Tour, by Elliott Gish

Come forward. Step into the shadow of the lane, past Mr. Akerly’s white wooden fence, past the dog tied onto a stake on the lawn of the Greene house who will bark and snap as you go by, past the hopscotch grid that has not yet faded after the summer rain. Careful of that dip in the pavement there—we need to get that fixed. Cross the green grass in front of the white house with its gable windows and peeping chimneys, up the sandstone steps and onto the porch, where it is damp and dark and the air is thick with blackflies. Breathe in. Taste the smells.

This is the place that you have heard so much about. This is the house where it happened. Five dollars, please, before we start, and be careful not to touch anything. Just to be on the safe side.

Keep close behind me as I open the door, which is unlocked. It never stays locked, this door, although the real estate agent who is trying to sell the house always makes sure she turns the key at the end of the day. In front of you is the staircase, strangely grand for such an ordinary-looking house, its shining banister curling upwards. Yes, that is the staircase where she did it. You can picture it, can’t you—those poor children, falling down to the ground floor? Her husband, following? To your right is an umbrella stand, and to your left is a stain on the wall. Note the colour, and the smell. If you touched it, you would find that it is sticky.

No, I’m not saying that youshouldtouch it. I just thought it bore mentioning, is all.

Keep walking. In this corridor, we have the living room, the kitchen, and the door to the garage. The garage is where she put them when she was finished, as you may have heard. What a trial that must have been! If you open the door to the garage, you may note the musty smell in the air, and a kind of faint, meaty noise like a hammer repeatedly striking a side of raw beef. Don’t think too much about that. Here, I’ll close it again.

The kitchen, you may note, is still a mess, its counter crowded with dirty dishes, its sink half-full of cold and scummy water. The real estate agent has tried to clean it, but every time she attempts to enter the room, she feels as though someone has taken hold of her shoulders and started screaming in her ear. She once hired a cleaning crew to come in and do the deed for her, but the only one that managed to enter the room suffered a perforated ear drum and a shattered clavicle. So the kitchen stays as it is. They say that this is where she first got the idea, that something conjured itself up out of thin air and began to pour suggestions into her ear while she was washing the supper-dishes, not long after the baby was born. They say that, but it might not be true. Here, try to go inside.

All right, all right. There’s no sense crying about it. Come along, let’s go to the living room. We can enter that one, although you may notice a cold spot in the middle of the floor. That is always there, even on the warmest days. That curio cabinet used to be full of porcelain collectibles, little boys playing tuba and little girls feeding geese and similar, and they were, apparently, the most valuable things in the house. A distant relative appeared soon after it happened and took them all away, presumably to sell. His ears were bleeding when he left. We think he might have tried to go into the kitchen. Someone should have stopped him, of course, but who wants that kind of trouble?

Over the mantle here, you’ll see a lovely photograph of the family in happier times, all five of them. Doesn’t she look lovely, standing there behind her husband in his chair? Doesn’t she seem content, holding her little baby, with the twins on either side of her? It just goes to show, you never can tell about some folks. You never know who will do what to who, or why, or how. They do say that if you stare at it long enough, the children will seem to weep, and their father’s smile will waver and fade into a grimace of pain, but I have never experienced that myself.

Did you hear a sound, just now? A kind of whispering noise, like folds of taffeta rubbing against itself?

Never mind.

Let’s go up the stairs to the second floor, where there is less light to lift the gloom. Hang on tight to the banister, so that you don’t fall before you get to the landing. There is a hole in the floor, just here, in front of the bathroom. Its origins are unknown, but if you look, you will see that it appears to be quite bottomless. I dropped a pencil into it the other day, and never heard it land. You may be tempted to put a foot into it, or a hand, just to see what happens, but I strongly advise against it. Apparently, the family cat wandered up here one night and fell into this hole. It has not been seen since, although sometimes you can hear it crying.

The bathroom itself is inaccessible. These vines that curl around the outside of the door are even thicker behind it, scabbed with perfect and poisonous flowers. If you went inside, you would be dead in minutes. They say she drowned the baby in there, though I personally do not believe it. The autopsy report said nothing about drowning.

Open the first door on the right. This is the twins’ room—you can tell from the bunk beds, and from the two matching dressers tucked against the wall. The light overhead, you may note, is huge and round like a crystal ball, and cracked down the middle. That happened one day, with a sound like a gunshot, and everyone on the lane heard it, although we shouldn’t have. There is nothing else much of interest here, although if you look at the plush dog on the ground, you will note that it is pulling itself towards you, slowly but surely, by one arm. There is no need to panic. It is very slow and will not reach you in time.

Open the second door on the right. This is the nursery, although it has not been that for very long. It used to be a tiny office, shared by both parents, with a desk for each of them and a little shelf full of books related to their respective careers. They had not intended to have more children when they moved in, as I understand it—the baby was a surprise. Not a welcome one, either, if you listen to rumours. Now, as you can see, the desks and bookshelf are long gone. Instead there is a crib with a blanket patterned with elephants, and a rocking chair painted green, and a chest of drawers stencilled with butterflies, and a small window with white curtains that ought to look out onto the house next door. Of course, if you step close to it and peek through the glass, you will see instead that it looks onto another house entirely. A white one, with gables and a porch. Look through the small window on the side of the house that faces you. Who is that person staring back? Don’t they look an awful lot like you?

