The Mystery of Fowler's Hill

© 2014 Kenneth Harper Finton

Take a boy of ten, a pleasant, smudge-faced little boy with dangling arms and freckles spotted rampant on his nose. He is wearing a red and white striped polo shirt––cool enough to eat. Then take a lonely old house on a windswept hill that looks down upon the main street of a small Ohio town like a melancholy illustration from a picture book of horrors. Then add to this an old woman existing in her lonely life by threadbare strands of memory. Lump the scene together. Let is simmer with the passing of time, with clocks that run backwards and a love that ebbs away to pity.

Thirty years ago, I was that boy of ten standing in the mist at the foot of Fowler’s Hill. I was about to earn my first dollar delivering papers on Sunday mornings. My route started at the dispatch office where we picked up our stacks of stack of folded papers still smelling of fresh ink. My first customer was to be Old Lady Fowler who lived alone, always cloaked in the old weathered house that stood atop the town’s highest hill.

Fowler’s Hill had been Mount Milly’s chief landmark for as long as anyone could remember. Mount Milly’s founding father, Jacob Fowler, declared the hill his sanctuary, but when the early settlers nestled in at the foot of the hill, their tentacles reached for the slopes, Jacob Fowler fenced the entire hill with a six foot wall of stone, two feet wide. The only entrances were a large wrought iron gate on the east side and steps dropping down into Mount Milly on the west side.

In the early days of Fowler’s Hill, the house blazed with lights and horse-drawn carriages labored up the narrow brick lane to the Fowler mansion. Every Saturday night music and the sounds of laughter could be heard floating from the open windows and down into the town. Pretty girls escorted by tall, sinewy young men sat on the white benches at the top of the hill looking down upon the lights of Mount Milly, entranced with the town’s haunting reflections.

When I was ten, the house was only a ghost of its memories. It stood windblown and weathered at the top of the hill. The house was the object of derision, as the people in Mount Milly laughed about how old man Fowler’s fortunes had turned after the 1928 crash. But the house itself stood unsmiling on the hilltop, staring down like some dark shade of gloom––unpainted, rotting, without expression. Scolding mothers threatened to take their wayward children to Old Lady Fowler for punishment. There, the prisoner of the hill, Old Lady Fowler, had shut herself into her hilltop estate, never to walk the streets again.

Thirty years ago, I stood at the bottom of the hill, my body braced against the weight of my paper bag, trying to muster up the courage to climb those time-eaten steps and carefully place the Sunday paper on the porch.

I tried not to look at the house as I climbed the steps. One glimpse and I could be hypnotized by the unblinking, long windows that stared at me and seemed to whisper: “Come up, my boy. Come to Fowler’s Hill.” As I climbed the steps, the house whispered in my ears and the air around me carried hushed strains of maniacal laughter. My spine was rigid, my knees unbending. I threw the paper on the porch and started running down the steps three at a time until I was safe at last on the streets of Mount Milly and the whispers of the house were drowned in the sounds of my panting breath.

Every Sunday morning I had to deliver the paper. As I became accustomed to climbing the steps and returning without being minced and placed as a seasoning in a blueberry pie. I gradually lost my fear of Fowler’s Hill.

For six months I delivered the papers to the old porch. Before I knew it, snow was blowing and sifting through closed shutters and white flakes were freezing to my eye lashes. The week before Christmas, I climbed the steps once again to place the paper on the porch. The sky was gray and the streets at the foot of the hill were drifted closed. Automobiles had stopped everywhere and had been abandoned where they stalled.