five years later
The frozen gravel crunches under my tires as Carlie and I approach the old McPherson house. As we get closer to the end of the drive, I can feel her beginning to tense and shift uncomfortably in her seat. She averts her eyes from the old house—eyes that plead with me to turn around—to run.
Parking next to the barn, I promise her that I will be back in a few minutes. I need to take one last look.
As I walk the grounds around this once magnificent house, I can still feel an oppressiveness that is beyond reason or explanation. Even in the middle of the day, I feel a dark, angry shadow hanging over the old house. To all outward appearances, it is nothing more than a vacant house, a house that someone abandoned long ago.
However, upon closer inspection, I can’t help but notice that the truly violent nature of the house seems etched into its very existence. The second-floor windows are still dark and discolored—a permanent reminder of Carlie’s brush with death. They are boarded up now with wood that has warped and grayed with age, a testimony to the cruel influence that the passage of time has had on the old house.
Rope tendrils still cling desperately to a rafter in the darkest recesses of the barn. Now the ill-fated victims of age and the elements, they may have at one time echoed the sound of laughter from a child’s swing. On the other hand, they may tell a completely different story—a story of one child’s abuse and indescribable suffering.
In their own subtle way, each tells the story of the McPherson house—a story with a past so dark and so cruel that the house has become little more than a scattered collection of broken lives, shattered dreams, and the deaths of its inhabitants.
While it is said that time heals what reason cannot, the true evil that is the McPherson house defies both time and reason.
As I climb behind the steering wheel, I hold Carlie’s hand in mine. I thank her for sharing her story, and I apologize for the pain it has caused in its retelling.
As we drive toward the end of Baxter Road—and away from the old house for the last time—the untended “For Sale” sign still leans precariously in the front yard. Its faded letters on rusted hinges squeak gently in the afternoon breeze, beckoning anyone who might hear it, as a siren to an unsuspecting sailor.
Turning onto the main highway, I can feel the house, and the evil within it, watching us drive away.
Again, it patiently waits.