No, it’s not a trick. Calm down. I am sure that, whoever they are, they mean you no harm. If they did, you wouldn’t be standing here.

Back into the hall, now, and watch your step. We are going to the final door, the one on the left at the end of the hall. Touch the doorknob—don’t turn, just touch. Notice the cracks that radiate from it into the wood. Notice that as soon as your fingertips kiss the metal the knob begins to turn, slowly and with a terrible creak. Watch as the door swings open, inch by terrible inch, onto…

Well, onto not much. It is a bedroom, certainly, but not one of any real interest. The bed with its purple comforter is usual, the night tables are ordinary, the carpet nothing of note. The only thing in this room that might raise an eyebrow is the mirror hanging over the dresser, where words have been written in red lipstick. (Or is it paint?) The mirror was washed after the events occurred, but the next morning the words appeared again, swimming out of the depths of the reflection to the surface of the glass. No matter how often the mirror is cleaned, the words return. I have tried washing it myself, with vinegar and water, and they always come back.

You will see that many of the words are backwards, as though someone standing on the other side of the glass has written them. This could be so. Mr. Akerley claims that on the night it happened she was screaming about mirrors, although he did not hear precisely what she said. You may see also that a sign has been scratched into the glass, as though with the tip of a knife. You are free to examine that further, but I doubt you will make sense of it. They had a man up here, a man whose job it is to read symbols and interpret sigils, and he could not make head nor tail of it when he looked, although he did begin to complain of debilitating headaches, and a soft, persistent noise in his left ear at all times. Like someone speaking at a low volume in another room. He died last week, I hear. A stroke. There was blood in his eyes when they found him.

Let’s go, finally, through this door and into the ensuite. His and hers sinks, his filled with pebbles, hers heaped with dirt. There is a worm in the heart of it there, squirming happily through the muck. All her perfumes and facial products are still lined up against the wall. She was very particular about her skin, they say, and became even more so as things in the house began to unravel. A family friend who visited days before everything ended claims that during that visit, she did nothing but slather handfuls of moisturizing lotion onto her face and arms and belly, coating herself in a thin and slippery film. She talked all the while, the friend says, loudly and nervously, her gaze moving from one spot in the air to another, following something invisible to all eyes but hers. The baby lay in its crib upstairs, screaming ceaselessly, and strange thumps came from the twins’ room, as though a large object were being tossed from one wall to the other.

The night that it happened, the husband came home to a cold, dark house and found his wife sitting at the kitchen table, still rubbing lotion into her skin. They found traces of it, after, on the walls and on the bodies. It hadn’t quite been absorbed into the skin when she did it.

The toilet is simply a toilet. We needn’t pay much attention tothat.

Here is the shower, with its curtain pulled all the way across. That is where she cleaned herself after it was all over, washing away the blood and hair. And this, the reports say, is where the trail ends. She came up the stairs, through the bedroom, into the ensuite, took off her clothes—they are gone now, but you can see the sticky patch on the tile where she put them—and got into the shower to wash. She did not get out again. When the police brought in dogs to chase down her scent, they all ended up crowded into the ensuite, sniffing at the shower curtain, whining like puppies. It is as though she melted in the water like a sugar cube. Or got sucked down the drain, washed away along with the gore and the mess. Were you afraid of that as a child—of going down the drain when the stopper was pulled? I know I was.

No, there’s been no trace of her since that day. They put a watch on the house for a while, in case she came back, but it’s been months now and no sign of her. No activity on any cards, no logins on any of her accounts. She really does seem to have vanished.

Yes, that shower curtain does look like it is moving slightly, doesn’t it? Just the air from the vent. There’s one right over the bathtub.

That’s it. That’s the tour. Not much of an ending, I’m afraid, but that is the way of such things, isn’t it? We always want these places to force something into light, to make sense of a senseless thing. But the house where it happened is just that: a house. It is the site of the thing, not the cause. The stage and not the play. To understand what happened, we would need to see what she saw, to hear what she heard. I—

The curtain is definitely moving.

Time to go. Let’s step backwards, now, nice and easy, into the master bedroom. Do not look at the mirror. Do not touch the door as we tiptoe into the hall. Do not peek into the nursery, or the twins’ room. Step over the hole on the landing. Take the stairs carefully but quickly, two at a time, and if you feel anything underfoot, if anything reaches out to grasp your shoulder, if you hear someone speaking at a low volume in another room, don’t stop. Past the living room and the kitchen, ignoring the sound coming from the garage—that meaty thump, over and over—ignoring the stain on the wall, ignoring the cold wind that blows from somewhere behind you, ignoring all of it. Open the door. Step over the threshold. Close your eyes as you cross and gratefully await the thick dark of the porch, the taste of cool, fresh air.

Open your eyes.

In front of you is the staircase. Behind you the front door shuts and locks.

This is the house where it happened.

Elliott Gish

Elliott Gish wants to creep you out. A writer and librarian from Nova Scotia, her work has appeared in Dark Matter Magazine, the New Quarterly, Wigleaf, Vastarien, and others. Her debut novel, Grey Dog, was published by ECW Press this year. She lives with her partner in Halifax.

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