Animus

Guess I first met the Andersons when I rented out that cottage on Nubanusit to them. They’d spent Memorial Day weekend at the Days Inn over in Peterborough, and again the Labor Day after. Said they liked the area and wanted some place to spend a couple weeks over the summer. Seemed like nice enough folks, for flatlanders anyway. Didn’t flaunt their money the way a lot of them do. Not that they had that much - but they didn’t pretend to, neither. They was just regular folk, even if they did order cocktails with names when everyone else was drinking beer.

There was this one time Louie Ducharme – you know Louie? – he was busting their chops one Friday night down at Paulie’s. Kevin, his name was. Kevin was sipping a Manhattan, and Louie was pretending to make a big fuss about wanting a glass with a stem for his Bud Lite. Kevin didn’t get all huffy about it the way a lot of summer folks might. Instead, he just looked at Louie for a second or two, then tossed back the rest of his drink, made a big show of wiping out the glass with a napkin, & handed it to him. Even offered him the cherry. That’s when I figured he was okay. He could take a joke and give it back just as good.

Like I said, they didn’t have a whole lot of money. He was some kind of electronics technician down around Fitchburg, and she ran a small real-estate office. I guess that’s how they first found out about the old Cutter place. It had been empty for years, but even after all that time on the market at rock-bottom prices, no one around here would touch it. Not after what Jim Cutter had done to his family there. The place was tainted, you know what I mean? Fact is, it was toxic even before Cutter bought it. There were those three college kids renting it who’d died in their sleep from a gas leak; before them an old widow living there alone had broken her neck falling down the cellar stairs and lain there for two weeks before her body was found. By the time Jimmy bought it, it was already an evil house.

And he didn’t come back from ‘Nam the same as when he went there, either, though he always did have a mean streak that got worse when he drank. At least before Quang Tri you could see it coming. You’d know when it was time to pay your tab and get the hell out before he started looking for some ass to kick. But when he got back from his tour, you couldn’t tell any more. He’d just sit there at the bar, real quiet like, staring into his glass, then all of sudden he’d explode like a land mine. It’s no surprise he had a hard time finding work, and an even harder time keeping it. The house where those kids and the old lady died was going cheap, and it was all he could afford.

Still, no one expected he’d do what he did that night. I mean, he must have thought he was back there in the jungle, fighting the VC all over again, taking no prisoners. What was left of his wife and kids were lying face down on the kitchen floor with their hands tied behind their backs, while old Jimmy himself took both barrels of the shotgun in his mouth.

By then the place’s reputation was set in stone. Even though the bank that owned it had the house professionally cleaned, and had the kitchen wallpaper and linoleum replaced, it didn’t help. Too many people had died in that house. It was haunted, and it stank of death. It was a hostile house. So the bank sold it to an out-of-state realtor and let them worry about it.

But to Kevin and Laura Anderson it must have been just what they were looking for. Like I said, they weren’t rich, and we all know what property taxes have done to real estate prices around here. Cutter’s place had been empty so long it was starting to fall apart. It wasn’t worth nothing but the land it sat on. And that’s what they settled for: a nice place to build when they could afford to.

I liked the Andersons. They were good people, but they were still city people. They liked it up here, but you know how that goes. They were like teenagers all googly-eyed in love, but nowhere near ready for marriage. You’ve seen it before. They move up here to the country thinking it’s going to be just like in the Disney movies, with dancing bunny rabbits and baby deer with great big eyes and songbirds carrying garlands. But when reality hits, they begin to question their move. Maybe they lose a cat to a coyote, or the power goes out for a day or two in a blizzard, or maybe it’s just the isolation – but at some point they start petitioning the town to pave the road, put in street lights and sidewalks, and throw in town water and sewer for good measure. And we all gotta pay for it.

But that wasn’t why I tried talking them out of buying the Cutter place. They didn’t know what they were getting into, and I don’t mean the simple realities of life out in the boondocks. Some folks around here think something bad still lives there. Nothing you can see, but you can feel in the hairs on your arms and back of your neck. Something that makes the shadows a little too dark, or the stillness a little too quiet. I passed by it a few years back during bow season, and just stopped to look at it. And I swear to Christ, that house was looking back at me. It was watching me. It just crouched there, staring, unblinking, like it had a hunger. I felt like a mouse about to be struck by a snake. For a second or two I didn’t even dare turn my back to it.

