Elizabeth Hand
I CAN’T remember exactly when I first started entering houses while the owners weren’t around. Before my children were born, so that’s at least thirty-five years ago. It started in the fall, when I used to walk my old English sheepdog, Winston, down one of the camp roads on Taylor Pond. That road is more built up now with new summer houses and even a few year-round homes, but back then there were only two houses that were occupied all year. The rest, maybe a dozen all together, were camps or cottages, uninsulated and very small, certainly by today’s standards. They straggled along the lakefront, some in precarious stages of decay, the others neatly kept up with shingles or board-and-batten siding. These days you couldn’t build a structure that close to the waterfront, but eighty or ninety years ago, no one cared about things like that.
Anyway, Winston and I would amble along the dirt road for an hour or two at a time, me kicking at leaves, Winston snuffling at chipmunks and red squirrels. This would be after I got off work at the CPA office where I answered the phone, or on weekends. The pond was beautiful—a lake, really, they just called it a pond—and sometimes I’d watch loons or otters in the water, or a bald eagle overhead. I never saw another living soul except for Winston. No cars ever went by— those two year-round homes were at the head of the road.
I’m not sure why I decided one day just to walk up to one of the camps and see if the door was open. Probably I was looking at the water, and the screened-in porch, and got curious about who lived inside. Although to be honest, I really wasn’t interested in who lived there. I just wanted to see what the inside looked like.
I tried the screen door. It opened, of course—who locks their screen door? Then I tried the knob on the inner door and it opened, too. I told Winston to wait for me, and went inside.
It looked pretty much like any camp does, or did. Small rooms, knotty pine walls, exposed beams. One story, with a tiny bathroom and a metal shower stall. Tiny kitchen with a General Electric fridge that must’ve dated to the early 1960s, its door held open by a dishrag wrapped around the handle. Two small bedrooms with two beds apiece.
The living room was the nicest, with big old mullioned windows, a door that opened onto the screened porch. The kind of furniture you find in camps—secondhand stuff, or chairs and side tables demoted from the primary residence. A big coffee table; shelves holding boxes of games and puzzles, paperbacks that had swollen with damp. Stone fireplace with a small pile of camp wood beside it. On the walls, framed Venus paint-by-numbers paintings of deer or mountains.
Camps had a particular smell in those days. Maybe they still do. Mildew, coffee, cigarette smoke, woodsmoke, Comet. It’s a nice smell, even the mildew if it’s not too strong. I spent a minute or two gazing at the lake through the windows. Then I left.
The next camp was pretty much the same thing, though with two canoes by the water instead of one, the dock pulled out alongside them. The door was unlocked. There were more games here, also a wrapped-up volleyball net and a plastic Whiffle Ball bat. Children’s bathing suits hanging in the bathroom. Nicer furniture, scuffed up but newer-looking, blond wood. The chairs and table and couch looked like they’d been bought as a set. The view here wasn’t as open as at the first house, because some tamaracks had grown too close to the windows. But it was still nice, with the children’s artwork displayed on the walls, and a framed photograph of Mount Cadillac.
I made sure the door closed securely behind me and continued walking. Winston stopped chasing squirrels and seemed content to stay beside me. I idly plucked leaves and sticks from his tangled fur, making a mental note to give him a thorough brushing when I got home, maybe a bath.
For the next hour or so it was more of the same. Only about half of the camps were unlocked, though all the screened porch doors were open. In those cases, I’d check out the view from the porch, angling among stacked-up wicker or plastic furniture, folded lawn chairs, life preservers and deflated water toys. On one porch, the door to the living room was open, so I got to take a look at that.
There was a pleasant sameness to the decor of all these places, if you could call it decor, and an even more reassuring sense of difference between how people spruced up their little havens. A tiny, handmade camp that consisted of only a single room had fishing gear in the corner, a huge moose rack over the door, and a six-point deer rack on the outhouse. In the neighboring shingle cottage, almost every surface was covered by something crocheted or handwoven or knit or quilted, and the air smelled strongly of cigarettes and potpourri.
I took stock of each place, and considered how I might move around the furniture, or what trees I’d cut down. Once or twice I recognized the name on the door, or a face in a faded family photograph. I never opened any drawers or cabinets or took anything. I wouldn’t have dreamed of that. Like I said, I just wanted to see what they looked like inside.
Finally, we reached the end of the camp road. Winston was tired and the sun was getting low, besides which I never walked any farther than this. So we turned round and walked back to the head of the camp road, then onto the paved road, where I’d left my old Volvo parked on the grass. Winston hopped into the back and we went home. I spent about an hour brushing him but didn’t bother with the bath. He really hated baths.
For the rest of that autumn, I’d occasionally walk along different camp roads in town and do the same thing. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, my curiosity had been sated. As the days grew darker and colder, I walked Winston close to home. A year later I married Brandon, and a year after that our daughter was born.
By the time I started walking again, a decade had passed. The old dog had died, and we never got another. I walked with other women now, the mothers of my children’s classmates. I grew close to one in particular, Rose. We began walking when our boys were nine or ten years old, and continued doing so for almost thirty years. Like me, Rose liked to walk along the camp roads, where there were few cars, though in summer the mosquitoes were terrible, and over the decades we learned to be increasingly mindful of ticks.
Rose was small and cheerful and talked a lot. Local gossip, family news. Sometimes we’d rant about politics. Our friend Helen joined us occasionally. She walked faster than Rose and I, so there’d be less conversation when the three of us were together. Over the years, Rose, like me, had stopped coloring her hair. I went mousy grey but Rose’s grew in the color of a new nickel. Helen continued to dye her hair, though it wasn’t as blond as it had been. Our husbands were all friendly, and the six of us often got together for dinners or bonfires or the Super Bowl.
So it was odd that I had known Rose for almost a quarter century before I learned that she, too, liked exploring empty houses. We were walking on the dirt road that runs along Lagawala Lake. It was late fall, and the weather had been unseasonably cold for about a week. There were few houses along the camp road, all clustered at the far end, all vacated till the following summer—we knew that because we’d gotten in the habit of peering through the windows. I never mentioned my old habit, though once or twice, when Rose wasn’t looking, I’d test the door of a cottage. But everyone kept their houses locked now.
