Page 76

The House Wakes Up

A house, at first, is not a home.

At the start, a house is just a house: It is a structure designed for the purpose of someone to live in it. Perhaps you! You move in. You bring your things—all your most precious stuff . You pack into this place your whole life—and that effect is multiplicative. Life makes life, a fungal efflorescence of existence begetting existence. You bring in a spouse, you have more children, you get one pet, another pet, a dog and a cat and now a bearded dragon; it’s where you learn to cook and fill the house with wonderful smells; it’s where you rest your head and give birth to dreams that are ambitious and strange. And it is in all this that a house becomes a home: You imprint yourself upon it, and it imprints itself upon you in return. It becomes a part of your very identity—your house, your home, is part of the tapestry that is you. You carry it with you, in your heart, to the end of things.

That, of course, is where the saying comes from:

Home is where the heart is .

—

The other thing about a house—a home —is that it is a private place. It has walls. You can draw curtains over the windows. You can lock the door.

And in that place, you can be you and do whatever it is you want to do.

You pig out on ice cream. You masturbate. You fuck. You sing in the shower. You take a shit multiple times a day. You watch the very worst of reality TV. You plunder the liquor cabinet. You talk absolute trash about people you know, people you work with, people you love, and others you hate. You get your hands tied behind your back, you get bent over a desk, you take a gag in your mouth and a cock—real or artificial!—wherever you so choose, done consensually, with a loving partner, or two, or three.

This, too, is part of a house’s purview: a home away from prying eyes where you can finally drop the mask, lose the pretense, and be who you need to be.

It is necessary and it is good.

Until, of course, it’s not.

That privacy also keeps hidden the fights you have. The cruel words, sharp as a tack, stuck in those you purportedly love. Your house is where you rage and punch drywall. Where families fight. Where relationships start to rot like fruit left long on the ground. It’s where kids learn to hate their parents. Where wives learn to hate the men they married and wish instead they’d fucked off to the woods and taken their chance with a bear. It’s where bad habits take root: too much drinking, too much eating, too many trips to the medicine cabinet, too much hoarding, too much sitting in the dark drunk-texting someone or trolling people on social media or flicking through the pics of an ex. Little seeds of neglect and pain, thumbed into your fertile dirt—seeds that grow best not in the light, but in the dark.

And if allowed to grow, to flourish, these invasive vines tangle—a braiding mat of suffering begins to form. A man hits his wife. A mother speaks the cruelest words to her child. A teenager pops all the pills in his parents’ bathroom and dies in the tub. An angry loner drinks beer, beats his dog, doxxes someone on the internet whose identity he hates. A whipping belt. A gun under the bed. A knife in the knife block. A computer archiving grotesque images of children. In the deepest dark of a house, of a home, hate and pain and suffering can fester. All that effervescent rage . All that crushing despair . Flourishing. Festering.

Dreams curdling fast into nightmares.

It’s where home stops being where the heart is.

Home is where the hurt is.

Where the horror lives.

Home becomes another name for that place where monsters go to hide and do their terrible work.

—

In the secret dark of such a place, sometimes, something awakens.

Something new.

Something terrible, with eyes open wide and a powerful hunger.

—

Enter: Dan Harrow, the man behind the Harrowstown planned communities of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

It was 1945, and Dan was in his favorite drinking hole in Philadelphia, sitting at the bar, sipping an Irish whiskey, doodling pictures of houses. Dan loved houses, having grown up in a cramped West Philly apartment in a crowded apartment building. He loved that single-family homes felt like islands —a private oasis, a retreat from the world. He sketched Craftsman style and single-floor Spanish Colonials and funky little Art Deco bungalows (though these were a bit too extreme for Dan, who really liked the confidence of clean, straight lines). That’s when a man sat down next to him, a fella who introduced himself as Eddie Naberius, and Eddie, well, he clocked right away that Dan was down on his luck. (Perhaps not too hard to clock, Dan figured, since he was drinking whiskey at an Irish bar at half past two on a workday.) Dan had in fact been fired from his architectural job for wanting to do more than work the damn mail room—he’d been there for five years, and he had ideas, why wouldn’t anyone listen?

