Hilltop House

Prologue

This isn't exactly a haunted house story. There's a house, to be sure, and it's possible that it's haunted (depending on how you define the word), but there's no crumbling Victorian Gothic mansion encrusted in ivy and webs, strange artifacts and curios layered in dust above self-igniting fireplaces. No portraits and pianos and music boxes that seem to have a mind of their own or peeling doors that creak open after you were certain you'd locked them. There's no family plot with its moldering headstones out back, no greenhouse crawling with poisonous flowers. Perhaps somewhere deep inside, I am that specter-filled structure, replete with horrors enough to drive one mad . . . aren't we all, a little bit? Had I had control over my making, it's what I would've chosen to be, but as it was and is, I'm really nothing extraordinary to look at.

I'm not that old, as far as houses go—in fact, I consider myself quite in my prime. I was built sometime after a war, during a housing boom, a standard one-story stone ranch in a quiet suburban neighborhood with its bike routes and puppy dogs and milkman. I had a nice little manicured lawn, a non-white picket fence, a stained glass window depicting a charming swan over the salmon tub in my hall bathroom, which also had little white tiles mimicking a beehive pattern. I had real hardwood floors in my dining and living rooms, two bedrooms with sunny south-facing windows, and the one bathroom already mentioned. There was nothing particularly large about me, but my appliances were freshly minted, and I sparkled with all the cheeriness of a brand-new starter home.

My first residents were the standard newlywed couple, he with his perfectly-coiffed hair and irritating smile and she in her flattering dresses and apron, always too eager to please. Though I was new to all of everything, I was savvy enough to know something unnatural writhed beneath their polished relationship. I never did like the way he got a bit too tense when she didn't have dinner on the table, or the fervor with which she dusted the furniture. Their taste was lacking, as well. Ugly floral arrangements and ugly serving ware with its yellowish butterflies and flowers, orange couches and bright cherry red table and chairs in the kitchen—overall, there were way too many colors, as if she in particular were overcompensating for the black-and-white television screen life they led.

I couldn't tell you their names, but I could tell you about the small bones that protruded from her fragile little wrists and knuckles; I enjoyed watching her hands when she'd raise them to straighten a picture or place something on the fireplace mantle. And her teeth—it was a treat to see them, as I so seldom did, the only time she smiled being when she prepared herself to step outside to greet him as he returned from work, pinching her cheeks as if to fit them into a mold. She'd also occasionally look at them in the bathroom mirror, a rectangular reflective glass with etchings of flowers at the beveled corners. She'd rub a waxed piece of string through them, or she'd touch at some perceived flaw there. Then I'd get a brief glimpse at those strangely too-small-for-her-face teeth, those tiny mouse teeth, ripe for chattering. I wished I could hear them chatter, as if it were wintry cold and she got a chill and couldn't control herself enough to stop. Oh, the thought of those mouse-teeth clicking against one another uncontrollably. It was a sound I was never privileged to hear.

The only sound that came close to what I believed her chattering teeth might resemble she made during those horribly uncomfortable nights when he'd do things to her on their bed. She'd always lie back and look up at me, try to mentally transport herself, I'm sure, and endure the unfortunate torment, and she'd press her nails against the bed post, click them against the wood in a strange way. Sometimes if I ignored what was going on in front of me, I could pretend her tapping polished red nails were instead her pearly white mouse-teeth.

I grew quite attached to her, in my own way, but I positively hated him. He had no respect for anything within my walls. He cared about the outside, argued about the shrubbery she'd over-trimmed and about hiring the right people to patch up the masonry and mow the lawn. He'd complain to the neighbors about her decorating expenses as he sat on the porch swing and yet never actually put in the effort to help her. But the worst of all were his hygiene habits. The little hairs he'd leave around the sink after shaving and the dirt he brought in off his shoes and forced her to clean up--such a lack of respect for both she and I! And then there were the more subtle habits of his, the ones that dirtied me but which he neither noticed nor seemed to care about. That disgusting pipe he smoked left foul stenches on my curtains and in the corners of the ceiling, and the mere aromas associated with his human male body were utterly stifling.