The creeping, uneasy part of death is the acquiescence of the aftermath. The practicalities of the fallout become mundane and even blasé after one day turns into another and another and another over and over. The loss of a parent feels detrimental and explosive when it happens, but life goes on (for the living, at least) and there is so so much paperwork to handle. When Jaden’s mother died of a heart attack he had put his whole life on hold, taking two weeks off work and flying back to Michigan to console his father and arrange the ceremony. Jaden’s wife, Ariel, was the picture of a perfect wife and mother, and she took care of Joshua (who was 7 at the time) while Jaden was gone and the family grieved together. The death of a parent is never easy, even though Jaden was aware his mother’s health had been failing for quite some time. Two years later, Jaden was back in the same position, this time in response to the death of his father. He hated to admit it, but the process was easier the second time around. The funeral home knew his name, the plot was already paid for, the family lawyer had everything on file, and even the florist from the shop in the village still had his credit card on file from last time. Jaden’s regional manager granted his bereavement leave without question and, once again, he was on a flight to Michigan, on his way back to his childhood home.
The literally heartbreaking coincidence of his father’s demise was that he met with the same tragic end as Jaden’s mother: cardiac arrest. It wasn’t entirely unfathomable though; Jaden quietly blamed the proliferation of fast food and other comestible junk as a prime coconspirator behind his parents’ poor health. His father was also notoriously sedentary and his mobility in recent years had been severely impaired. Now Jaden knew that he would never speak to his father again, and he cursed himself for not ending phone conversations with a simple “I love you.” Jaden couldn’t remember the last words he spoke to his father when he was alive, and the last text exchange they had was (embarrassingly) just an idiotic internet meme he had thoughtlessly shared. The sucker-punch his father’s death had delivered to Jaden was two-sided because not only did Jaden grieve the loss of his loving father, but he could feel the icy hand of his own mortality on his shoulder. He looked at himself in the mirror the morning after he heard the news and he couldn’t help but see age and decrepitude written all over his face. His parents were gone, both of them now, and Jaden, he knew, would be next.
Jaden picked up his rental car from the airport and made the long drive up the peninsula in time to meet with Stanley. Since Jaden had no siblings he was naturally designated as executor of his father’s estate and Stanley had been the family’s dependable attorney for decades. Jaden was bequeathed power of attorney and he was required to sign the will, amend the trust that included the deed to the house, and attend to his father’s banking and retirement accounts. Jaden had already authorized the morgue at the county hospital to transfer his father’s corpse to the funeral home where a ceremony had already been scheduled. The burial would be in ten days. As Jaden drove the pastoral road through the autumnal small towns of the rural Mid-West, he was nostalgically transported to his adolescence. Red leaves were falling and there was a chill in the air. Wisps of smoke emitted from the brick chimneys of country homes and porches were adorn with festive pumpkins. He passed a school bus that looked exactly like the one he’d taken every day years ago, and he noticed a farmer’s market that seemed to be selling the same seasonal cornucopia he’d perused with his family in his youth.
Because Jaden’s flight path was atypical, flights in and out of the regional airport were infrequent and expensive. There was only one flight a day in either direction, so Jaden planned to spend one day in town attending to the business of his father’s estate and arranging last rites, then he would take the only flight back the following day. He didn’t want to saddle Ariel with all the household duties on top of her busy schedule at the firm. Jaden would travel back to Michigan the following week with his wife and son to observe the memorial and grieve together. It could potentially be the last time Jaden would see his son Joshua in the town where he’d grown up himself. He cherished seeing Joshua, bright and young with his whole life ahead of him, exploring the brook behind the library or crossing the road in the village center. It made him feel like he was watching himself, a generation removed, innocent and precocious.
Stanley gave Jaden a warm and conciliatory hug when he arrived at his office. He offered his condolences and shared familial memories of Jaden’s father. Stanley was mindful of Jaden’s limited time, and he had dutifully prepared the pertinent documents and legal certificates with punctilious attention to detail. Jaden’s duties as executor of the estate were completed forthwith and he earnestly thanked Stanley for everything he’d done for his family over the years.
His next stop was the funeral home and Mrs. Lahey similarly anticipated his appointment. After another heartfelt offering of condolences and sympathy she escorted Jaden to the office where he could conveniently tender payment for their services.
“You’ll opt for a closed casket at the ceremony, I assume,” she said.
Jaden understood completely. A heart attack is a terribly sudden demise and the abrupt nature of the assault can be grotesquely observable on the face of the deceased. The face is paralyzed in fear of what’s coming, and the expression that’s frozen for the rest of time is one of inescapable horror and dreadful realization. When Jaden’s mother died Mrs. Fahey had recommended a closed casket for the same reason. Jaden saw no reason to do otherwise for his similarly-fated late father. It would be humiliating for his memorial to be marred by the ghastly image his father’s horror-stricken face. Jaden thanked Mrs. Fahey for her attentiveness and compassion before he returned to his rental car outside.