About halfway down the road someone from out of state had bought a huge parcel of the lakefront, where for the last ten years they’d been building a vast compound. We both knew some of the contractors who’d worked there at some point—stonemasons, builders, roofers, electricians, plumbers, heating and cooling experts, carpenters—and they told us what was inside the various Shingle-style mansions and outbuildings that had been erected. An indoor swimming pool, a billiards room, a separate building devoted to a screening room with a bar designed to look like an English pub. A miniature golf course with bronze statues at every hole. The caretaker had his own Craftsman cottage, bigger than my house.
Most extravagant of all was an outdoor carousel housed in its own building. Electronically controlled curtains kept us from ever being able to see what this looked like inside. There was also a hideous, two-story high, blaze-orange cast-resin sculpture of a plastic duck. In nearly a decade, we never saw any sign that someone had occupied the house or property, other than the caretaker.
One winter day early in the construction, when the mansion had been closed in and roofed but none of the interior work had been done, Rose and I halted to stare up at it. Work had stopped for the winter.
“That is a disgusting waste of money,” I said.
“You’re not kidding. They’re heating it, too.”
“Heating it? The windows aren’t even in.”
“I know. But the heat’s blasting inside.”
“How do you know?”
“Cause I’ve been in a bunch of times. The doors are all open. Want to see?”
I glanced down the road, toward the caretaker’s house. A thick stand of evergreens screened us from it. Besides, if anyone caught us, what would they do? We were two respectable middle-aged ladies who’d served on town committees and contributed to dozens of bake sales.
“Sure,” I said, and we went inside.
It was warm as a hotel room in there. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of tools and materials had been left in the various rooms— electrical wiring, sheetrock, tools, shopvacs, you name it. We wandered around for a while, but I lost interest fairly quickly. There were no furnishings, and the lake view was nice but not spectacular. I also wondered if the owners had installed some kind of security system.
“We better go,” I said. “They might have CCTV or something.”
Rose shrugged. “Yeah, okay. But it’s fun, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said, and we returned to the road. After few seconds I added, “I used to do that sometimes, on the camp roads. Go into houses when no one was there.”
“No!” Rose exclaimed so loudly that at first I thought she was horrified. “Me too! For years.”
“Really?”
“Sure. No one ever used to lock their doors. It was fun. I never did anything.”
“Me neither.”
After that, we’d compare notes whenever we passed a house we had entered. Rose knew more about the owners than I did, but then she knew more people in town than me. Sometimes, when Helen walked with us, we’d forget and mention a camp we’d both been inside.
“How do you know these people?” Helen asked me.
“I don’t,” I said. “I just like looking in their windows.”
“Me too,” said Rose.
Last October, the three of us took a long afternoon walk, not on one of the camp roads but a sparsely populated paved road that runs from our village center up the neighboring mountainside. We call it Mount Kilden; it’s actually a hill. We drove in my car to where there’s a pull-out and parked, then started to walk. Helen with her long legs strode a good ten feet in front of Rose and me, and looked over her shoulder to shout her contributions to our conversation.
“If you want to talk you’re going to have to slow down,” I finally yelled.
Helen halted, shaking her head. “You both should walk with Tim— I have to run to keep up with him.”
I said, “If I ran I’d have a heart attack.”
Helen laughed. “Good thing I know CPR,” she said, and once more started walking like she was in a race.
The paved road up Mount Kilden runs for about four miles, then does a dogleg and turns into an old gravel road that continues for another mile or two before it ends abruptly in a pull-out surrounded by towering pines. A rough trail ran from the pull-out to the top of Mount Kilden, with a spectacular view of the lakes, Agganangatt River, and the real mountains to the north. The trail was used by locals who made a point of not telling people from away about it. It had been a decade since I’d walked that path.
A hundred and fifty years ago, most of this was farmland, including a blueberry barren. Now woodland has overtaken the fields: tall maples and oaks, birch and beech, white pine, hemlock, impassable thorny blackberry vines. The autumn leaves were at their peak, gold and scarlet and yellow against a sky so blue it made my eyes hurt. Goldenrod and aster and Queen Anne’s lace bloomed along the side of the road. Somewhere far away a dog barked, but up here you couldn’t hear a single car. Our pace had slackened, and even Helen slowed to admire the trees.
“It’s so beautiful up here,” she said. “We should walk here more often. Why don’t we walk here more often?”
I groaned. “Maybe because I’d have a heart attack every time we did?”
“We can go back if you want,” said Rose, and patted my arm.
“No, I’m fine. I’ll just walk slowly.”
Within a few minutes, we all started to walk more slowly. The woods had retreated from the road here: we could see more sky, which gave the impression we were much higher than we really were. Old stone walls snaked among the trees, marking boundaries between farms and homesteads that had long since disappeared. Nothing remained of the houses except for cellar holes, and the trees that had been planted by their front doors—always a pair, one lilac and one apple tree, the lilacs now forming dense stands of grey and withered green, the apple trees still bearing fruit.
I picked one. It tasted sweet and slightly winey—a cider apple. I finished it and tossed the core into the woods, and hurried after the others.
“Look,” said Helen, pointing to where the trees thinned out ever more, just past a curve in the dirt road. “Don’t you love that house? When Tim and I used to hike up here, we always said we’d buy it and live there someday.”
“We did too!” exclaimed Rose in delight. “Hank loved that house. I loved that house.”
They both glanced at me, and I nodded. “I never came here with Brandon, but oh yes. It’s a beautiful house.”
Laughing, Rose broke into an almost-run. Helen followed and quickly passed her. After a minute or two, I caught up with them.
A broad lawn swept down to the road. The grass looked like it hadn’t been mowed in a few weeks, but it hadn’t been neglected to the point where weeds or saplings had taken root. Brilliant crimson leaves carpeted it, from an immense maple tree that towered in the middle of the lawn. Thirty or so feet behind the tree stood a house. Not an old farmhouse or Cape Cod, which you’d expect to find here, and not a Carpenter Gothic, either. This was a Federal-style house, almost square and two stories tall, with lots of big windows, white clapboard siding, and two brick chimneys. You don’t see a whole lot of Federal houses in this area, and I’d guess this one was built in the early 1800s. There was no sign of a barn or other outbuildings. No garage, though that’s not so unusual. We don’t have a garage, either. Blue and purple asters grew along its front walls, and the tall grey stalks of daylilies that had gone by.