But this fella, Eddie, he says after hearing Dan’s story, “You know, Dan, the G.I. Bill passed last year, it’s gonna change things. War’s over—not formally, but it’s all over but the crying.” Dan made a face at that and then Eddie said the most curious thing: “Right, that one’s not out yet, is it? Ink Spots, keep your ears out. Anyway. Point is, Dan, gonna be a lot of soldiers coming back from the war with money stuffed in their pockets from Uncle Sam. And they’re not going to want to live in the cities, no sir, not with all that racket, all the smoke and those people. They’re going to want some peace and quiet. I think you could be the man to give it to them with your—” Here, Eddie tapped the doodles. “Nice little houses here. Houses for good men with nice wives and lovely children. Soldiers. Upstanding fellas. The kind of people who upheld the dignity of this country. Who restored dignity to the world. People who are American as an apple pie. And I think we can repay them. Don’t you, Dan?”

—

(It was only later that Dan realized: He never told Eddie his name.)

—

Dan designed four houses: the In-Towner, the King’s Castle, the Ranchhand, and the Dreamboat. Each equal to the others in its category, and each category offering something a little bit different for different buyers. A garage on this one, three bedrooms on that one instead of two, different paint colors on the wood slat siding. Each house was some form of what they were calling ranch style, or ranchers—just one floor, but with an expandable attic and a basement. Each had a small parcel of manicured lawn, a paved and sealed driveway, and a white picket fence separating you from your lovely neighbor.

Eddie had money and he had contacts for government land contracts, and he helped Dan start a building firm using builders who learned to mass-produce things fast and efficient for the Navy during the war.

And by 1947, they had their first neighborhood—

Not just a neighborhood, but in fact a whole Pennsylvania municipality:

Harrowstown, PA, in the south of Bucks County, not far from the city.

A suburb. Clean and beautiful.

Each house was under ten thousand dollars. Most advertised at just sixty-five dollars a month. And best of all:

No money down for American heroes!

(Dan initially had it say “for veterans,” but Eddie wanted that punched up a bit. “Marketing,” he said, with a sly wink.)

Three months in, every house was bought.

(By white people, of course. Eddie said this was a neighborhood for a certain kind of person, and didn’t the Blacks like the city better anyway?)

—

Enter: Alfred—Alfie—Shawcatch.

Shawcatch, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne, Army. There on the ground to liberate Wobbelin, a sub-camp of Neuengamme just outside Ludwigslust. This camp was not one of gas chambers and experimental surgery suites, but rather had been used as overflow when Germans moved captive Juden and other inmates out of camps that were on the verge of liberation. At Wobbelin, the inmates were forced to live like animals, thousands wrangled together, left to suffer thirst, starvation, disease—

And ultimately, cannibalism.

Alfie Shawcatch came home to his wife, Judy, and sought peace away from the nightmares of war. When it came time to settle down, thanks to the G.I. Bill, he was able to choose one of the inaugural homes in Harrowstown—

He chose the most handsome model of them all.

The Dreamboat.

—

And just like that, a house became a home.

Judy, pregnant, gave birth to the first of their three children—Marie was the first, then the next two were boys named Oliver and Francis—Ollie, and Little Frankie, respectively. They bought a dog: a red hound they called Lou.

Alfie himself took a job in the city as a trolley conductor for the PTC, the Philadelphia Transit Company.

Judy grew roses and loved to bake.

Marie was a little firecracker—a whip-smart kid with dreams beyond her expected station.

Ollie was a church mouse, and Little Frankie was a clown.

Lou didn’t understand how to play fetch. He’d fetch whatever you threw for him, but he did not return it and instead liked to be chased around.

Things were good.

Except inside Alfie’s head.

—

Every night, a little bit less sleep. Eroded, chewed in sharp-toothed nibbles. Alfie dreamed so often of war, not just of the gunfire and the explosions and the eggy hell-stink in the air. Not just of the injuries he saw on his fellow soldiers—injuries that wouldn’t close, that seemed to birth clots of maggots, that started to smell like old meat. Not just of who he had to kill—and Alfie did have to kill, because that was war, you became death or you got dead. Most of his dreams were of the camp. Of the starving and the sickened and the dead. Of people pushed so far they had to eat one another just to survive.

What kind of world is this? he wondered, never out loud.

As his sleep frittered away, so did his mental state.

Soon he stopped sleeping altogether.

