I drove to Mordant Acres Estates at nine o’clock that gloomy, drizzly morning. Thick mist was rising in the woods, and the black storm clouds were so thick, you could not tell whether the sun had risen at all.
My car navigation system failed just before I entered the massive housing project, so I had to resort to my flashlight to read the addresses on the mailboxes. I saw that within the gated complex, the great majority of homes were so-called “McMansions” built for the new rich, but they were all empty now because of the economy and the blood-curdling rumors spread in the newspapers and online.
I wove from one empty house to another, all well off the road with long drives, their bodies ensconced in thick woods with perhaps a dormer window showing through the trees. The Elder Home, I had been told, was on Sleepy Hollow Road, near the intersection with Rose Road.
It was not one of the new mansions. It was well over a hundred years old and lay in a depression. The natural underground springs and the surface water runs kept the place drenched. It was not supposed to be occupied. Yet the caller wanted me to do an estimate for repairs. The job was urgent because the property was up for sale, and the owners were aiming to close.
The buyer wanted me to take a look and give an independent opinion. She must have used the old phone book because she reached my land line, not my cell. She was supposed to meet me at the end of the drive by the mailbox, and there she was standing, soaking wet in the rain by the box with number 666 and the sign that read, “For Sale By Owner.” The woman seemed to enjoy the wet weather and licked the moisture as it streamed down her pallid face.
“Hello, Milo. It’s been a very long time, and you probably don’t remember. Anyhow, my name is Uldra Grimmstead Elder. I’m glad you came—and right on time. That’s the place down the drive there. Watch the bump as you drive in and the stream before the porch. Here’s the key. Take it. I’ll just wait here. You know what to look for in the cellar and the attic. You just take a look and give me the key when you come out again.”
“Look, it’s raining. Why don’t you hop in and we’ll drive down together? I won’t be bothered by your being in the house while I work. I don’t want to leave you out here in the cold and wet. It might take me a while.”
“Don’t worry about me. I like the rain. It’s no problem to stand up for a while after all the time I spend lying down. You can do the job by yourself, can’t you? ‘Course you can. Hahaha. ‘Course you can.”
With her arthritic fingers, she handed me a very large zinc key that was supposed to open the front door. It looked like a key to a family crypt I had once evaluated, and I shivered to recall the details of that spooky visit. At the moment that I grasped the key, lightning shot through the sky in a triple fork, followed immediately by a deafening crash of thunder.
The woman laughed again, and held onto the key a little longer than I expected, as if to keep us joined while the lightning continued and the thunder cascaded. When she released the cold, metallic key, I felt its weight and looked in the woman’s eyes. Her eyes were entirely milk white, like the marble in a classic sculpture, and I knew that she was blind, and I had a flash of memory in my youth of those same eyes upon me looking without seeing.
As I drove down the winding drive, I saw her in the rearview mirror, waving her hands as the lightning struck, as if she were the conductress for a mighty symphony. Ahead, I saw the house emerge from the woods, with ravens rising all around it, and then falling back on their black wings to the boughs and branches that surrounded it.
The woods around the house were a mix of ancient, gnarled trees, and new growth. The line of larches that blocked the view of the front porch from the drive was overgrown, so they crowded the dormers. Four enormous dead trees extended their crooked, bare boughs over the roof, which I could see needed extensive repair. As the lightning continued striking, the dead trees looked like hulking giants with arms and fingers reaching for the house, menacingly.
My job, I thought, was simple, but to do it, I had to get from the drive to the building. That was not going to be easy, because the stream of water that ran into the hollow where the house stood, was continuous and, as Uldra said, cut across the walk that led from the end of the drive to the porch.
I did not have to use my flashlight to make it to the porch because the lightning was almost continuous now. One lightning strike hit so near, I thought it must have been guided to the ground by one of the lightning rods on top of the highest gable of the house.
I thought of Martin Luther, who had been struck by lightning and by grace, survived, and I wondered how close the latest shaft had come to me, and by what chance or grace I had not become its victim. I stepped into the stream, and my foot dropped in, and I sank up to my knee.
I forged forth and found the bottom with my other foot, and then I slogged through the torrent to the other side where the steps to the porch beckoned. By the time I reached the porch, I was soaked almost to the waist, and my work shoes were sloshing and squeaking with the water.
As I stepped up onto the porch, I felt the wood giving way below me. I did not have to stick my probe into the porch to determine that it would all have to be replaced. I walked very carefully across the rotten wooden porch for fear of falling through. That was only the beginning of the rot and mildew that must be general.
The door itself was not fastened, but a great chain with an ancient lock barred the way with links joined to the jambs on either side by iron rings that had been set in the jambs many years ago. I fitted the zinc key into the lock and, with effort, turned the key and opened the lock. I dropped the chain and the lock with the key on the porch and pushed the rotten door open carefully, lest it fall off against my hand.
