Foreclosure

I get shot at.

A lot.

But it isn’t what scares me about this job. When I arrive at a home and see someone burst out of the front door clutching a rifle, I know what to expect. They have something to lose. They’re scared and they don’t know what to do. So I tell them. I give them resources on fighting back. I refer them to law firms who do pro bono work. Government bodies and charities that can help them get back on their feet. I speak calmly and with empathy. And people listen. Some even thank me as they pack their things up and drive away.

The suicides are harder to deal with. I get at least three or four a year. And people who kill themselves out of spite really go all out on the spectacle. The harder it is for the bank to clean up, the better. And people assume the bank puts their house on the market the second it’s seized but a house can sit forgotten for years before I’m sent to look it over. Lone bodies swinging in empty living rooms, flesh like melted candle wax from all that time left in open air. I find it profoundly sad. These people lay themselves out like a spiteful diorama and then no one turns up. They slit their throats while clutching eviction notices and by the time I arrive the blood has dried and the ink has faded. The worst ones don’t just hurt themselves, but their loved ones too. Suicide pacts are more common with the elderly, but it isn’t always octogenarians. Families too. It’s rare but it does happen. A sun-baked house with drawn curtains, so much time passed in the dry Autumn heat that their skin turned paper-thin. Receding lips. Black toothless gums borne in a rictus grin.

Hell of a thing to see staring out of a crib.

Each house is its own apocalypse. Its own ruined city for me to wander. Whiskey in the toilet’s cistern. Fentanyl under the bed. Bills passed due. And it doesn’t just end with the people we kick out. These places are empty so long you’ll often get squatters. Usually harmless. Not always. Some have the potential to be thoroughly lethal. Stringy men and women with flinty eyes and missing teeth who come bursting out of mouldy old blankets and indoor tents, slashing box cutters wildly at the air. You could play tic-tac-toe on my forearms from all the defensive wounds.

Even when they’ve moved on, the things they leave behind aren’t exactly safe. Fumes from homemade labs can rot your lungs, and HIV positive needles stuffed down the sides of old sofa cushions wait to prick curious fingers. And the cooks get real paranoid about being robbed so they like to rig their homes with traps. They get inventive with whatever’s lying around. Shards of glass on spring loaded broom handles. Trick floorboards over boxes of razor blades. Shit smeared knives hidden beneath false window sills. Every now and again I find a trap that’s been set off. A baseball bat rigged to lash out at anyone entering the kitchen, blood and hair dripping from the bent nails hammered into the wood. No sign of the poor fucker who set it off, just a grizzly trail of gore leading outta the house and into the nearby woods. Most likely candidate is the guy who set the trap. These addicts stay up for days and pass out, then when they wake up the first thing they do is head for their stash not remembering what they left behind.

One time I found the guy lying a few feet away from his own trap. He kept his money in this old metal lunch box at the back of a cupboard and he’d rigged it so anyone reaching in would get a hell of a surprise. The blade went in at his elbow and left just below the knuckle on his thumb. No helping him after that. He died bleeding out on his late grandmother’s cold linoleum. What a God awful way to go. And his little lunchbox? On the ground and empty of everything worth taking. Police reckon someone was with him when it happened. Must’ve gotten scared, so they took the cash and left him to die. It’d take a full month before I found him and no one even reported him missing in the interim. You’d think the kid would be angry, but he wasn’t. He just looked like he was scared. Nineteen, going through withdrawal and dying slowly. Curled up like a baby, one hand gripping his opened wrist. You can’t trap the ocean in your fist. It leaks through your fingers. That kid knew what was coming. I could see it in his eyes. Terrified. Fucking terrified.

Meth is a hell of a drug. These poor guys fry their brains out in the middle of nowhere. I can’t even begin to imagine what they think they see out there. What visits them in the dark. Found this trailer once that’d been rigged with damn near a hundred traps. They weren’t particularly sophisticated but they were numerous and vicious and desperate, and they circled the lone motorhome out in the middle of the desert like an invading army made of knives and bear traps and stolen guns and even a few hastily made IEDs. Took me and a bomb squad a week just to get to the front door and by the time we opened it we were all fairly certain of one simple fact - this place hadn’t been rigged to keep thieves out. Whoever had set the traps had been scared of something leaving. Probably just drug fuelled paranoia on behalf of whoever set them, but I think the idea that something was in there waiting for us got under our skin anyway. During the operation we’d sometimes get shouted reports of someone moving around in the trailer and the whole site would go to hell. Armed men and women lying on their bellies, iron sights lined up on the front door, hands shaking. I guess we kept asking ourselves over and over what’s in there that had someone so scared they set all these traps?

