The Story as Haunted House

by Josh Hanson

She steps out of the taxi at the end of a long gravel drive. It is necessarily a she, because women are haunted. This is history. The woman arrives at the house, the estate, the abandoned asylum, and she carries with her some heavy freight of memory that drags behind her like an anchor loosed in a choppy sea. Some trauma, some great loss, the last words of her ailing mother spoken in anger before her death. All of this makes the steep climb toward the iron gate arduous, a telescoping distance to the heavy door. Some setting that opens inward toward the story. 

It’s early enough that the woman is a cypher, a thing that stands out in negative against the doorway’s yawning dark, ready to be filled up with our collective dread and desire, because we all want to enter the house. Nothing is more ordinary than a house, of course, but that is its charm and its horror. On the outside it could be any house, though the people in the village below may whisper about it. It could be your house. It could be left to you in a will, or you could arrive as a servant, a governess, a nurse. A house is like a story, a receptacle waiting to be filled, and in this case it will be filled by this young woman and the her past, which rises like smoke, up to the high ceilings of the entryway, obscuring the old portrait that still glares down, a silent audience, a patient reader, its eyes following her as her shoes clack against the tiles as if tapping out a message. There is only one message: find me. Here in this labyrinthine block of rooms, find me, though I run and hide, find me, make me known, make me seen. Body forth the seed of my terror. Let it loose to walk your halls, where I may meet it finally, tall and strong, though faint as music scratching out upon an old phonograph in some attic room. Sing that song, which is the refrain of my lifetime, born only moments before, when I stepped out of the taxi and onto the page, already haunted, ready to offer myself up to the story’s yawning mouth, to be devoured, as I’ve always wished to be devoured: a skittering thing caught by a lightning strike of fang and poison. 

The eyes in the portrait are familiar, hauntingly so. They are my eyes, the woman thinks. Who else’s eyes could they be, here in this house, where I was born, where I was taken in, given breath and body, here, in the only place I’ve ever thought to call home. 

Author Bio: Josh Hanson is the author of the novels King’s Hill, The Woodcutters, as well as Fortress and Caliope Street (both forthcoming), as well as the novelette, Marshbank. He lives in northern Wyoming where he teaches, writes, and makes up little songs. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies as well as The Deeps, The HorrorZine, Siren’s Call, The Chamber, BlackPetals, and others.

Artwork: "Of Course You Can Trust Me" by Jane Zich (2022), 10x8 acrylic on mulberry paper painting

Artist Bio: Jane Zich is a Northern California mixed media artist and writer who explores imagery from the unconscious in her creative process. Her award-winning paintings have been exhibited nationally and featured on the covers of American Psychologist, Dream Time, Fiction Fix, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, and Permafrost Magazine. Her writing has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Dream Time, Jung Journal, and various art publications.

Artist’s Website: www.zichpaintings.com