returned home out of an act of desperation.  Simon was still sitting at the window with his tea, but you couldn't have everything.

I was feeling pretty good about myself and felt the urge to masturbate.  Just then, though, the door to the study creaked open and in the gloom of the cellar I saw two blood red eyes staring at me.  There were things watching me all over the house, I realized.  I've never been an exhibitionist and masturbation is really a private act so I just decided to call it an early night.

On the fifth night the screaming stopped.  This was a welcome relief for all of five minutes until I heard someone tramping, ostentatiously up the stairs.  A moment later a slender woman as pale as death flung open my door.  She then proceeded, in a shrill, scratchy voice to tell me how her twin brother had raped her and then locked her in the basement, telling everyone that she was mad and then, after years of seclusion and psychological torture, he killed her.

I listened as best I could.  After you get published, people do this to you all the time.  They tell you sob stories hoping you'll write about it so they can brag to their friends that such and scuh book was based on them.  Ridiculous.  Anyway, the pale girls' story wasn't worth the lost sleep.  No one believes stories like that because that's not life.

On the sixth and last day I was able to finish the draft despite untenable circumstances.  Just after I started working, blood began to drip from the walls.  It started as a trickle and then a steady stream.  It wasn't long before the house was flooded and I had to use the desk as a work space and ad hoc life boat.  I kept telling myself I didn't deserve this and powered through.

The family had called an emotional armistice in order to get through the business of selling the farm.  In cleaning out all the family possessions they slowly began to remember good times, but it wasn't enough to heal old wounds.  In the final chapter, the family is staying in the empty house one last night when an electrical fire starts.  They all get out safely, and the story ends with all the family watching their home and financial security burn to cinders.

It was a day early, but I decided that staying another night at the Body House would just mean another night of lost sleep so I drove back to Iowa.  My editor, when she got the novel, sent me a dubious email.  When I asked her for clarification she said it was boring and I told her she could fuck herself.

A week passed and the bills came.  My bag was empty and after some desperate pleading I got my editor to talk to me again.  How do you feel about horror? I asked her.  She said that I should stay out of her personal life.  I told her I was bored and angry and frustrated and haunted.  I told her how a tornado took my house when I was sixteen, every woman I've ever dated was named Sarah, I lived as a woman for a year, I declared bankruptcy once, I am a rock-paper-scissors international champion, and how could life be so unbelievable?

She asked, Have you ever considered writing nonficiton?