When we finally got our answer, the first thing we found was a meth lab, pretty par for the course. Less normal was a body that had been torn to fucking pieces. Halfway to dust after all that time in the heat had passed, but it was strewn all over the interior. Walls. Floors. Ceiling. Couldn’t argue it was a natural death or a product of scavengers, not unless coyotes can work a lock and key. What was left of his head and torso looked like he’d gone through hell. I’m hardly a forensic expert, but it looked to me like he’d died slowly and painfully. Missing fingers. Teeth. One eye plucked out. Torture is what it made me think of. Even stranger than all that though was what we found sat on the kitchen counter next to all those broken beakers and stained chemistry equipment. A doll. Not like a kid’s doll. Porcelain, like a collector’s item that had seen better days. Scared the shit out of me, given the circumstances and all. Couldn’t shake the feeling whoever had made all those traps had done so with that thing in mind. Which begged the question, who was the poor guy stuck inside the trailer? And what had happened to him?

Cops wrote it off. Meth is a hell of a drug, so they say. We all knew that. Only I wasn’t so sure. I’ve seen a lot of weird shit. Who knows what visited that poor guy out in the wild, so far from civilization. A lot of life gets lived out in the world, out on the plains or in forests and amongst hills, far from prying eyes. You get a sense of it in my job. The sheer quantity of untold stories. Failed dreams, great triumphs. Abandoned canvases. Well worn guitars. Haydays that came and went, or simply never came at all. Most stories follow a rhythm. Most. Some, like that doll, raise profound questions. Others aren’t really stories at all, so much as nightmares just waiting for the next victim.

This world is full of hidden needles waiting for probing hands.

There are rare occasions where I’ll advise the bank to not sell a property. They become part of a kinda no-go zone the government has set up around the country. I only see bits of this machinery at work. Whatever bureaucracy manages it is way over my paygrade. But there is a system in place for managing the worst of the worst. I’m not talking ghosts either. None of the examples I’ve given so far would be candidates. Sounds fucked up, I know. Scrub the blood. Scrape the brains. Pick the shotgun pellets out of the plaster. If the next family who move in have to contend with the ghosts of a few clumsy methheads or disgruntled former owners, well so be it. No, for a place to be deemed a no-go it has to be beyond recovery and an active threat to life. I’m talking factories with bottomless holes that pump out enough radiation the government has to build a nuclear dump site just to make a convincing cover.

Although that is a bit of an extreme example. Most of the time we just blame it on radon or meth fumes and condemn it. Had this one place. A farmhouse where a family of five had lived for nearly sixty years. By the time I got there the kids were adults and the parents had been dead for a while. The children had resisted selling the family home, tried to keep up with the payments. But they had their own debts and in the end the bank got its pound of flesh. At a glance the house didn’t look too bad. Bit rundown, sure. But my standards are low. Crack den low. Windows were intact. No graffiti. Roof hadn’t been stripped. Satellite dish was still up. From where I sat in my car, gulping down a lukewarm bottle of water that had spent the drive tumbling around the passenger footwell, the house was relatively untouched by anything except nature and time.

Something about that gave me pause. Shame I didn’t listen to the gut feeling telling me it was all sorts of weird that an isolated house had gone unmolested for so long. I grabbed the keys the Sheriff had given me and went inside hoping for an easy gig Three hours later and I was crawling out a kitchen window I’d smashed, the shirt and skin on my back cut to ribbons. I stumbled to my car, chest near bursting from the pounding of my heart, and my eyes fixed on the empty window frame I’d just escaped. A lone figure, barely visible with the bright sun in my eyes, but still too substantial to be a mere ghost. My wounds were a testament to that.

Once the doctor had finished patching me up, I sat in the waiting room and tried calling the former owners. The siblings. One after the other. I wanted to know what had attacked me, if anyone knew what I was walking into. There’d be hell to pay if so. The oldest son was the first to answer. I didn’t go all in straight away. I asked probing questions, took my time before I mentioned the basement. The guy laughed when I brought it up. Told me he hated going down there as a kid because he’d hear the weirdest noises, like someone moaning. They all thought a ghost lived down there in the dark, and to keep them from hurting themselves or playing around with stuff they shouldn’t, their father had embellished this ghost. Given it a name. Marion, he called her.