The house appeared vacant—no curtains in the windows, no lights— but it had been kept up. The white paint was weathered but not too bad. The granite foundation hadn’t settled. The chimneys were intact and didn’t seem in need of repointing. I walked up to the front door and tried the knob.
It turned easily in my hand. I looked back to catch Rose’s eye, but she was heading around the side of the house. A moment later I heard her cry out.
“Marianne, look!”
I left the door and walked to the side of the house, where Rose pointed at a sign leaning against the wall.
FOR SALE BY OWNER.
“It’s for sale,” she said, almost reverently.
“It was for sale.” Helen picked up the sign and hefted it—handmade of plywood painted white and nailed to a stake. “They probably took it off the market after Labor Day.”
I stepped closer to examine it. The words FOR SALE BY OWNER were neatly painted in black letters. Beneath, someone had scrawled a phone number in Magic Marker. The numbers had blurred together from the rain. I didn’t recognize the area code.
“I wonder what they’re asking for it,” said Helen, and leaned the sign back against the house.
“A lot,” I said. Real estate here has gone through the roof in the last ten years.
“Well, I don’t know.” Rose stepped back and stared up at the roofline, straight as though drawn by a ruler on the sky. “It’s kind of far from everything.”
“There is no ‘far from anything’ in this town,” I retorted. “And people who move here, they want privacy.”
“Then why hasn’t it sold?”
“If the owner’s selling it, it might not be listed anywhere. Nobody drives up here except locals. And the season’s over, it’s off the market now anyway. That’s why they took down the sign.” I gestured to the front of the house. “The door’s open. Want to look inside?”
“Of course,” said Rose, and grinned.
Helen frowned. “That’s trespassing.”
“Only if we get caught,” I replied.
We headed to the front door. I pushed it open and we went inside, entering a small anteroom that would be a mudroom if anyone lived there, and cluttered with boots and coats and gear. Now it was empty and spotless. We stepped cautiously through another doorway, into what must have been the living room.
“Wow.” Rose’s eyes widened. “Look at this.”
I blinked, shading my eyes. Bright as it had been outside, here it was even brighter. Sunlight streamed through the large windows. The hardwood floors were so highly polished they looked as though someone had spilled maple syrup on them. The ceiling was high, the walls unadorned with moldings or wainscoting, and painted white. I walked to one wall and laid my hand against it, the surface smooth and slightly warm to the touch. I rapped it gently with my knuckles. Plaster, not drywall, and smooth as a piece of glass. Not what I’d expect to find in a house this old, where the plaster should be cracked or pitted. It must have been refinished not long ago.
I turned to Rose and Helen. “Someone’s spent a lot of money here.”
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s ever been here,” replied Helen. She was crouched in one corner. “Not for ages. Look—this is the only electrical outlet in this room, and it must be almost a hundred years old.”
Helen and Rose wandered off. I could hear them laughing and exclaiming in amazement at what they found: an old-fashioned hand pump in the kitchen sink, water closet rather than a modern toilet. I stayed in the living room, enchanted by the light, which had an odd clarity. An empty room in a house this old should be filled with dust motes, but the sun pouring through the windows appeared almost solid. You hear about golden sunlight: this really did look solid, so much so that I took a step into the center of the room and swept my hand through the broad sunbeam that bisected the empty space. I felt nothing except a faint warmth.
“We’re going upstairs!” Rose yelled from another room.
I left the living room with reluctance—the days had grown shorter, soon it would be dark and that nice sunlight would be gone—but the hallway was nearly as bright, illuminated by glass sidelights beside the door and a half-moon fanlight above it. A single round window halfway up the steps made it easy to find my way to where Helen and Rose waited on the second-floor landing.
“I’m ready to make an offer,” Rose announced, and laughed. “Did you see how big those rooms downstairs are?”
I nodded. “You’d have to modernize everything.”
“Oh, I know. I’m just daydreaming. But it’s all so beautiful.”
“I can’t believe what good shape it’s in,” said Helen, whose husband was a carpenter. “I wonder who’s kept it up? I mean, someone can’t have been living here—no appliances.”
“Big pantry, though,” said Rose.
She turned and walked down the hall. Three doors opened onto it, each leading into a bedroom. The largest overlooked the road we’d walked up, with a heart-stopping view of trees in full autumn flame and the distant line of mountains. The other two rooms were smaller but still good-sized, bigger than our master bedroom at home. One looked up the slope of Mount Kilden, to the rocky outcropping up top called the Maidencliff, for a young girl who died there in the 1880s. She’d been picnicking with her family in the blueberry barren when her hat blew off, and she tumbled to her death as she chased after it.
In the other bedroom, you had a view of Lagawala Lake, which from here looked much larger than it did when Rose and I walked along the camp roads there.
“This would be my room,” I said, though no one was listening. The three of us went from one room to the next then back again, passing each other in the hallway and sharing observations.
“No bathroom—what would that have been like?”
“No heat, either.”
“There’s a floor register in the main bedroom. I guess the kids would just freeze.”
“They would probably have been two or three to a bed, back then,” said Helen, who had six grown or nearly-grown children. “That might have helped.”
“No lights, though.” I looked at the ceiling. “It would have been dark at night.”
“Yeah, but they’d have candles and lanterns and things like that. And people went to bed early then, too. Farmers, they have to get up at like three a.m.”
“I don’t think this was a farm,” I said, and peered out the window. “No fields or barns.”
Rose shook her head. “They could have owned all this land—it could all have been farms.”
“Maybe,” I said.
But I doubted it. Every farmhouse I’ve ever been in was sprawling and slightly ramshackle and comfortably messy—low-beamed ceilings, wood floors scuffed and uneven, walls dinged-up where kids had kicked them and showing evidence of having been painted and wallpapered numerous times over the years. The rooms opened one onto another and tended to be small, with few windows. And once they could afford it, farmers usually adopted new technology—electricity, milking machines, anything that would make their lives easier.
Electric lights and outlets would have marred the clean lines and planes of this house. I’ve been in plenty of old houses that have been up-to-dated, as the old timers put it, and ruined in the process.