And on one dark summer night, Alfie did something terrible. He got up out of bed, dazed, weary, seventy-two hours straight without sleep. He took out the paratrooper knife from under his pillow—not even sure when he’d put it there—and stuck it in his wife’s throat. No logic to it. No thinking she was an enemy soldier, no hallucinating her as some kind of foul thing. Best that can be surmised, he had all that pain, all that bad stuff inside him, and it built up like an infection. Swelling and swelling until it popped. Until the rage needed somewhere to go.

Judy didn’t get to scream.

Then he went after his children. Frankie and Ollie slept in one room, Marie in another, because the Dreamboat was one of those blessed three-bedroom models, wasn’t it? A real beaut, that house. Powder-blue walls in the boys’ room, suddenly sprayed red with what was kept inside them. They screamed. They fought. Like good boys, Alfie knew. Good boys knew to fight. Even when the fight was a losing one. And then, finally, Marie.

He went to find her in her bed, but she was gone.

She’d seen him, he realized. Seen him and crawled into the small attic of the house, and then slipped down into the crawlspace—like a little rat. He promised her if she came out, he would do okay by her. He would keep her safe and even bring her mother and her brothers back to life again. But Marie refused. Because Marie was smart. And that’s when Alfie knew, only one way to get out a rat like that. He’d smoke her out. So he set a fire in the attic and waited for her to show herself, and ohh, that fire spread mighty quick. But Alfie wasn’t about to leave and miss her sneaking out, so he stayed there in the house as it burned down around him, as it blocked the doors and choked him with smoke. Soon, it had him, too, the fire crawling up his legs and setting his hair ablaze. That’s how Alfie met his end.

—

(Marie escaped via a panel in the back meant to access the basement.)

(She lived, though her family did not.)

—

The house watched it all.

It may seem strange to think of a house watching anything, but when a house becomes a home, it becomes imbued with life. Alive in an almost literal way—and certainly aware. If a house becomes haunted, it is not haunted by the ghosts of its inhabitants but rather by the memories of those inhabitants—it is the house that remembers, and the house that records and replays the lives lived there.

Houses, in this way, are like vessels. Waiting to be filled up. And what fills them can spill out—be it love, be it pain, be it hate.

And Alfred Shawcatch filled that house, his Dreamboat, with the blood of his family, the screams of his children, and the nightmares of war.

—

When the house burned, it was gone. Cooked to the earth—naught but a few black-char splinters sticking up from the ground like the teeth of a beast.

But gone is not always gone .

And in the great void where dead things go, the house was reborn.

—

It was reborn a cursed thing. It went to its death splashed with blood and burned with fire. It came alive in the dark, the prefab structure redrawn first as a mere sketch, but soon with walls and slab and glass. It became fully aware—with only hatred as its guide. Hatred for Alfie Shawcatch and what he had done to his family.

It was hateful, yes.

But it was also alone. And houses— homes —crave company. To be empty is the worst fate, and so the house, whether consciously or not, called out.

It sang a hammer-and-saw song to other homes like it.

A song of blood and fire.

—

The wages of civilization and the vagaries of the twentieth century saw more and more people, meaning more and more houses, more and more homes, and in the uncaring churn of industry and the ever-steady march of war, trauma and pain radiated out—the glassy, brassy pealing of a bell. More homes were filled with nightmares instead of dreams, and when some of those homes died—be they burned, demolished, abandoned—they sometimes could come back. They rose together in the void, sometimes one room, sometimes many, drifting toward the original house—Dan Harrow’s Dreamboat model—called by its grim gravity. It reached for them, and they for it. They joined with it, room by room.

And as they did, its power grew.

Its hunger, too, in equal measure.

It had all this hatred, and nothing to do with it.

It needed people.

People to hurt.

So it put out staircases. Doorways. Windows. All in places where only a few might find them. Distant places where the portals would be safe. In forests, on beaches, in meadows. Bait for the ever curious. And when a person went in, the house had them. It could mine them for their own pain, making more rooms just for them. Torment, though, was not enough. The house learned that once it hollowed them out, it could fill them back up—with itself. And then it could set them free again, put back into the world. There they would return, sharing their hurt, sharing the horror, and making more of it for everyone. The more that went around, the greater the house became—

And the larger, too.

This, then, is where hate lives.

This is its home.