Marion lived in the basement, hiding amongst the crates of old photos and clothes. She lurked behind the half-disassembled lawnmower, scuttling always to the dark places at the very edge of your eyesight. Marion had long fingernails and a haggard flour sack dress. She had black lips and a pointed nose and a wart the size of your thumb. Marion ate children, their Dad had told them with glee. And if Marion knew there were three bite sized kids living just above her, she’d come out of the basement and come crawling up the stairs with arms as long as her body, and she’d slink her way into their bedrooms using the shadows as cover, and she’d start by taking tiny little bites out of any bare feet that lay dangling in the cold.

“What about that freezer? Did you ever use it?” I asked.

“Oh God no,” he said. “Even now that basement gives me the creeps, and that freezer was where Marion lived, or so we figured as kids, so we stayed the hell away from it. It was just always there in the back, looking old and forgotten. I think Dad used to go hunting when we were little and that’s where he’d keep the meat, but he phased all that out before I’d turned five.”

He seemed sincere so I didn’t tell him what I’d found in the house at the end of my inspection. He didn’t know that behind that freezer was a false wall, and behind that wall, basement number two. Homemade. God knows how the father managed it with no one noticing, but he’d dug it out and made a private, sound-proofed space. Hollowed out a room about the size of your typical jail cell. The furniture was threadbare, deliberately so. A single mattress propped up against one wall. An iron shackle bolted into the foundation.

A dentist’s chair modified with restraints.

And a stain. A vague Rorschach blob of ancient browns and almost-greens that pooled outwards from a patch in the corner. It had texture. I knew that stain. I’d seen it before. Residue left behind after the professionals have finished peeling a desiccated corpse off a hard surface. At first I assumed someone had moved the source of that stain. There were even footprints. But they didn’t look right. Something about them made me queasy. They had not been left in the residue. They were made of it. Something or someone covered in that stuff had been stomping around down there. Until that moment the inspection had been mundane and boring, but it isn’t every day you stumble across a hidden dungeon. Now I was suddenly presented with a hell of a family secret, and one that didn’t quite make sense. I stood there for a good minute trying to make the pieces of that puzzle fit. Had someone moved a corpse and gotten covered in rotten flesh, then walked around leaving a trail? Why the fuck had they done it barefoot? And why not clean it up afterwards? And how had they been so clumsy, yet so clean as well? There were no drag marks…

I took another look at those prints and something inside my gut soured. Small feet. A woman’s. We all know this story. Don’t make me go over it. Basement out in the middle of nowhere. Restraints. A family man that no one suspects. He’d hunted alright. Sick fuck. So who had died in that basement? And who had left those prints?

Not all of them were on the floor, either. With an increasingly shaky hand I tracked a few to the wall where they mounted the vertical surface and continued upwards and onto the ceiling. Just like that a cold sweat gathered on the back of my neck, and a powerful sense of the uncanny ran over me like ice water. Somewhere overhead the wind blew and the boughs of trees groaned in the yard. Sounds of another world. I could see it in my mind, up there, not far away. My car sitting in the shade. Those images felt like they belonged to another world. I desperately wanted to rejoin it, to leave this squalid little hole behind. All I had to do was walk out of that basement and make for my car. Only I wasn’t so sure I wanted to move at all. Felt like I might break something brittle, the notion that the creeping dread I felt was all in my head. A product of an overactive imagination, nothing more. And yet I got this feeling that if I tried to run the nightmare would spill out into the real world and give chase. I even tried telling myself I didn’t know what happened in that room. Not for sure. It could’ve been a game, one played between him and the wife… But then I looked at the chair again. At the cracked and frayed leather of ancient straps.

There were teeth marks on some of them.

I took a deep breath and regained control of my legs. Unless I saw something alive down there, I had to assume I really was alone down there, so I turned and began to walk. Eyes forward. Mind steeled against the myriad of little groans and creaks that felt as if they followed me, going from shadow to shadow. I couldn't stop myself from filling in the blanks of that basement’s history, even as I told myself to stop.

