The Deeps - Volume 1, Issue 2

After the Fire

Josh Hanson

The children found it. Of course they did. They’d been playing in the house’s charred skeleton, only the vague shape of a house now, sifting through ashes, making games among the wreckage, which is the most ancient work of children. And they’d found a piece of the back wall that was almost intact: a corner whose walls sloped away at both sides, the inside of the walls blackened and scorched, the one window empty of glass, and a door, still intact, fitted neatly into its jam, the small scallops of glass that had once filled the upper part shattered outward from the heat.

This had felt like a readymade game, and the children began to play. It was Colin Best who discovered the door’s strange properties. At least he claimed it was. He was the one I overheard talking, the one who, when threatened with the requisite violence, spilled the story. We were outside the corner store that sat strangely in the center of our residential neighborhood: a dark, low-ceilinged place that took up the first floor of a massive three-story building where neighborhood kids bought bubble gum and learned to shoplift.

I’d gone in to get a newspaper for my grandma, and when I came out Colin was telling a tall tale about a haunted house. I didn’t pay much attention. There were three of them. About ten years old, all straddling their bikes, lifting their front wheels and bouncing them on the sidewalk.

But as I passed, I heard one ragged end of Colin’s story.

“Gonna go back into the Meyers house,” Colin said, popping his gum.

I stopped, backtracked.

“What did you say about the Meyers place?” I tried to keep my voice neutral, like I was just curious, but there must have been something in my face or my body language, because Colin shrank back. Maybe it was my age. At seventeen, I was just this side of adulthood, and the only sure rule of childhood is not to trust adults with anything that really matters.

“Nothin,” Colin said, looking at the ground. “We were just talking about the fire.”

“Bullshit,” I said, maybe a little too aggressive. I took a step back and feigned nonchalance. “Tell me about this game.”

Colin looked to his audience. Travis Goins was there, and Aron Diel. They both stared back and forth between Colin and me, like we were the show. Colin crossed his arms, trying to look tough. It kind of worked. When I was ten, I would have been scared of Colin Best, scrawny as he was. When I was ten, I was scared of everything.

“It’s not a game,” he said finally, mouth twisted into a sneer, like I’d missed the whole point. “It’s real.”

The Meyers house had stood on the corner just across the street from my house, in the middle of Finch Point, where the houses were late Victorian but had none of the stateliness or grandeur one would expect from the name. They were just old places with lots of molding and built-in cabinets, all of it painted over so many times that it seemed like a layer of flesh over the houses’ bones. Our place was a little one-story house shaped like a cracker box, but all gussied up, with a half-enclosed porch on the front and decorative shutters on the windows. The Meyers place was nothing like it: a big sprawling place with two floors and an attic, the front done up in gingerbread and the rest of the house all plain siding.

Jason’s room was in the attic.

The story Colin Best told went something like this: They were playing in the ruins of the house, two or three weeks after the fire, and they’d found the corner walls with the door still intact. Colin thought it was funny how the whole house burned to the ground along with all three of the Meyerses, but this wooden door remained. He pulled it open and went through into the backyard, which was shallow and overgrown and dark. They messed around in the shadows of the trees for a while, pulling old matchbox cars out of the mud, and then went to leave.

The others climbed out through the rubble, but Colin Best went back through the door, and that’s when it happened.

According to Colin, he stepped into the Meyerses’ back room, just a little hallway that led off to the laundry on the left and up a few stairs into the kitchen. And it was all there: the laundry area, the stairs, the kitchen itself. The lights were out, but the house was there, the kitchen window looking out onto the street, the same overcast sky outside.

Colin ran out the way he’d come in, trembling and nearly in tears. (Travis Goins gave those details.) But once he’d settled down, and once he’d looked out over the black ruin of what had once been the Meyers house, he told the others what he’d seen. And then, like the intrepid explorers they were, they’d gone back inside.

Colin claimed the whole house was there, still standing, just as it had always been, though none of the other doors or windows would open. One way in. One way out.

I told Colin Best he was a liar and fucking ghoul, and even though I’d never hit a person in anger in my life, I stepped toward him, my fists balled. I wanted to hurt him.

But instead, I just walked away.

My whole life, walking away.