But there’s no telling city folk something like that. They think that access to museums and concert halls and five-star restaurants makes them smarter than us. The Andersons, not quite so much maybe, but they ever-so-politely ignored all of my advice to the contrary and put in a bid on the place. I hear the realtor took their first offer, no questions asked.

Laura asked if I’d go with them to check out the house. That put me in kind of an awkward spot. There was no way I wanted to be anywhere near that place, much less walk around it – but while I liked Kevin okay, he could be a doofus at times, if you know what I mean. Book smart but street stupid. And she was as naïve and trusting as a schoolgirl. So I said sure, and agreed to meet them at the property one Saturday morning.

It was one of those gray muggy days we have so many of during July and August. It felt a lot warmer than it was – maybe low 80s, but with all the humidity you break a sweat just from the effort of toweling off after your shower. You might be cooler skipping the undershirt, but you wear one anyway as a diaper for your torso. Stepping out of the air conditioning in Mike & Julie’s Diner was like stepping into a warm, soggy blanket. One of those days.

I met them out at the Cutter place, just where Damon Road peters out as a Class VI jeep track. They were already there when I pulled up, ambling along the road frontage, not taking particular notice of the property itself as much as the general surroundings. They were pointing across the way toward McCreary’s stony pasture, where a half-dozen Holsteins and a couple of Jerseys were grazing. They were smiling and chattering and hugging like newlyweds. I felt like I was about to tell a favorite nephew that there’s no Santa Claus.

But I didn’t say anything. Just “Hi, folks! Hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long,” or something like that. You know, the usual stuff you say to grease the social skids. I guess I figured I’d let the place speak for itself.

You probably recall the house was set a ways back from the road, maybe 100 feet or so, with a long curving driveway that passed by its west side before continuing on to the barn. The barn was long gone, of course – Cutter had demolished it and sold off the lumber for salvage. The driveway was still passable, but overgrown at the edges, mostly just grass with a few blackberry brambles spreading out from the stone wall at the border. They were just starting to put out fruit, but the berries were small and hard and mostly still red. I wouldn’t eat anything that grew on that site anyway. Where the driveway curved out towards the old barn’s foundation, we stepped off and into the yard.

The grass in the yard was halfway up to our knees and still wet from the rain the night before. Here and there chest-high milkweeds towered over the grass, and windfall from a decade or more of winter storm lay scattered about. Tiger lilies had escaped from somewhere and now danced orange amongst all that green. Pine and birch saplings had gotten a toehold and were starting to crowd each other out as they jostled for sky space. Across the way, we could see the rotting hulk of an old 1980s-vintage Datsun half-hidden in the brush out towards where the barn used to be. The windshield had been shattered by three or four spider-webbed bullet holes, the trunk was open, and the passenger side door was missing. Couldn’t see the wheels for all the undergrowth, but from the crazy angle the car was tipped, I assumed some of the tires were gone, too.

By now we were standing right next to the house.

I think this is when they first felt it, ‘cause they got real quiet. They just stood there up to their knees in wet grass while they and the house looked one another over. No one spoke – all we could hear were the crickets, an occasional belch from one of the cows across the road, and every so often the squeak of a woodpecker somewhere off in the woods.

It wasn’t a big house – a 1-1/2 story Cape with a center chimney, and an entry facing the road. The gray, weathered clapboards still bore traces of red paint, with bits of white trim around the windows. Many of the window panes were still intact, surprising given how long the place had been abandoned; not so much so, given its reputation. Even 12-year old boys must have felt the bad juju emanating from the place.

A pair of wires dangled from the insulators near the ridge of the roof, though the feed from the pole out on the road had been removed ages ago. The metal inspection tag on the meter read “October 1988” – Cutter had done his deed later in the winter of that year.

It was hard to guess the Andersons’ moods as they regarded the blackened windows staring back down at them. Laura seemed to be awed, but Kevin was harder to read. Maybe he was starting to think he’d bitten off more than he could chew. I hoped so, anyway. Neither one looked as uneasy as I felt. I felt like I was standing next to a sleeping dragon that could awaken any minute.

He was the first to break the silence. “House is in better shape than I was expecting,” he said. To me he added, “Any chance we could look inside?”

She looked at him a bit incredulously. “Honey, what for? We’re just going to tear it down anyway… aren’t we?”

He seemed to answer from far away, like he was thinking about something else. “Maybe,” he said. “Probably. Shouldn’t we at least check it out before making that call?” Laura didn’t seem to know what to say, so with a little shake of her head she just looked back at the house. To me he said, “Think we could?”

