THAT'S CREEPY!

The Forever House

It’s funny, really.

You finish college, get yourself a degree, maybe stay shacked with your folks for a few years longer while the paychecks build up and, well, eventually? Eventually, your own place pops up. You wake up one morning as an overgrown version of the kid you used to be, and the next, well, you’re a man. You’ve got bills and responsibilities and you’re suddenly allowed to start harboring expectations of your own – but most importantly, you’re free. You’ve got your own space.

I don’t know at which point it happened for me, but my parents’ home just stopped doing it. Things that had been so cozy for so long suddenly became cramped and annoying. My own room barely felt private, I could barely afford to stock the fridge with what I felt like eating; but the point is that once I stood in front of that house, just a short drive away from the highway, I felt free. The real estate agent told me it was a bit of a fixer-upper thanks to some obviously shoddy construction, but it didn’t really bother me.

I mean, damnit… I was home!

It took a while for me to start noticing just how crooked the place was. I didn’t complain, though – I’d set a price limit that pretty much had “starving artist” written on it, and I loved the location. The para-transport service worked flawlessly in the area, and I still had the advantage of general solitude. The place was newly built, too. Aside from these vices, that crooked appearance it had? Everything was absolutely flawless. It wasn’t big, really – one bedroom, one guest room, a reasonably-sized living area right next to a kitchenette with its own little stretch of counter-top. That’s it. There was the basement, too, plus the parking lot, but these wouldn’t catch my eye until much later. The real estate agent had told me it had been a real find at this particular price margin, and that for some odd reason, none of the nearby developers remembered building anything on that particular lot. For that matter, for all the searching she did, she never did find the lot number for that house in any of the local registries!

Now, a savvier person than myself would’ve realized something was odd a long time ago. I didn’t. I was young, I worked three odd jobs to pay the bills, the place wasn’t much more than a dorm for myself and my occasional friends, and I was generally out at all hours of the day and night. More often than not, the place was locked up tight. If distance hadn’t been enough of a factor to dissuade any would-be burglars, then my meagre possessions would’ve done the job. Like a lot of newly emancipated guys around my age, I lived surrounded by hand-me-downs and thrift store horror stories, horribly mismatched items I didn’t really care all that much about.

Like I said, though; the house was crooked. Slightly stilted to the left, if I remember correctly. The oddest thing is that it only became obvious if you looked at the upper corners in each room, where the ceiling and walls met. Pull out a laser guide, though, or your smartphone’s level app, and you’d realize that the place was actually leveled out. Your eyes would keep reporting the odd bend, but everything else reacted as though the house was entirely straight.

The basement, though, was interesting. First, the entire place smelled new. You ever smelled a freshly installed window frame before? It’s got that acrid, almost antiseptic tang, that unmistakably “new plastic” scent that sticks on clam-shell wrappers in a more muted variant. Some friends of mine called it the “new keyboard” smell – but the thing is, the house looked like it’d just been built, and it didn’t show up on any lot registries. Everyone around me more or less went through the same logical hoops and assumed the place hadn’t been fully squared out before the real estate agent sold it to me. Even she was surprised, and her own bosses just shrugged it off, assuming some paperwork was missing. Everyone told me I’d eventually receive a call from City Hall, asking me to come and fix up a few administrative niggles or issues, basically sign my name on a couple dotted lines.