OPEN HOUSE | Horror

Exploring a house made from forgotten memories.

Both of my birth parents overdosed last month after a multiple day drug bender. When they met, my mother was seventeen and had a full-ride scholarship. He was twenty-two, a college dropout, and worked freelance. My mother’s parents hated him from the minute they laid eyes on him. Seemingly for this reason, they eloped as soon as she graduated and never spoke to her parents again. I was born not even a year later. They were both ecstatic when they heard my mother was pregnant. Apparently, she always wanted a baby girl, him too. My early years are a blur of shouting, screaming matches, and physical altercations. I was never told much about my parents, probably for good reason. They ended up dropping me off at my mother’s parents’ house when I was five and never looked back. My grandparents tried for custody shortly after and my parents never showed up to the hearing. For all intents and purposes, my grandparents are my real parents.

As you can imagine, hearing the news didn’t affect me too much. I don’t remember my life with them at all, and despite what some may think, I don’t think that period affected me all too much. Since their passing, I’ve heard more about their lives than I ever have, and more about my younger years. I was dropped off the day after my fifth birthday, without any potty training and no diaper. My clothes were tattered and stained. I was filthy, my dental hygiene was awful, and I hadn’t ever been to the doctor. “Neglectful” would be an understatement for their parenting style.

My earliest memories are a haze apart from the time spent with my grandparents. The issue became so prominent in my life that I recently started going to therapy in an attempt to remember some of my younger years. In a recent session, I was able to remember a specific moment from my time with my birth parents. My mother had gotten off early from work one day. She came home to find me attempting to shake my father awake after he had passed out on the couch. He was supposed to watch me that day, instead I was crying while desperately trying to wake him. I believe the tears I shed that day weren’t uncommon. I remember plenty of them.

I was their only heir, so naturally I inherited the house that both I grew up in and they died in. The past two months have been filled with court hearings and legal paperwork. Currently, I’m in the waiting period to finalize the transfer and I finally decided to head over and clean the place up to prepare it to put on the market. The house is about an hour away, so I packed up my car with the necessary supplies and began the drive. Entering the next town over was an immediate shift. Neighborhoods transitioned to trailer communities, parks to landfills. Chain restaurants and parking lots filled the landscape, an urban hell of power lines and billboards. The little space that wasn’t filled with businesses with zero customers and unkept houses, was instead filled with decaying factories and rusty industrial buildings. The neighborhood connected to a six-lane main road with no turn lane. Driving past the houses felt strange. I recalled passing glimpses of memories still lost to me, concepts and ideas that could not be fully pieced together to form a whole. I pulled up to the house after many winding turns, and headed inside.

Opening the door, I was immediately hit with the strong smell of ammonia and cigarettes. The yellow wallpaper was stained with dark brown streaks, built up from years of puffs and drags which polluted the interior with smoldering smog. The furnishings were decorated thoughtlessly, an even mix of antiques with cheap, mass-produced, bargain bin veneers. A vintage lamp sat atop a fiberboard table, cigarette butts and ash covering the surface. All things considered, more than half of the furnishings in the living room were obstructed from view. Most of the room—apart from space most likely formed from desire paths—was covered in piles of garbage. Heaps of old boxes, clothes, crumbled napkins, old food containers, and god knows what else riddled the environment. Wading through the piles was difficult, but I managed to make progress to journey deeper into the home. If there was a chance that coming here would reignite any suppressed feelings, seeing it in this state surely wouldn’t. After taking in my surroundings I began the grueling task I had initially come here for: cleaning.

Re-entering the house after retrieving the trash bags from my car, I began bagging most of the waste which riddled the room. Within the garbage, I found what would be expected. There were old pipes, alcohol bottles, burnt vapes, bottle caps, and an extensive number of cigarette butts. One of the more notable finds was a container of McDonald’s Chicken McBites, which had been discontinued over a decade prior. It was an immensely tedious process, picking up hundreds of individual items and bagging each one, before continuing my search once again. I bagged what must have been dozens of pounds of old clothes, stained, tattered, and burnt garments. There was a specific piece of clothing I found towards the bottom that caught my eye. It was a very small shirt, fit for a toddler or smaller. Purple in color, and printed on the garment were the words “Mama’s Favorite Girl”.

When I had mostly finished bagging the house’s first room, I noticed something particularly strange previously hidden by the heaps of garbage. On the baseboard of one of the interior walls, adjacent to the front door, was a small crawlspace door. This was impossible, for it was the exterior wall, and there were no additions outside the house that this door could connect to. Noticing it, I walked outside and stared at the approximate position of the door but on the home’s exterior. To my shock, there was no door to parallel the interior one. I ran back inside and opened the door, expecting to just see a wall of concrete or supports. I peered inside to see an adjoining room, an impossible space within the home’s walls. It must’ve been the same size as the living room, same colored wallpaper and flooring, as if the room had been duplicated in its original state. Just to confirm, I peered outside once again to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. As I expected, the connected room was not there, and the impossible door was absent as well. I walked back inside, opened the small door, and crawled through.

Now getting a full look at the impossible room, it was identical in size to the home’s living room. The copy’s walls lacked the degradation of its original, and lacked all of the previous room’s furnishings. The walls were spotless, and the carpet was soft and fuzzy. In fact, the duplicate room’s smell starkly contrasted the previous. Despite the context and ominous placement, and the total lack of windows, the room felt warm and inviting. I walked further into the next room.

On the farthest wall was a doorway to the kitchen, which once again, was in pristine condition. It appeared almost as a replica of when the house was first bought. To the right of the kitchen sat a small dining room space. The table was barren, apart from an empty vase in the middle. To the right of the dining room, and adjacent to the living room, was a hallway. Almost by second nature, I walked down it, taking the first door on the right into my childhood bedroom. Similarly, the room was barren, apart from another crawlspace door. I figured I had come far enough, so I once again crawled through the door.

