What The House Forgot

Let The House Tell The Story

Thankfully Victor kept his sulking up throughout the morning, and instead of having to explain where he was going, John merely texted him a quick farewell before heading out the door, following the sidewalk to the house assigned to Rosie Watson. John knew he wasn't technically allowed at this house by Victor's rules. In fact, the boy had gone out of his way to make sure John didn't get the chance to so much as glance at the windows, for fear that the woman inside would catch his eye and spontaneously combust. It was Mary Watson, the mother, that was the issue. Something about her scared Victor, scared him enough to prevent any tracing of lineage between oceans and between families. Scared him enough to keep John away.
Thankfully, today John had scared Victor more than Mrs. Watson ever could. Scared him into not daring a follow up question, that very silence preventing John from admitting that he was going to visit the very woman who was supposed to be off limits. This wasn't just his idea; no in fact it was Rosie's blessing that prompted him to escape the house this morning. Great minds, and great last names, thought alike in this situation. Both John and Rosie agreed that his summer would be wasted if he did not take the time to visit the woman that may very well be his relative. Victor didn't have to know everything, in fact Victor was probably still trying to contemplate what he didn't know at this very moment. Best to leave him in the dark. The trip, after all, would be perfectly harmless.
When John arrived at the appropriate house, counted out to match the very same arrangement of his childhood home in respect to Victor's old house, Rosie was found leaning up against the mailbox. She was picking at her painted nails, her blonde hair shining in the morning sun as she stared at John with a squinting, suspicious glance. Her dark clothes made her stand out against the white paint of the mailbox, looking to be in a Hot Topic commercial instead of poised in the middle of the Queen's suburbia. The look on her face spoke to the severity of the arrangement, with nervous eyes but a firm, set jaw.
"Hi John," was all she could say, her voice flattering at the name as if she knew the significance it was about to bear. John had learned through Victor that his name did not purely belong to himself. Apparently, Rosie's late father had also been called John Watson.
"Is your mother expecting me?"
"No," Rosie sighed. "She's in bed right now, took a turn for the worst a couple of days back."
"She's sick?"
"She's been sick. It's unexplainable to even the doctors. It's like her brain is draining her life force, and as she gets weaker the delusions get stronger. It's purely mental. But it's dangerous anyway," Rosie tried to keep her voice passive; she tried to speak of her mother's decline as one might the local sports. Nevertheless, her words faltered, her throat cracked, and Rosie turned her head away in shame.
"I'm sorry to hear that. If it's not a good time I could..."
"No, there's no better time," Rosie assured, leaning forward to grab John's wrist and yank him into the yard. With the sudden aggression John was pulled onto the property, and his first inclination was to stare back down the way he came, half expecting Victor to be tailing behind with vengeance in his eyes. When there was no threatening confrontation, John found he could breathe easier, stepping with ease upon the grass and following Rosie towards the front door.
"I think maybe you'll help. Maybe just meeting someone who reminds her of Dad could help her brain start to work right," Rosie suggested.
"I'm...well I'm not sure I'll remind her of your father! I've got the name and really that's...that's not much," John defended, taken aback by the implications that he shared more with the deceased than just his titles. Rosie paused as she grasped the doorknob, turning back towards John to study his face with a newly curious eye.
"I'm not sure that's for either of us to decide," Rosie muttered a bit cryptically, pushing the door open and finally stepping into the house. As John followed in pursuit he could only describe the home as a sort of museum. It seemed to be put together by someone who was expecting their oncoming death, and thus chose to display every one of their possessions for the mourning procession to pick up in their memory. Shelves upon shelves of trinkets and household items lined the walls; all lined neatly upon white table cloths or curtains to display the fading colors of some of the seemingly ancient possessions. Dust covered empty wine bottles, stacks of textbooks moldy with age and abandonment, a set of car keys that had long since rusted. Each item was displayed with reverence, as one might line up the holy cross along an altar in a church. Rosie didn't pay any mind to the strange items on display, though John hesitated near the shelves as he passed, studying the textbooks closer. Each seemed to be on the topic of biology.
"Those are my Dad's. He used to be a professor," Rosie explained carefully, keeping her voice down as she spoke within the confines of the silent house.
"I'm going to be a biology major in college, I think," John muttered, feeling the strong urge to pick up the books and study them. "I've always liked frogs."
"Weird," Rosie muttered, wandering towards a staircase with the intention of John following behind. Nevertheless, he hesitated. He studied the bottle of white wine, which still seemed to have a splash or two left in the recesses of its tinted bottle. Each one of the objects, some even folded pairs of socks or a shirt, seemed to hold some holy significance in the house. It was no wonder Mrs. Watson couldn't overcome her husband's death, especially since she seemed to display his absence for the world to see!
