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How to Sell a Murder House

This, then, was the Greige Space Room:

It was a living room broad in the shoulders—nearly three hundred square feet, longer than it was wide (or wider than it was long, depending on your perspective), but it was big, roomy, with a high double tray ceiling and a big airplane-propeller-looking ceiling fan. The white leather couch was crisp and new. On the other side of the TV stand in the middle of the room was a sitting area with more leather chairs, these with the color and texture of faux rhino skin. The chairs, and a white marble table, were arranged around a black electric fireplace nestled in a facade of whitewashed brick. Built-in bookshelves lurked on either side, and those shelves were lined with books. On the adjoining wall, the wall they could not see when staring through the closet, was a massive aquarium. In it were a dozen fish of several varieties, all dead, so dead they were nearly disintegrating, wisps of fish fiber floating off of them. The life bled out of them, same as how the color was bled from the room.

The room had three doors:

One, the closet, which they had just come through. That door, now closed.

And off the sitting area, two more doors, one on each wall in the corner, both greige, both closed.

The room smelled like sweetly sour vanilla candles and new carpet. It was overwhelming, the smell. Like it crawled up your nose and laid eggs in your sinuses. Lore felt assaulted by it—by the smell, by the non-color color, by the fibrous wads of dead fish. She worked at the puzzle of this place. What was it? Where was it, when was it, why was it? It rotated in her mind, a Rubik’s Cube of all gray-beige, the lines of cubes turning and turning and resolving into nothing.

That’s when Hamish said: “Jesus. I know this room.”

They all turned to give him a look.

He stared at it, mouth agape. In horror, he said, “I know this room, I know this house. I sold this house.”

—

He told them a story. Said it was back when he worked in the “real estate trenches.” This room was one room in a murder house—that’s how everyone referred to it, and any house, where a murder had happened. Murder houses. Hard to sell because you couldn’t hide it. Couldn’t keep it secret. It was public record, and they had to tell buyers anyway. So you always knew you were going to take a hit—if you were smart, you rented it out for a few years at a cut price, kept it up and updated so it didn’t get that haunted house vibe about it, and then, then you sold it, when the market was hungrier, when the stain of death had been forgotten, when the worst dip you’d take was ten, fifteen, percent.

This murder, though, he said it was a real bender. It was a family of three that lived here—the parents, upper middle-class, well-put-together people. Father was some kind of finance guy, wife was an art broker, and their son was a seventh grader at a local private school. But the parents, they hated each other. Hate so strong it trapped them together, like chains. Fought all the time, so loud the neighbors—an acre away—could hear. Then one day, Hamish said, “The father lost it. He took one of the mother’s own art pieces—she didn’t make art anymore, but she had this piece from college, this heavy blown-glass piece that looked like a, a, I dunno, a melted heart, like the heart from a playing card, not a human heart? And he beat her to death with it. In front of the son. The son tried to run, but he held the boy down in front of that fish tank, and choked him to death on the floor.”

Hamish said the dad fled. Calm and cool, got in his BMW, went to the airport, headed to Europe. They found him dead years later, on a yacht in Italy.

“That art piece,” Hamish said. “They kept it on the bookshelf.”

They all turned to look.

The bookshelves, full of books, and only books, except for the second shelf from the top. A tall shelf, tall enough for coffee-table books and art books and—

And a blown-glass heart.

The glass red.

The blood flecks on it darker than the glass.

Bits of skin and hair matted to the side.

“So we’re in a murder house?” Nick asked. “That’s what you’re saying?”

Owen said, “That girl, Marshie. She didn’t kill anyone but herself.”

“Suicide is a kind of murder, the murder of self,” Lore said, and she realized it sounded haughty, pretentious, like she was trying to score points with an English teacher or a psych professor. Still. She wasn’t wrong, was she?

“Last room had a thumb on a cake, so that’s pretty murdery,” Nick said.

“The other weird thing?” Hamish said. “Every living room I’ve ever been in—big, small, rich, middle-class, poor, TV, no TV, carpet, hardwood, whatever, they all had one thing in common. Always.”

The room looked to him expectantly, so he gave them the answer:

“Windows. There’s no window here. No window in that dining room either. Not in the bedroom. Not in the hallway where we came in. There should be windows here. Somewhere.”

A chill settled over all of them.

Hamish spoke aloud what they were all just realizing—

“There may not be a way out of this place.”

Lore felt her contrarian blood rising. “No. No. Bullshit. You don’t know that, Ham. It’s a house. There has to be a door. There’s gotta be a way out.”

Hamish fell backward into the couch, looking exhausted. His gaze, distant, the gaze of a man at war. “Matty didn’t get out.”

“We don’t know that,” Owen said, but Lore could hear his heart wasn’t in it.

