The House on Hill Road

Sly gets a fresh start

It wasn’t his house.

The house on Hill Road, the dream house that Sylvester designed and supervised and chose all the finishes for, it wasn’t this house. This house was wrong.

“You’re disoriented because you’re walking through empty rooms in the dark,” came his wife’s voice, tinny through his outdated phone. “It will make sense when there’s furniture, amor. It will look like the drawings.”

The sun was setting when he carried his air mattress, camping lanterns, and battery pack across the threshold. He watched it dissolve into the horizon, said goodbye to his last day as a renter, and promised he would not look back.

But when he set up the lanterns they threw beams of light at crooked walls, sweeping purple shadows into strange shapes, revealing angles that weren’t quite right. He sucked in a breath, pressed his palm flat on the door frame until the vertigo subsided. Nothing was right.

The foyer was cavernous, dark and soaring, like stepping into an abandoned cathedral. Sylvester didn’t think the entry to a home should make you feel like you were floating away, but this one did. It wasn’t his design, not at all.

He called his wife, charged up on the idea that they were being scammed by shady contractors and shoddy carpenters.

“You don’t have to stay there tonight, Sly. I actually don’t know why you’re doing this. Why don’t you wait until I get back from my parents’ and we can move into our house like normal people? With furniture and electricity?”

But he did have to stay there. After five years of real estate paperwork, taxes and contracts, five years of fighting with architects and firing landscapers and picking through a mountain of reclaimed bricks, which he carted to the site with his own bloody hands, he could not stay away one more night. Five years of rejecting crown molding and baseboards that didn’t match his vision, stripping the finish from the parquet floors three times, smashing drywall with a sledgehammer when the bathroom measurements were wrong, again. He had aged ten years in five, and he had to start the rest of his life.

His house was ninety-nine percent ready, and he wouldn’t wait one day longer.

“Amor? Are you there?” Lina’s voice was screechy. He moved the phone away from his face.

He didn’t have a tape measure or any way to know for sure but the living room was off-kilter. Not quite square and something worse. Not quite his.

“Uh, yeah. I’m here.” His own voice a near-whisper, for reasons he didn’t understand.

“You’ve been obsessed with this house for five years of your life. Please, we are almost there. Just relax, you sound a little crazy.”

Even the hallway— a simple hallway, no more than fifteen feet long, bedroom doors on either side-- it wasn’t simple and it wasn’t fifteen feet. Sylvester felt himself balanced on the lip of an icy, savage tunnel that stretched away into blackness. The walls leaned in on him like a crypt.

“Amor? Are you listening? Why don’t you go home and stay at the apartment tonight? I’m not even there to celebrate—”

“This is home, Carolina,” he snapped, his voice tipped with venom.

But he knew it wasn’t. This was a haunted castle, a prank mystery spot created through funny angles and forced perspective. A vengeful practical joke by his builders, screwing him because he cared too much.

“Wow. Ok, fine. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I guess have fun camping out in a half-built house all by yourself. It’s the love of your life anyway.”

“Are you crazy? It’s at least ninety percent—“

But the line was already dead.

He decided to tightrope walk the hallway, to measure it with his own strides. He heel toed along the wall. One two three four five six seven— he should have been halfway down, but when he looked up from his feet he wasn’t even to the first bedroom. He whipped his head around. The entrance to the hall was within an arm’s length. The other end disappeared into the night. Everything smelled like sawdust.

He retreated to the front entry.

This is so fucked up, he thought. The fucking contractor or the carpenter or whothefuck is playing some prank on us or what? Is this some kind of shakedown?

He pulled out his phone, started snapping pictures of everything that looked wrong. But in the white light of the flash it was hard to discern scale and what he saw on the screen mostly looked unfinished, like Lina said.

When he flipped the air mattress motor to “inflate,” the buzz of it bounced so loud around the empty rooms he held his breath.

His empty rooms. Every dollar he had ever earned, poured into this horrible wrong house. Every day he had ignored Lina, holed himself up with blueprints or boxes of copper pipe. The back of his throat tasted like chalk.

Sylvester breathed out as loud as he could, puffing his cheeks and trying to sound annoyed, wanting to take up more space, to make the noise of the living. Wanting, he realized, to crowd out all the other shit in the house with him.

He smacked his hand on the wall and the sound was like an axe falling.

---

He thought about the roof right about the time he reached the top rung of the ladder. Perched eye-to-eye with his new perfect rain gutters, he suddenly became aware of where he was. He didn’t remember going outside, finding a ladder, climbing twenty feet into thin air. His top-of-the-line shingles rose away from him, disappearing into the dark sky like a moutain summit. The treetops were black and frazzled and scratched at the navy blue dusk.

Sly’s hands were freezing and sweating and he gripped the ladder too hard, because he was not a check the roof kind of guy.

He fumbled with the phone in his pocket, which somehow had gained ten pounds. He wouldn’t have said he was afraid of heights. More—he didn’t prefer them. But he was afraid.

Afraid of falling.

Afraid of how he got up there.

