Recluse
written by: Christopher Johnson
We called him Rail because–well, because he was so skinny. The skin hung on him like a cheap suit that you put on a skeleton that you would see in your biology teacher’s classroom. His face was a cadaver, thin to the point of nonexistence, with platter-sized eyes as black as the nothingness of outer space, ears that jutted out like monkey’s ears, lips as thin as a rule stretching to infinity, cheeks as sunken as the Grand Canyon, skin as sallow as a body in a closet, neck as thin as a Venus coloring pencil. His eyes shifted back and forth, examining, questioning, gazing ironically and caustically, looking for trouble.
We were thirteen years old, in our freshman year at Chester A. Arthur High School in Elm Park–a building so old that it had practically been built before writing was even invented—a building that held the ghosts of the past principals, teachers, and students—a building that held secrets in its thick woebegone bricks. Rail and me—this was where we went to school. This was where we spent six hours a day absorbing supposedly important knowledge, reading our books, writing our compositions, answering test question—you remember the drill.
Rail. His real name was Pete Blonsky. We’d been buddies for two or three years—something like that. We were buddies, but he didn’t come around to our house. My parents didn’t like him. Especially Ma. “Trouble with a capital T,” she sniffed. “Ulee,” she said, “I don’t like you hanging around with him. I don’t like it at all. You just watch your step with him.”
Rail. Him and me would sit at the picnic table at Monroe Park, gabbing, gabbing endlessly. It was like this was the tipping point for entering the World of Trouble—Rail eagerly, enthusiastically–me, reluctantly, limned with doubts. We rode our Schwinns around Elm Grove, riding faster than the speed of light, feeling the wind rush through our hair and pound against our skin. We attached playing cards to the spokes of the wheels of our bicycles to imitate the sexy sound of motorcycles, and we pedaled madly, crazily, around our boring town, pumping furiously, bursting with teenage hormones, flying down alleys and kicking over garbage cans, trooping arrogantly into the Sugar Cup in uptown Elm Park, ordering coffee and sneaking out without paying, shoplifting candy from the Ben Franklin, sneaking into people’s well-kept gardens and trampling flowers, emptying sand out of sandboxes at the playground, stealing Mr. Wilson’s erasers from his classroom and throwing them into the trash bins. Stupid stuff. Inane stuff. But Rail would say it’s fun stuff, and after all, who really got hurt by it?
There was a manic anarchic energy to Rail that drove him chaotically ahead and towed me in its wake. I was all too willing to go along. Why? I don’t really know. There was something tempting and charismatic about Rail—something that made me want to follow him. He shoved unpredictability into my all-too-predictable life in Elm Park. These crazy hijinks—sometimes they gave me pause. I felt as if I were learning over and staring into the Abyss of Sin. I was fascinated and repelled as I gazed over the brink of lawlessness. We streamed toilet paper over a tree. It rained, and the TP hung from the branches like sad woebegone slices of pathos. I felt some hesitation, some guilt, but Rail’s confidence and fearlessness pulled me along. Good God—what was going on in our thirteen-year-old minds! If only Ma had known!
On our journeys, one day we stopped in front of an old house at the corner of Fairview Avenue and Crescent Street in Elm Park. We stared at the house. The yard was completely enclosed by a metal fence that was at least ten feet high. The house itself was in various degrees of disrepair and decay. The dark wood of the front and sides of the house was cracked and splintered, and the primordial paint was peeling. The front porch was on the verge of collapse. The front steps were cracked and looked as if they would not carry any weight whatsoever. The shutters to the sides of the windows were falling apart, and the paint was peeling from them. The house wore the look of a malevolent spirit. The endless lawn was choking on weeds. Tall, unkempt bushes, completely uncut and unshaped, obscured the front of the house.
As we stared at the house, an enormous dog suddenly appeared from somewhere behind the house and rushed toward us, barking loudly, insanely, ferociously. It was a Great Dane. It rushed toward us and slammed against the fence that separated us from mortality. It barked and snarled at us, and we drew back from the fence. Saliva drooled from the mouth of this ferocious beast. The barking echoed through the entire neighborhood. The beast raised itself up on its hind legs and grasped at the fence with the claws of its front legs, as if it could claw its way through the fence and attack us and tear us to pieces. We instinctively backed away from the beast.
