Dannye Chase is a queer writer from the US Pacific Northwest. She claims to write in many genres, but her oldest offspring suspects it all boils down to either romance or horror…or somehow both. Dannye’s fiction has or will appear in the podcast Tales to Terrify, the anthology Anna Karenina Isn’t Dead from Improbable Press, and Allegory magazine. She’s on Twitter as Dannye Chase, and at DannyeChase.com, where she gives weird writing prompts.
The Impossible House
by Dannye Chase
THREE: I’m never going to leave this house again.
“There’s the one that goes into the bathroom.” Marjean pointed at the ceiling, her finger following the faint footsteps across the upstairs hall.
Sydney didn’t look up from her phone. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Tell that to the ghost.”
On the wall behind Sydney hung a photograph of an open window, a lacy curtain blown outward, its ragged edges escaping the house. The only real activity Sydney had engaged in over the last two weeks was taking window photographs. At least this morning Marjean could see her sister had taken a shower, her blond hair damp against her neck, slim frame in clean clothes.
“How are things with you today?” Marjean asked.
Sydney didn’t answer. It was answer enough.
“I’m here if you ever want to talk about him,” Marjean said.
There was a sharp creaking sound from the upper story, where the stairs split the floor. Marjean curled her fingers around her spoon, waiting to hear if the footsteps were going to come down the staircase, toward them.
The house was different on the second floor, the hall shadowy, the walls close, with a faint stale smell that lingered in the bedrooms. But down here, where Marjean’s paintings hung beside Sydney’s photos on the flaking walls, where the windows could be wrestled open, where the front door was solidly in sight—down here, the ghosts were harder to dismiss as figments born of dark, unaired corners.
The house had been vacant a few years, and Marjean had told herself the lowered price was for that reason, the grimy floors and expired smoke detectors, the mousetraps and sagging front steps. But the wrongness of this place was obvious if you paid attention to the whimpers and whispers when the wind blew through the rusted gutters, to the brick walls always a little too warm, like skin in the sun, with the hint of a pulse.
Sydney stood up from the table, looking toward the front door. For weeks, she hadn’t set foot farther than the yard, peering up at the windows with her camera. But Marjean knew it wouldn’t last. Sydney had recently walked out of a job, and Marjean alone had never been enough to make her sister stay around.
“Leaving?” Marjean asked.
The emotion must have come through in her voice, because Sydney looked chastened, and then defeated. “No. Not this time. I swear I’m never going to leave this house again.”
*
FOUR: We will find out everything that happened here.
Three months later
Marjean didn’t meet Eric Dunn in a graveyard. She’d been halfway expecting him to suggest it in their awkward emails. Hi, my name is Marjean Campbell. I was wondering if you could help me. My sister is—
Marjean hadn’t been able to think of the right word. It’s about my sister was what she finally wrote. Marjean had found Eric Dunn on a website of white type on a black background, and everything about him said SCAM, but maybe that’s what Marjean was looking for, something that made sense, even the wrong kind. She told herself she’d meet this man and see him for the fraud he was, then go home knowing this avenue of investigation was useless.
Marjean had not been prepared for Eric Dunn to be quite beautiful in an ethereal way, all cheekbones and blue veins beneath the skin, faint glimmering lipstick.
Marjean was in jean shorts and a t-shirt, her red hair in some semblance of a braid, and no makeup at all. At least she’d showered. Anyway, this wasn’t a social call. It was a meeting with a psychic investigator in a shopping mall food court where Marjean’s sneakers squeaked on the waxed floor and everything smelled like fast food taco meat. Her stomach growled anyway. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a full meal.
When Eric told Marjean to start from the beginning, she had no idea where that was. “I can’t find my sister. But I think I know where she is.”
Marjean drove Eric to the brick two-story that didn’t feel like home anymore. Apparently, he didn’t drive, something about slow reflexes, whatever that meant.
It was October. Marjean had always loved October for its bright colors, bizarre costumes, and butterscotch candy. This house showed none of the sweetness of the season. It was dark, even in the light of day, bland against the fall leaves. Next door, Mr. Nolan had apples on his trees and an orange bow on his mailbox. Marjean’s house looked like it was in the ravages of winter already, everything in the yard dead.
Eric stood a moment in the weedy grass, as if reluctant to climb the splintered porch steps, but somehow Marjean doubted the disrepair was really what had frozen him there. “Please,” she said, wondering if for the rest of her life, she would regret saying it.