"Come on. I think she's awake," Rosie instructed, tearing John's attention away from the shelves and starting up the staircase earnestly. John nodded, following behind like an obedient dog waiting for its master's commands. He ascended the staircase only to get hit with a stench of medicinal creams, the stinking staleness of an ointment left to dry and fester on skin that was sweating underneath week old sheets. It smelled of sickness, of despair, and as John ascended the steps in the wake of Rosie Watson he began to realize just why Victor was so afraid of this house. The very walls seemed to resonate with instability, the air itself moved thickly throughout his lungs. His brain seemed to get caught in a sort of familiarity, the sort that confused these steps with something he had climbed before. The sort that made this house feel like home.
Rosie pushed against the first door on the right, for the knob had not been properly fastened. She held up a hand of warning, an indication that John should linger for a moment in the hallway while she prepared her mother for the incoming visitor. John doubted that Mary Watson got many visitors, and for a moment he was hit with a pang of sadness, a pang of guilt, that he could not fully explain. It felt as if he was directly responsible for this woman's loneliness, though of course he had no hand in her downfall. Why hadn't he tried harder to coordinate her friends? Why hadn't he visited sooner? Why did he wait until just now to visit when he had been alive for a full seventeen years?
"Mom, I've brought someone to say hello. One of my new friends," Rosie said in a hushed voice, her words hardly passing through the door which hung only inches ajar. John could smell the stench of medicines much stronger from the soft flow of air coming from inside, pushed around by a noisy and rotating fan. He couldn't get a glimpse of anything but white bedsheets, a pair of legs making so small an indentation that they may just be folds in the blankets. John shuttered to wonder what the rest of the woman looked like, how much of her had withered away since he last saw her. But no, that wasn't right. John withered his face to display his confusion to the empty hallway. He's never seen this woman before. Why does his mental narration seem to want to prove that he had?
"I don't want to see him. Tell me you've not brought that horrible Holmes," responded a crackling voice, followed by the sounds of a weak hand slapping against the bedsheets.
"Not Sherlock, no. Someone new, he's just arrived from America," Rosie explained, her voice softer than John had ever heard before. She was usually so rough, so gruff, though perhaps she took out her anger on the world, rather than allow her mother to see how much she was truly suffering.
"America, yes. The last of them, I imagine," the woman broke into a fit of laughter which quickly turned to coughing, coughing which became so violent she began to stutter and gasp for air. "John's returned at last."
"What, you've heard..."
"How do you know my name?" John insisted, finally stepping through the doorway to introduce himself properly. He felt as if he was allowed to enter at the most dramatic moment, and right now it seemed as though a formal introduction was no longer necessary. She already seemed to know, already seemed to sense his presence. They had never met before. They couldn't have met before.
John was faced with what he could only describe as a withered woman. He saw the potential for beauty, though the humanity had been leaked away as if through a tap, as if through a series of needles draining the life force from what now remained as an empty husk. There was a face hidden away under those dried wrinkles, there was a style that could use that tangled white hair to its greatest potential. And yet the woman seemed to blend more into the bedframe than with the rest of society, so frail and so thin that she might exhale too hard and release her life force all together. It was a pity. Such a pity.
The woman's eyes widened upon his entrance, her coughing fit silenced and she suddenly grew very calm, very collected, as if she had been waiting for this moment for her whole life. For a moment a spark of humanity caught within her glance, as if the rays of the passing sun had filtered through the curtains at the perfect angle to add the extra illumination to her ghostly skin. As their eyes met, Mary Watson seemed to glow with the aura of her former self. A withered old thing, summoning the enthusiasm of a well lived housewife.
"I've known your name for a while," she explained poorly. "I said my vows to your name."
"How did you know it was attached to me?" John corrected, stepping forward all the while Rosie veered closer to her mother, as if trying to keep herself between this rather awkward reunion. For a moment John didn't care what the girl thought of their conversation. He felt a supreme sense of seniority over Rosie Watson; he knew that he was entitled to say anything he liked within her presence. Rosie stayed quiet, as she should, because the adults were talking.
"Because, darling, you said you'd be back. They've all come back; you were the last to arrive. You said you'd be back," Mary began to chuckle, nestling into her cavern of white blankets and settling into the dent she had born into the mattress beneath her. She might have been sitting in that same spot for days, weeks even.
"Who's they?"
"Sherlock, and the Parisian," Mary muttered. "The one with the pointed face."
