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The House Always Wins

Soon, they would come to hate one another.

It wasn’t there, yet. Hate was a strong word, Owen knew.

But the road was straight, and the destination was clear.

They spent so much time together in the tight space of the crawlspace, Hamish said he felt like a “trapped rat.” They had to wander that between-space, finding ways into the house from time to time, looking for food or items or just a space to breathe. Necessary, even though it meant the house could whisper its hate in their ear and show them yet another tableau of human pain. And they had to do it together—it was, after all, one of the rules. But spending that time together was increasingly an act of agitation and irritation. They didn’t have much freedom from one another. They were bound together, a chain gang of friends.

Being together so much in such a terrible place made them not want to be around one another anymore, not at all. It may not have been hate, no, but it was certainly not friendship, not anymore. They sniped at one another. Argued. Insulted. Wandered the spaces as if they too were ghosts of the house. Lore even hissed like an animal sometimes, as if she’d gone feral. Whatever warmth they started to again feel toward one another had gone cold—summer into a hard winter. Owen felt the resentment in his belly building, and even sensing it, he couldn’t quite do anything about it. His forgiveness for Lore was short-lived, and he wanted to punish her for what she’d done to him—treating him like he was expendable, a resource to be used and not a friend to have or a person to love. He was angry again toward Hamish, too, for the way his friend had changed—Lore told him one night about how Hamish had literally died from an overdose, and at the moment, he felt such immense sadness about that. Sadness that was now a kind of disdain, for how weak it was that his friend had done that. How pathetic. How much he’d changed . And coming out of those addictions just gave him new ones: addictions to a church, to his family, to working out, to his self-image.

Sometimes Hamish prayed out loud. Lore told him to shut the fuck up.

Owen would tell Hamish it was all right.

Hamish would tell him to shut up.

And all the while, the house pushed on them. Owen felt it most keenly, because he knew what it was to become a domicile for the entity. Now, he could feel it creeping around them, a shadow slinking around their margins. And in them, too. Cockroaches in their walls, scuttling about. Even in the crawlspace, its whispers were distant, but ever present.

They alternated between long periods of simmering silence that erupted in bouts of yelling at one another. Hamish called Owen weak. Owen said Lore was a thief. Lore said Hamish was a fool. Around and around they went like that.

Then one day—or one night, did it even matter anymore?—Owen remembered thinking, I want to kill them, and the thought was crystalline in his head, like a fork tapping against a drinking glass. It was not the thought of, say, one sibling to another, fed up with their nonsense, I’m going to kill you, Becca. No, I’m going to kill you, Jeremy! It was a clear directive. He wanted to kill them. Same as he’d wanted to kill Nick.

And that’s when he knew, the house had them. This time, it was not so dramatic as it had been when he was alone—there, it felt big, bold, like he was an empty house on a buyer’s market, move-in ready, and one day, there it was, this entity, this demon, and it came in right through the front door. But this time, they’d left the crawlspace often enough, and the house had slipped in when it could. Like a squatter sleeping in the attic. All the while working on them, in them, at them. One beam or brace at a time. A scrape of putty, a splash of paint. Bits of décor, design, architecture. Slowly building a panic room inside each of them.

He realized this when they were back in the same pantry where he’d found the lighter—and where Nick had beaten him and left. By now they each had flashlights, and were grabbing whatever they could find off shelves. Lore grabbed a box of crackers, and Hamish groused at her, snatching it out of her hand and shouldering her aside. She barked at him, called him a “Republican piece of shit thief,” and Owen felt himself want to say back to her, Lot of nerve calling someone else a thief, but he bit back those words and instead started to say:

“The house always wins.”

And then, as if on cue—

The door opened—

And in walked Nick Lobell.