Maybe she died first. Maybe he did. Maybe he got bored and left her to starve, or maybe he nearly got caught and decided to put it all to an end. Maybe she snuck something sharp and killed herself. But she died for sure and she stayed dead a long time. At least a couple months for that kind of liquefaction. She lost cohesion. Skin. Muscle. Blood like the plug of mould that forms on top of forgotten coffee. I could see it in my head, her collapse. A claymation timelapse. A riot of colours. Only somehow the natural cycle broke. She didn’t go away completely. And no one came to take her away. Those were her prints on the floor and walls and ceiling, weren't they?

She laid down.

She died.

And then, somehow, she got back up.

By the time I reached the top of the basement steps, I’d scared myself so bad that sweat was pouring off me. So far the only things I’d seen on my way were just old boxes and crates and ancient bits of crap, weed wackers and leaf blowers with cobwebs and defunct logos fading away. But that didn’t mean I was alone. There was something wrong with that place. I could feel it. A radiant heat. A palpable aura of hatred, even in the absence of anything seemingly real. It was so bad that as I opened the door I actually felt a moment of childlike relief, a little like how you might feel racing back to bed after going to the toilet in the middle of the night, convinced some ghost was just inches behind you.

I laughed.

And something cold and hard wrapped around my ankle. A hand had reached up between the slats of the stairs, like it was reaching straight out of the world of make believe and into this one where things are real. I stared down, heartbeat like thunder in my ears, and slowly began to process what I was seeing in bits and pieces. First was the hand. Gnarled. Black. Like a badly sketched shadow visible only because it caught the light coming through the open door. And then beneath it, in the shadow, a face like a skull wrapped in a garbage bag, the plastic pulled tight so you could see the suffocating outline of empty eyes and a gaping mouth. I’d expected something wetter, something straight out of a bad horror movie. In reality, whatever was in that basement had undergone a strange transformation. I only ever saw it in parts, so I can’t say for sure what all of it was like. But it sure as shit didn’t look like a ghost or a corpse or anything else I’d ever seen or thought I’d seen in life or movies.

Looked like a monster, the real deal, and I reacted like a child seeing the bogeyman. I made some weird half-muffled groan of fear and ripped my leg away so quickly that I surprised myself and got free. But whatever was hiding under those stairs was quick. Before I had time to take another step, it had left its hiding place, climbed the stairs, and was already driving me to the ground. The last thing I saw before my chin smashed into the kitchen floor was that Marion really did wear a flour sack dress. At the time this strange detail passed over me without notice. But in hindsight, the fact that the son would later recount that particular item of clothing convinced me his father had been the man responsible for that hidden basement. It wasn’t like it had been waiting undiscovered when the family moved in. And on top of that the father must have been a real piece of shit to inject that sort of sickening detail into a story he told his kids. He’d likely done it so if his prisoner ever escaped and his kids saw her, their first instinct would be to scream for their lives and run.

I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course. I had only vague notions of what had attacked me. Something hateful, for sure. Something that had died in that awful room and come back to life. God she was so fucking angry. She pinned me, knelt on my back, and howled like a banshee that’d been hit by a car. I pissed myself at the sound, at the feeling of helplessness. At the realisation this was a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.

She went to work on my back with fingers I couldn't see, but could feel as white hot tattoo-needle pain. It lasted only a few seconds. The agony was enough to send me into spasms that knocked her off and onto the floor. That tiny moment of freedom was all I needed. I crawled to my feet and jumped headfirst out of the nearest window. I didn’t give a fuck about any cuts I might acquire. If you could’ve felt what I felt you wouldn’t have either. These weren’t scratches. Doctors compared my wounds to those left by a box jellyfish, the kind of thing that causes the muscle beneath to wilt and wither after a million hypodermic needles have turned the flesh to a porous sponge. I had to get skin grafts. I had to get rid of my car because they couldn’t scrub what I’d left of my skin from the leather seats. Even now my back looks like I got run over by a mower. Still hurts when I put my top on each morning.

Somehow they’re not even the worst of my wounds. Just the biggest. The most visible. At least those scars made it easy to convince the bank not to sell. Normally it takes a lot of effort, but they took one look at the doctor’s reports and agreed to condemn it thoroughly, pass the land onto whatever strange governmental department handles this kinda thing. That particular house has been left to crumble. No piece of paper or deed or mortgage payment is taking it back from Marion. We can only shut it off. The land is fenced, and every window has been slapped with so many toxic gas signs that I can only hope no one else is stupid enough to ever go back inside.

Looking back, I really should’ve listened to my instincts. Squatters don’t leave a place alone without good reason.