short horror stories

glashus

 called groundskeeper, though I hardly enter the grounds anymore. Glashaus is all I have left.

If you were to see the estate for the first time, dazzling like a glass-eyed beetle, poisonous in the sun, ringed with blind alley mazes and jungle spooks, you would not be surprised to hear that it frequently drove visitors to rash and wild acts. There were velvet ropes and warnings everywhere. Guests wore wristbands with tracking chips, and armed guards prowled the hedgerows.

That's when the estate was the country's third most popular tourist attraction. We ran six guided tours per day, one at midnight. On Día de Muertos we presided over a squirming, sugary sleepover where children ran up and down dead-end staircases and huddled in blankets in the dimmest corner of the cold tiled shower, beneath the thirteenth faucet. The doors had to be double-locked, even the one that opened onto a brick wall. The floor-mounted skylights were barred, and absolutely no one was allowed into the turret with the suicide doors.

We simply could not trust the guests. That was the cardinal rule. Even so, nearly every day we would find a toddler locked in a transparent closet or wedged behind a trick mirror — the mother would swear it was only to stop the baby's crying. A lover might say to her companion, "I'm scared, don't leave me," and find herself speaking to his image in the silver, hands outstretched and unfeeling. (Inevitably, she'd beat the pane until it shattered.) One father instructed his budding Rubenstein to try the glass harmonica, despite a sign that read "I'm an Antique: Do Not Play Me." When the boy made an inevitable misfingering, his father shoved him into the spindly keys. The contraption shattered; the boy was stuck with thousands of tiny slivers. And siblings always dared each other to crawl into one of the dozens of four-poster beds, trying to guess if this was where the widow, Grandmother, had finally expired. Then one would press a goose down pillow over the other's face.

Still, our vigilance managed to prevent any deaths, timely or no. Life was more precious before the war, before the bombs and forest fires, before the famine and the drought and the floods and the poisonous bees and internment camps and fracking and the kidnap and beheading of the president's daughter. Before the state was declared a no-fly zone and tourism expressly forbidden.

The lawyers and accountants assured us that Grandmother's holdings were enough to weather crisis, but as one tragedy bled past another and ticket sales tapered to nil, the staff cuts began. Smiling guides were first to go. Then ticket takers, landscapers, and all but one housekeeper, Celia. (The guards, having lifetime contracts, we kept.) Then father died, and our home — the widow's house — finally became the miserly oasis she had designed. Endless mirrors allow me to keep my own company, no matter where in the house I roam.

Grandmother had impeccable taste. Each of the thousand teak doors is fitted with knobs of crystal and brass, and all the plumbing is copper. Her fine china sits prettily in breakfronts shipped from France. Oil paintings fluoresce in the gallery like sexless jellyfish. In her bedrooms, boxes and boxes of diamond tiaras. Glashaus itself is a jewel in a war zone, prey to circling, hungry gangs.

The guards take their jobs quite dead into their savage hearts. I haven't seen one in months, not since they stopped coming to the kitchen for meals. They don't sleep in the barracks, either. They communicate with signs and calls. That is the least frightening explanation I have for the sounds I hear at night, dark rustles of purpose. I suppose I am grateful if they choose to remain close by at all.

The buyers are due tomorrow at noon, bringing me freedom by helicopter. I get drunk on the last of my father's rum, stoned on the buds of the little plant I keep warm with spotlights in the fifth pantry. I undress in front of the spirit mirror, daring Grandmother to look. I pilfer her green crepe dress from the south second floor display case and button it down my back. I seat her foxtail hat in my curls and pull her gloves over my small square hands. Then I strip it all off again, thrilling to the drafts along my contours. How long has it been since I felt young?