I was shaken by the ferocity of the beast. We rode our bicycles to our respective homes. We came to my home first. I started to dismount and go into the house. Rail tugged at my shirt. “Hey, Newman, wait a minute,” he said. “I got an idea. A great idea. A cool idea.” When Rail said he had an idea, watch out. It would not be a good idea, not be an acceptable idea. It would be an out-there idea. I shivered inside. I smelled Trouble. I recalled what Ma had said about Rail. I smelled something coming. He looked at me with his sly and devious gaze. “I’ll tell you what,” he started. “I’m thinking about that old house. Do you have any idea who lives there. Does anyone live there at all?”
I knew a little something—something that had reached me through the teenage grapevine. “I heard once,” I started, “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard that an old woman lives there. She’s lived there for years. I have no idea if someone else lives there or not. I heard that she never goes out. She’s a . . . a recluse.” I was proud that I could use that word. It had once been one of our vocabulary words when we’d read Great Expectations. Miss Havisham—she’d been a recluse.
Rail stared dangerously at me. He scratched his chin. “A recluse,” he said. “So no one ever sees her. Very interesting. Very interesting.” He rubbed his chin with his fingers. Trouble was brewing. I could feel it. Finally, he said, “I have a thought. It’s a fantastic thought, even if I do say so myself.” He paused. The smell of Trouble grew stinkier. “I want to see this old lady. I want to check her out. I want to see the inside of that great big dumb ancient house. Who knows—maybe she’s dead. Maybe she’s dead! Then the cops will thank us for finding her corpse! Who knows—maybe she’s been dead for days, for months. For years! I want to see her—or her corpse. I want to see the inside of her house. I’ve got to. It’s like this house is calling me. I’ve got to see the inside of this house! I just gotta!”
Boy, did I smell Trouble at that point, stinking up the air around us. But . . . but . . . old Rail had tapped something. I was curious about the old woman, too, about that great big old ancient house, about whether she was dead or alive in that great big old thing. Rail said, “Let’s think about it. Let’s put our genius heads to it.” We shook hands in our buddy way, wrapping our fingers around each other in the secret grip that we had devised.
It didn’t take Rail’s genius brain long to work on the problem. I saw him the next day, and he said, “I got it! I know how we’ll get into that house! My old lady—she’s got these sleeping pills. I’ll borrow some from her, and we’ll get some hamburger meat and mix some pills into that delicious ground round. Then we’ll slip the meat through the fence, and that big mean ol’ dog is sure to gobble the meat right up. And sooner than you can say lickety-split, that big mean ol’ dog is gonna be far away in dreamland! Then we can open the gate and walk in as pretty as you please and figure out a way to get into that house.”
That was The Plan. Oh, God, I should have backed off then. But no, Rail was pulling me in the wake of his genius and his audacity and his derring-do. A few nights later, each of us snuck out of our bedrooms at about 10 p.m. when we were supposed to be sawing logs. Ol’ Rail had taken great care to buy a pound of hamburger meat and stow it in the back of the fridge where his ma wouldn’t see it. He plunked the meat into his backpack and came by my house on his bike, and together we rode in the cold, dark dead of night to the house. All this while, my heart was beating like crazy. What were we doing? It was insane! I was supposed to be in bed, sawing logs and getting my proper sleep so I’d be fresh and alert for school the next day.
A beautiful full moon came out that night and guided us to the Mysterious House, where the Mysterious Old Woman lived. When we got there and parked our bikes, Rail started stuffing all these sleeping pills into that hamburger meat, and going a little overboard, I thought. After all, how many sleeping pills would it take to put even a humongous Great Dane to sleep. In fact, I said something to Rail. He said, “Oh, he’ll sleep it off just fine. Don’t worry about it.” He kept stuffing sleeping pills into that hamburger meat.
Rail leaned up against the fence and put two fingers into his mouth, and let out the loudest whistle you ever heard. “God!” I whispered, “You’re gonna wake up the whole neighborhood!”
“Oh, stop worrying, Newman!” he whispered back.
Half a second after the whistle, that Great Dane came bounding like a beast out of hell, covering three yards with every stride and growling more ferociously than ever and then slamming into the fence and standing up on its hind legs and opening its mouth as wide as the sea and barking ferociously. I thought for sure the whole neighborhood would wake up. And the old woman who lived in the house, too—she would wake up, too, unless she really was a corpse. Rail—the dog’s ferociousness caught him by surprise. His fingers started trembling, and he dropped the meat filled with sleeping pills on our side of the fence. By now, my own fingers were trembling. But I picked up the hamburger meat and started shoving it under the fence to where that giant beast could get at it.
