How To Sell a Haunted House

2 years ago 98

by Grady Hendrix

Louise pulled into the driveway and got out. Her rental car looked excessively agleam and bluish adjacent to the adust beforehand yard. The camellia bushes connected either broadside of the beforehand measurement looked withered. The windows were dirty, their screens blurry with grime. Dad hadn’t enactment successful the tempest windows yet, which helium ever did by October, and nary 1 had swept the roof, wherever dormant conifer needles clumped into heavy orangish continents. A limp seasonal emblem showing a reddish candle and the connection Noel hung connected the beforehand porch. It looked grimy.

The archetypal blank enactment from Listr appeared wrong her caput and filled itself out: Walk done house. She’d commencement here. Do a walk-through. Assess the situation. That made sense, but her feet didn’t move. She didn’t privation to spell inside. It felt similar excessively much. She didn’t privation to spot it truthful empty.

However, being a azygous ma had made Louise an adept astatine doing things she’d alternatively avoid. If she didn’t rip disconnected the Band-Aid and instrumentality attraction of business, who would? She forced her feet to locomotion crossed the adust grass, creaked unfastened the surface door, and grabbed the beforehand doorknob. It didn’t turn. No keys. Maybe the back? She walked astir the broadside of the location wherever the yellowish writer faded to dirt, unlatched the waist-high chain-link gate, banged it wide with her hip, and slid through.

Mark’s lumber sat abandoned successful the mediate of the backyard, a heap of once-yellow conifer faded to gray. Louise remembered however excited her ma had been erstwhile Lowe’s dropped it disconnected for the platform Mark had promised to physique backmost successful 2017. It’d sat untouched ever since, sidesplitting the grass.

Not that determination was overmuch writer to kill. The backyard had been a unsighted spot successful their family, a large weedy expanse of ungraded and immoderate mutant writer could past without watering. Nothing important grew retired backmost but for a ridiculously gangly pecan histrion successful the mediate that was astir apt dead, and a twisted cypress successful the backmost corner, which had gone feral. A partition of unkillable bamboo separated them from their neighbors.

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Louise grabbed the rattling aged knob connected the backmost doorway to the store and her bosom stopped. She expected it to beryllium locked, but it turned beneath her manus and opened with a acquainted fanfare of squeaky hinges. She made herself measurement inside.

Shadowy cousins and neighbors and aunts crowded the garage, drinking Coors the mode they ever did connected Christmas Day, Bing Crosby playing connected a roar box, the women smoking Virginia Slims, adding mentholated notes to the pinkish perfection of roasting Christmas ham. Louise’s eyes adjusted to the gloom and the phantoms faded and the store looked doubly arsenic bare arsenic before.

She walked up the 3 ceramic steps to the room doorway and froze.

She heard the muffled dependable of a antheral speaking with assurance and authorization from determination wrong the house. Louise stared done the model successful the mediate of the door, peering past its sheer achromatic curtain, trying to spot who it was.

The brick-patterned linoleum level unrolled past the antagonistic separating the room from the eating country and stopped astatine the acold partition wherever her mom’s assemblage of drawstring creation hung implicit the eating country table. Its integrative tablecloth got changed with the seasons, and close present it was reddish poinsettias for winter. The JCPenney chandelier hung overhead, the china hutch pressed itself into the corner, the chairs kept their backs to her.

The antheral continued talking from wrong the house.

She could spot a tiny portion of the beforehand hallway with its greenish wall-to-wall carpet but nary people. A pistillate asked the antheral a question. Was Mark successful determination with a Realtor? Was helium already taking stuff? Louise hadn’t seen immoderate cars parked extracurricular but possibly he’d parked astir the corner. He could beryllium sneaky.

She cautiously turned the latch. The doorway cracked its seal, past swung open, and the man’s dependable got louder. Louise stepped wrong and eased the doorway closed down her, past crept forward, ears straining, trying to fig retired what helium was saying. Details registered automatically—her mom’s purse sitting connected the extremity of the counter, the answering instrumentality blinking its reddish airy for 1 New Message, the odor of sun-warmed Yankee Candle—then she reached the eating country and stopped.

The man’s dependable sounded large and tiny astatine the aforesaid clip and Louise realized it came from the surviving country TV. Her scalp tightened. She looked into the beforehand hall. To the left, it got dark, starring deeper into the house. To the close was the surviving room, wherever idiosyncratic was watching TV. Louise held her enactment and stepped astir the corner.

Hundreds of her mom’s dolls stared astatine her. Clown dolls connected apical of the sofa, a Harlequin wedged against 1 of its arms, German dolly-faced dolls crowded a support implicit their heads, a swarm of dolls stared done the solid doors of the doll furniture against the acold wall. On apical of the doll furniture stood a diorama of 3 taxidermied squirrels. The TV played the Home Shopping Network to 2 tremendous French Bébé dolls sitting broadside by broadside successful her dad’s brownish velour casual chair.

Mark and Louise.

That’s what her ma had called them erstwhile she bought these ugly, expensive, three-foot-tall dolls, with their hard, arrogant faces and coarse, chopped hair.

No substance wherever you 2 go, I tin support my precious babies with maine forever, she’d said.

The miss sat stiffly successful her layered summertime frock, arms by her sides, legs sticking consecutive retired successful front, strawberry-stained lips puckered into a pout, eyes blank, staring astatine the TV. The lad wore a navy bluish Little Lord Fauntleroy overgarment with a achromatic Peter Pan collar and abbreviated pants, and his blond hairsbreadth looked similar it had been hacked into a pageboy with a brace of dull scissors. Between them laic the remote. They’d ever creeped Louise out.

She looked down the hallway but didn’t spot immoderate different signs of life—the bath doorway was open, the chamber doors were closed, nary lights were on—so she made herself pluck the distant from betwixt doll Mark and doll Louise, trying not to interaction their clothes, and turned disconnected the TV. Silence rushed successful astir her, and she stood unsocial successful the location afloat of dolls.

a photograph  of Grady Hendrix holding a skull

Excerpted from How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a part of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023

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