"Victor?"
"Victor, that's right. You took them with you, the same time, the same moment. You promised me you'd all come back, and here you are. It's been seventeen years, John. Seventeen years is a long time to wait."
"Mrs. Watson, you're not making any sense," John admitted, to which Rosie looked aside in shame. She didn't seem surprised that her mother was spewing nonsense, as if she was used to these psychotic ramblings. As if she had to deal with this cryptic talk on a daily basis.
"It sounds mad, doesn't it? It sounded mad the first time you presented the idea to me. All this talk of destiny, of that house...of reincarnation," Mary chuckled. "But here's the final proof. Young John Watson, back for round two. Or three. Or one hundred, for all I know."
"Rosie...is this normal?" John whispered, trying to keep his insulting question pointed at the daughter who was positioned directly next to her mother. The question was heard by both, though Mary seemed accustomed to the accusation. She merely shook her head, a smile tinging upon the corners of her lips.
"I've heard so much about reincarnation that I'm starting to believe in it myself," Rosie sighed.
"John, come here," Mary instructed. John stayed put. The woman waved her hand again, summoning him with the finger that was enclosed inside of a silver wedding band. John obeyed this time, though he felt as if he was helpless to make his own decision. His feet shuffled along the hardwood floor, displacing Rosie as she backed away to allow the two to share a private conversation.
"I'll be outside," Rosie decided at last, feeling as if she was nothing more than an appendix to this long awaited reunion. John nodded, thankful for her departure. He wasn't entirely sure what the girl would make of his conversation, especially since he was becoming wrapped within this madness almost as soon as it was presented. Like a spider weaving a web, with every word Mary Watson spoke John was more and more willing to get stuck within the narrative.
"John, I don't suppose you would recognize your own handwriting?" Mary wondered after the closing of the bedroom door announced Rosie's departure. John pulled a chair up towards the bedside, figuring he ought to give his trembling muscles a break. He wasn't scared, no he was simply nervous. Some part of him recognized that this was a rather unhappy reunion, some day of reckoning to make up for all he had done in the past.
"I could try," he offered. Mary nodded, pointing towards the bedside table with a hand that dangled weakly off of the side of the bed.
"In that drawer, an old envelope. Read it, and see if you recognize your writing," the woman suggested.
"Ma'am, I'm not entirely sure what you think of me, but there's no way I could have written anything to you. I don't know you," John defended, trying one last time to debunk this woman's madness before falling head first into their shared delirium. Mary merely flailed her arm, insisting that John follow her instructions before she was forced to bat him on the head with the next exertion.
John had no choice but to obey, and with a sigh of reluctance he twisted in his seat, gently easing the drawer of the bedside table open to reveal a rather cluttered assortment of things. Cough drops that had melted onto the wood, bookmarks for novels long since finished, tissues that were yellowing and withered with age. An envelope, tucked neatly against the side, tinged with such distortion that it almost blended in with the side of the wooden drawer. It was this envelope John took with gentle fingers, shutting the drawer just as quietly before turning back to the woman apprehensively.
"Go ahead, open it," she instructed, folding her hands onto her lap and allowing John to work the top of the envelope from its folded depths, unearthing the note which had been written carefully inside. A folded piece of paper, aged to such an extent the folds seemed hesitant to bend, as if the document was content with staying hidden forever.
The handwriting was faint, but legible. Written in a blue pen, a recent enough writing utensil. From what John could tell, it was a will. A hastily constructed will, leaving the whole of his possessions to his daughter Rosie.
"You wrote that the day you disappeared. Well, I say disappeared," Mary huffed, shaking her head in exasperation. "I've said disappeared for the past eighteen years."
"I'm not your husband," John insisted, a rather strange statement to make so passionately.
"Do you recognize your handwriting, John?" Mary wondered, interrupting the boy before he could do any more denying. John squinted upon the writing, finding that it was indeed quite similar to his own hand. And yet there could be millions of men who wrote in a similar style, millions who bent their t's just a little to the side, or who ended their u's with an exaggerated loop. It wasn't too uncommon to put a little extra effort into the penmanship.
"It's similar," John lied, trying to keep it hidden that it was in fact uncanny.
"Have you been to the house yet?" Mary asked, extending a hand so that she might be able to hold the letter once more. John passed it over to the old woman, who cradled the paper very delicately between her fingers. She didn't dare to crease it, nor to push too hard against the withering paper.
