The Graveyard Shift Read online

  How I wish I could have spoken, to have shared my words with them. But I could not. Speech is an impossibility for me, for I am Eastlake Manor. My bones are strong, carefully crafted of pinewood framing and nails. My skin is lathe and plaster, painted proudly and smooth as silk. The wood-burning hearth in the great room is the heart that pumps my metaphorical blood. Boldly oversized sash windows are the eyes which allow me to look out into the world. And my spirit: it inhabits all. I was born of care and love, nurtured by family, and somehow have managed to continue living despite the frigid vacancy of my halls and hearth.

  Teary eyed and apologetic, June planted a For Sale sign outside the front gates. Always the stoic gentleman, Theodore watched somberly as his sister did the deed. Then, with their families loaded up in their respective automobiles, they waved goodbye. They were good children, the very best, in my opinion. And I don’t blame them for leaving me, for leaving the empty husk of this estate behind. There were no hard feelings. They gave me the happiest years of my life. I hope that wherever fate has led them the Everton clan is prospering greatly.

  It is in our nature to adapt to change. But even so, when the Everton family left I was greatly saddened. More than once I contemplated ending it all, burning down these walls of plaster and sorrow with a quick flicker of the gas stove. But I never could muster up the courage. I spent two whole months wallowing in my own filth and depression. It was pitiful. Only when a man from the bank stopped to inspect the premises and threw a fit about its neglected upkeep was I forced to pry myself from my lethargic state. The balding banker reduced the price on the For Sale sign before tearing off down the road in his fancy sports car. Out of shame I returned to work. If there was one thing I couldn’t afford, it was the attraction of the wrong sort of buyer.

  After a few months more, my life did regain some form of routine. Watering the lawn, trimming the hedges, and cleaning the estate: all those things helped to keep purpose in my life once I was on my own. Occasionally the banker would return to assess the property, and each time he visited he left a little happier about the estate’s maintenance. Eventually, and much to his surprise, he re-raised the home’s asking price.

  Time passed as my solo routine became my life. My existence was a never ending work cycle, and one which reminded me of my departed family at every turn. But in the end, that was alright. All I had left in the world was time and memories.

  The sun rose and fell, chased by the moon round and round without end. They had their routine and I had mine. And if I wasn’t exactly happy, deep in my heart I came the closest to peace that I’d ever been since the Evertons had left. Perhaps a year passed. Perhaps it was a decade.

  And then one day a man came from the bank, a new fellow. His suit was of a peculiar cut I’d never seen before, very bland, with a funny tie that was long and square, instead of a bow. But his smile was genuine and warm. I liked him immediately. I was surprised to find that, as he stepped through the cherry doorway and into the great foyer, he was not alone. Like ducklings, a young family filed into my foyer behind him. The family name was Dunkle.

  Words cannot express how happy I was at that moment. I was overjoyed at the sight of not two, but three beautiful children standing beside their parents, admiring my handiwork. The mother and father, I learned, were named Peter and Alison. He was a tall, fire-bearded man who spoke with the intent of being heard. A defense attorney, I later found out, and a successful one at that.

  Alison was tall as well, for a woman. Her hair was chestnut brown, tied up in a tail at the back of her head. She wore a dress that was inappropriately short, in my opinion, but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. She seemed kindly, after all.

  All three of the children were under the age of eleven. The eldest and youngest were both boys, named Trenton and Tucker. And the middle child was an eight-year-old girl called Denise. I was excited to get to know them.

  Was.

  Right away, it was evident who ran the house: the children. While Peter was away (which was always) and Alison scrubbed my floors and made extravagant lunches, the children went on an unstoppable rampage of destruction. Trenton stomped mud onto my rugs. Tucker swung a wooden sword and painted scratches on my doors and walls. Denise ripped my wallpaper in chunks and threw it into the air like confetti.

  When Alison found out, she sent them to their rooms to “think about what they’d done.” And so Trenton and Trucker scribbled crayon murals onto my hundred year old walls, and Denise ripped up the blinds. Apparently that was their way of thinking about it, by adding to the chaos.