Not this one. The bedrooms seemed to be almost perfectly square. Even the upstairs hallway felt square, though of course that was impossible. This symmetry could have felt restrictive, even claustrophobic. Instead, the plain white walls and warm-toned floors and carefully ordered doorways made me feel not calm, exactly, but quietly exhilarated. Like back when my husband Brandon and I would go to see a movie in the theater and we knew beforehand that it would be good and make us forget about everything else for a few hours. The house made me feel something like that.
“You know what else is weird?” asked Rose. “The way it smells.”
“It smells fine.” Helen glanced at me. “I don’t smell any mildew, do you, Marianne?”
“No,” I said. “But she’s right, that’s what’s weird—it doesn’t smell like mildew, or mice, or anything like that. And it doesn’t smell like paint, either, or polyurethane on the floors.”
We all took a final circuit of the three rooms, then trooped downstairs. Rose walked over to the brick fireplace—a Rumford fireplace, its angled sides designed to throw heat back into the living room. The hearth was immaculately clean, and so was the cast-iron bake oven set into the bricks. Rose opened and closed the oven door with a soft clang.
“You know what we should do?” she asked, and looked at us expectantly. “We should have a sleepover here.”
I said, “I’m in.”
Helen hesitated. “Someone would see us. People are still hiking up here.”
“They’re not hiking at night,” said Rose.
“No one would see us,” I said. “If we just have flashlights, no one’s going to notice.”
Helen mulled this over. “It’s going to be cold.”
“It’s cold in the state park lean-tos when we camp there in the fall.”
“But there we can have a fire.”
“Don’t be a wuss,” said Rose. “We can tell the boys we’re having a girl’s night in one of the lean-tos, if there’s an emergency or something they’ll call us and we can head home.”
“It’ll be fun,” I said, and looked out the window behind us. The sun had edged to the crest of Mount Kilden. The magical squares of gold light had shrunk to the size of a laptop screen. “It’ll be an adventure. I’ve always wanted to do something like this.”
“Breaking and entering?” Helen frowned.
“The door was unlocked,” said Rose. “Technically it would be civil trespassing—criminal trespassing means you broke in. If we come back here, and it’s locked, then we’ll just turn around and go home. Even if we did get caught, it’s only around a hundred dollar fine.”
Helen looked at her in disbelief. “How do you know so much about this?”
“I told you, I’ve always wanted to do it. Didn’t you ever think about it when you were a kid?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “But we’re all sixty years old.”
“That’s why it’s so important that we do it now,” said Rose.
“I’ll bring wine,” said Helen, and we all cheered.
I lowered my gaze to watch the last slim bars of light slide across the floor. For a few moments no one spoke. At last Helen said, “I’ve got to go home and get dinner going.”
“Me too,” said Rose, and they walked to the front door. I stared at the empty room, its white walls greying as twilight fell, the glowing floorboards now charcoal. It still looked beautiful, and my exhilaration became a sort of quiet expectancy. I rested my hand against the wall again, saying goodbye, and followed the others outside.
* * *
We decided to have our sleepover the following Saturday night. The weather was supposed to be good, which meant there would be hikers on the summit trail, but we didn’t plan to go to the house until sunset, which would be right before six. If we saw any cars parked in either of the pull-outs, we’d just wait till they were gone, then drive up. We told our husbands we’d be camping at a lean-to in the state park, something we’d done many times over the years.
“Don’t get eaten by a bear,” Brandon warned me as I left. “What time will you be back?”
“Early, maybe ten or so? Helen goes to church, we’ll all probably leave when she does.”
“You should have gone before now, it’s getting dark.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said, and kissed him goodbye.
I went out to the car and put my things in the back. The day had been warm and sunny, in the sixties, but the air had already grown chilly. I knew it would get colder, so I’d brought my ultralight sleeping bag, good for temps down to the thirties; also my pillow and a backpack with three sandwiches I’d bought at the general store, a big bag of chips, cookies, and a couple of water bottles. I beeped as I pulled away from the house, and drove at a respectable speed. We don’t have a police force in our town, only the occasional statie on rotation, but this would be a bad time to run into one of them.
I’d arranged to pick up Rose, then Helen, so we’d only have one car.
“It’s going to be cold.” I eyed Rose’s sleeping bag, one of those flannel-lined camp bags that’s really just meant to be used indoors.
“I’m wearing layers. Plus, hot flashes.”
“Did you bring the wine?” I asked Helen when we picked her up.
“Of course.”
We drove through town, everything quiet as always, and dark except for the streetlight by the general store. The darkness deepened as I pulled onto the winding road up Mount Kilden, my headlights illuminating trees that seemed slightly threatening as their branches moved in the wind. Dead leaves swirled across the road, and a pair of laser-green eyes flashed in the headlights, like bits of glass. Something stirred in the underbrush, too big for a fox or porcupine. A bobcat, maybe.
I slowed the car to a crawl. I don’t see well in the dark anymore—I should have let Helen drive, she’s a few years younger and has better night vision. I steered carefully between potholes and ruts, keeping an eye out for deer. Rose and Helen chattered in the back seat, laughing at something Helen said. I smiled, even though I wasn’t paying attention and hadn’t heard the joke.
It took us twice as long to reach the end of the road as it had the last time. There were no cars in the pull-out. I backed in, turned on the dome light, and opened the trunk so we could gather our things, then kept the headlights on so we could see our way to the house.
“No, don’t,” said Rose. “Turn them off, I want to look at the sky for a minute. It’ll be fine.”
I nodded, and we stood outside for a few minutes. It was much colder now, and I shivered as I craned my neck to look at the sky above Mount Kilden. The stars looked bright as a string of LED lights, much bigger than they appeared down in the village. I heard wind high up in the trees. In the distance, an owl hooted twice.
“Okay, I’m cold,” announced Helen. “Let’s go.”
We all switched on flashlights and trooped to the door. Rose went first, pausing with her hand on the knob. “What’s if it’s locked?”
“Then we go home,” I replied. I tried not to sound too excited by that prospect, but it really was much colder than I’d expected, and while it was only getting on for seven, I was tired.
But the knob turned easily under Rose’s hand. I heard a click, followed by a sweeping sound as she pushed the door open.
“We’re home!” she sang out, as Helen and I walked in behind her. I hesitated, then closed the door. Immediately I felt better—safer, even though the three of us were alone in a dark empty house, and trespassing at that.
