by William J. Jackson

GOOD DAY TO YOU. I SEE YOU’VE ONCE AGAIN COME TO DELAWARE FOR A RELAXING SUMMER. THE BEACHES ARE CLOSED. BUT VALMAR IS OPEN. PITY…

                         

          With passionate regret I purchased the house where Clotilde died. She rested now, immaculate in a lawn that never needed mowing,  beneath a stone cross she never believed in. The House, tender in the worn shingles. Sturdy in her contempt for the morbid squalls that taunted the land. Nothing could bring her to ruin, not even Clotilde, while she lived. This I know, because she hired me to kill the thing.

          You hear the words and know from the roots of common sense that a house cannot be killed per se. Its inanimate spirit will never know a Heaven, cannot dream of Purgatory, Hell, nor Nirvana. It simply, is. A retainer one cannot remove. But she tried. Then I tried.

          Allow me to set the stage, and take you back several months. It was February, when the innocence of Delaware is stilled by glassy sheets of frozen dew and the Delaware Bay is a mirror reflecting the sky’s vaunted sins.

          Clotilde hired me on a forlorn Tuesday. She entered what I called an office at the time in silk stockings to show off the legs, femme fatale style. I laughed in her cherry blush face. Her worldly experiences came straight out of fiction. Harlequin novels mired in film noir nostalgia. But she tried to seduce me, entice a small-time private investigator into burning down her own house in exchange for a bottle of Glenfiddich, five-hundred bucks and a weekend in the sack. 

          Negotiations were heated. Confounding. Pleasurable. I did it for a lascivious one-night stand and a thousand dollars. Cash. It felt more like mutual prostitution than a business arrangement. This stained both our souls, though I had no idea right then and there. I agreed, with the snarkiest laugh I could maintain. She kissed my forehead, scribbled the address on my notepad, and sauntered out the office. 

          “Easy money,” I assured myself. How could it not be? Roll up late on a Sunday, dullest day of the week, drop down a heap of kerosene. Strike a match. Drive off. A Balaclava on the face to ward off the damn traffic cams. An old car from my pal’s junkyard. Not the thing for a guy with ten years in the Wilmington PD plus a PI license to get himself into.

          But I have one flaw. Beauty. Clotilde cornered that genre. Besides, crime is only illegal if you get caught.

          So I went out on a Sunday, dressed like a lowlife in a rusty Coup Deville, lugging a leaky plastic red gas can full of kerosene. Pour. Strike. Flames. Haul tail.

          I fell asleep on an empty bottle of Blanton’s, only to be shaken and stirred by the rowdy ringtone on my phone. ‘Inagodadavida’. Max volume.

          “Whut now?”

          “I told you it’s a living thing.”

          “Whut is?” I rubbed my eyes trying to get the daylight out of them.

          “The House! It’s here. Still!”

          Clotilde told the truth. I spun over there two hours later to find the House standing pretty, or as pretty as a cabin from the 17th century can be. It’s one of those Ship of Theseus things, I reckon. So much of it’s been replaced over time you can never be sure what’s original. Certainly looked ancient, or as ancient as anything America bothered to make. Basic char marks at the base of the House. The grass was certainly gone, hell, the entire yard burned real nice. But the House? Right as rain.

          “Damn polyurethane add-ons. Alright. Gimme a few more days. I’ll put this thing in a hole.”

          She half believed me. I saw my own word as gospel, and plotted more ways to get the thousand dollars plus benefits. I tried a load of schemes.

          One by pitiful one. First, a gas leak. Clotilde said her old man installed it back in the 70s. Perfect. One spark to end the whole affair. Or so I thought. The fire never got out of the basement. Made no sense to me. The entire structure reeked of phantasmal fumes but, nothing. Fire department showed, thought we were junkies sitting in there, befuddled. They gave us a lecture. Again, I laughed. She had red rage.

          “You think it’s funny? Don’t you know this thing has devoured my family?”