That night, I stood on our porch and looked across the street to where the Meyers house had stood for all my life. Now it was like the gap left after having a molar pulled. It was an absence that had weight. A hole in the world. Light rain fell, illuminated around the streetlights like static, and I thought of that space filling slowly with black water, a pool that one could dive into, down into the world behind this world, a place I knew must exist. A place I desperately needed to exist.

I turned my back and went inside, disgusted with myself for letting a ten-year-old’s ghost story affect me, even a little. Time ran in one direction. Houses, when they burned, were simply gone. This was a simple fact.

Inside, Mom and Dad were watching TV, some cop show turned up too loud. I skirted the entrance to the living room and slipped into my bedroom. Leaving the lights off, I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the window. The blinds were half down, the dark outside a few degrees lighter than the inside of my room, the rain just a soft shushing broken by a car passing on the street outside in a long zipper-pull.

I thought of Jason Meyers, lying in his own bed, beneath the sloping ceilings of his attic room, and then I thought of gray smoke curling up under his door and I stopped. I left my room, crossed the hall, and knocked at my grandma’s door.

“M-hm.”

I cracked the door. She was sitting in her big chair, watching TV. I came in and sat down in the matching chair. They were green velvet and were as essential to my image of my grandma as her face or her smell.

She was watching a different cop show. I wanted to ask her about Grandpa, about how she had moved on, with such seeming ease, after he’d died. I wanted to ask her what the appropriate ways to grieve might be. Grief, it seemed to me, was an utterly private thing, almost secret. And even though Jason Meyers—my childhood friend, my brother in all but blood—had died terribly, no one had introduced me into those mysteries. I had not been initiated into any secret knowledge.

Instead, we watched the show for a while. I couldn’t follow it beyond its formula. I’d missed the murder, had arrived only in time for the endless questions. At a commercial break, I got up, kissed my grandma on the top of her head. She squeezed my hand and smiled sadly at me.

I went back down the hall, back out onto the porch. The rain had picked up, rattling against the porch roof, filling up the gutters and spilling out into the street. Our whole neighborhood tilted slightly to the west, sloping down toward the sea, and the runoff carried leaves and trash, off and away.

I stepped down from the porch, crossed the wet grass, and jumped over the running water at the curb. Across the street, tall trees hunched down under the rain, and a line of once-neatly-pruned bushes lined the walk, now running a little wild. Jason’s dad had trimmed them once a year. He hadn’t gotten to it yet that year.

I walked up the sidewalk, around the corner, to where the front of the house once stood. There was a patch of grass, torn up by boots and wheels, divided by a cracked cement pathway that led to the place where there were once three wooden steps leading up to a wide porch and the Meyerses’ front door. Now the ground dropped down a few inches, down to dark earth already filling with rainwater. It was a long rectangular hole in the ground, though only a few inches deep, broken here and there by the black ribs of fallen walls, charred and crumbling. For the second time that night, I imagined jumping into the black water and vanishing down below the earth.

Instead, I picked my way back, around the edge of the house’s footprint, toward that hunk of wall Colin Best had described, jutting up like a shark’s tooth from mud and standing water.

In the backyard, I saw the two concrete steps leading up to that miraculously preserved door. I stood there, the rain running down my collar, my shoes already soaked through, and watched the rain fall through the scalloped holes in the door that once held glass. The world looked the same though those holes. There was no portal to anywhere. The house was gone. Jason was gone.

I climbed the steps, grasped the handle, and pushed it open.

It was dark inside, but of a different kind from the rainy night. Warmer, perhaps. Maybe just dry. Familiar. I stepped into the narrow room. Boots lined the wall and jackets hung from hooks on the right. The steps were ahead, leading up into the kitchen, and my chest tightened. I stepped up.

The kitchen was long and narrow, with the big white stovetop and outdated countertops with the little gold flecks embedded in them. It was the gold flecks that did it. I let out a gasping sob. This detail was so perfectly accurate, and I hadn’t even remembered it. A whole childhood in and out of this room. And later, in adolescence, making nachos in the toaster oven and sandwiches on the slide-out cutting board next to the sink. Over and over, the tiniest details seemed to stab at me.