“Hang on,” said Helen, and I heard her rummaging in her backpack. Seconds later, light filled the room as she held up a large brass hurricane lantern. Tim had given it to her as a thirtieth anniversary present. She crossed to the fireplace and set it on the mantle. “Let there be light.”
We set down our sleeping bags, pillows, and other gear in the center of the room, a few feet from the fireplace. It felt distinctly warmer in here, or at least less cold. I took out my own lantern, much smaller than Helen’s—plastic, not brass, but with a powerful LED light—and set it on the mantle beside hers. Rose did the same with the lamp she’d brought. We each had our own flashlight as well, and our cell phone lights.
I unrolled my sleeping bag, folding it over to make a comfortable place to sit, and dug through my backpack for the food I’d bought at the general store. Three sandwiches, one tuna salad, two Italian. Also the bag of fancy sea salt and vinegar chips, and three ginger-molasses cookies. Those cookies are huge, probably we could have split one between the three of us, and god knows I don’t need the extra calories. But it was a special occasion, so I splurged.
I sat on my sleeping bag and lined up the sandwiches, cookies, and bag of chips in front of me. Rose had scooted over to the fireplace and was fiddling with something there. A match flared in her hand, and she began to light a number of little votive candles.
“There!” she said, pleased, and got to her feet. “Now we can actually see.”
I was surprised at what a difference those little candles made. Combined with the lanterns on the mantle, they lit up the entire room. I could even read the labels on the different sandwiches
“Everyone warm enough?’ asked Helen. “I brought an extra hoodie and a big scarf.”
Rose nodded. She wore a bulky sweater under her fleece jacket, also a knit cap. I pointed at the cap.
“That was a good idea.”
“Remember that time we froze our butts off at the lean-to? I learned my lesson then.” Rose sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag and pulled it up over her legs like a blanket. “I’m starving. Where’s the food?”
I handed out the sandwiches, opened the bag of chips, and set it on the floor. I knew that Rose and Helen liked tuna fish, but there had only been one tuna fish sandwich left, so they each took half. Helen produced a screw-top bottle of red wine and three plastic cups. She handed the cups around, then filled each one.
“To us,” she said, holding hers up.
“And the house,” added Rose, and we clicked our cups together.
We ate the sandwiches by candlelight and lamplight, reminiscing about camping trips, snowstorms, power outages.
“This is so much better!” Rose exclaimed. “I’d do this all the time if I could.”
“Really?” Helen raised an eyebrow, took a sip of her wine. “I mean, you couldn’t—you can’t just go breaking into houses. But don’t you like being outside? Seeing the stars and a campfire and the trees and everything?”
Rose wrapped her arms around her knees and stared up at the ceiling. “No,” she said after a long moment. “I like this. I prefer this.”
“But we live indoors all the time,” countered Helen. “This isn’t camping, really.”
“I know that. But this is different. It’s so… welcoming.”
Helen and I looked at each other but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of any reason why Rose would find this empty house more welcoming than her own, which was a perfectly nice house, especially since Hank redid the kitchen a few years ago.
But she did have a point. There was a kind of, maybe you would call it an aura, about this place. It might have been what people mean when they talk about good feng shui. I’d never felt it before, either, but I wouldn’t say I preferred it to my own home.
“Maybe I could talk Hank into selling our place and buying it,” Rose went on. I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she was kidding or not.
“Well, that would make for an interesting conversation,” said Helen, and we all laughed.
When the chips were gone, Helen produced a bag of Little Lad’s popcorn, and we finished that too. She poured the last of the wine into our cups and placed the bottle on its side on the floor.
“Spin the bottle?” She sent it rolling toward Rose, who put it in the bag we’d designated for trash, then turned to dig into her own backpack.
“It’s only half full. But here.” She held up another wine bottle, uncorked it, and refilled our cups.
I felt pleasantly buzzed, not drunk but happy. The light from the votive candles made the walls appear washed in yellow paint and cast shimmering circles on the ceiling. I wondered what it would be like to live here. Not seriously, not for myself; but for whoever had lived here, once upon a time.
“They must have had money,” I said, thinking aloud. “Whoever lived here—if they weren’t farmers, they must have been well off to keep up this place. And who keeps it up now? It must cost a fortune.”
Rose yawned. “I don’t know. I’m getting tired.”
“Don’t you think it’s mysterious? Even if it’s just once a year,” I continued, “somebody has to do something to maintain it. Otherwise how could it have lasted this long?”
“Me too,” said Helen. She stretched and glanced at me. “Tired, I mean. Sorry, Marianne.”
I tried not to look annoyed. I’d go to the town office and ask to see the tax maps and determine who the owners were. Someone there would know who kept it up. Regina, the town clerk—she knew everyone. “Yeah, okay.”
Helen and Rose took turns going outside to pee while I picked up the rest of the trash. When they returned, Helen walked to the mantle, switched off her brass lantern, and looked expectantly at me and Rose.
“Go for it,” I said, and Helen turned off our lanterns as well.
We all snuggled into our sleeping bags. “Are you going to be warm enough?” I asked Rose, thinking of her flannel bag.
She nodded. “I’m wearing thermal long underwear.”
I scrunched into my own down-filled bag. Even though I hadn’t bothered with a sleeping pad, and I was lying on a hardwood floor, I felt as snug and warm as if I were at home in my own bed. I gazed at the ceiling, where the light from the votive candles danced. I soon heard Rose breathing, deeply and evenly. A little while later, Helen started to snore. Not too loudly, but enough to make me wish I’d thought to bring my earplugs. Brandon snores and I have to wear them every night. I turned onto my side and closed my eyes, grateful for my pillow.
I couldn’t fall asleep. My thoughts weren’t racing, I wasn’t worrying about bills or the kids or anything like that. I just couldn’t fall asleep. I looked at the time and it was getting on for ten, my usual bedtime. But sleep wouldn’t come. I finally decided I’d go outside to pee, since I hadn’t when the others did.
I crawled reluctantly from my sleeping bag and stood. I expected the room to be cold but it was quite comfortable. Most of the votive candles were still burning, so maybe they generated a bit of heat, along with the three of us. I pulled on my sneakers, padded to the back door, and went outside.