My God, did that dog go after that meat! He dived at it, devoured it. You would have thought that that dog had never eaten a thing in its whole entire life. The dog forgot all about us. It opened its mouth into a yawning cave and bit down on those pieces of meat with its dagger-like teeth and grabbed that meat with those huge teeth and settled the meat into its mouth and chewed it and swallowed it—all of it, in about half a jig. I’d never seen meat disappear so fast in my whole entire life. That beast slathered that poor defenseless hamburger meat into its gullet, and now that meat was bouncing around in the dog’s big belly. Along with the sleeping pills.
We waited for something to happen. At first, nothing did. The Great Dane took care of the meat and then turned its attention to us and started growling at us again. I was amazed that the whole neighborhood hadn’t come out to see what the heck was going on with that dog. A few minutes passed, and finally we could see that the sleeping pills were taking effect. First, the dog lowered its paws from the fence, and its growling grew less ferocious. Then the beast started to walk around and kind of moaning and squeaking like it didn’t feel so good.
The big ol’ dog started walking in circles like it had no idea how to walk straight ahead. It lolled its head back and forth. By the light of the silvery moon, we could see the dog’s eyelids start to close. Rail and me—we looked at each other by the light of that same moon and smiled. “It’s working!” Rail exclaimed. I nodded. The dog slowed down and then started to stagger on those powerful legs. The dog wagged back and forth unsteadily, like it had lost its balance. It folded its front legs and leaned down, and then folded the back legs so that its body lay completely on the ground.
In two minutes, the dog fell dead asleep. Dead asleep. We opened the latch to the gate and snuck into the front yard. We tiptoed past the dog, which was snoring loudly. Just as we were passing the dog, it laid out this loud fart. God, did it stink! We both giggled. We tiptoed to the front of the house and climbed up the rickety stairs onto the front porch. I was scared and thrilled at the same time. I thought for sure we would fall through those wooden stairs; they were so fragile. Luckily, Rail had thought to bring a flashlight. He turned it on and shone it in my eyes. “Damn it!” I said. “Don’t shine it right in my eyes for God’s sake!”
He turned the flashlight away from me and cast it all over the front of the house, which had two long, narrow windows, one on each side of the front door. Rail tried the front door. It was locked. Of course. He shone the flashlight through one of the windows and into the front room—the living room. We could see all kinds of old stuff, but we couldn’t make out exactly what the stuff was. Rail went over to the window on the other side of the front door. He tugged it. Slowly, it opened. It squeaked as it opened, as if the window had not been opened since the Stone Age. As he raised the window, it squeaked and squawked. “S-h-h!” I exclaimed.
“I’m trying!” he said. “But the damn thing is old and squeaking.” At last, the window was open wide enough for us to climb through. Rail went first because he had the flashlight, and then I followed. We closed the window behind us, and it squeaked as it closed. “God!” I said. “Even if the old lady’s dead, she’ll hear that!” Rail covered a snicker.
Rail swept back and forth with the flashlight. We were standing in the living room, which had an unbelievable conglomeration of stuff—stuff of faded elegance. The wallpaper was a garish gold and purple that reflected the light of the flashlight. To our right, against the wall, stood an ancient mahogany and glass cabinet holding all kinds of crap—dishes and bowls and soup tureens and what have you. In front of us stood two easy chairs and a loveseat, which looked as if they dated from my great-grandmother’s times. The chairs had dark wooden frames and were upholstered in a severe black, and looked completely uncomfortable to sit in. Coffee tables of dark mahogany sat next to the easy chairs and the loveseat, and on the tables sat elegant lamps made of cold metal, topped by ornately decorated lampshades. Statues of gargoyles sat on top of the china cabinet and looked as if they were about to leap at us.
Rail shone the flashlight on the floor, which was covered with an intricately designed rug of red roses and green vines. In the corner of the living room, two large vases held flowers that had long since died. Rail shone the flashlight back on the far wall, which was festooned with sepia-colored photographs of people who posed in rigid stances—the men dressed in coal-black suits and severe ties, the women corseted in long gowns. The men and women in these antediluvian photographs stood in unfailingly severe unsmiles, staring at us from the distant past.