Eric Dunn followed her into the house.
Inside, Eric reminded Marjean of those videos of cats reacting to something their owners couldn’t see, staring into corners with their fur ruffled, occasionally giving a low growl. Eric didn’t growl. But neither did he speak, or move quickly, or stop seeming to metaphorically have his fur ruffled. He was perhaps the most unnerving thing Marjean had ever gotten a good look at in this place.
“I hear them walk around upstairs,” Marjean said. “And downstairs. I think I even saw one once by the hall closet. But they don’t follow you outside—” she broke off, realizing Eric looked as if he had bad news to share.
They were back downstairs in the kitchen. The window was cracked open and the curtain fluttered inward this time. “They’re everywhere, aren’t they?” Marjean asked.
Eric put a hand on her shoulder, which should have seemed either comforting or patronizing, but instead was startling, because his hand was ice cold. He led her to the table, and they sat in chairs spattered with the paint of many kitchens before this one.
“Let me explain,” Eric said, and Marjean was more than ready for that, finally an explanation, even if it was bogus, but everything Eric said only made it worse. “I’m not really psychic, not the way most people think of it. But I can tell you there are at least four people in this house besides you and me. One of them hasn’t been here long. I think it may be your sister. If we’re to get her out, we’ll have to work fast. This house is… very powerful. So tell me who she lost.”
Marjean hadn’t realized until that point that she’d taken Sydney’s usual chair, and Eric was in hers. This was the view Sydney used to have of her, backed by the sink and window, the cheerfulness of a soap bottle and the pressure of unwashed dishes. “She doesn’t believe in this,” Marjean said. “Ghosts. Psychic investigators who aren’t psychic.”
Eric looked away, which only made Marjean realize he hadn’t taken his eyes off her since they’d come back into the kitchen. “I forget,” he said. “Well, I try not to think about how hard it must be in the dark, without answers. I want to give you what I can.”
“Sydney lost everybody. All her co-workers.”
“But who was it that died?”
Marjean shivered, her hand jumping in her lap. “Her patient. Uh, his name was Sam. Leukemia. She was an oncology nurse. They were—close. Talked on the phone every night. She thought he was going to make it.”
“And after that, she was ambivalent about death. Her own, I mean.”
“Jesus, you don’t have to put it like that.”
Eric flinched, and sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry. I only meant a place like this is dangerous for a person who doesn’t have a firm hold on life. You—Marjean, you are angry and stubborn and ready to fight. There’s so much passion in you.” Eric had faint color in his cheeks now, the first time Marjean had seen it. “The spirits in this house don’t have that desire for life.”
“Is my sister a spirit?”
“It’s complicated. What happened the last time you saw her?”
“We were in the kitchen, right here. I got up for a bowl of cereal. The damn box was empty, and I knew she’d put it back that way, she always does, and when I looked up to bitch at her about it—” Marjean’s voice faltered, as if speaking it only made it more real. “She was gone. But everything was still here. Her phone, half-eaten toast. Purse, shoes, car keys. You can hear when somebody leaves this house, the screen doors are half rust. I called the cops, but it’s been two weeks, and I know she’s still here.”
“I believe she is.”
“How are you supposed to know that without being psychic?”
“There are other ways to see beyond the veil. I believe the oldest ghost here is from 1850, when it was a boarding house. There are two others from 1946. Murder-suicide.” Eric smiled in a clear effort to appear reassuring. “I promise you, Marjean, we will find out everything that happened here.”
The moment he said it, something in the house shifted. Eric’s head snapped up, his dark eyes widening. “No, no, no,” he said, and afterward, his mouth stayed open like more words might fall out.
Eric jumped up from his chair and jogged toward the front door, the first quick movement Marjean had seen him make. She watched in horror as he yanked on the doorknob and the door refused to move.
“The back door,” she said.
“It won’t work.” Eric picked up a heavy photography book from a table and heaved it at a window. The book bounced off the glass and thumped onto the floor. Eric stared outside for a second, and then pulled the curtain shut, as if to hide the shuttered escape route.
Maybe this had never been a house, Marjean thought, not really. More like a prison, with cold, clammy air, and the feeling of being watched from a strange angle, the target of a strange anger. “What happened?” she asked.
Eric looked around the living room, and Marjean wondered what—who—he could see. But she was staring at him, and for the first time, she noticed something. Marjean was panting in her panic. But Eric wasn’t breathing. At all.
“What are you?” she gasped.