Almost immediately, a peculiar unease came over me. The air was still and cold, the stars so brilliant that, after a few moments, I could clearly see the expanse of grass and Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod that swept up to the woods behind the house. I heard nothing except the rustle of leaves. But it still took all my courage to take the first step, and then another, until I reached the trees. I quickly did my business, zipped my pants back up, and started back.
I only took two or three steps before I froze. I’ve been outside in the middle of the night plenty of times, in places far more isolated and wild than this. I’ve never felt afraid. Watchful and on alert, in case I came across some wild animal, but I never saw anything more exciting than a skunk, and I smelled him long before I saw him. I’d never been truly frightened.
But now, in the overgrown backyard of a house in my own hometown, surrounded by woods I’d hiked dozens of times over the years, I felt my unease grow into dread, and, after some moments, terror. Gazing at it now, I realized that the house appeared different than it had just a few hours earlier. The neat proportions that had felt so calming now seemed, not exactly askew, but crude. The house no longer appeared three-dimensional: it looked like a drawing someone had made on an enormous sheet of grey paper, four black lines enclosing a grey square.
And as I stared, even that changed. The roof dissolved into the night sky, the windows shrank to black dots. I couldn’t see the door, and as I tried frantically to determine where it was, my mind grew sluggish, as though I was waking from a heavy sleep.
Yet I couldn’t wake and, as I stared at the looming shape in front of me, I could no longer remember what a door was. Something important, I knew that, something I knew and had often used—but for what purpose, and why?
I squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them again to fog, a haze that darkened from grey to charcoal to inky black as it spread across everything around me. The stars were gone, and the ridge of Mount Kilden. My chest grew heavy, as though I was compressed between heavy walls. Was this a heart attack? A stroke? I tried to breathe but the air had been sucked away. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs, my face or skin. Everything melted into darkness: I was being snuffed out, like a candle.
A sudden noise jarred me: I lurched forward and felt air rush back into my lungs. As I gasped, the sound came again—an owl hooting not far behind me. I fought to catch my breath, looked up to see the house just a few yards away. I stumbled toward it, sneakers sliding on damp leaves and grass, grabbed the knob and turned it and staggered inside.
I closed the door—too loudly, but I didn’t hear a peep—locked it, and walked unsteadily into the living room. Relief flooded me, not just relief but a sudden, overwhelming calm. The stark terror I’d felt only minutes before faded completely, the way a middle-of-the-night dream does when you try to recall it in the morning.
I was safe here. A single votive candle still burned in the fireplace, its flame wavering. I could see Rose and Helen curled up on their sleeping bags on the floor: Helen on her side, arms tucked out of sight and her expression relaxed; Rose face-down, half of her pillow squashed up to cover her head.
I sighed with pleasure, removed my sneakers, and slid back into my own sleeping bag. It was still warm. So was my pillow. I burrowed deeper, gazed through half-shut eyes at a hint of gold on the wall from the tiny candle flame, and felt the house sigh with me as I fell asleep.
I woke early, to Rose and Helen speaking in low tones.
“…going to be so cold,” murmured Rose, and she laughed softly. “I don’t want to get up.”
“I know. But I told Robert I’d be back in time for church.”
“You could call him.”
“That’s not going to make it any warmer in here.”
I rolled onto my side and propped my head on my hand. “Good morning.”
“Good morning!” Rose said brightly. Her eyes shone beneath her mussed-up hair. “Did you sleep well?”
“I did.” I stopped, recalling my trip outside. I felt none of the fear I’d experienced then: I felt detached from it, as though remembering a story someone else had told me. “It was weird—I went out to pee, and… I don’t know. I had some kind of sinking spell.”
Helen sat up. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. I felt dizzy, and then I couldn’t breathe. Everything got dark—even darker, I mean.”
“Maybe you had a stroke. A mild one,” she added.
“Maybe,” I said. “It didn’t feel like that.”
“Have you ever had a stroke?” asked Rose.
“No. But I’ve read about it, and—I feel fine now.” I sat up so I could see them better. “I felt fine as soon as I got back inside. I might have just stood up too quickly or something.”
I rubbed my arms. Rose was right—the room was very cold. The light was cold, too, more grey than gold. I remembered the dark haze that had blotted out everything else the night before, and shivered. “We should go get coffee at the general store.”
“They don’t open till eight on Sunday,” Rose said.
“We can go to my house.” Helen emerged from her sleeping bag, yawning, and ran a hand through her hair. “I wish there was a mirror here.”
“No you don’t,” said Rose, raising an eyebrow at Helen’s disheveled clothing, and we both laughed.
“Well, running water so I could brush my teeth. I’ll be right back.”
Helen bent to retrieve a cosmetics bag and headed for the front door. I thought of warning her, but against what? I turned to Rose. “You sleep okay?”
“I swear, I slept better than I have for a year.” She sat upright, her flannel bag pulled around her shoulders like a comforter. “Hank snores like you wouldn’t believe—he has sleep apnea, he should really have one of those machines. I may come back here tonight.” She smiled, but sounded half-serious.
I got up and found my own toothbrush and toothpaste and water bottle. When Helen appeared in the doorway and announced “Next,” I went outside.
The sun had risen but was hidden by the mountain. Mist streamed up the hillside and clung to the trees at the edge of the woods.
Everything looked the way it does through a window screen, dim and a bit out of focus. I stood beside the door, steadying myself with one hand on the wall, waiting to see if I had another bad spell. I felt fine. I started to walk away from the house, pausing to look back.
The FOR SALE BY OWNER sign still leaned against the wall. Overnight, more leaves had drifted around the stake, and the lettering seemed more faded. The plywood had buckled and splintered where it was screwed to the stake, and more of the white paint had flaked off, revealing the bare wood beneath.
Overhead, a crow cawed and another replied. I turned to look up at the mountainside, shreds of mist disappearing as the sun broke over the eastern horizon. The wind picked up, loosing a flutter of yellow leaves from the birches. The brisk air smelled of acorns and dead leaves, the smoke from someone’s woodstove in the village below. I brushed my teeth, rinsed with a mouthful of water from my water bottle, and spit onto the yellow grass. I raked my fingers through my hair, felt in my pocket for my cell phone. I walked over to the sign and took a picture of the phone number. I’d call later, just out of curiosity.
