Dark Corners and Shadowy Spaces

A group of kids scare themselves silly in their old house.

   Every old house has them, the places where the sun never quite reaches, the places where even the brightest table lamps and ceiling lights can’t quite penetrate. Newer places, I have found, the ones built with drywall and cheap plastic don’t really have them. It’s only the old ones, the ones built with long strips of dark brown oak flooring, lathe and plaster walls and big thick crown molding. They have warped and wavy windows with lead counter weights hidden in the walls behind real wood trim. They were finger smashers, these old windows. Old houses have them, lots of them.

   My sister and brother and I called them dark corners and shadowy places and the house that I grew up in had them for sure. We found monsters in these places, hideous glimpses of demon like faces, horns and red eyes glowing like hot coals. The basements of these old homes are filled with such places, I know ours was.

   Inquisitive youngsters, myself included, terrified themselves peering behind our ancient oil furnace, daring each other to venture there, and more often than not, fleeing back up our creaky ankle breaking stairs to the light above. Sometimes with dark, wet stains decorating our shorts or pants.

   One summer an unfortunate kid named Sean, a friend from down the block, blundered into one of these places and never came out again. Our house got him, we were sure. It got hungry sometimes.

   I was six I think, my sister eight and my brother was ten. Sean oddly was seven. I am certain of this, I remember quite clearly because seven was supposed to be lucky. Bad things aren’t usually associated the number seven. Our house didn’t care though. No exceptions were made for mostly lucky seven year olds.

   We were playing hide and seek, stuck inside on a rainy day. Sean had come over and the four of us had been having fun playing in the many hiding spot our big house had to offer. It was my turn to count and when I started, my brother, sister and Sean scattered. I heard their feet on the hardwood floors gradually fade and then stop as they found their spots. I counted to fifty. I didn’t cheat when I counted either. Never.

   Our house was pretty big. At least it seemed pretty big to me. It had two big floors and a basement. When we played hide and seek, none of us dared to hide in the basement. It was dark and scary down there and full of cobwebs. That was a place for sure, that monsters lived.

   I found my brother pretty quick. He was bigger than us and the old floors would creak and groan under his heavier footfalls. He was in the old wooden closet when I found him.

“Tag”, I said, “Found ya.”. He went to the kitchen and left me to find the other two, a little bit mad, I think that I found him first.

  I took a while longer to find my sister. She had somehow wedged herself into the big chest at the foot of our parents bed. It was filled with all manner of thick quilts and colorful blankets. She managed to get inside and somehow pull them over the top of her. She was able to do this with a stealthy silence that I found very cool. I crept up the stairs and crept around softly, finally coming to the old cedar chest. I lifted the lid and was immediately disappointed. Just the usual things in here, no sneaky sisters to be found. If she hadn’t had to breathe I never would have found her. I bet it was pretty hot under there too and the earthy cedar smell was likely almost overpowering when combined with the aroma of the mothballs my mother kept in there. I saw the pile rise and fall from her breath.

   “Found ya.”, I said, “Caught ya.”, Pushing my arm down deep. It was a good spot though and I told her so. It had taken me almost half an hour to find her. She ambled off to join my brother and left me to continue my search. Sean was last but we never found him.

   I looked everywhere. Under beds, behind couches. In closets and behind our long curtains that hung to the floor. I looked in kitchen cupboards and in our little pantry. I went to get my siblings and after some begging and pleading, convinced them to join me in the search. Monsters, I said. Maybe the monsters got him. I was scared.

   We looked in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain. I thought he might have crawled in there and fallen asleep. Nope, not there. We looked in the hall closet behind the coats and hats and scarves and sweaters. Not there either. We finally walked to the basement door. We stopped there and looked at each other with dread. The door beckoned.

   “I didn’t hear him go down there.”, I said. I was growing terrified of what we might find.

   “Me neither, I didn’t hear the door.”, My brother whispered.

   My sister said not a word. She couldn’t have heard the door open from the upstairs hiding spot where I had found her. She looked as frightened as I felt.

   “Do you think he went down there?”, I said to no one.

   “How should I know?”, My brother said.

   “He wouldn’t have gone down there by himself, he wouldn’t.”, My sister insisted.

   I put my hand on the antique crystal door knob, hesitated.

   “I’m not going down there by myself.”. We all knew perfectly well what was down there lurking, waiting.

   “We’ll all go okay?”, My sister said.

   I turned the knob and pushed the door open. The murky darkness glared out at us menacingly. I could make out thin little laser beams of diffused sunlight filtering through the ground level windows of ancient leaded glass. There was an old coal chute down there too.

   The three of us ventured down the noisy old staircase. My sister went first, and so, by right, held the flashlight that was always at the ready, hanging by its magnet just inside the door. The yellow incandescent beam was all but eaten up by the murk.

   At the bottom we stood there like three statues, barely moving, hardly breathing. My sister waved the light around. Of our missing companion there was no immediate sign. The foreboding old furnace made sighing sounds and triple dog dared us to invade its space. We scraped up enough fortitude and snuck quietly around and behind. The pilot light was flickering, making our shadows dance around and the demons that hid there flitted and cavorted about, mocking us. Sean was not behind the evil old furnace. The coal chute, the only place left for him to hide, beckoned us. It was our last option, the only place left that he could be. We padded forward leaving kid sized shoe prints in the coal dust on the floor.

   “He wouldn’t hide in there, its dirty, his mom would kill him.”, My brother said.

   The door just hung there, leering, black and dangerous and silent. Its iron handle waiting for one of us to turn it, deceptively benign. I reached out, expecting to be bitten or perhaps even swallowed whole, sucked into its gaping maw by a horrible oozing tongue. I turned the handle and swung the chute door open, expecting to see Sean’s corpse, violated and rotting. But there was nothing. It was absolutely and completely empty except for maybe a spider or two. The three of us sighed with relief.

   Upstairs the phone rang suddenly, shrilly, screaming at us. We all jumped out of our skins, my sister let out a surprised little yelp and I’m pretty sure a few errant drops of urine escaped from my terrified bladder. We ran up the stairs heedless of the leg snapping risers.

   My sister got to the phone first, flashing past my father who had been going to answer it as well.

   “Hello? Hello?”, She asked, inquiring into the open line.

   “Um, hi”, the disembodied voice announced,” Is this Nicole? Um, Eric’s sister?”

   “Yes, yes it is.”

   “Um, hi, uh, this is Paul, um Sean’s dad, down the street you know?”

   Oh crap, this could be very bad. How could we tell this man that our house had murdered his only son?

  “Uh, well, I just wanted to let you know that you kids should be more careful.”. He was right about that much at least.

   Instead my sister said, ”Huh?”.

   “Sean fell down over there and skinned up both of his knees, he came home just a minute ago bleeding like crazy.”. He admonished us.

   The old house seemed to chuckle softly to itself. It was patient. It would get one of us sooner or later.