I wanted to turn and run. I wanted to go back through that fire-blackened door, back out into the rain, and leave the house behind me. But I couldn’t. Here it was: the world behind the world, and I’d stepped inside. I’d found it. My greatest fear was, to some degree, assuaged. There was magic in the world. I had started to doubt.

Through the kitchen was the living room, with the Meyerses’ mismatched furniture and the big redwood burl coffee table that we’d used as cave formation with our G.I. Joes. Again, the specificity of the memory was almost too sharp to hold.

At the front of the house, I pushed the curtain aside and looked out the window at the street. Rain fell. Lights shone from the Parker place across the road. Out there, the normal world ran on.

I climbed the stairs where Jason and I had slid down in our matching Spider-Man sleeping bags and Jason had broken his tailbone, the day after Christmas when we were eight. The house was quiet, but it was as if I could hear the high whipping sound of the nylon against the worn carpet. On the second floor was Jason’s parents’ room and the office where his mom did bookkeeping for a dozen local businesses. We stayed out of the office. The bedroom, though, we’d thoroughly searched when we were twelve, Jason finding a brown grocery sack full of old VHS pornos at the back of the closet. Neither of our families owned a VCR, so we would just study the boxes and then tuck the bag away again. A whole summer of that. I thought I might be able to make a list of movie titles.

I wondered only briefly if that bag would be there now, if I looked, but the sense that looking would be an invasion of privacy was—if anything—greater now, after their deaths. Outside, in the real world, the bag had most likely burned up in a snarl of melting plastic.

At the opposite end of the hall was the staircase leading up into the attic space. Into Jason’s room.

Muted rainlight came in through the small window at the far end of the room, falling in weird angles across the slanting ceiling, and I felt momentarily disembodied. There was Jason’s bed beneath the window, his desk with a page tacked up and comic panels blocked out, his shoes and clothes and books and water glasses all piled on the floor—and I realized that I knew this place better than I knew my own reflection. My reflection still caught me off guard in the tall mirrors at the mall and had always seemed somehow alien, like someone else’s approximation of myself. Jason’s room had a scent and texture that was embedded in my mind, and yet somehow it was also gone.

I half expected Jason to sit up on the bed, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, ask me what I was doing. Or maybe he would come in through the door behind me, hunched and grinning, ready to show me something: a book, a comic, a video he’d just watched about giant jellyfish. The eternal kindergartener with his hyperfocus and unchecked enthusiasm, Jason could sometimes be embarrassing, especially at school, but in that moment, I missed it.

I don’t know what I would have done if Jason had appeared. Run screaming, most likely. But there was nothing particularly frightening about the house. Rather, it was utterly familiar.

I sat down on the edge of Jason’s bed. The springs groaned. I looked down the length of the room. The door at the far end opened into darkness. Behind me, rain pattered against the window, the night of the real world alive with muted light.

I thought of the summers sleeping in that house’s backyard. Sleeping bags beneath the trees, waiting until the small hours, until the lights inside the house went out, and then hopping the low fence and moving silently out into the neighborhood. We would just wander the streets, ducking into yards if a car approached, but they were so few that we could pretend the world was empty, that it was just us. I loved the quality of the light at those times: inky dark broken by smears of yellow from the streetlight all caught up in the fog. Being in the house felt like some strange inversion of that feeling. Outside, the world was real and moving, but here, inside this house that could not be, life was frozen and inert.

Suddenly that stasis, that calm, that absolute silence felt oppressive. Jason wasn’t here. His parents weren’t here. They were dead. They’d died when this very house burned to the ground. Now it was just a phantom, and I was the ghost haunting its rooms. I was the thing moving along its hallways and creaking up the stairs. I was the spirit that would not rest.

I rose and walked the length of the room, down the stairs, and along the hall. I passed all of the open doors and I left the rooms to themselves. I passed through the living room and into the kitchen. At the back door, I turned again, looking back. It felt as if each room were dissolving behind me, as if just out of sight there was only darkness, perhaps slashed by rain, or maybe just velvety black.

I opened the back door, stepping through into the open night, where there was no looming shadow of a house. I didn’t look back when I shut the door.

Three days later, they came with front loaders and knocked down the last of wreckage, smoothing out the earth where the house had once stood, and I went on, attempting to build a life on more than dream and memory, telling you this story, which is built of dream and memory.