The Murder House

The Porsche pulls into the driveway, spinning its wheels. Jim had driven fast and hard. Even worse than usual. Susan and Kyle both were uncomfortable with Jim’s vehicular aggression, and Kyle kept noticing how his dad’s eyes looked unusually sunken and vacant. Throughout the drive, Kyle and his mom shifted nervously, clutched their seats, and Susan had almost spoken up and asked Jim to cool out on the NASCAR stuff. But, predictably, Susan had stiffened, held her tongue.

At least their car was bigger and better made than most of the others on the road. Certainly an advantage of an SUV. That’d long given Susan some semblance of solace as Jim, snarling and squinting, would weave his way furiously through traffic...

Mia and Lisa are waiting in the driveway. Mia is scrolling on her phone and looks up smiling widely, upon seeing her parents roll in. Lisa looks positively giddy. She’s animated, a whirlwind of movement. She’s pointing her phone at the house and its environs, snapping photos like a screaming schoolgirl at a boyband concert.

Jim, Susan, and Kyle hop out of the car, press the doors shut. Mia and Kyle, Mia and Jim nod hello, exchange brief, awkward hugs. Then Susan and Mia hug tightly and Susan hugs Lisa too and the ladies make the typical sounds people make and say the typical things people say when they haven’t seen each other in a while.

Kyle thinks he’s going to have another panic attack. A stream of cold sweat runs down his back. The house ... It looks so sinister, with its jutting spires and church-like structure. The big, horrific antique house, with its twin turrets, looks like a castle, a dark gothic building from Transylvania. He can picture a vampire in it, sucking blood, sleeping in a coffin. The whole place just has a choking ugliness and cold touch of evil to it.

Kyle’s body quivers. His breath skips. Then he’s breathing as if he’d just run a race, his chest rising and falling in deep heaves. His anxiety claws from within, bares its fangs. It leaps like the spring of a beast. He then reaches into his jean pocket, plucks out a bottle of pills. He has 3 different prescriptions. These are for the panic attacks, if a severe one strikes. If he can’t breathe. Like now.

His family oblivious, Kyle stops in his tracks. He shakes a couple pink pills into his cupped hand and swallows them down. The dose is supposed to be one- but fuck that. He wants instant relief. The pills take a couple minutes to kick in, but when they fall in his mouth and he tastes their bitter flavor, when he feels them slug down his esophagus, he instantly feels better, knowing relief is on its way.

The five walk towards the front porch. They trudge up the curiously steep front steps.

Opening the door, it’d be hard to imagine this was once a crime scene. There are no bloodstains. There’s no yellow tape. Despite its creepy exterior, the house’s interior looks, well, normal. But to Kyle, it still doesn’t seem right. He senses something in the air. A heaviness. And his nose crinkles at the strong smell of cleaning fluid, an overly sterile, antiseptic scent that reminds him of a hospital.

Lisa, who’d been giddy and excited, quiets down too. She folds her arms over her chest, seemingly awestruck by the house’s grandiosity. Inside, the house appears cavernous, endless, in a way, almost like a desert.

Entering inside, Susan’s heels click on the hardwood, then click to an abrupt stop. Susan, Mia, Lisa, and Kyle freeze in fear. The four are on tenterhooks, nervous wrecks, and they pan their gazes, furtively, every which direction. To them, there’s a gravity, a pull, a weight. They feel 100 pounds heavier.

Only Jim doesn’t feel it. Only Jim plods in, dragging his gnarled leg, as he does, and grunts something barely intelligible as he lurches forward.