  Alison called it all “non-violent parenting”—something she relayed to a friend on the telephone in a huff of exhaustion—because she didn’t believe in disciplining her children and upsetting them. What she failed to realize, of course, was how much it was upsetting me.

  Peter would come home on weekends and lazily buff out a few scratches or replace old, broken window shutters with cheap, ugly, plastic blinds. And then he’d go back to the office on Monday and the three children would paint more scratches over the old, leave new messes where messes had never been before, and tarnish more of my once pristine interior.

  One day, I’d had enough. I decided that if Alison wasn’t going to do anything about it, I would.

  It started when Tucker saw Alison’s back turned and he pulled out the wooden sword he’d used on me many times before. He crept immediately to the study, where he had been told repeatedly not to go. I saw the glint in his eye as he spied a lamp left behind on Jonathan Everton’s old desk, a lamp that Gloria Everton had carefully picked out for her husband some thirty years ago. All Tucker saw, however, was a target.

  I warned him to stop. The carpet bunched up beneath his feet and he stumbled, bracing himself on the desk. He then glanced around the room, expecting to see someone. I assume he would have stopped and returned to his room, had he known he really was being watched. But he didn’t, and so he raised his wooden sword with that devious glint bubbling back up in his terrible little eyes.

  And with an anger I’d not felt before, I swept the lamp high up off the desk and out of his path. The wooden sword instead carved a deep scratch into Jonathan’s writing desk, and my anger continued to soar. Beside the desk was Peter’s library, row after row of books sewn into a bookshelf; I made them rain down on Tucker like a hailstorm, and I assure you that as a lawyer, Peter’s books were anything but small.

  In all my years I’ve never heard a child scream that loud.

  When Tucker crumbled into his mother’s arms in a flurry of tears, she warned him about going into the study when he had been told not to. She assumed that he had been swinging his sword and knocked the books down on himself. As always, she sent him to his room, where he ripped his own books to shreds and tossed the paper, in piles, all across his room. No real lesson was learned.

  I felt good, however. I felt vindicated. I knew these monsters didn’t respect me, and so I didn’t respect them. I didn’t feel bad when Denise went to shred more of my wallpaper and the door slammed behind her, startling her so badly that she ran back to her room in tears. I felt no remorse when Trenton threw a baseball through one of my windows, and I brought the window frame crashing down into the sill mere inches from his face as he came closer to inspect. And I felt pure joy when Trenton dared walk back into my study with his wooden sword, eyeing Jonathan’s lamp, and a single book on the bookshelf wiggled menacingly, as if to say ‘don’t you dare.’

  He fled so fast he didn’t even close the door behind him.

  Soon the children were telling Peter and Alison that I was haunted, but of course, as parents, they thought their children were just overreacting. By then I had come to hate them all—children and parents alike—and I knew that the only way to evict them as a whole would be to scare off Peter and Alison.

  I toyed with Alison by opening random doors while the kids were at school, even if those doors were locked. I disconnected her phone calls; I unplugged her vacuum and ir
on in the middle of using them; and when she stepped away, I even raised the temperature on the stove until the food she was cooking was burnt and ruined. This left her frustrated but not scared. She thought she was going insane, but didn’t question the house. She questioned only herself.

  Peter, of course, was much easier to break. I unplugged his alarm clock and frequently made him late for work. I stopped running the refrigerator so the lunch he took to work would be spoiled. I even shuffled up his important work documents, and often threw them in the trash on mornings before meetings with important clients.

  Soon, the family was livid… but not with me. With each other. Their snappiness toward one another left the children bitter and angry, with no one to take out their aggressions on but each other. They fought loudly, and often. Rather than scratch and dent my walls they were now filling them with the sounds of yelling and crying, of hurtful things said in anger, and I’d had enough of it.