I tried moistening my lips with a tongue that had gone dry. “I suppose so,” I managed. “As long as it’s unlocked and the floors look sound. Entry’s over this way,” and before I thought too long about it, I set out along a footpath now almost totally reclaimed by the weeds.

The entryway was protected by a little cantilevered roof attached to the wall, and reached by ascending a stairway of three granite slabs laid atop one another. At the bottom step I paused to let them catch up, and happened to glance up towards the overhang.

“Whoa,” I cautioned. “Take care.”

A colony of wasps had taken advantage of the meager shelter to build an enormous paper nest in the corner where it jutted out from the wall, scant inches over the top of the door frame. Must have been the size of a football. A half-dozen wasps hovered near the opening, and a few others crawled down towards it along the coarse, gray paper. “Move slow, but not too slow,” I said, and gingerly ascended the steps.

The front door opened readily enough when I turned the white porcelain doorknob and gave a little push. It scuffed against the floor and stopped, but it had opened far enough to allow entry. “Floors look okay,” I said, and tested them with my foot. They felt firm. The intact windows no doubt had helped preserve them. I stepped inside, paused, and looked back.

Laura was right behind me, warily eyeing the nest overhead. She scuttled past it and into the doorway, where she stopped, peering past me into the house’s gloomy interior. Kevin was partway up the steps, watching his footing, and bumped into her. “Dammit!” he said, and involuntarily recoiled. The sudden motion must have alerted the wasps to his presence, because a few swooped down and began circling him. He tried waving them away, but one managed to 

land on his neck and deliver a sting. “Son of a bitch!” he cried, slapping it. “What are you waiting for?” he scolded his wife. “Get in, get in! Jesus Christ, Laura, move it!”

I took a few more steps to give Laura room to get out of the doorway. Her husband scurried in after her and shut the door against the angrily swarming wasps. He rubbed the back of his neck where a white welt with a tiny pink pinhole was already beginning to form.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asked him.

“Just fine,” he snapped. “Never better.”

“Are you allergic?” I asked him.

“No,” he growled. “But it still hurts like hell.” He glared at his wife but said nothing further, and in the awkward silence that followed we took a closer look at where we were, which was a tiny foyer with a stairway directly ahead leading up to the second floor, and a small coat closet missing its door to our right. Within it a dozen rusted wire hangers clustered together on a wooden rod. Despite the windows – or maybe because of them – it was damp and chilly inside, suffused with a musty odor redolent of soot, damp stone, and rotting wood. An open doorway on our left led to a large empty room beyond.

We passed single file into this room. Our scraping shoes seemed unnaturally loud, reverberating within the dank, empty confines of what had probably been a sitting room. Bits of plaster from the ceiling now littered the bare wooden floor, whose finish was peeling off like sunburnt skin. Wallpaper hung in sheets from the plasterboard, which in places was black with mold. Through a single window in the front wall we could see our vehicles parked out along the road. A fireplace occupied the center of the interior wall we’d just passed through, and opposite that, two filthy windows looked out at the tangled, overgrown yard. I could see the broken headlights of the Datsun. It seemed to be winking at me in collusion with the house. An eerie sense of foreboding swept over me, a dread, a subliminal awareness of danger, as though we were entering the lair of some wild beast.

“Living room,” I said, demonstrating my mastery of the painfully obvious. I felt that breaking the silence might help dispel the suffocating sense of trepidation. It didn’t.

It looked to me like the Andersons were feeling the full force of the house as well. At least Laura did. She stood in the center of the room holding herself – perhaps to warm herself from the chill, perhaps to instinctively protect herself. Kevin still rubbed the back of his neck, but in a way that seemed perfunctory and distracted, and he walked around as quietly as the debris underfoot would allow, stopping to look through a doorway opposite the front to a room beyond. I followed his gaze and saw the electrical service where a range had once stood, identifying this next room as the kitchen. I was too far away to tell if the stains on the floor of the stove’s footprint were mold, grease, or something else, and I didn’t want to find out.

I turned to make another banal remark, but didn’t. Kevin appeared to have shifted into a state of alertness, cocking his head as if listening to something. He started walking slowly around the room as if to help pinpoint it. It reminded me of tuning one of those old radios with the analog dial to get the station to come in clearest.

“You hear that?” he said, barely above a whisper.