On the far wall hung a color portrait of a clown wearing a strange, crooked smile. In the corner, on the floor, I saw a mousetrap with a dead mouse caught in its jaws; the mouse looked half-eaten. In another corner, on the other side of the china cabinet, a skeleton sat on a chair. A skeleton, for God’s sake! I shrank away from it. The skeleton leered at me. Was it a real skeleton or a plastic one that the lady had bought somewhere? I could not tell, and I dared not reach out and touch the skeleton. The skeleton appeared to be smiling at Rail and me. I shivered as I looked at it. On the far wall, the head of a deer hung—a deer with gigantic antlers that filled half the room. When I moved, the deer’s deep, dark, brown eyes followed me. I shivered again. There was a chill in the air—the chill of a ghost present—the chill of death.
Then . . . then . . . we heard the padding of footsteps. Behind us. In the hallway that led out of this strange living room. We saw the bright cast of another flashlight. We turned. The old woman herself—she was standing before us, holding the flashlight! Right in front of us! Alive! “What the hell are you two doing in my house!?” she barked in a scratchy, sharp voice that cut like a knife through the wintry air of the living room. My heart started to crash. Rail and me turned quickly and faced her.
She was like a cadaver—emaciated, practically skin and bones, the tincture of her skin deathly white, gray, unkempt hair scattered across the dome of her head, wrinkles spreading across her face like canyons. Her cheeks were sunken, her brown eyes ablaze with anger. She wore a faded pink bathrobe and blood-red slippers. Her naked calves and ankles protruded from the bottom of her bathrobe like broomsticks. She stared at us with eyes that burned. Tiny whiskers traipsed across the top of her lip, forming a vague moustache.
In her right hand, she held a gun. A pistol. A pistol, for God’s sake! Rail and I stared in disbelief at each other. The old woman held the gun steadily and pointed it first at Rail and then at me. For the first time in his life, Rail was speechless. Utterly without words. Our jaws dropped open simultaneously. Instinctively, we raised our hands. “Don’t shoot!” Rail exclaimed.
The old woman spoke with a voice as sharp as scissors—a voice that cut through the cold of the space that separated her from us. She said, “I ain’t gonna shoot you as long as you answer my questions! What the hell are you doing in my house!? How’d you get in? And what’d you do to my Flower—to my dog? How the hell did you get past him? If you killed him, I’m gonna kill you!”
That gun–she pointed it steadily at us. The barrel was long and gray, the handle dark. Rail said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “The dog was asleep. We . . . we just snuck past it.”
“Well,” she said, “you shouldn’t ‘a’ oughta broke into my house!” The old woman’s eyes were steady, determined. Her eyes wrapped around her anger. She barked, “You are on my property! You have invaded my house! I have every right to shoot you! I would be within my rights! You are trespassing in my house! You have invaded my space!” As she spoke, with steely intensity, she became more and more animated. I was afraid that the gun would go off accidentally. This lady—she was crazy; she was unhinged. She thundered, “I could shoot you right now if I wanted to! I would be within my rights to do it—to shoot you! What the hell are you doing in here?! What were you thinking? This is my house!”
Neither of us knew what to say. We were too afraid of the gun. We had fallen into a web of unpredictability. We had fallen off the edge of our safe suburban existence and into an abyss—of what? We didn’t know. Each moment trembled with uncertainty. The old woman stared at us and continued to hold the gun and point it directly at us. Her eyes glowed with anger. “I could shoot you right now!” she exclaimed. “Now what the hell are you doing in my house—on my property! Why are you bothering me?”
Somehow, in that moment of her ranting and raving—in that very moment, I knew that the old woman was not going to shoot us. I looked at Rail, and I knew in that very instant that he knew it, too. The lady continued to hold the gun on us.
Finally, Rail said in a squeaky voice, “L-lady, we just wanted to make sure you weren’t dead or something. Th—that’s all. We were worried you was dead because no one in town ever sees you. Lady, we were just curious.” He paused. “We’re just dumb kids! We were just curious—that’s all! That’s all! We didn’t mean you no harm. We didn’t mean no harm to you at all. We just wanted to make sure you wasn’t dead or injured or something and needed help.”
He stopped.
I looked directly into the old woman’s eyes. I pointed at Rail. I said, “His name’s Rail on account of he’s so skinny—he’s got it right. We didn’t mean you no harm. We were just worried about. Like Rail said, we were just worried that you might be dead or fallen down or something. We were worried that you were lying in here all by yourself. We couldn’t stand the thought of you being in here dead, all by yourself!”