Eric blinked. “Oh. Well. Uh, that’s complicated too.” Eric’s hands wavered in space. “What matters is I’m a necromancer.”
“What’s that?”
“I speak to the dead. Fortunately, in this house, the dead want to talk.”
*
They were on the ground floor. There was nothing below them, but as Marjean followed Eric deeper into the house, their steps seemed to descend into a place Marjean had never been. By the time they reached the dining room, the wallpaper was an unfamiliar pattern, and the furniture was of an old style but looked new. Marjean could smell food cooking in the kitchen, and hear the voices of women chattering somewhere in the house. Outside the windows, snow was falling.
So much for Eric being a fraud.
“What is this?” Marjean asked, her hand squeezing Eric’s. Though his touch was still freezing, she had no intention of letting go.
“1850. Boarding house.”
Steps sounded on the staircase, more solidly than Marjean had ever heard them. A young woman in old-fashioned clothing crossed briefly through the dining room on her way to the kitchen.
“Can they see us?” Marjean asked.
“No. This is more like… a memory.”
“Whose?”
“Your ghost’s.” Eric pointed into the hall, where a young woman with dark hair was standing by the coat closet.
“Her name is Ivy,” Eric said, leading Marjean closer. Ivy seemed unaware of their presence, her face red and blotchy. She stood gazing at the closet for a moment, and then jerked the door open.
Eric squeezed Marjean’s hand. “Let’s see what she sees.”
*
ONE: I will make you want me.
Ivy was the one to find them in the closet, lovely Cordelia and whiny Edith of all people. It was almost enough to make Ivy tell what she saw, hands and skirts and buttons undone, Cordelia’s lower lip red-purple from being sucked. But Ivy couldn’t bear the frightened tears in Cordelia’s dark eyes, the way her skin went pale as the wallpaper. This wasn’t her fault. Edith was cold and cruel and whatever she wanted she took.
“Go on,” Ivy whispered, watching Cordelia’s beautiful chest disappear as her chemise was righted over her corset, the bodice re-fastened. But there was also no forgetting Edith’s figure, still fully clothed, skinny as a piece of string. Was that what Cordelia liked? A girl who weighed less than her own skirts?
Ivy wasn’t heavy, not really, not like the widow landlady, Mrs. Adams. But maybe, Ivy thought, as she watched Cordelia and Edith flee down the hall, she could start skipping a few meals.
Maybe she could figure out a way to start taking what she wanted.
Ivy was fanatical about her diet for the next month. One night, nearly faint from hunger and desire, she found Cordelia alone, and pulled her into the closet among the musty coats, giggling, her hands finding the little buttons over Cordelia’s—
Cordelia pushed her away, her eyes wide, spots of red on her cheeks.
“But you like this,” was the only thing Ivy could think of to say. “I’ll leave my clothes on, just let me touch you—”
“Is this the price for your silence?” Cordelia asked, and the air in the house began to feel heavy as water, drowning Ivy in the small space.
“Of course not,” Ivy gasped.
“Then stop this.” Cordelia fixed the one button Ivy had managed to undo. She stepped into the hall, and Ivy had to grasp the arm of someone’s coat to keep upright.
“I promise,” Ivy whispered, shaking, watching Cordelia move away, “I will make you want me.”
Ivy ate just enough every day to stay awake and do her job, cleaning neighboring houses where dust sparkled in the sun, and then back to Mrs. Adams’s place, where clean floors were the color of mud. The dieting didn’t work. Ivy had to let out her corset. Her swelling breasts strained her chemise and gapped her buttons, and her thighs thickened beneath her skirts.
And then one shattering afternoon, color burst back into Ivy’s life, as Cordelia took her hand and drew her into the closet. Ivy didn’t fit the way she had the first time, her ample hips catching coats, but she barely noticed, as Cordelia’s hands were on her buttons, freeing her heavy breasts.
“You still want me, don’t you?” Cordelia whispered, her mouth—God her mouth—on one of Ivy’s broad nipples, and Ivy moaned as answer.
They kissed desperately. Ivy thrust her hand beneath Cordelia’s skirts, pulling cloth, pinching skin in her eagerness. Against her throat Cordelia moaned a name.
“Ruth. Oh, Ruth.”
Ivy startled, her hand frozen against a slender thigh. “Ruth—Mrs. Adams? The landlady?” she whispered, horrified.
Cordelia made a little retching sound, and jerked away. It knocked Ivy off-balance, and she hit the floor hard.