Back inside, Helen had rolled up her sleeping bag and was gathering whatever stray bits of stuff remained. A piece of waxed paper, a balled-up tissue, a glasses case. She’d already lined up her backpack, sleeping bag, and pillow beside the wall. The Catholic church was in Gilead, about ten minutes away. She’d have to leave soon to get there in time for nine o’clock Mass.
I started on my own belongings, exchanging my socks for a clean pair. I made a circuit of the room, halting at the fireplace to gather up the spent tea lights. I dropped them into a paper bag and set it with my stuff in the middle of the room. I texted Brandon to let him know I’d be back soon, and asked if he’d like to meet at the general store for coffee and donuts. He replied immediately.
Sure, text me when you’re there.
“Brandon’s going to meet us at the general store.” I glanced at Rose. “You want to tell Hank?”
Rose didn’t seem to have moved. She still sat on the floor and stared intently at the empty fireplace, as though trying to will flames to appear in it. Finally, she reached for her handbag, took out a hairbrush, and slowly brushed her hair. When she finished, she replaced the hairbrush and got to her feet. She rolled up her sleeping bag and set it by the wall, along with her handbag and backpack, went outside and returned after a few minutes.
I picked up my own bag. I was ready to go—my back hurt from sleeping on the floor, and I had a slight headache. Too much wine. I knew Helen was growing impatient as well. Rose stood near the door but made no move to leave. Her brow furrowed; she cocked her head, gazing again at the fireplace.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Helen and I looked at her, then each other. I shrugged. “Hear what?”
“That noise. Like—I don’t know. A radio? Listen.”
I held my breath, listening. And yes, after a moment I did hear something, though it was hard to tell if it was an actual sound or something in my head, like tinnitus—it seemed as though I might have been hearing it for a while without noticing it. A nearly inaudible sound, not voices but not quite music either.
Yet it wasn’t tinnitus. It sound more like wind chimes, or someone striking random notes on a tiny xylophone. I strained to hear, but it didn’t grow any louder.
“It’s coming from upstairs,” said Rose. She walked to the foot of the steps leading to the second floor, pressed her palm against the wall, and turned to look at me. “If you stand here, you can hear it.”
I joined her and gazed up the stairway, saw nothing but the pale morning light brightening the walls.
But Rose was right. The chiming sound was louder here, and slightly more distinct, as if a cellphone set at low volume was ringing in a distant part of the house. I glanced back at Helen. “She’s right. Come listen.”
Helen stayed where she was. “I think I’m going to just call Tim and ask him to come pick me up.”
“Hang on.” Rose shook her head and sniffed. “Can you smell that? Someone’s baking something. Bread—it smells like baking bread.”
I inhaled deeply, and nodded in agreement. “You’re right. It smells like bread. Or cookies. That’s very strange.”
The scent, like the sound, seemed to emanate from upstairs. The faint chiming hadn’t grown any louder, yet it now seemed on the verge of being intelligible, though I still couldn’t determine exactly what the sound was. It was like listening to an old-fashioned shortwave radio, trying to tune in to a station in some unknown country. Only who was broadcasting, and why?
“I’ll be right back,” said Rose. Before I could stop her, she ran upstairs.
I gazed after her in alarm, but didn’t follow. In a few seconds, I heard her footsteps on the bare wood floor above as she walked down the hallway.
Then the footsteps stilled. The chimes grew louder, as though she’d opened a door onto one of the bedrooms, and whatever produced the sound was inside. At the same time, the scent of bread gusted downstairs, though now it smelled different. Like bread but also loamy, like upturned earth when you’re gardening. I wrinkled my nose and looked over at Helen, who’d moved closer to me.
“What’s that smell?” she asked, and grimaced. “We should get out of here, it could be a gas leak.”
“It doesn’t smell like gas,” I said. But I agreed with her, we should get out. “Rose!” I yelled. “Let’s go!”
No reply. I braced myself, setting one hand on each wall of the stairwell. But I still didn’t move to go upstairs. The chimes grew louder and more measured: for the first time, they sounded like music and not aimless tinkling. The earthy smell overpowered me, filling my nostrils, my lungs.
“Rose!” I shouted, coughing. “Get down here!”
From upstairs came the sound of running footsteps, then a thump. Rose appeared at the top of the steps, wild-eyed, one hand clapped over her mouth. She staggered down the stairway, and when she reached bottom, roughly pushed past me. I only had a glimpse of her face, white as a china plate, before she fled outside.
I raced after her and found her kneeling at the edge of the lawn by the road. Her body heaved and I thought she was being sick, but when I crouched beside her and laid my hand on her shoulder, I saw that she was convulsed with sobs.
“Rose! Rose, what happened? Is there somebody up there?”
She said nothing, wouldn’t even look at me; just wept uncontrollably with her face in her hands. I took a few deep breaths—the choking smell was gone—glanced back but didn’t see Helen. What if someone was inside and had attacked her? I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, started to enter 911 when Helen ran outside.
“There’s no one up there,” she said. She knelt on Rose’s other side and touched her arm. “Rose, what happened? Did you see something?”
Rose shook her head but said nothing.
“I checked all the rooms upstairs,” Helen continued, her voice steady. “I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t hear anything or smell anything, either. I did before, when you first mentioned it, but not just now. If somebody was there, they’re gone. Can you tell us what you saw?”
Gently, she grasped Rose’s face and turned it toward her. Rose remained silent, her pale face blotched scarlet from weeping. She opened her mouth as though to speak, but seemed to think better of it.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you in the car.” I looked at Helen. “I’ll stay with her. Go get everything.”
I helped Rose to her feet and walked her down the road to my car. She refused to get into the front seat, so I opened the back and she crawled in and lay face down, covering her head with her hands.
She was afraid to look at the house, I realized. I leaned inside the car and rubbed her back, felt her trembling beneath my hand. I stared out at the second-floor windows, searching for any sign of motion, a glint of light, or the shadow of someone moving.
I saw nothing. If anything, the house seemed even more peaceful and inviting than it had the day before. Morning sunlight set the windows ablaze. The asters along the front glowed amethyst. Above, the bulk of Mount Kilden shone green and scarlet beneath a cloudless blue sky.
After a minute Helen emerged, laden with sleeping bags. She dumped them in the back of the car and returned for our handbags and backpacks, the paper bag containing the remnants from our meal.
“That’s everything,” she said, and jumped inside the car. “Go.”
