The facade presented itself plainly and elegantly before me, though the structure, in truth, seemed to face the ocean on the other side. There was a clean and yet still appropriately aged look to it, evident in the slight peeling of the white paint and the way the porch may have creaked a little when I made my way cautiously to the door. From the path, I hadn’t noticed its color as much, but here it stood before me, the gate’s face, a bright and challenging sort of golden color, with a large, obnoxiously crimson “M” painted in the center. It was an annoyingly simple design for a front door, but only so in that it still held its own presumptuous self up in a surprising display of boasting.
My eyes traced the shifting wood down to a lustrous and intricate gold-colored brass orb, peeling as well, fading out in the most lovely way. I reached out and the knob began to turn, somehow warm to the touch as if, perhaps, it hadn’t been so long since my last visit. I don’t remember closing it behind me, the door I mean, but I suppose it must have been closed at some point, securely, though there were no locks.
I felt safe there. And in this new hallway that wrapped itself warmly around me, I felt so welcome. I was home, sort of.
There was a large map that followed me as I walked toward the next room. It was not a map of any place in particular, but it was old and filled with all the places I had ever been or wished I had been. On second thought, I don’t think the map was of any real place at all. The name above it read “Alterna”, which I thought then was a land I had perhaps once visited in a dream. Of that dream, however, I could remember neither content nor theme.
As I walked into what appeared to be the living room, I noticed some dust-covered photographs hanging crookedly on the wall. Within each cracking frame, a separate scene containing smiling people with frowning faces.
There was a wide window in that room that let in the warm sun and let it dance on the carpet where I soon sat down, barefoot, and began humming a tuneless melody to myself.
After a time, I rose and ventured to explore the rest of the house. There was an unremarkable emptiness to the bedroom, (not unlike the fridge in the unused kitchen) but when I made it to the last room, a study of sorts, with book-lined walls and the kind of singular, articulated lamp one only finds in such rooms, I found her. Though I had not been looking for anyone in particular, at the sight of her I knew she was my reason for being in the house.
She sat with astoundingly good posture, looking out the back window at the sea. There was a longing in her eyes and a nervousness to the way she clutched the arms of the unmoving rocking chair, her tense rigidity balancing it against its nature. She looked elegant, stoic and picturesque like she was posing for a painting. There was a discomfort on the edge of her mannerisms, yet her solidity suggested she belonged more to the house than I did.
At some point in my staring, she looked up and saw me at the doorway. There was a moment when all sounds ceased. Both quite perplexed, I stared as if to ask her name and she as if to ask why I came so late.
For the first time I noticed that there was no longer any sunlight, that the light in the room had only been the moon reflecting from the window off of her pale face. A looming cloud traversed across the face of the moon, breaking that perfect moment. A heavy darkness filled the room in that instant, yet I could still feel her eyes upon me like a cool breeze on a summer’s day, chilling sunburnt skin touched with perspiration.
I took a breath and lightning flashed. In that half-second, she had moved, ghost-like, across the room and was standing right in front of me, a piercing gaze shooting from her eyes. Then, with the crack of thunder like a dull, aching thud, and the returning darkness, she was gone. I tried to flick the switch on the wall, but the power must’ve been out, so I walked over to the window, taking note of the sea’s waves rising above the cliff in the storm. I shut it just as the spray hit the glass and then turned to the still unmoved rocking chair. Placing my hand upon its back, I pushed it gently. The sudden creaking noise made me jump back and I hit my hand hard against the wall. It hurt, but only for an instant.
Everything in that house felt suddenly older, cold and fading like an early morning fog. In the shifting light my hands looked ghostly and translucent. I too, it seemed, would fade with the dawn.
Just then, I heard voices coming from the kitchen and left the room with a permanence to my steps. The ceiling light was on, and there was a crowd of people standing below in the passageway blocking my path and my sight. Some time has passed, I felt, but how much time I did not know. The group’s voices blurred into hushed conversation as I stepped closer, whispers loud enough to hear yet too secretive and implicating to understand.
Every eye glanced and glared as I traced a shaky path through the group. They cleared away, avoiding even the slightest touch as I walked into the kitchen, which now seemed much smaller than before.
By the counter she stood, the girl from before. Head down, sea-salt storm air glided through the curtains behind her and danced with her hair as it fell across her face. Though she was still young, she looked as though she carried the burden of many hard years. The boisterous whispering behind me hushed itself. Her eyes lifted just a little, a glint of harsh emotion behind the shadow of fallen bangs.
My breath caught as our eyes met. She was unlike any other girl I had ever known, yet she seemed so familiar, as if anything I had ever seen as beautiful about any other girl was nothing compared to just one tenth of her. She was hauntingly dreamlike but more real than anything in any dream, more real than anything in the house or outside the house or anything. My heart was tied inexplicably to hers, I felt it, I knew it right then in that moment. Utter and inescapable infatuation. I stood there, captivated, breathless, intoxicated at the woman of my dreams. There were no words, but my mouth fell open anyway as if to speak.