*
“Come back out, Marjean,” Eric said, and then Marjean was watching Ivy’s body begin to shake. Blood seeped out beneath her dark hair. This was how the first person died in this house, Marjean realized. Starved and seizing, alone.
*
As Ivy went still, the house shifted. Marjean had the sensation of descending again as Eric led her past updated wallpaper and windows framing taller trees, out onto the front porch.
“1943,” Eric said, and Marjean found old-new cars on the street, a humid field of green corn where in her time there were houses. The porch was in good repair and smelled faintly of paint.
Beside them two young men and a woman sat on wicker chairs, the men in military uniforms which looked unlived-in. The taller man, blond and good-looking, was laughing. The woman hardly seemed to hear it. Instead she had frozen as the house gave a hushed creak behind her, a sound Marjean had often heard. It sounded a bit like breathing.
“That’s Anna,” Eric said. “Let’s see what she sees.”
*
TWO: I will wait for you.
William laughed when Anna said the house was haunted. Joseph took her more seriously, or at least pretended to. Still it was William whom Anna allowed to kiss her clumsily on the front porch, William who made her think of a child she could cradle inside her body and then atop her hip and in her heart forever.
For now, Anna lived in the house alone, and she knew that wasn’t ideal. The house had come into her possession from older relatives, and it was nice, especially with fresh paint and new floors. But from the beginning there were signs.
Anna’s childhood home had housed a presence that smelled of vanilla and liked to hover by the pantry where the canned fruit gathered dust. But maybe it had been harmful in its own way, giving Anna the idea that all ghosts were pleasant and harmless. The one in her new house was neither.
It centered around the hall closet on the ground floor. Nothing could be kept in there for long. Clothing went musty and tinned food spoiled. Brooms were colonized by creeping things with too many legs, becoming instruments that spread filth rather than sweep it away. And that wasn’t all.
Anna confessed it to William one night, why she preferred to meet callers on the front porch. The way closed doors in this house never seemed quite snug, as if a breath of cold air could open them, locks no obstacle. The way apples on the kitchen counter became inedible not through rot but desiccation, drying sponge-like even on the most humid of days. The footsteps she could hear in the deserted halls.
William laughed. That night, she opened the front door to him anyway. He had papers in his pocket sending him away to war, and Anna drew him close while she still had him, allowed him into her bedroom, into her body. He was gentler than she expected, but lost control and spilled inside her. She put his ring on her finger during his tearful apology. It seemed right if she might carry his child.
“I promise,” Anna said, “I will wait for you.”
Joseph left too, for Italy, when William went to France. And after Italy, Joseph came home. After France, William was…nowhere. Vanished on some battlefield without leaving boot or blood, not that anyone could identify. He’d been swallowed, Anna thought, by a river or a lonely plot of earth, where animals disposed of whatever was left of him.
There had been no accidental baby. Every last trace of William was gone.
Joseph, however, made his home on Anna’s front porch, a medal on his breast. He was haunted, like the house, like Anna, and maybe that’s why Anna let him inside, upstairs, why she ended up at a courthouse with a coat hiding her growing belly, and Joseph’s ring on her finger instead of William’s.
After that, like the apples on the counter, Anna’s life dried out. Joseph had escaped war-torn fields, but he couldn’t survive the road outside their house one dark night, whisky in his throat and the car bent around the tree in the front yard.
So quickly widowed, Anna put the house on the market. But it wasn’t the realtor who pounded the door one morning, but a revenant. A specter shipped home from France, found miraculously alive in body but in spirit horribly changed. William. He wasn’t the man Anna had loved. She knew it as he drew the gun from his pocket and aimed it toward her swollen stomach.
“You promised you’d wait for me.”
Anna told him the truth. The baby was gone, had been for nearly a day. She’d only just come back from the hospital. Everything that had taken William’s place was dead. Her promise had been kept, despite herself. The thing wearing William’s face did not care.
*
“Come back out, Marjean.”
Eric’s cold hand drew Marjean away, stumbling onto the porch as the gun fired twice and the house gained two more ghosts.
*
FIVE: We will walk out of here alive.
The house shifted a final time as they went back inside, and Marjean took a seat on the second-hand couch she and Sydney had shoved through the front door a few months ago.