“Yeah, we do,” Hamish said. “We didn’t save him and now we’re trapped here.” He made a small, troubled grunt. “We deserve it.”

Nick sat catty-corner to him on the couch, elbows on knees—a predatory, fox-like lean to him. “Sure, now you feel bad about leaving Matty behind.”

“Fuck you, Nick. I always felt bad. We all always felt bad.”

“Always,” Owen agreed.

Lore shook her head. “Not me. I let it go. I had to.”

“I call bullshit,” Owen said.

Whoa, look who’s got a little fire in his belly? Good. Lore wanted the fight. She longed for the fight. Fights got shit done.

“It’s not bullshit. I choose to live a life without regrets.”

“Then why’d you run up those stairs? We didn’t even have a chance to talk it out. You just—you booked it right up the stairs, and we had to deal with that.”

“Oh, please, stop. I made my choice, and it didn’t have to be your choice, Owen. See? That’s your problem. Always basing your decision off everybody fucking else’s, always waiting —”

“No, no, ” Owen said, now raising his voice—he really was on the edge, wasn’t he? Owen rarely, rarely raised his voice. Especially to Lore. “This isn’t that. You took off like a fucking gazelle. We were there together. We’re supposed to be friends, and your decision became our decision. But that’s always been your problem, hasn’t it? Lore does what Lore wants, fuck everybody else.”

“See, now I think you’re talking about more than just the staircase, Owen.”

Nick turned his hand into a gun and pointed it at Owen. “I see you. I see you, Zuikas. Clear as glass, buddy. Lore goes up those steps and oh, little lost puppy has to follow after, go on, puppy, chase the girl. But Matty goes up there, Matty, our best friend, our fuckin’ leader, and you’re like Nah, bro, we’re fine .”

Hamish laughed an unhappy sound. “Oh fuck off, Nick—”

“We were kids!” Owen said.

“We were kids, ” Hamish echoed. “We didn’t know shit from shit. Matty went up there and then he was gone. You wanted us all to go, too?”

Nick stood up, arms out in an incredulous crucifix. “You just fucking said we deserve to be here—”

“I didn’t say I didn’t regret it!”

“You never looked for him! You never answered my emails! I tried to get us to look for him, for a new staircase, for years, years, you fucking dicks, you fucking cowardly shitty dicks, so where was that regret, then? Huh? Instead, Owen’s too scared to live, Lore is off making precious video games, and Ham, you’re off, what, getting fucking married and having fucking kids and selling toxic fucking mortgages to poor stupid idiots who don’t know any better and living the kind of life Matty never got the chance to live !”

That last part, yelled so loud it filled the room, with the roar of blood, with a sharp tin-scrape noise. And then it erupted. A cacophony of noise—everyone standing now, their blood up, shouting and pointing and seething . It was like the room wanted them to fight. Like it trapped them here in this soul-killing place, a room of greige walls and cloying vanilla and spilled blood. Lore could feel something working its way through her, like a rabid animal looking to take a bite out of someone.

She barked then: “Everyone shut up!”

To her shock, they did.

“We are in a situation none of us understand, and we need to keep it together .”

“Doesn’t feel like we’re very together, ” Nick said.

“ Nick .”

“Fine. Whatever.”

Lore held up the palms of her hands. “We are all very tired.”

“And hungry,” Hamish said, with a half shrug.

“That, too. We spent half a day marching through the woods and then we came here—and since then it’s been, I don’t know. I don’t know how long it’s been or what this place is, but it is not our imagination. It is a real place, and we are here in it, and we will need to find our way out of it.”

“No, we need to find Matty, ” Nick said.

“We need to get out, ” Hamish mumbled.

“There he goes again, folks. We have a shot at finding our friend and you don’t even want to take it, you just want to run for the hills again —”

“Yeah, I do! I want to find a fucking exit! A front door, a back door, a—a fucking window to jump through—”

Lore yelled at them again to shut up .

And again, they did.

“We need to stay here in this room for a bit. We’re safe. We need to rest a little—”

“No way,” Nick said. “We pick one of those doors, and we go find Matty.”

“None of us are good right now. We need a minute. And we need to stay together. No arguments.”

Nick groused, but he gave a pissy thumbs-up.

“Everybody, take a few beats. Just, um, just be quiet. I need to think. Maybe rest my eyes a little,” Lore said. “Everyone go to your corners. Chill out. Take a nap or something. We will regroup in a bit.”

And Lore wandered away from them. She had to. She needed some space alone just to let her brain work. Alone was always how Lore worked best—without distraction, without nonsense, without other people’s bullshit . She needed that clarity to figure out how they were going to get out of this place—

This place without windows, without exits.