          “What the hell are you talking about?” I laughed in her face.

          I learned to stop the guffaws once she laid it all out. Her entire line, the Millers, had dwelt in this two-story log house since they completed it in 1645. One of the oldest homes in the First State, second only to the Nothnagle in Swedesboro, New Jersey. Some whispered strange forces worked through the colonists back then. They brought more than greed and destruction from Europe. 

          Clotilde agreed with the whisperers. She claimed to be into Wicca, crystals, Greek god worship, a loyalty to the Thirteen and a whole host of other occult words I tuned out. Fine. I was with her for the money, the body, and a boyish lust for adrenaline rushes and danger. So what she was a tad off.

          Come to find out she was the normal one in her family tree.

          Death claimed every Miller in the house, early. Cancer. Diabetes. A wooden beam to the temple. Tumble down narrow steps to a snapped neck. Clothesline around the throat, tight, scornful. “It got them all,” Clotilde told me. I admit to feeling low after her lengthy tale finished. Three centuries of familial executions with the killer never being caught can destroy your good mood. 

          “Do you get it now? I’m the last Miller. I’m the only one left to know it’s a beast. At night it sours my dreams. By morning it mocks me. It has to die. I…I have to win. Or else.”

          I tried to resist. But right after the speech and a hypnotic glare and she spat out lovemaking without mercy. Liquor by the gallon. Money. More money than do-whatever-to-get-by me had ever rubbed between calloused fingers. I came to the next day with five thousand in cash, a migraine, and an empty bed. Just a note that begged one word:

          PLEASE

          Two weeks later I hired a wrecking crew. They brought the ball with them. It wouldn’t function. The next day I rented a steamroller to ram the damnable thing. It died out right before touching the logs. Money wasted, frustration over me like a plastic bag, smothering, I went to quit once again. She poured on the intimacy, alcohol. Same tricks, same victory for her. Promised a wild life of wealth once the work was done. The Millers had life insurance going back to the original land trust of 16-what-the-Hell-ever. Clotilde was old money with a Frankenstein obsession to pull her life from the jaws of death. I became her Igor.

          More gas leaks, more fires. The house stood. Minor wounds but no fatality. I almost got religious trying to find its weakness.

          “Who built this monster?” I asked. Once.

          “Agnes Stall Miller,” she whispered, looking around the House. “She who brought Columbia in. Or rather, that which claimed itself to be her.”

          “Yeah? Who was she? Columbia.”

          “Not who. What.” And Clotilde banned me from bringing her up ever again.

          That night we got it on inside the House. Everything creaked, from bones to boards. I reveled in it. Her motions gave me visions. Fingernails ripped open my back. Lip split. Instead of slumber afterward, I felt potent, a wildfire sweeping across the state no one could tame. We took a drive up Ninety-Five doing a hundred in her Audi, screaming. Free as vultures feeding off the stiff world. Hot damn she was the most electric being since lightning, and getting struck by her ignited every cell in me.

          Nothing could go wrong. Killing the House of Columbia was just math, a matter of patience times persistence.

         Three days later the paramedics pulled Clotilde Alice Miller out of the House. Stiff. Cold. Multiple heart attacks they said. Never had a chance, they said. Clotilde was twenty seven.

          “Can’t be dead,” I repeated over and over and over to bare walls in my office. The high had crashed. I was in a basement and the thunder, the lightning, drifted to the other side of the world, leaving me without weather. Dry. Parched. 

          After a black funeral on a sunless day, no mourners save me, I got plastered. Laid in bed. Stared at stacks of bills in my open safe. Bank account in the thousands. I called the realtor. House was historical but its pedigree, plus multiple fire marks, made it a no sell. 

          “Too much local lore,” she proclaimed. “Everyone in nearby Valmar knows the stories. Hell, all of Kent County and half of Sussex does. Every attempt to get it listed on the National Historic Register failed, because of the modern implants, so I’m told. I couldn’t give it away.”