I could see that while me and Rail were talking, the old woman was loosening her grip on the gun, that the tight grimace in her face was slowly relaxing, that the deep furrows in her brow were loosening. With her cavernous, cadaverous eyes, she looked from Rail to me. She was still suspicious and angry, but the suspicion was dwindling ever so slightly. “So,” she finally said, “you was worried that that I was dead.” In the blaze of her flashlight, we nodded, slightly at first and then more obviously.
The atmosphere around the three of us was growing less deranged. She was now pointing the barrel of the gun down at the floor and not at us. She eyed us sharply. “What would you have done if you had found me dead?” she crackled.
A dead silence pierced the air between her and us. I didn’t know what to say. But Rail . . . somehow . . . somehow he knew. He said, “Lady, we woulda knelt over your body, and we woulda said a prayer for you. We woulda said a prayer for your soul to go to heaven.” He paused. “And then we woulda called the police.”
I looked at the old woman. She stared at Rail. She continued to point the barrel of the gun down at the floor and not at us. She said, “You were really worried that I was dead?” We both nodded.
After a moment, Rail said in the most respectful tone, “Lady, could you please put your gun down? We ain’t gonna attack you or anything like that.”
She looked from one to the other of us. “You won’t try any funny business, eh?”
We shook our heads. She slowly put the gun down on one of the coffee tables. It lay there like a paralyzed snake. A silence fell upon the chill in the living room. The old lady stared at us expectantly. We stared at her . . . expectantly.
So, now what? Somehow, something had changed among the three of us. Finally, she said, “You was really worried that I was dead?” We nodded our heads. She said, “I didn’t think anyone cared if I died.”
“We did,” Rail said. I nodded in fierce agreement. Something had shifted between her and us. You could feel it in the air. Rail, who had always been more intuitive than I, blurted out, “Lady, what’s your name?” He paused. “I’m Rail, and he’s Ulee. That’s short for Ulysses.”
She said, “My name is Eloise Hand. Few people know my name. Now you know it. I don’t like to share my name or even to say it out loud.”
I stared at the old woman. Her tiny body was determined, sturdy, alone, proud. Her body and arms and legs were so painfully thin, but she stood before us–tough, undefeated.
Rail asked, “How long have you lived here alone? How come you never go out of this house? Why do you keep to yourself?”
A moment passed. Another moment. “There are reasons,” she said. She motioned for us to follow her. She led us down a hallway and opened a door. We entered. It was her bedroom. She turned on the light. There was a double bed and an antediluvian dresser, on which sat an ornate bowl and pitcher. A bedspread of vines and flowers covered the bed. Draped across the floor lay an old braided rug. The room was frozen in time.
We stood in the middle of the bedroom. She whispered, “You asked me why I never go out.” She tiptoed to the bed. Over the bed, hanging on the wall, was a shelf. On the shelf sat a canister shaped like a bowl—a bowl that that emitted a golden hue. She turned to us and said, “Can one of you tall boys reach up and lift down that urn?” She stared fiercely at us. “As you handle it, be very very careful!”
Rail stepped forward and reached up to the shelf, and carefully lifted down the canister. I stepped closer to Rail. So did the old woman. Rail cradled the canister in his arms as if it were a baby.
“Now,” the old woman said, “please lift off the lid from the canister.” I knew that this was an urn. I knew because an uncle of mine had been cremated, and his wife—my aunt—had kept Uncle Artie’s ashes in an urn just like this one. Rail slowly moved to remove the lid from the urn. “Here,” Rail said, handing the urn to me, “you look.”
I peered into the urn. The interior was deep and dark. As I peered, I felt myself somehow disappearing, falling into the urn. Suddenly I . . . I saw images of people . . . a couple . . . standing in the sunshine . . . dressed as if they were going to church . . . a man and a woman holding hands . . . smiling . . . the woman wearing a colorful hat . . . her face beaming like a rainbow . . . her face young and fresh and innocent . . . in her hands a bouquet of flowers . . . her smile positively glowing . . . the man standing next wearing a dark suit . . . he also smiling . . . his hair slicked back . . . standing tall and proud . . . wearing a hat . . . a fedora. I could not take my eyes off them. The couple stood there, in the past, the past came alive in the interior of that urn. I stared, speechlessly. I was shaken, I was frightened. I was amazed. I was horrified.