I turned on my flashlight to enter the dark cavern that was the main vestibule. As I walked through the room, beaming my flashlight to show the way, I heard scuffling on the second floor and on the stairs, and I thought I heard the dim caw of the ravens that guarded the outside, though not religiously. I then heard the house groan, as if it were trying to communicate a warning or to tell me of some great pain it was enduring. I wondered whether the building was going to collapse on me, and had signaled a warning of that very event, but that is a risk of my job, and why I get paid well for what I do.
I mused that I was inspecting the interior of a giant music box of a house that moaned and whistled while I worked. I heard water running as if the roof had dripping holes and a runlet collecting the rainwater was cascading through the house to the basement, which was my first destination, as it was for the water of that raining morning.
I managed to get to the basement door to the right at the end of the great hall that divided the house in two. I pushed the door open and step by step, descended. The stairwell held, and I saw at the bottom was a pool with water running into it from many conduits. I could see the flows from the flashlight, but I could not know their origins.
My flashlight showed thick cobwebs hanging from the ceiling of the basement area, and huge black spiders creeping away from the light. Some cobwebs brushed against my face and hair as I moved, and I hoped the spiders had abandoned those.
In the black water of the basement, my flashlight illuminated two large black rats swim away into a corner, where they dived and disappeared under the oily water. I stuck my prod at the beams under the floor above, and the prod sank in easily to the hilt. The floor was being carried by damp, rotten wood, but the rats did not care any more than I did.
I went to the bottom of the basement stairs, and I stepped onto the basement floor through the black water that gathered there. I mused that rain water was pouring into the basement, but as fast as it poured, some force pulled the effluent from the basement. I found the floor steady and ankle deep, while I explored the enormous space under the joists and struts that held the house up.
A bat dropped from the ceiling and scurried about to find some way of escape, and I heard the noise of rats and their children chirruping about my presence. I knew that my mission was not their concern, and my flashlight found the large bulbous cocoon-like entities that hung from the ceiling of the basement foundations. The spiders had made good work of whatever they had surrounded by their handiwork.
I was glad that I was not among their collection. I could not understand how the spiders had suspended corpses of human size, so they remained above the black surface of the flood, yet were so enclosed that they could be ready, decomposing, to feed several generations of spiders. I had no time for biological investigations, so I concluded my investigation of the basement with the record of twelve human-sized web constructions that were better acclimated to the weather and circumstances than the house itself.
I turned and rose through the stairwell, to the first floor, and ascended to the second floor. I reckoned that the first floor was all for show, as it always was in these cases, and I was right. On the second floor, I found the containers that humans would have named coffins, all safe from the elements, though the floor underneath them was strained to the breaking point.
As the lightning flashed through the windows, the larches played a tune against the still intact window panes. I counted three dozen coffins ranged in the room, and I figured that additional I-beams must be installed to carry them. A bat flew through the space, and three others gathered on my shoulder as if to relay a message to me about the future. I did not care. I knew that the coffins were a configuration. I only hoped that I might not soon be numbered among the undead that were interred there.
So I moved from the second floor, which was a mortician’s delight, to the third floor, where more coffins lined the rooms, all closed, but waiting for some external impulse to open and release what was within them. I knew better than open those wooden mouths that ingested the dead and rotting human flesh. I counted the coffins and moved to the attic floor above them. In the attic floor, I found along the ceiling, more bats than I had ever seen before. They released their excreta as I flashed my light on them, and they bustled about and flew around me since I had interrupted their slumber. They had clearly only just returned from their nocturnal searching.
Now that they had returned, they were disgruntled about my light and my presence. I illuminated females with their brood, showing their fangs in warning. All this, I recorded in my memory as part of my deliverable. I saw the runlets of the roof water that fed the basement pool. I heard the ravens and crows cawing their annoyance at my presence inside their preserve. I thought I heard the protestations of the house itself, which seemed to moan and rock as I stepped through my motions.
Finally, I knew I had enough to provide my report. I tripped, though, and found myself on the floor of the attic, covered by spiders and attacked by the bats that ate them. I stood as tall as I could, given my size and the height of the ceiling. I went back down from the attic to the third floor, and then the second and the first, where I found the largest rats running that I had ever seen. They looked at me and then scuttled down the stairs to the basement. I thought for a few minutes while the lightning flashed and the thunder roared. Had I missed anything? Then, I felt a hand upon my shoulder, and I started and turned.