I shook my head, but listened all the same. I glanced over at Laura. She seemed to be listening, too. And in the ensuing silence of that room, I heard it – or thought I did.

Footsteps. Or what sounded like them – slow, stealthy footsteps coming from overhead, as though someone or something was taking pains to step quietly around the room above us. 

We all looked at one another. Footsteps, he mouthed, and gestured up towards the ceiling.

I shook my head, but held up my hand to indicate I was still listening and processing. It sure sounded as if someone were tiptoeing across the floor overhead; not with a steady tread, but stopping after every two or three steps as if they themselves were listening – to us, perhaps. Then again, it could have been the soft thumping of a draft-driven door, or the quiet scratching of a rodent, or the creaking and groaning of an old, arthritic house slowly succumbing to gravity’s relentless downward pull.

Or maybe they were footsteps.

Kevin’s gaze had returned to the ceiling, seemingly following the sounds’ slow migration towards the back of the house, to the space over the kitchen. As the pauses between them grew longer and longer, the sense of oppression within the living room lifted slightly, as if a dangerous animal briefly roused from slumber were falling back asleep.

When it appeared that they’d finally stopped altogether, I glanced towards Laura, who returned my look with an expression of relief; but when I looked towards Kevin, his attention had shifted to the mantle shelf above the fireplace. 

At first I saw nothing there but dust, debris, and cobwebs; then I thought I made out a curled scrap of paper on the mantle board, partly hidden in shadow. Laura saw it too, and though all three of us made a move to retrieve it, she got there first.

It appeared to be an old photograph. She brushed away the grime of decades and held it up towards the light from the windows to examine it. She only looked at it for a few seconds before turning away with an expression of disgust and horror. She held it out towards me, closing her eyes and covering her mouth with her other hand.

I took it from her. It was an old color Polaroid, badly faded and blotched with mold, and it took a few seconds before I could make out what it was. And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t old Jim Cutter himself, decked out in camo, smiling in front of a jungle background, with an M16 tucked under his right arm and his left hand extended out in front of him, towards the camera. From it dangled the severed head of an NVA soldier.

I looked away. I felt a little sick, and tried giving Laura a commiserating look. Her hand was still clapped over her mouth, but now her eyes were wide with fright. I looked over to Kevin and offered him the photo, which he took from me without a word.

He looked at it. And what he did next chilled me.

He smiled.

He held up the obscene image for us to see. “Check this out,” he said. “The hunting was good that day!” He pointed to the wall above the mantle. “Shoulda had it mounted and hung up right over there!”

At this point, I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was I wanted to get the hell out of there. I was sure I’d have no problems convincing Laura of that, but the only way I could think to placate Kevin was to play along.

“Would’ve made an interesting trophy,” I said. “Hey, the damp in here is getting into my aging bones. If you’re done looking around, let’s head back outside. You can keep the photo as a souvenir. Then we can – we can figure out what to do next. It’s chilly in here.” I gave Laura a knowing look, which she acknowledged with one of her own.

“Come on, baby,” she said, taking his arm. “Let’s get back out into the sunshine.”

To my relief, he didn’t object. That ghastly photograph actually seemed to buoy him, and, clutching it in his other hand, he slipped his arm around her. Without a word, we filed out.

Once outside in the embrace of warm summer humidity, once awash in the scent of wild, pagan verdure, and the gentle sound of grazing cows and rustling leaves, the oppression seemed to fall away. The further we got from that place, from that shrine to Jim Cutter’s savagery, the fainter its malignant aura became, as though it shunned the warmth and fresh air and could only thrive in the structure’s dank, malodorous decay.

I was leading the way towards our cars, with Laura and Kevin a few steps behind me. “Wait,” I heard him say, and stopped to look back at them.

They had stopped as well. He’d released his wife and was looking with what appeared to be genuine puzzlement at the photograph. He glanced at her and then at me. “I don’t – I don’t really want this. I mean – it’s awful. Shouldn’t we – maybe we should leave it here?”

I’ve never seen a more palpably hopeful relief on a person’s face than the one she wore. “Kev – don’t you remember what went on in there?”

His own look of confusion only deepened. “Well, sure,” he said. “Sort of – but it’s – it’s a little fuzzy – almost like a dream. I remember getting spooked by…” He stopped and looked at me. “Did we hear someone walking around upstairs?”