"I've not, but I've seen it before. In dreams," John admitted nervously. Usually he would keep his delusions to himself; in fact he hadn't mentioned his recurring dreams to his parents even after they began again after so many years of idling. For once he felt as if someone not only understood his madness, but shared it. Mary Watson seemed to be the sort of woman not to laugh, but to sympathize.
"I figured as such. You used to speak of it like it had magical powers, as if the house itself was alive," Mary admitted. "You blamed all your problems on that house. All your vices."
"What happened to...me?" John wondered carefully, figuring it was no use denying the correlation between himself and the woman's late husband. While John was still not convinced on the topic of reincarnation, he still felt that playing along with her constructed narrative would generate more of the needed conversation. He would interrupt too harshly if he were to flatly deny the woman's claims.
"No one knows for sure. No one knows except for me and that strange man. That man who...who had been wandering in the woods," Mary hummed for a moment. "And even we never knew for sure."
"A man in the woods?" John clarified.
"He helped me hide the bodies. Helped me hide the crimes. Buried them in the basement, under the cement. The body of my own husband, water logged and bleeding. The body of his lover, strewn across the bedroom floor, and the body of their friend..."
"With his head missing," John finished, remembering the assignments of the corpses throughout his childhood nightmares. The bleeding man, the faceless man...the drowning man? Had this been the fate that he had never realized, a third casualty in that house of horrors? Had he been dreaming of the death of Mr. Watson, the original cue to this maddened frenzy?
"Half of me wishes to tell you everything. The other half wishes you might never have to know," Mary admitted cryptically.
"Your husband died in the house?"
"You died in the house! Can't you see, John, you are the reincarnated form? Can't you feel there's a reason you're here, here with Sherlock Holmes, here with Victor? Can't you feel it already, that buildup of passion, that overwhelming and fantastic urge to take him upstairs, to betray yourself and your wife, to betray your family, and leave your child fatherless...leave your wife alone?"
"Ma'am..."
"You would pick Sherlock Holmes over me; I should think you would pick him over every other person on earth. But don't you know, John, that it was your pistol which shot the holes that killed him?"
"Mrs. Watson...please!" John insisted, interrupting before the woman could run down another equally disturbing tangent. "I don't think you understand. Sherlock is Victor's friend, not mine."
"They were married, in another life. In the first life, I should think."
"They're seventeen!" John defended.
"They've been around for hundreds of years, dear. You were the first to explain it to me. I should think that you remember your own arguments. Your own lineage. You're old too, John. Older than me. Older than this house. Older than this town," Mary's voice receded, her body began to fade back onto the pillows which hoisted her up, as if the words were trickling out forcefully, as if every inch of her body refused to speak these truths so meaninglessly. John was forced to believe her. He was forced to swallow the stories she told. What choice did he have? How could he prove a woman wrong when neither side had definitive proof? Stories to tell, dreams to interpret, conspiracies to follow. Who could deny madness with any logical fact? Who could swear to facts when madness could seep into the cracks of an argument, splitting it in two? Perhaps John was reincarnated, for what proof did he have to say that this life was his first?
"When did your husband die?" John asked nervously.
"Soon to be eighteen years ago. May 12th," Mary muttered.
"May 12th," John repeated. He kept the significance of that date to himself. He kept his own birthday secret from the woman who would use that as particular ammunition. His birthday and Victor's, too.
"John, I'm not crazy," Mary promised, leaning forward across her pillows so that her entire body began to slacken in a single direction, sagging towards the edge of the bed on the verge of collapse. "They say I'm crazy, but I'm not," she repeated.
"I don't believe you're crazy, Mrs. Watson. I just don't believe that...that any of this could be possible," John admitted with a laugh, forcing a smile onto his face to hide the stern impression of a terrifying truth, the growing fear that the woman's stories may hold some validity within them.
"Go to the house, John. Don't just take my word for it, live through it. I beg of you...let the house tell you your story," Mary whispered. One of her hands reached out from underneath her, stretching towards John's wrist so abruptly that the woman forgot to prop herself up effectively. The elbow that had been securing her to the edge of the bed was suddenly lost in her enthusiasm, and as soon as her bony fingers wrapped across his wrist so too did the old woman fall heavily towards the side of the bed, the momentum of her top half pulling the rest of her frail body to the floor. John yelped, jumping to his feet as soon as he felt the weight of the woman land upon his shoes, her body hitting the floor with a sickening smack but her mouth never releasing a word.
"Mom!" Rosie called against the door, seeming to sense when something had gone wrong inside. The thump must have been a familiar sound, judging on the way the woman landed almost expertly, she perhaps was accustomed to diving out of the bed during the dramatic climax of her conspiracy tales.