There, in my flashlight’s beam, stood an old man in a cape with a scythe over his shoulder. He had an inordinate smile, and his crooked finger beckoned as if he were trying to lure me to look at something I had overlooked before. I followed him to the fireplace that ran straight up through the decrepit mansion. He had no trouble crawling up the flue, and I followed him because I thought I had no choice. Up through the enormous chimney complex I rose, scattering flying squirrels and bats and spiders. We reached the roof and crawled out above the house to walk the slate roof itself.
The black figure in the flashing of the lightning kept his black robes flowing and indicated what he wanted to show me by gesturing with his scythe. I saw the way the water flowed from the roof and ended in the basement. He then, without effort, jumped to a giant conifer to the rear of the building and clambered down. I followed him so we stood in the overgrown backyard of the mansion. With a curled finger, the strangely familiar figure beckoned me to follow him.
We walked through brambles to a clearing in the woods, where an iron fence separated the former living from the dead. An old cemetery was there, illuminated by lightning flashes and adorned by gravestones and crypts and mausoleums. The hooded figure gestured with his scythe to an open grave as if to invite me to try it on for size. I shook my head. I was not ready for that kind of play. I noticed that the last names of most headstones were Elder. I said, “I have enough, and I must be going now.”
The figure did not deter me as I made my way back through the woods to the house, and then around the outside of the house to the front porch. There, by the lightning, I traversed the running stream, which ran at the same level as when I entered. I made it to my vehicle and looked back one more time.
Above the house in the lightning, I saw the ravens rise and fall. I heard the water streaming all around the place. I fancied that I heard the house itself moaning intermittently as the storm ranged above it. I then decided I had to go back again across the water to place the chains across the door and retrieve the key from the ancient lock. Why had I been so hasty as to leave this undone?
I forded the stream for the third time that morning, and when I reached the porch, I rejoined the chain and locked the lock and retrieved the zinc key. The house was as I had first encountered it. Then, I forded the stream for the fourth and final time that day, and then, dripping wet, I waited to get into my vehicle while the water streamed from my clothes. I listened to the symphony that the house and nature played, and I swatted several spiders that crawled over my clothes and skin. When I thought the time was right, I backed out the drive to the place where the mailbox and the realtor’s sign, and my client stood.
She was smiling when I arrived as if she had accompanied me and now was waiting for what I thought of the adventure we had experienced together. I gave her the zinc key, and I told her everything that I had seen during my visit. She did not interrupt me but nodded while I recounted my experience. While she listened, a raven flew to her and perched on her shoulder. As I talked, the bird accepted something that she fed the bird. Every time she fed the raven, it cawed after it swallowed the morsel, and in unison, the raven’s cohorts rose from the branches around the house and descended again.
“You have done well, my son. I am satisfied with your inspection. Do you have any recommendations for me?”
“It seems to me that you’ll need some steel reinforcements of the floors in which you have the coffins. I don’t think you’ll need to worry about the water’s flow because the drainage is sufficient to handle all runoff.”
“Anything else?”
“You might want to install feeders for the ravens and the bats around the grounds. You heard the ravens while you fed the raven on your shoulder. They’re hungry. As for the bats, their food is well established. If you can allow the rumors to subside somewhat, you’ll find that the food will come for them.”
“Young man, how will I ever repay you?”
“There is no need for repayment above what we agreed to in our contract, Uldra.”
The woman drew forth a pouch with twelve gold coins and handed it to me. I counted them for form because I knew she would not cheat me.
“So you saw my friend with the scythe and survived the encounter?”
“Yes, I saw him and survived. It was unexpected.”
“As it always is, my son.”
“So now I must be going.”
“Yes, and be safe. You never know these days what might happen.”
I saw that her hair was streaming with water, and her tongue occasionally licked her lips. She was quite comely if you ignored the white of her eyes. I started my vehicle and began to drive off, when through the rearview mirror, I saw the man with the scythe come up behind her and gently take her by the waist. They looked like an old American painting of a farmer and his wife, though much transformed. I kept right on driving out the way I had come in, and as I drove, the black clouds dispersed, and the shafts of sunlight streamed through. The storm was over.
I stopped by the exit to the main thoroughfare, where I had to decide whether to go right or left. It was not yet noon, and I took a coin and flipped it. I had business in both directions, but no fixed time for any of it. I felt lucky today, and when the coin showed heads, I turned to the right. My clothing was soaking wet from the belt down. I hoped I had swatted the spiders.
The next house on my list was a prime, just-built estate with no vestiges of age or decrepitude. I certainly did not want to bring those degrading elements with me for the inspection. I looked in the back of my vehicle and saw that my own scythe was still intact and ready for use. You just never know these days when that might come in handy.
I figured I had missed the lightning barely and the man with the scythe also. I pulled out on the highway and came up to speed. I felt the pouch with the twelve gold coins. I was then reassured that it was going to be a great, sunny day after all.