          “Let me take it. I know it. Clotilde, would want that.” I hadn’t said her name since forever. 

          The realtor agreed right away. No problem. My name was in Clotilde’s will, to my surprise. A half million dollar injection and a short love letter:

          Ronald,

                    You were a glacier that became the fire I needed in my final hours. 

          I went to the lawyer, signed the paperwork. Spent a brief sabbatical shedding tears like a baby. After a lifetime of trysts and flings, drunken revelries, did I have something more with her? I feel I did. I know I did, but I figured it out only after she…

          Paperwork and time traded hands. I got the key eight months later, with notes from the historical society they would come by to take pictures. I nodded but in secret I vowed retribution. 

          The House was fit for the grave. End of discussion.

          I sat in one of the bedrooms on the first night, staring out into the minacious darkness of a colonial hallway and blessed it with a curse. “If you’re alive then you can hear, right? Yeah, well, remember this. I’ll send every stick that made you straight to Hell.”

          Unseen floorboards down the way creaked.

           Clotilde had been a seething whirlwind, the most cryptic of women. But she had embedded a blood red wax stamp to seal me with her soul and I would never violate that. If that’s love, then I finally found it and it was a raw, pure, Big Bang of a thing. I saw her starlight in the old paintings lining the hallway, in the kitchen, dining room. The family line. Overworked men pale as hopelessness. Women who all were carbon copies of Clotilde’s breathtaking face and glossy hair. Soft paints. 

          Egregious woodcuts. It’s amazing. We celebrate the colonists, but my God, were they a frightening lot of brigands with dead eyes and gaunt skin.

          But there she was. Way in the background of a Dutch painting of one Marcus Caesar Miller, dated 1759, had a curious woman in it. A pallid blonde, barely in the image, drifting over the countryside. She had a laurel or some type of plant crowning her head. No smile. No eyes, only black spaces. COLUMBIA swirled in the tatters of her white robe torn into a dozen tendrils.

          I knew nothing of Greek mythology. Me and Bullfinch’s never got along. Now I don’t have a clue who came up with a Grecian goddess being the symbol for expansionism in a supposedly Christian or religious freedom country, but my gut told me she was a bad influence. A thief. A taker of security. Sanity. Life.

          I made dear old Marcus face the wall, and moved on. 

          Every night in the House I dreamt of my high school teacher, shoving the works of Bradford and Mather down my hormonal throat. Dust devil scribblings. Then I would awaken, breath stolen, to the faded sound of sweeping, sawing, ethereal giggles from shrouded children.

          Sours my dreams. Mocks me in the morning. Dammit. Clarity never arrives on time.

          Restlessness pervaded my muscles. But I had that burning ambition to win, a chivalric swagger. Clotilde would rest in peace, the House would tumble down into whatever den was reserved for spiritless ogres dressed as winsome Delphic oracles, and I would have my life back. Whatever it had been before this tumult, I had completely forgotten.

          On the twelfth morning, I pulled away a legion of cobwebbed sheets, searching for flaws in the floor, furniture, trying to uncover if a living home possessed by dark divinity had a heart to stab. Nothing. 

          Nothing, that is, until I peeled away a well worn, orange, oval rug. The floor it protected appeared…youthful. But in its unstreaked wood were engraved words, softened by walking and dear old time.

          PUSTULE

          PUSTULE

          GRAVE WOUNDS BREEDETH ME

          THY BLOOD SPREADETH MY SEPULCHER FROCK

          BLIGHT PUS BLOOD 

          HER SKIRT WET BONES CLAWING BREEDING 

          MAGNA COLUMBIA TACTRA UDARA

          My breathing stuttered. I leaned against a chair and stared into those grand words writ tiny as if by a child’s unknowing hand. 

