The Love House

The house had always been on the hill. Dark image: brooding like a mother about to scold children caught playing with cigarettes behind the garage. It was said to have no sex, and no face anyone could remember. Its staircases were supposedly all circular.

The assumption was that gnomes and trolls, dragons and politicians lived there, eating light for breakfast and dropping dark out of their windows; that it had no bathrooms, only outhouses; and that the ghosts of dogs buried the bones of lost children in the back yard.

Interestingly enough, had it been down in the hollow, we would not have wasted a visited. Low places can be malevolent and still fit in. High places that are evil scare us with their flaunting of the universal order of events: all the more we want to climb up the porch, bang the huge gargoyle knocker, and see what misshapen errand boy of underworld disharmony answers. You expect someone like that down in the hollow. On the hill, poking its eye into the tangle of God’s beard, it makes a statement.

After an afternoon of torturing insects with a magnifying glass and the great goodness of the sun, the five of us that most closely ran together as the proud neighborhood terrors decided that someone needed to see if the house were more than a painted façade placed on the hill to give our town character. No doubt, in other generations others had climbed to the shadowed porch: circus clowns had goaded brave boys into disappearing into the house’s peep show dark; whimsy girls in see-through gowns had drawn thoughtless teen-aged boys onto man eating mattresses carelessly dragged into the sweetly clinging hallway.

I started up the hill, my four companions at least a dozen steps back as we leaned forward into the never-used driveway. Each switchback was an opportunity for dread, for discovery of axe wielding midgets, murderous geese or the corpse of last year’s junior high prom demimondaine. The higher we climbed, the darker it got: the base of the hill full afternoon, but the top nearing midnight. The house twisted on its natural angles like the snarled shadows of competing cathedrals pushing drearily into the night.

My plan was to start at the right side of the house, hug the brick at the base of the porch, run up the eight or ten steps of the stoop, and bang on the door with the blunt end of a long stick I had picked up days before for the effort. My friends would stand still on the driveway, waiting just slightly off center, to the right and back a few paces. Their unoccupied minds would be filled with visions from late-night movies, with remembrances of family funerals, with the eyes of Laura when she fell from her uneven bicycle and one breast popped entirely from her summer top. They would be dancing on one leg no matter how still they stood.

Up the stoop and extend the stick. Poke. Poke. Poke. No one surely had been home for twenty years, no one would answer the door. I would be back down the stoop, celebrated, proud to be at an age when I could imagine using that extra inch of penis such a move would embolden. I knew the feat would fade, but it would begin a reputation.

I stood there, the pole in my hand, leaning forward just under the lip of the lurid dark deepened by the porch roof. My heart simply beat, unable to master a fitting rhythm. My eyes adjusting to the murk, I drew back the stick to make my plea incessant.

The door began to fall back, to slide ever so slightly open. From the window behind the door, across the whole thin length of the house, I could see the dark, less dark than the rest of the house, flooding in: and I was running, having missed the steps of the stoop entirely, having forgotten the driveway, grass to my knees wet and holding and expecting me to stay or fall, but I kept my...