  One night Peter was awakened by the wind. The window was open, and he hadn’t remembered opening it, because he hadn’t. I had. And as he approached the window, asking himself this very question—hadn’t he closed it before bed?—I saw the resentment in his eyes.

  “I wish I’d never bought this piece of shit house,” he mumbled, as he rested his hands on the windowsill.

  And without second thought, I brought the window down on all ten fingers so hard the neighbors said they could hear his scream from five blocks away.

  When the moving trucks came the next day, Peter watched with a scowl (and two bandaged hands) as the team of movers hauled away his furniture and law books. His entire horrible family was gone by noon. And although the For Sale sign was once again planted in the drive, my heart was lightened to witness their departure.

  I had done that, had succeeded in forcing them out of me. If only Gloria Everton had been able to do the same with her cancer, perhaps things would have been different. But she had not, and I told myself not to dwell on once future dreams now broken. Things had turned out the way they were going to turn out and the sooner I came to terms with that, the better.

  I had just discovered something about myself. With Peter and Alison Dunkle gone, headed to parts unknown with their rotten brood, I realized that I was capable of doing more than just self-maintenance and upkeep. I was capable of protecting myself. It was an unexpected revelation, given that I had spent my entire life with the Evertons as a silent helper, a mortar-winged guardian angel of sorts. Never before had I ever imagined hurting someone living within my walls. With my old family, such an act was unthinkable. But, as I unfortunately came to realize through experience, there would never be another family like the Evertons.

  Within two months another family took ownership and residence of Eastlake Manor. In all fairness, there was nothing particularly bad about their manners, but I couldn’t let them stay. They were foreigners, and their native tongue droned endlessly through me like buzzing bees. It drove me to madness within two days. Coming from a superstitious culture, they were gone in three.

  Next came the Bandini brothers, with deep pockets and high hopes of stripping my body of its antique finishings for the purpose of resale. I upended their beds in the middle of the night, dragged them down the grand staircase into the main foyer, and offered them a closer inspection of my fine Tiffany chandeliers by dropping one inches from the elder brother’s head. They left that very night. The bank man came the next day for their bags. He turned to cast a wary look at me as he walked down the drive.

  The next time the sign came down, it signaled the arrival of the Lindberg family. They were grotesquely fat, all of them, including the solitary child. And to match their gluttony, they were vile people, loud and obnoxious and ignorant to their own coarseness. Therefore I felt almost no remorse when I attacked them during their first piggish dinner in the kitchen. I turned the room into a tornado of flying utensils and food. The missus took a serving fork in her back fat, and her husband caught a rogue paring knife in his thigh. The child was knocked unconscious by a flying apple, likely the first one he had ever touched in his life. And just as they had begun to attend to their wounds and count their blessings that the event had stopped, I started it all over again.

  That family, in particular, drained me of energy. Or rather it was what I had done to them. You see, I learned that my unusual exertions—the ones beyond standard maintenance—took their toll on me. It took days for me to recover fully from the kitchen table maelstrom. My memory had become hazy trying to recollect the rest of that evening, and the subsequent day. But, fortunately, by the time I did leave my convalescence I found that, like the evictees before them, the gluttonous Lindbergs too had left.

  They all left eventually.

  There were the Morleys and the Andersons, neither of whom stayed longer than a week. Then came the absurdly foolish Bradys, who didn’t stay two full hours. They were followed by the veterinarian, Dr. Rodriguez, whose pups dared to piss on Mrs. Everton’s favorite imported rug.

  And then there were a handful of others. But all of them were dealt with summarily. I did what had to be done in order to protect both myself and the honor of my family. And the more I did it, the easier it became. When one watches the heirlooms of his past tampered with and carelessly destroyed for long enough, he will come to understand the true purpose of wrath and the beauty of vengeance. One day, I ceased feeling bad about the occasional broken finger or mild maiming. I never inflicted undeserved pain on my temporary tenants. And I certainly never killed anyone.