It entered back into the living room, but it was different this time. The room was furnished and full of life. The walls were covered with decorations and family photos containing my parents and I. A small couch sat on the left wall, facing a television on a large entertainment center. Below the screen sat a Playstation 3, with a DVD player beside it. Resting atop the disc player was a copy of Finding Nemo, my favorite childhood movie.

I walked into the kitchen, this time turning left into a hallway with two doors opposite each other. The leftmost door, adjacent to the living room, opened into the garage. Inside was a beautiful vintage convertible mustang. I recalled an image of the vehicle, it felt massive to my childhood self. I remembered the sensation of wind in my hair and sun on my face. My father’s tools sat atop his workbench, a large toolbox spilling over onto the desktop. I turned around, walking back into the dining room. The table was set with a beautiful array of stainless steel and ceramic, a delicate vase resting as the table’s centerpiece with a single fake flower resting within. I stepped back down the right hallway and into my childhood bedroom.

Inside sat a crib, a mobile made of cartoon fish dangling above. Toys and stuffed animals were strewn across the floor. A fort made of old diaper boxes rested in the corner. Along the walls were painted murals of fish and sea life. I recalled dreams of the decor coming to life, swimming with me. Once again, I crawled through the crawlspace door, arriving in a new duplicate of the living room.

The space was a shell of its former self, decrepit, with trash once again piled up along the floor. The faux leather couch was torn and peeling, the TV had a large crack in it, and the wallpaper had fallen off in some places. Continuing further, the kitchen was no different. Disgusting dishes filled the countertops, pots and pans dotted the stovetop, with old food caked on. The microwave door was ajar, showing the interior. The spinning plate was black with food debris, the white walls of the box now stained brown. I walked towards my bedroom, walking inside. The toys which covered the floor were now broken, pieces of them sprawled everywhere. Ripped drawings and crumbled notepads mixed with the broken toys, making a thick layer of debris atop the carpet. The crib was gone, now replaced with a single twin mattress on the floor. I kicked the trash out of the way, and crawled through the small doorway once again.

I was met with a new room, a large open space which once again, completely lacked furniture. The walls were a light beige, with large purple stains covering them, like bruises on skin. The walls seemed to contort to my breathing, moving and shifting as I did. One patch contained small, white blemishes, which resembled second-degree burns. I ran my hands along them. The walls were soft and squishy, feeling almost identical to human flesh. At this realization, I quickly snapped my head around to go back through the crawlspace. However, the door which I had just seconds prior crawled through, was now gone. I got on all fours and felt around the wall’s baseboard, but the door had vanished within seconds. I began crying, banging on the spot where the door had just been, to no avail. I rose, and hurriedly ran to the end of the room. It opened up to the kitchen and dining area, which were completely barren. Not even the counters or appliances remained, the only reminder of the space’s previous state was the layout.

At that moment, I heard a booming roar, shaking the home’s walls. At this point I was bawling. Tears gushed to my feet as I ran through the space, desperately attempting escape. The roaring ceased, but my adrenaline continued. I ran to my bedroom, once again the room was blank. The paint was chipping horribly, entire spots of the wall were white with drywall. The walls were completely empty, apart from a single shirt, nailed to the wall by the collar. It was a small, purple top, with the words “Mama’s Favorite Girl” on it. The garment was ripped, dry rotted, and stained with blood. It hung above the spot where the door had been previously, now vanished once again.

I ran to the garage, before quickly pressing the control button, opening the large metal door. As it creaked open, I hoped light would shine from the outside, but this was not the case. As the door opened, the sight of what lay beyond met me. A tunnel of dirt continued from the large door’s opening. I couldn’t see the end, but it appeared as if light was illuminating from beyond. As I noticed this, I heard the beast’s roar once again. I quickly shut the garage door, before booking it into the tunnel. I turned around, hearing the beast inching ever closer as the door slowly inched along the tracks. The monster could be heard crashing through the house, and when the door was almost entirely shut, I got a small glimpse of a looming shadow entering the garage. The door shut, the noises of the machinery ceasing, and the beast began to bang on the metal, bending and contorting it. I turned around and ran, hastily speeding to the end of the tunnel.

As I ran, I noticed the tunnel slowly widening. When I finally reached the end, it had opened to a large cave. The dirt had turned to stone, massive stalactites hanging from the ceiling. The dirt floor slowly transitioned to pavement, eventually extending into a driveway. At the center of the cavern was my childhood home. I gazed upon the structure, before I heard the beast chasing behind me. I hurried inside and locked the door, running to my childhood bedroom. I turned the corner into the kitchen, then turned again into the hall, barrelling towards the room. I hid under the crib, cowering for safety from the monster chasing me. Down the hall, I could hear it scouring the building for me. It snarled and huffed through the halls, attempting to sniff me out. Inevitably, the monster arrived in the room I cowered in. The door slowly creaked open, the light from the hall casting in. The creature slowly stepped in the room, allowing me to finally see its form.

She stood in the door’s opening. She wore small, maryjane buckle shoes. Her legs were covered in bruises, cuts, and burns. She wore a blue skirt, failing to cover her injuries. Her small arms held a little stuffed fish. Her eyes were full of innocence, contrasting with even more bruises and gashes on her neck and shoulders. Her shirt was tattered from wear, it had various unidentifiable stains and tears. The top was purple in color, and the pattern plastered on it flooded my mind with memories. It read, “Mama’s Favorite Girl”.