          “What are you?” I asked aloud a half dozen times while praying the answer never came. My revenge slinked away, replaced by a revelatory phobia. “You are a scheming, cunning, real beast, aren’t you? Killing them. Why? For what reason?” Fear would be my reward for ending this, a healthy, sensible fear that some itches must not be scratched, no matter how beautiful the packaging. It was the prize all the Millers received, falling like dominoes over the short space of ages into the common grave. 

          I must have sat there most of that day. Whining. Realizing. Stuck on a roller coaster of fearsome lifts and infuriating drops.

          Fine, House. It won crucial battles, but it would not have the war. After another evening of churlish laughter and hollow butter-churning, I escaped the parlor games for a time and hit the hardware store. My permit kept its validity. I stocked up on dynamite. Clerks joked around, wondered if I was set to undermine an entire forest. 

           “Lots of stumps need clearing,” was my excuse.

          I returned to the House and her deceptive charms. History dared me to try again. Place the dynamite where the frame lies, and she’d crack. Collapse. Bleed. Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner?

          I placed them one by perilous one. Where the supports crossed over into the kitchen, I removed a curtain near the east window, looking for a loose board to drop explosive into. But there I found more words.

          GAPESEED

          WOUND ME 

          WOUND YOU

          I moved away from it. Those scratchings! I had examined every square inch of the House by that point and knew those scrawlings were something else. Fresh. New as the next thought. I scanned the whole place, running into every room. I stumbled up those tiny foot steps made for smaller ancestors to the second floor. Busted my chin right at the top. Eyes watered. I cursed, spat blood.

          An unclothed Clotilde drifted from one room to another. Temptation from either side of the veil.

          “No.”

          I screamed then, but the rest of that day collapsed around my soul. Panic and perspiration, the otherworldly owl screech of an ambulance. Fire. Pain. Blackout. Force.

          White lights played havoc on my sense of self. A hospital bed gave little cushion. Plastic moaning under me. A nurse, coming and going. Checks on my many wounds. She tells me I must be blessed to have survived. 

          “Did I lose my house?” 

          “Lose? You mean like, destroyed? Oh no. Darnedest thing. Some preservationists checked it out. Most of the dynamite never went off. Only the addition got blown up. She’ll be rebuilt, good as knew..”

          I sobbed deeper than when my own mother passed. “I didn’t need to know that,” I cried. My stomach churned as children giggled from behind the blue ER curtain.

          She tilted her head. “Doctor says it was an accident. Dynamite went off premature. Next time keep it in a shed, hmm? Safer that way.”

          “I don’t. Want. The House is. I feel. It’s inside me.”

          “Shh. I’ll go so you can rest, sweetheart. Whatever happened in there, it’s far from you now.”

          She walked out eyeing me with that tender look that says she pitied me. I stared at a dead television. The remote. I mumbled. Drooled. Pulled back the thin blanket to scratch the wound on my abdomen.

          It’s wrapped in bandages but I can see it so I’m compelled to pull back the white strands and see. Not the hellish burns of explosive powder or a thousand jabs from flying splinters. They are slithering into my being, frock tentacles becoming one with my nervous system, tasting blood, remaking its content. Yes, but there’s more. I’m cut into. Carved. Communication through clotted, maligned tissue. 

          LOVE SCARS

          I laugh through pain and tears and miserable, suffering comprehension. Her love is tainted, yet sickened love grows faster than any other, spreading across the House, the nation, crossing seas on the backs of unsuspecting men and women who refused such a gift of blood-soaked laurel wreaths. 

          She has written into me and now I know what Clotilde never could. Her lusts were fleeting, imperfect, manic. And I think, I feel, that I want Columbia’s grace now. Let the splinters sink into the spleen. TACTRA UDARA ET RONALD. This is special. I gave her Hell, the hot place all of my relationships were born from. Maybe she will take me to the Purgatory I long for. Pustule, pustule. Grave wounds breedeth us.

          I will keep the House open. For the children. For everyone. We need to learn our history, caked into aged floorboards one treacherous footstep at a time.