Hands trembling, I handed the urn to Rail. He took it and held it up so that he could peer into it. I watched him. As he stared, his eyes widened, his jaw dropped open. He continued staring. He took the urn away from his eyes. He looked at me with a look, partly of disbelief, partly of faith. He handed the urn back to me. I peered once again into it. Deep in the urn was . . . ashes. Gray ashes. Simply gray ashes. “They’re gone,” I whispered. Rail grabbed the urn from me and stared into it. I could tell that, for him too, the vision was gone . . . the urn simply contained ashes. For some irrational reason, I suddenly felt a tear in the corner of my eye like a tiny spider. I wiped the tear away. Rail—sarcastic, all-knowing, hotshot Rail—he wore a look of inexpressible sadness on his face.
With fingers trembling, he reached to replace the urn on the shelf over the old woman’s bed. I turned to say something to the old woman.
She was gone.
Both Rail and I looked around. “What the hell?” Rail said. “Where is she? Where did she go?”
“Mrs. Hand?” we both called out. We looked in the closet of the bedroom. We ran out of the bedroom and ran down the hallway to the kitchen. She was not there. We ran to the living room. She was not there. Inexplicably, the gun that she had placed on one of the coffee tables in the living room was gone. We both shouted as loudly as we could, “Mrs. Hand! Mrs. Hand! Where are you?” We looked at each other, puzzled beyond belief. We stared at each other. “What the hell!” Rail said. “This is ridiculous! Where could she have gotten to?”
We searched the house again, tramping down the hallway to her bedroom. We looked under the bed. We looked once again in the bedroom closet. We looked in the pantry of her kitchen. There was a door in the kitchen that led to her backyard. We opened the door and turned on the porch light, which illuminated the entire yard. There was absolutely no sign of her. My heart pounded as we searched for her. We called her name repeatedly: “Mrs. Hand! Mrs. Hand!” She had totally disappeared. We ran again through the house, looking for her. I was gasping, out of breath. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock in the morning. Finally, I said to Rail, “She’s gone! We ain’t gonna find her. She’s totally gone!”
We ran out the front door of the house and toward the front gate that guarded her yard, where we had left Flower–left the dog sleeping soundly. He had fallen asleep about six feet from the gate. The dog was gone, too! Rail and I stared in wonderment at each other. Rail still had his flashlight, and he cast it around the entire yard. That dog—it was gone, too! I pinched myself. Was this some weird dream that Rail and I had stumbled into? “What the hell?” Rail said. “What the hell?”
I said, “The old lady—she must have moved the dog or something. She must have gone outside and woken up the dog.” I paused. “Rail, we gotta get home. It’s one o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake!” We jumped on our bicycles and parted ways, and I pumped furiously through the night to reach my home and my family. I rode furiously, trying to escape the images of the night—of Mrs. Hand—of the urn –of the disappeared dog. I climbed through my bedroom window and collapsed into bed. My dreams that night were feverish. I woke up twice with a sweat. I dreamt crazy dreams–of Mrs. Hand, of Flower the dog, of the urn with the images inside. When I woke up in the morning, I was soaked with sweat.
In the ensuing days, the vivid memory of that strange night refused to fade. It was as if Rail and I were still living through those events. After about a week, we dared to ride by that old house. It exhibited absolutely no signs of life. There had always been the fierce dog. Now, the dog was gone, just as it had disappeared that night. There was no weird dog named Flower to snarl at us and crash against the fence as it tried to get at us.
Time passed. After a few weeks, we rode by that forsaken house once again. A “For Sale” sign had been pounded into the grass in the front yard of the house. A few weeks after, we rode our bikes there once again, and the “For Sale” sign was no longer there. We assumed that the house had been sold. Some weeks later, we rode by once again. The house was being demolished, brick by brick, beam by beam. We watched, fascinated, as the house slowly disappeared.
Rail and I continued to watch the tearing down of that old house, the demolition of that rickety front porch and the dangerous front steps, and the sides with the peeling paint. It was like watching the destruction of a grand old duchess. Rail and I stood next to each other and didn’t say a word. Slowly, the house disintegrated before us, and I found myself thinking back to that night—that vivid night with the strange events. What could explain those strange events, the disappearance of the old woman, the equally mysterious disappearance of the dog, the images inside the cremation urn. The house was disappearing, becoming a thing of the past as if it had never existed. I knew we would never understand what had happened in that house that evening. But as I remembered the old woman—alone but defiant—facing us with her gun, and now gone–a spider tear crept into the corners of my eyes. I turned away so that Rail would not see.
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