  But the entire ugly process began to wear me down, to harden me. It put me in the darkest frame of mind that I’d known beyond my grief for the Evertons. I began to contemplate the easy flicker of the gas stove, of the simple kindling that comprised my strong bones. Night after night it called to me, urged me to end the pain and regret once and for all.

  And just when I thought I had reached the deepest, darkest bottom of my despair, I found a light.

  One morning, a solitary man came knocking at my door. I watched him stand on the porch. There was an easy, unrushed grace about him. The stance was strikingly familiar; it was the same as my dearly departed Mr. Everton’s. This man was perhaps in his mid-fifties and fit, a heavy satchel slung over his shoulder. He wasn’t dressed professionally, but was clean-cut in khaki pants and a blue denim shirt. There was a sharp intelligence in his eyes, and also, a glint of kindness.

  Again he rapped at the front door, cocking his head slightly, like a jeweler listening for the inner workings of a timepiece.

  The rumble of an engine caught the man’s attention, and he turned to find the fellow from the bank skid to a halt in the driveway. Dirt kicked up at the car’s tires and the banker got out slowly. He was much older than the first time I had laid eyes on him. He was gray and paunchy, a direct opposite of the man on the porch.

  “What an entrance,” the man said to the banker, extending a hand. “Jack Thorpe.”

  The banker looked down at the hand and offered nothing more than a weak attempt at a smile. “You’ll have to excuse my pessimism, Jack, but I’ve not had much luck with this house. Let’s just get inside and get this over with, okay?”

  The banker unlocked the front door and led Jack inside to the lobby. I could see the glazed look in Jack’s eyes as the banker prattled on in a monotone voice, the same speech he’d told a hundred times before. Jack was not interested in the banker’s thoughts, and made this apparent when he left the banker alone to talk to himself and explored my hallways like a child navigating a maze. He pulled out a notepad and pen and scrawled down notes—items he needed to repair me. How much it would cost. Where he could get them.

  “It is quite nice, isn’t it?” the banker asked, when he found Jack in Mr. Everton’s study a few minutes later, turning Mr. Everton’s lamp over in his hands.

  “It’s very nice, and I’m very interested.” Jack set the lamp down with care, and then spread his arms wide. “So… go on with it, then.”

  The banker
arched an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Well, what’s the catch?” Jack asked. “I’m not a stupid man, Mr. Caldwell. This mansion is dirt cheap and it’s gone through owners like I go through underwear. So spit it out, and not just because you’re legally obligated to. But because I’m curious.” He crossed his arms over his chest as he eyed the banker smugly. “What, murder took place here? Or maybe little Johnny couldn’t take it anymore and hung himself in the basement? Or maybe mommy found daddy diddling the maid? Murder/suicide?”

  The banker grimaced at Jack’s crudeness; I, on the other hand, admired his candor. “Actually, no. People can’t get out of here fast enough because they say the house is alive. That it’s haunted and…” He sighed. “I can’t even believe I’m speaking these words… they say it’s trying to kill them.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Jack said, running over a mural of scratches with the palm of his hand. “If I was treated like this, I’d try to murder you, too.”

  That afternoon Jack signed on the dotted line, and that evening he returned in a huge work truck with more supplies than I’d ever seen stuffed into one vehicle. There was paint, and bags of plaster, and wallpaper. There were blinds—ornate ones, and not cheap plastic, either—and endless rolls of carpeting. It all was in the style of what I held now, and it was all top quality. But that was all that came in that truck, and I realized then that Jack was alone. He heaved his toolbox inside, like a metal, riveted briefcase and proceeded to fix me from the ground up. By himself.

  The first week Jack spent with me, I’d like to think we bonded. He spent it in near darkness with weak lighting and sweat pooling at his brow, but he took great care to fix every crack, every scratch, every dent and every imperfection, so I made sure to shine my lights in just the spot he needed, and if he lost a screw or a nail, I always made sure it popped up right in his line of vision. And when he was thirsty, and he walked back to his truck and saw that he had forgotten his thermos at home, I turned on the hose out front.