He juggled the phone around to the front of him, unlocked it with a couple sweaty swipes. His heart slammed against the ladder rungs, shaking the cheap aluminum under his hands. He couldn’t see anything through the camera except a black screen but he clicked anyway. There was a flash of white on the peaked roof and then he was blind.

But not before he saw it. A second peak, a raised lump of roof that indicated an attic. But there was no attic, he knew. He had designed this house.

---

Back inside, he stormed through the funhouse rooms in a rage. Those fucking contractors. How much extra had they charged him for a room he didn’t want? How many days had the attic no one ordered taken to build?

He marched to the back corner of the house. To the room that would be the baby’s room someday. A sweet little nest for the child that would eventually join them, the room had a custom skylight, or it was supposed to. But from his pictures of the roof, it had an attic instead.

The chemical-treated carpet in that room smelled clean and bright, like his future. Like their future.

But as soon as he stepped inside he knew it would never belong to any baby. The room chilled him down to his fingernails. It was supposed to be butter yellow, but in the light from his phone everything looked pale and sickly. The proportions were wrong, the angles dizzying, and the ceiling hung down low— to make room for that attic, he thought, but the thought was fleeting. The attic was the least of his troubles.

In the center of the room his eyes landed on a shape of uncertain contours. A shimmering kind of darkness, something he knew he couldn’t burn away with his phone’s flashlight, or even one of the lanterns. He understood it in an instant, this sticky darkness, this unshape—

This was its house, not his.

He took a step toward the shape and the carpet turned to soft sand. His foot sank and he reached out a hand to touch the blackness and he started to fall. And as his finger brushed against the darkness at the center of the room there was a snapping sound, and a horrible tearing falling sensation in the pit of his guts. He cried out and felt his voice sucked into the void, and everything went as quiet as if he had been struck deaf.

When the movements and sensations stopped—and he couldn’t be sure how long that took—he found himself in a tiny room. He whipped his head around, looking for a door or window, but there was none. The ceiling was too low to stand, so he crouched and pressed his back against it, wondering if he could break through. A panicked pulse beat at his temples.

Pink insulation puffed out from the unfinished walls around him, and he tore at it with his hands, releasing noxious fibers into the air. He coughed so hard he fell to his hands and knees, wheezing and hacking. Then, tiny cracks between the wooden floorboards revealed the buttery yellow carpet of the nursery below.

Buttery yellow, the way it was supposed to look with sun pouring in through the skylight. Had he passed out? Slept in the attic all night?

He strained at the crack until he saw a shadow. Until she walked into his view— Lina! She must have come back early when he didn’t answer his phone.

He banged on the floor, he yelled her name, but she didn’t hear. He yelled and banged some more, refusing to believe what was plainly true. Sweat poured off his face and soaked into the floor. Lina walked away.

Eventually his voice gave out, and he lay helpless, watching the room go from light to dark to light again.

Time passed strangely in the misplaced attic. When the police came— trampling through is house in dirty boots— he screamed and kicked and knocked on the floor until his hands bled. They found his phone on the carpet, containing dozens of blurry, nighttime pictures of their perfect, beautiful house, the corners and roof angles, especially.

Search the house, he begged them. Please do your jobs.

He heard his wife explain that he sounded loco right before he disappeared. That he was obsessed with the house and tried to move in while it was still under construction. He heard an officer ask if they fought. If there was another woman. If Sylvester had money troubles, which of course he had.

Out of options for rescue, he scratched the letters ACAB into the floor with his fingernail. Fuck those guys.

A few days later they packed up their “investigation” and that was The End. He heard someone remind his heartbroken wife that adults are allowed to disappear. He heard them admit that it was weird for his car to sit abandoned in the driveway, and then do nothing with this fact.

The smell of Lina’s perfume faded fast, the molecules of her scent degrading to zero, and he understood she would never move in.

By then Sly’s body was giving out, his thirst reaching a splintering, deafening need. He spread his cracked and scabbed hands on the ugly plywood and prayed for his last breath.

He didn’t know when he crossed from living to something else, but he began to feel his skin sinking into the boards, his muscles flexing into the warm, soft wood. As he faded from his body, his blood and brains washed over the floor, seeped into the cracks, eventually soaking through to the ceiling.

Drip by drip, his chemistry tunneled through the walls and sluiced through PVC pipes. His electricity zoomed around the wires he had hand selected. His nails scratched their way through insulation and carpet, grout and mortar.

He became peaked roof, glazed windows, soaring foyer and everlong hallway. He felt his own beating heart in every room.

Like this, he learned the quirks of the house— the little ways his contractor had actually ripped him off— squeaky floors, uneven stairs, mislaid tile. But he realized the house was absolutely his, the one he wanted, the one he lived for. It was his dream, perfection in stucco and wood.

Satisfied, he gathered his essence from all the the corners of his castle, folding his soul into a shimmering darkness, a misshape that hovered under the secret attic and waited.

He waited and watched, pulling at shadows and bending parallel lines.

He waited for the family who thought they might get a good deal and finally say goodbye to renting life.

He waited with the patience of a stone, for the day he could haunt the house on Hill Road.

His house. Forever.

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This is a subscriber story. Founding members of Age of Aquarius get to star in their own tales of woe. Are you brave enough?