Eric dropped onto the other end of the couch, weary, pale as ever. “I think this house has always been—wrong,” Eric said. “Life and death are not the distinct categories people think they are. I used to live in California. One day there was an earthquake, a bad one. I was injured, and my fiancée was killed.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Eric looked down at his hands, his ring finger bare. “In my grief, I held onto her so strongly I was drawn into one of the cracks that run between life and death. She moved on, but I was never quite able to find my way out again. That’s why I can talk to ghosts. It’s also why I—well. That was the Long Beach quake. 1933.”
After watching Eric not breathe for a while, it felt like a satisfactory explanation. “So you’re a walking existential question, is what you mean.”
Eric laughed, and it was a lovely sound. The house couldn’t quite swallow it, the brightness glancing off the flaking walls. “I suppose I am.”
“So what’s wrong with my house?”
“Sometimes what we think of as hauntings are just energy. They’re not people, like ghosts, they’re the emotions people have left behind. But they affect whoever comes in contact with them. This house, this land has a strong emotion to it, something cold and lonely. What does it feel like to you?”
“Betrayal,” Marjean said, before she could really think about it.
Eric gave her an appraising look. “You’re quite sensitive to these things. I think that’s it, too. Betrayal. And I think that’s what the house is doing. When people make impossible promises, it’s forcing them to keep them. I just wish I’d caught on sooner, before I made one myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I said we’d find out everything that happened here. That’s when the house locked us in.”
Marjean felt cold and small. “Oh, god, my sister. She—she promised she’d never leave this house.”
Eric looked troubled, and his voice fell soft. “Marjean, look out the window. Tell me what you see.”
Dread crept over Marjean as she shifted her gaze from Eric’s face to the window behind him. Where the curtain gapped, she could see a slow, pulsing light, bright and dark, shifting every few seconds. “What is that?”
Eric’s voice was grave. “I promised we’d find out about your sister, but to do that, we’ve had to follow where she went. Those aren’t lights. They’re sunrises and sunsets. Sydney isn’t dead, but she’s disappeared into the house, out of place and out of time, and now we have, too. Marjean, I’m so sorry. If I’d only said I would find out, not we—”
“This isn’t your fault. I asked you to help me.”
“And I knew better than to come into this house.”
Marjean realized what he meant, with a sickly feeling. “You don’t have a firm hold on life, you mean. You’re vulnerable here. Why did you come in, then?”
The answer was clear, because Eric didn’t answer. “We should try to find your sister,” he said.
Sydney’s room had a large tree outside, and the quickly revolving day and night made its shadow crawl across the floor. Marjean had spent hours in this room, trying to guess where Sydney had gone, hoping if she closed her eyes Sydney might be there when she opened them.
And now, finally, Sydney was. She stood in front of the window, as if posing for one of her own photographs. Marjean dropped Eric’s hand and threw her arms around her. Sydney felt real, warm, alive, and Marjean wet her shoulder with tears. Sydney wiggled away. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I missed you,” Marjean said, half-laughing.
“You just saw me five minutes ago at breakfast.”
“Feels like longer,” Marjean said, forcing a smile. “Hey, let’s go for a walk, okay? Just around the block. Fresh air will do you good.”
Sydney was looking over her shoulder. “Oh, who’s this? Cute neighbor?”
Marjean wound her fingers with Sydney’s and started pulling her toward the bedroom door. “Isn’t he? He’s taking us to brunch, Syd, come on. I want you to meet him.”
“You always did have a thing for guys in makeup.”
“Oh, do you?” Eric asked. But his smile didn’t quite come off, and crucially, Marjean was the only one moving. She gave Eric a frightened look, and he shook his head. “Think we may be here a while.”
In her growing panic, Marjean almost missed Sydney asking, “Did you leave something on the stove?”
The tree’s shadows stopped moving across the floor. Something was blocking them. Marjean looked up to find boards nailed across the window. The faint smell of smoke worked its way into the room, and the chill of the house began to wear off as a sickly heat rose up from the ground floor. The walls trembled, as if the house wanted to run away from itself.
“We’ve disappeared,” Eric said. “It’s been months or years. The house has been abandoned. And it’s caught fire.”
“So what happens to us?”
Eric didn’t answer. Marjean grasped his hand, and it was ice cold.
“Then I guess it’s my turn,” Marjean said. She was careful to speak clearly. “I promise we will walk out of here alive. Right now. All three of us.”
“Marjean,” Eric said, sounding both fond and sad. “I’m not alive.”
“That’s what makes it impossible.”
The house burned, the flames brighter than anything that had ever been inside it.
Copyright 2024 by Dannye Chase