Chapter 1

“It used to be a funeral home...”

“Whoa, it is ... gothic ... and that burgundy color ... looks a bit like an old church. It’s definitely big enough for all three of the kids,” says Susan, who’s stirring nervously in her seat and repeatedly sweeping back a wayward strand of wavy golden hair behind her right ear.

Jim, her husband, seemingly pays little attention, and mumbles “kids” sarcastically. Sitting behind the wheel of his black Porsche SUV, his eyes are empty as open graves. He snarls and turns the steering wheel, nosing the vehicle smoothly into the property’s long, straight, almost endless driveway that reminds Susan of a tarmac.

“How long will the project last?” she inquires. Her voice slightly raises. Anger and annoyance are coursing through her.

Jim relapses into silence, then shrugs his shoulders, parks the car. Susan sighs and shakes her head.

“Typical Jim,” she thinks, “malignant in his reserve and stoic in his void.”

The two exit the vehicle. Susan’s high heels clicking rhythmically on the black pavement of the driveway as they walk towards the verandah, step up the curiously steep stairs and approach the high, pitched, thick black metal gothic double doors. The entranceway is cut from granite stone and has ornate carvings of Biblical themes and 3-foot statues of Peter, Paul, Jesus and Mary built into the lower left and right sides of the archway.

The door opens inwardly, as if by itself. The pair are met by a real estate agent, a frumpy woman who materializes, like an apparition. The schmoozy woman smiles with her whole face and ushers the couple inside.

Susan thinks the agent just looks like an agent, just looks like someone from a real estate sign. Like she’s more of a photograph than a person.

The agent moves fast for a woman of her size, and makes cloying conversation, attempting to ingratiate herself, and as she speaks, she laughs mechanically in a way that reminds Susan of the sounds of sitcoms she’d watched as a kid, like Married With Children and Friends. Those 90s sitcoms with laugh tracks that’d go off in bursts at snappy one-liners.

Susan wonders if the real estate agent is a human at all, or if she’s a bot, a cyborg, or AI hologram.

Then Susan starts to notice the agent’s perfume, how musky it is, how it lingers in the air as the agent whisks them through the furnished house. No robot would be programmed to smell like that, Susan thinks.

They move fast through the first floor, their heads on a swivel. The agent’s hands glide, gracefully, as if in tai chi movements, and she speaks of amenities, distances, and dimensions.

Inspecting the antique furniture, the drapes of crushed velvet, the house strikes Susan as a time warp. Or perhaps a bizarre, grotesque museum. Everything seems dusty, like a museum, and although every room has large windows, little light enters the house. There’s such a grimness to the place. A stuffy feeling. An ugliness to everything.

Even the hardwood floors. They look freshly polished; however, their shine is almost unnaturally sparkly, Susan posits. She scratches her nose and notices a strong antiseptic smell wafting in the air.

When they step onto the wide staircase, they find themselves instantly on the second floor, unnervingly so, as if they didn’t climb the stairs at all, or as if Susan experienced a splice in time, or a spell of amnesia.

Then they are checking each bedroom. They move with precision, at an almost military speed. The hallways slant and bend curiously, disturbing Susan’s equilibrium.

The bedrooms are horrendous, each room painted a different unsightly color- lime green, 70s neon orange, banana yellow. Yikes. Whoever designed the place must have been color blind. Or insane. Susan ponders redecoration schemes...

Susan is suddenly spooked by the rooms’ dim, unnatural light that repeats in various wall mirrors and gilded picture-frames. It’s a sepia tone that’s harsh, hideous.

Gazing at one of the picture-frames, she’s creeped out to notice that all the picture-frames hanging about the house are empty. Every single one of them. They are devoid of photos, paintings, anything, and Susan feels it renders the house indescribably creepy and bleak...

Besides barren, the house just seems ... chaotic, uneven and off-balance. It’s as if the house was an experiment, a strange arrangement of angles, geometric spaces and patterns only a mathematician could understand. Every room seems like a wrong turn, a dead end in a maze. Every room she sees is confusing and ultimately unsettling.

In addition to her aesthetic repulsion and discombobulation, viewing the house just feels joyless. It’s a mechanical, cold task. It’s automatic. It’s forced. There’s no happiness here. The place feels suffocating. Susan loses her breath and wheezes once or twice, like she’s at a high altitude.

After inspecting the fully furnished bedrooms, which, to Susan, are all morbid, they’re at once in the basement; and again, Susan only recalls beginning down the stairs from the second floor, right as she was thinking of how the stairs remind her of an Escher print...

The basement is a tall, windowless space. It is bright white. White everything. Shiny white linoleum floor, white paneling, white walls with Grecian cornices, but in the background, the basement’s space is vast and dark, and Susan sees stars, moons, and planets, cosmic debris and what looks to be an asteroid, the space rock barreling forth, in their direction, like a wrecking ball.

Susan presses her eyes shut, grinds her teeth, braces herself for impact, feeling as if she’s aboard a passenger plane, about to crash.

But she opens her eyes to find herself in a forward motion, from the living room toward the kitchen, and Susan has a sensation that their feet aren’t moving, that the floor is moving, instead of them, like the floor is an electronic machine, a people mover, like in the airport. She feels a hard stop and gets slightly dizzy crossing into the kitchen.

She shudders, gulps instinctively, then pans her gaze around the spacious, fully equipped kitchen, with its silver refrigerator, and modern appliances. It’s a stark contrast to the rest of the house. It’s so ... modern ... It’s light and there’s not a single antique ... It could be in one of those “Modern Homes” magazines she sees at the supermarket.

Surprised by the commodious kitchen’s immense size, she also thinks the house appears far larger, almost infinite inside; the house far bigger than it seemed from the outside.

Jim, as usual, doesn’t speak much to the agent or Susan, just grunts and snorts, here and there, but he stops to take a business call, rages at his phone, drowning out the tinny voice in his headset. Hoarsely, he bellows out something unpleasant regarding a projected target date.

Susan does most of the talking with the agent, asking the usual, perfunctory house-related questions, inquiring about the neighborhood too.

However, in truth, she’s confused and scared. She already hates the house, its design. Its effect on her. The psychic visions and unnatural movements. How she’s losing her grip. It’s as if the place was meant to be intimidating, disorienting, and ugly.

It could have been nice, warm, a real home, perhaps, Susan thinks to herself, pensively. It has huge panoramic windows in the living room, a wide staircase in the anteroom, and its chestnut brown hardwood flooring is an inviting color. There’s plush antique furniture everywhere, 19th century moldings, and recently added marble flooring and brass fixtures in the bathrooms.

And the kitchen, even by Susan’s standards, is immaculate. It’s sparkling, and state of the art, having just been remodeled, and has a fancy, see-through fridge, and smart controls for the appliances.

It could have been a nice home, Susan thinks. It really could have, if not for...

Behind the house sits a sizable spit of land, a behemoth of a backyard. Tragically, though, it is an eyesore. The square patch of land is filled with only shabby wildflowers and bushes and is bisected by a small unkempt lawn.

The backyard is curiously empty, giving it a strange, eerily vacant and lonely feeling. She’d never seen a backyard that big be so empty. Not a patio set or a wooden table or grill or playground or pebble path or bird bath or anything. Susan thinks it probably should have a pool, given its tremendous size, but considering the house’s history, she understands why no pool was installed.

The house’s history, yes, it flits through her mind, once again. The history is probably what makes it appear uglier than it is.

Almost telepathically, the agent’s smug robotic face shifts, darkens, and becomes downcast, as she lowers her double chin toward the floor, the basement.