How To Sell a Haunted House

by Grady Hendrix

Louise pulled into the driveway and received out. Her rental automobile regarded too brilliant and blue subsequent to the dry entrance yard. The camellia bushes on both facet of the entrance step regarded withered. The home windows have been soiled, their screens blurry with grime. Dad hadn’t put within the storm home windows but, which he all the time did by October, and nobody had swept the roof, the place useless pine needles clumped into thick orange continents. A limp seasonal flag displaying a purple candle and the phrase Noel held on the entrance porch. It regarded dirty.

The first clean line from Listr appeared inside her thoughts and stuffed itself out: Walk by home. She’d begin right here. Do a walk-through. Assess the scenario. That made sense, however her toes didn’t transfer. She didn’t wish to go inside. It felt like an excessive amount of. She didn’t wish to see it so empty.

However, being a single mother had made Louise an knowledgeable at doing issues she’d quite keep away from. If she didn’t rip off the Band-Aid and handle enterprise, who would? She pressured her toes to stroll throughout the dry grass, creaked open the display door, and grabbed the entrance doorknob. It didn’t flip. No keys. Maybe the again? She walked across the facet of the home the place the yellow grass pale to filth, unlatched the waist-high chain-link gate, banged it large together with her hip, and slid by.

Mark’s lumber sat deserted in the course of the yard, a pile of once-yellow pine pale to grey. Louise remembered how excited her mother had been when Lowe’s dropped it off for the deck Mark had promised to construct again in 2017. It’d sat untouched ever since, killing the grass.

Not that there was a lot grass to kill. The yard had been a blind spot of their household, a huge weedy expanse of filth and no matter mutant grass might survive with out watering. Nothing important grew out again apart from a ridiculously tall pecan tree within the center that was most likely useless, and a twisted cypress within the again nook, which had gone feral. A wall of unkillable bamboo separated them from their neighbors.

Louise grabbed the rattling outdated knob on the again door to the storage and her coronary heart stopped. She anticipated it to be locked, but it surely turned beneath her hand and opened with a acquainted fanfare of squeaky hinges. She made herself step inside.

Shadowy cousins and neighbors and aunts crowded the storage, ingesting Coors the way in which they all the time did on Christmas Day, Bing Crosby taking part in on a increase field, the ladies smoking Virginia Slims, including mentholated notes to the pink perfection of roasting Christmas ham. Louise’s eyes adjusted to the gloom and the phantoms pale and the storage regarded twice as empty as earlier than.

She walked up the three brick steps to the kitchen door and froze.

She heard the muffled voice of a man talking with confidence and authority from someplace inside the home. Louise stared by the window in the course of the door, peering previous its sheer white curtain, making an attempt to see who it was.

The brick-patterned linoleum ground unrolled previous the counter separating the kitchen from the eating room and stopped on the far wall the place her mother’s gallery of string artwork hung over the eating room desk. Its plastic tablecloth received modified with the seasons, and proper now it was purple poinsettias for winter. The JCPenney chandelier hung overhead, the china hutch pressed itself into the nook, the chairs stored their backs to her.

The man continued speaking from inside the home.

She might see a small slice of the entrance corridor with its inexperienced wall-to-wall carpet however no folks. A girl requested the person a query. Was Mark in there with a Realtor? Was he already taking stuff? Louise hadn’t seen any vehicles parked outdoors however perhaps he’d parked across the nook. He may very well be sneaky.

She rigorously turned the latch. The door cracked its seal, then swung open, and the person’s voice received louder. Louise stepped inside and eased the door closed behind her, then crept ahead, ears straining, making an attempt to determine what he was saying. Details registered routinely—her mother’s purse sitting on the tip of the counter, the answering machine blinking its purple mild for 1 New Message, the odor of sun-warmed Yankee Candle—then she reached the eating room and stopped.

The man’s voice sounded huge and small on the similar time and Louise realized it got here from the lounge TV. Her scalp tightened. She regarded into the entrance corridor. To the left, it received darkish, main deeper into the home. To the best was the lounge, the place somebody was watching TV. Louise held her breath and stepped across the nook.

Hundreds of her mother’s dolls stared at her. Clown dolls on high of the couch, a Harlequin wedged in opposition to one in every of its arms, German dolly-faced dolls crowded a shelf over their heads, a swarm of dolls stared by the glass doorways of the doll cupboard in opposition to the far wall. On high of the doll cupboard stood a diorama of three taxidermied squirrels. The TV performed the Home Shopping Network to 2 monumental French Bébé dolls sitting facet by facet in her dad’s brown velour straightforward chair.

Mark and Louise.

That’s what her mother had known as them when she purchased these ugly, costly, three-foot-tall dolls, with their exhausting, conceited faces and coarse, chopped hair.

No matter the place you two go, I can hold my treasured infants with me eternally, she’d mentioned.

The lady sat stiffly in her layered summer time frock, arms by her sides, legs sticking straight out in entrance, strawberry-stained lips puckered into a pout, eyes clean, staring on the TV. The boy wore a navy blue Little Lord Fauntleroy jacket with a white Peter Pan collar and brief pants, and his blond hair regarded prefer it had been hacked into a pageboy with a pair of lifeless scissors. Between them lay the distant. They’d all the time creeped Louise out.

She regarded down the corridor however didn’t see another indicators of life—the toilet door was open, the bed room doorways have been closed, no lights have been on—so she made herself pluck the distant from between doll Mark and doll Louise, making an attempt to not contact their garments, and turned off the TV. Silence rushed in round her, and she or he stood alone in the home filled with dolls.