“We heard something,” I replied. “Sounded a little like footsteps… but I’m not sure if…” I stopped, suddenly realizing that we could debate the elephant in that room as vigorously as the three blind men in a childhood poem had argued over the nature of theirs. 
He started to object but stopped, with the dazed, disoriented look of someone coming out of a grand mal seizure. Instead, he changed the subject. “And I remember – remembering – or thinking I was remembering – a day long ago, almost like a scene from a movie – or maybe a dream I’d had…” He glanced down again at the photograph. “And it had something to do with this.” He looked back up and hesitantly offered it to me.

I took it from him, and took out my cigarette lighter. “Do you mind?”

He shook his head, so right there in the driveway, in full view of the house, I burned that unholy relic. When the flames reached my fingers I dropped it to the ground, where it writhed and curled like a living thing as the fire consumed it. I found myself wondering if the man behind the depravity caught on camera had likewise writhed in the flames of Hell.

“Shit!” Kevin exploded, and for a moment I thought he was experiencing another fugue. He was ducking and bobbing like a boxer in the ring, and flailing his arms around him – and then I saw why. Two wasps were circling around him. Another seemed to be investigating Laura. When I heard a buzzing near my head, I knew some had found me, too. A quick glance toward the front of the house revealed a cloud of them issuing from the nest, headed our way.

My act of sacrilege had angered the house.

“Let’s get out of here!” I said, and we ran in ignominious retreat to the safety of our cars.

We never went back there together again.  In fact I only saw them a couple times after that. The first was when they told me they’d decided to buy the place, and asked me to recommend local contractors to demolish the house. I didn’t like either idea, but didn’t bother trying to dissuade them. I didn’t know what more I could tell them that house hadn’t already.

The second time I saw them was when they couldn’t convince anyone local to take on the job. I suggested that maybe they could get someone from back home to do it – someone who’d never heard of the Cutter place. ‘Course, I didn’t tell them that part. Again, no point. They’d already convinced themselves that what had happened that day was nothing more than a fit of imagination exacerbated by the discovery of a disturbing photograph. City folk seem to believe that within their citadels of steel and concrete they’re safe from the wild Animus that stalks the woods hereabouts. We know better. We know the Animus roams freely, from the Tophet swamps where whippoorwills chant for possession of the souls of the dying, to the syringe-littered alleyways of tired, dying New England mill towns. Tearing down the old Cutter place might have seemed like the most logical thing to do – but the logic of real estate development isn’t like the logic of the Animus. And out here, the Animus rules.

But city folk can’t accept that, so that’s what they did. Probably cost them a lot more than if a local firm had taken the job, but at least it was getting done. The day after Labor Day a convoy of trucks from Leominster rumbled down Damon Road and pulled into the driveway. Chain saws buzzed, backhoes grunted, men shouted, and bit by bit the Cutter place fell before the advancing army. Or appeared to, anyway.

Things started going wrong almost as soon as the land around the house was cleared. The backhoe that took its first bite out of the house knocked down that wasps’ nest, and the driver got stung so bad they had to rush him to the clinic in Newport. A few days after that, when the chimney came down, one of the workmen got nailed by a falling brick. Broke his collarbone in two places. If it hadn’t been for his hardhat, it would have been his skull. Fires, unexplained equipment breakdowns, even a fight between two of the workers – all the signs were there. That house was fighting back.

The Andersons? Haven’t seen them since. Last I heard he’d lost his job, and after several months without work he’d started drinking. She left him shortly after, and once she filed for divorce all the money they’d set aside for the project just evaporated. The bank repossessed the property, by now just an empty lot with a cellar hole surrounded by piles of rubble. It’s not worth much now, so it’s likely to stay that way.

That was two years ago. The rubble’s still there, and the undergrowth is coming back. You know, milkweed, witch grass, poplars – the usual junk. They all like that kind of habitat. Dead soil. They thrive feasting on the dead. And now that whatever’d been caged within the house is free to roam, it’s been calling to the kindred spirits. It summons them. And they come: the underage drinkers, the drug dealers, the child molesters, all the cockroaches that shun the daylight come to revel in the darkness. Beer cans and liquor sampler bottles all over the place, now. A lot of money and cocaine change hands there, too. Remember last spring, when those three boys from Ashuelot High lured that 14-year old girl out there, got her drunk, and gang-banged her? Remember when McCreary found the body of that homeless fellow what froze to death in the cellar hole last winter? That place is an open sore, now. The land itself, and the air above it, are poisonous. It’s the Devil’s playground.

And there’s no way you’ll ever catch me hunting out there again. No fucking way.