That’s when I finally noticed. The most astonishingly beautiful girl I had ever seen, the one who had, in an instant, stolen my whole heart, was standing before me crying her eyes out. In between choking gasps, her perfect eyes blinked at gushing streams of tears. The sound of the storm outside grew louder, but her sobs beat above it all.
“How could you?” she pleaded, her voice an exquisite diamond etching each and every word into my breaking heart, “Why did you do this to me?”
I didn’t know what to say, what was happening, or how to stop it, but as she continued she seemed to die a little with each word, her soft skin losing all color, turning a sickly pale.
“You led me on, made me trust you, and then just let me down. You let us all down, but me the most. And you know it.”
I wracked my brain for memories of my betrayal but it seemed as if I had taken the place of someone else, without any leftover pieces of the crime except for the pain of guilt thrust upon me in my sorrow for this dear one’s suffering. As she continued, she began to rip at herself, tearing off chunks of her long, dark hair at first and then scraping at her skin till she bled openly. With every second I tried to reach her, but my feet seemed glued to the ground where I stood, helpless.
She screamed, “You monster! You villain! You’ve broken my heart over and over a thousand times, taking it from me when it wasn’t yours to have, stealing the innocence of my heart and soul with your jokes and games and teasing and compliments and...and promises. All your promises. You’ve shattered me, made me an object...a prize! Then, then you got bored with me, didn’t you? You had better things to do on your own.
“You can’t trust anyone at all, can you? You were too scared.” She gasped, “We were both scared, okay? But this...” She broke off, the distance stretching out between us. I reached my hand out but to no avail. There was so much blood, from her arms, her chest, even her eyes bled with the tears, little crimson rivers. “Why,” she said, “just why?”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say something, to do something, to apologize, to hold her and wipe away her tears, to do something, anything. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was stuck in place by a force much stronger than my will.
I heard the group behind me renew their whispering, hateful gossip burning up the back of my neck. I remembered then that I had recognized them from the pictures in the living room, old friends, their friendship now lost in time. All this, my fault, I thought.
She grabbed a dark cloak from the floor and wrapped it around herself, wiping her eyes with its sleeve. Not looking up, she took a sip of water from a glass on the counter, then choked, hard, a bit of blood shooting out and hitting me in the eye. I scratched at it, then took a step toward her, but a hand grabbed my shoulder and stopped me. She walked out the back door, quiet as a phantom, the one who had grabbed me moving past me and following her out. I watched them go, pixelated through the screen door. She walked like a shadow, tangled up in the curtains of rain, and he, though almost three times her size, followed as a shadow, meekly behind her. She was so far off and yet only a few footsteps away, really, though ever retreating.
I could see the waves crashing across the cliff-face behind her, the breakers rising higher than her head as she approached the edge. I shoved off any last hesitation and the reaching hands of those beside me and ran to the door. Flinging it open, I sprinted after her, my hand outstretched in desperation. My feet slipped in the mud, and I crashed landed at full speed, head-on into the ground. My body suddenly felt so weak, powerless, the rain growing heavier on my back. Slowly, I pushed myself up and ran a shaking arm across my mud-covered face. I cried out to her, but my voice was so muffled by the storm that even I couldn’t make out my words. My voice was weak, broken, and alien. I lie there in the mud, struggling to move as if, with a thousand tiny fingers, it crawled up my limbs and pulled at me, holding me down.
She didn’t even turn around. She just kept moving, floating away, as if she’d suddenly just drop right off the edge of the cliff. She turned to her tall companion, who had begun to wrap her wounds in bandages as they walked, and she motioned for him to stop, but he just kept wrapping tighter and tighter till she collapsed into his arms. Anger flared up within me. How dare he strangle her like that. I grasped around and found a small stone. Even in my great weakness, my rage against the giant gave me strength, and I hurled the stone at his head. Somehow the stone not only picked up speed but grew in size as it flew, striking the giant across the face and scraping off a chunk of flesh. He stood, dumbstruck for a moment, then tumbled backward, right off the cliff, my love in his arms.
Suddenly strong enough to stand, I ran forward and gazed over the edge. They were both gone, swallowed by the waves.
The storm raged a bit longer but soon calmed, and as the tide receded, memories began to flood my brain of the times she and I had spent together. We had been the best of friends in our youth and as we grew, so did our love. So many wonderful days and nights of hopes and dreams and complete joy. We promised our hearts to one another on the night of her eighteenth birthday when... something terrible happened. But what was it? Everything in my memory seemed to stop there as if severed from my mind. All I knew was that it had something to do with the house. The storm had passed and a red sun slowly rose over the far horizon.
I could feel the flames rising within my very being. The tips of my fingers felt electric, and my heart beat fast as flashes of heat touched my forehead. Crimson beams of morning glimmered off my shaking hands as lifted them to beat against the walls of that accursed house.