I stroked Rose’s hair and touched her head, closed the back door, and got behind the wheel. I pulled out quickly in a spray of grit and gravel. In the rearview mirror, the house grew smaller and smaller, until we rounded a curve and it disappeared from view.
I dropped Rose off first. Helen and I accompanied her up the walkway, Rose moving between us like a sleepwalker. When Hank opened the door and saw her, his eyebrows shot up. “What the hell were you girls drinking?”
“She doesn’t feel well,” I said. Rose collapsed against Hank and once again began to cry. His confusion turned to alarm. “What happened?”
“We don’t know,” said Helen. “She—it seems like she had some kind of episode.”
“What kind of episode?” demanded Hank, but he didn’t wait for a reply. He shut the door, and through the window I saw him walking Rose to the couch.
Helen and I hurried back to the car. “What do you think happened to her?” I asked as I drove toward town.
“I don’t know. I think there might have been a gas leak or something. You said you felt strange last night.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like that—I didn’t smell anything. And that noise—what was that noise?”
“A ghost?’ She laughed brokenly.
“Ghosts don’t act like that.”
“Have you ever seen one?’
“Of course not.” I tightened my hands on the wheel. “But that’s baloney. It’s more likely she had some kind of, I don’t know, a psychotic break or something.”
“Rose?” Helen said in disbelief. “Are you kidding?”
Whatever it was, Rose didn’t recover for a long time. She wouldn’t see me, or return my phone calls or texts. She did the same with Helen. Whenever I spoke to Hank, he was terse. I could tell he thought Helen and I were somehow responsible for whatever had happened. We hadn’t told him the truth—that we spent the night in an empty house up by Mount Kilden, and not at a lean-to at the state park. I still don’t know what Rose told him.
“She needs some time, Marianne,” he said the last time I talked to him. “When she’s ready, she’ll give you a call.”
Helen and I walked a few times after that, though we stuck to the camp roads by Taylor Lake. For a while we endlessly rehashed the events of that night, but we never came up with a reasonable explanation. Or an unreasonable one, either. Then Helen learned that her daughter was pregnant, and that took up her attention for the rest of the year.
The day after our sleepover, I got out my cell phone, found the picture I’d taken of the FOR SALE BY OWNER sign, and copied down the phone number on it. I had to screw up my courage to punch it into my phone. As I did, my heart began to pound.
The number rolled over to a message saying the call could not be completed. I attempted it again with the same result, then tried varying some of the numbers—the handwriting on the sign was hard to read on the tiny screen, even when I enlarged it. I never got through to anyone.
Later that week I went to the town office. I told Regina, the clerk there, I wanted to look at the tax map for the part of town bordering Mount Kilden. She took me to a room and showed me the oversized books with the information for every piece of land in town, showing property lines and the names of landowners.
“I know the house you mean,” Regina said as she pulled one of the heavy volumes from the shelf. “Every year people come in here asking about it.”
I wanted to ask her more, but the phone rang in the other room. “Excuse me,” she said, and went to answer it.
The house lot was easy to find—the last one on that long road that led to the foot of the mountain. I wrote down the lot number, then went to another book to check it against the landowner’s name: J. Jones. I didn’t bother to write that down. I closed the tax map and replaced it, waited till I heard Regina get off the phone, and returned to the front office.
“Do you know anything about the property owner for that place?” I asked. “J. Jones? There’s a For Sale sign there, I tried calling the number on it but I couldn’t get any answer.”
“No one ever does,” she said. “I tried it myself once, out of curiosity. Said it was disconnected.”
“But he pays his taxes, right? This J. Jones?”
She nodded. “Every year. By money order, and there’s never a return address. I checked that, too. It’s been like that for as long as I’ve been here. The deed goes back to the early 1800s. Same name and initials. Far as I know, it’s never left the family.”
“But it’s for sale. It’s a nice house.”
“It is, but that’s too isolated up there for me. Everyone else must think so, too—that sign’s been up for years.”
“Who maintains it?” I picked up a pamphlet with information about fishing and hunting licenses and pretended to peruse it. “It always seems in good shape for a place no one lives in.”
“That I do not know.” Regina shrugged. “Never heard of anyone here doing it. They might hire someone from one of the bigger property managers out of Augusta.”
“Okay, thanks.”
I set the brochure back on the counter. As I turned to go, Regina’s face creased. “How’s Rose doing? Hank was in here to register his truck and said she hasn’t been feeling well.”
“I don’t know.” I felt my throat tighten. “I think she’ll be all right. I hope so.”
“Me too,” said Regina, and nodded goodbye.
I got in the car and drove up the road to Mount Kilden. A car with out-of-state plates was parked in the first pull-out, and as I continued onto the gravel road I passed a man and a woman, both wielding fancy-looking trekking poles. They waved. I nodded and kept going, past the last turnout until I reached the house. I parked at the edge of the road, and got out.
Someone had mowed the lawn and raked away all the fallen leaves. The purple asters nodded in the wind. By the door, a single tiger lily had opened. The white clapboards appeared newly painted, as did the sign planted in the center of the lawn.
FOR SALE BY OWNER.
I hesitated, then walked warily across the grass. A different phone number had been scrawled on the sign. I held up my cell phone to take a photo, thought better of it, and let my hand drop.
“Oh my god, look at this place!”
I looked back to see the couple I’d passed a few minutes earlier. Trekking poles tucked under their arms, they gazed in delight at the house. The woman smiled and waved and began walking across the lawn.
“Are you the owner?” she asked in excitement. “We’ve been looking for a place like this for months!”
“A year!” her husband called cheerfully after her.
I opened my mouth and started to say No. Instead, I turned, grabbed the sign, and yanked it from the ground. It resisted at first, but I planted my feet more firmly and pulled harder, until it finally came out. Without pausing to catch my breath, I carried it toward my car.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as the man and woman stared at me. “I changed my mind.”
I got into my car and headed back down the mountainside. Just before the gravel road ended, I stopped and left the car idling while I retrieved the sign from the back seat. I crossed to the far side of the road and clambered over a fallen stone wall into the woods, fighting my way through brush and overhanging branches until I found a cellar hole, deep and filled with decades-worth of moldering dead leaves and fungi. I heaved the sign into the cellar hole and returned to my car, and drove as fast as I could until the mountain fell out of sight behind me.