Jaden then drove to his parents’ house, struck by the numb reality that no one was inside. The house was a sturdy post-and-beam relic with sunny windows and a welcoming porch. The walls of the modest two-story structure were chock full of cherished memories and the paint on the siding was only recently beginning to peel. Jaden held the keys to the front door in his hand as he walked up the flagstone path to the front door in the cool October afternoon. The old oak tree in the front yard was still just as he remembered it. It’s knotted branches were denuded of leaves by the presage of winter. He fondly recalled the tire swing his father had tied for him from a prominent low branch. The tire and rope were long gone now, lost to the ages. He wistfully recognized the broad lawn beside the old house where he’d practiced scissor kicks as an ambitiously athletic child. And, in uncanny coincidence, there was presently a lone, neglected soccer ball nestled at the edge of the tall grass. It was untarnished and properly inflated, as though waiting for the ghost of 10 year-old Jaden to come back and play. Whether the abandoned ball was mislaid by a neighborhood youth or belonged to anyone at all was impossible to know.
And, like an archly familiar specter, the gaunt house next door still stood as it always had and cast its menacing shadow across the property. The gothic mansion was older than the home Jaden’s parents had built. It pre-dated the war and was listed with the local historical society as one of the first residences built by the town’s ancestral settlers. It had ornate, wooden trimmings and curlicued balustrades. It’s gables were dark and ominous, and the flat peak of the roof was carved with intricate crenellations. Every single window had its curtains tightly drawn: no light in, no light out. Surrounding the lichened foundation of the house was a stone parapet sunken into overgrown weeds. Jaden, in his boyhood, had spent many summer nights inventing spooky stories with his best friend Kyle about the eerie goings-on at the house next door. They never saw anyone come or go, and their puerile imaginations were captivated by the insinuation of evil spirits and sinister wickedness within its gloomy walls.
Kyle and Jaden’s favorite oral past-time after lights-out was adding embellishing detail to the story of the Walligasp. Kyle would hold a flashlight under his chin, then describe in hushed and fabled tones the fearsome, cold-blooded creature that lay in wait within the house next door. The Walligasp was dragon-sized and thick with muscle. It had scales like a crocodile and slime like an eel. Its massive feet were overgrown with lethal claws that were sharp enough to cut through steel. And its horrifying mandible was malformed with monstrous fangs, capable of effortlessly tearing flesh from the bone. Its two hideous eyes were beady and red and glowed in the dark.
The legend young Jaden and Kyle had understood about the mansion next door was that it once housed a worldly biologist who was dedicated to researching rare, exotic creatures and pursued Earth’s last remaining undiscovered species. The well-meaning scientist, at the height of his academic authority, traveled to far-flung antipodes like Swobtana or Golmonia, and it was on one such trip the biologist captured and extradited the fledgling Walligasp. He consigned the slippery organism to a large terrarium in his home laboratory for extensive analysis, but the innocent scientist haplessly confused the fascinating specimen as fully-grown, instead of the mere hatchling it was. The beast’s mucoid body then grew in size prodigiously, stretching to revolting and horrendous proportions. It transmogrified to be far too large for any trifling terrarium to confine. Before long (the imaginative boys told each other with solemn agreement) the vicious Walligasp turned on its master, and gobbled the poor scientist up. Its awful talons tore the man’s body limb from limb, and its pulverizing jaws ground his bones to scratch.
After the monster’s fateful slaughter of its pedagogical warden it was free from its constraints. But: the Walligasp was clever. It understood that the world outside was man’s domain, and its vulnerability to forceful recapture was all the greater the more it made itself seen. And so the blood-thirsty giant remained in the dismal house, lurking in the shadows and cunningly biding its time. The Walligasp was a man-eater, through and through, and it henceforth subsisted on the delicious meat of wayfaring boys who’d lost their way home after dark.
To conclude the retellings of the Walligasp’s lore, Kyle would abruptly switch off his flashlight and let the haunting whisper of summer breeze through an open window serve as a chilling coda for the frightful tale. Jaden had spent nights as a youth laying awake in the dark, unable to sleep for fear of the horrible monster that dwelled next door. Jaden was absolutely sure the Walligasp was patiently waiting for the moment his eyes closed to make its carnivorous ambush. And when he did sleep, Jaden was plagued by endless nightmares of the horrid beast. He envisioned himself helplessly trapped in its mighty claws and subjected to the terror of being eaten alive. Jaden would awake screaming, cold with sweat, still agitating his hands in front of his face in desperate attempt to escape the beast’s deathly grip.
Jaden’s parents routinely chided the boys for getting themselves so riled up with their fanciful tales of terror and imaginary heroics. But when it came to the story of the Walligasp, his parents weren’t entirely persuasive with their assurances that the story was simply juvenile confabulation. There was a small, almost imperceptible lilt in their voices, a gravid caesura that belied their insistence that there was nothing of which to be afraid. Even as a boy, Jaden could tell there was something about the Walligasp that even grown-ups found difficult to fully dismiss. Or escape.
The quaint coloration of childhood thrill was adorable to consider from the perch of adulthood. Life as a boy in a small town was simple and bucolic. Especially now, as a parent, Jaden treasured the evanescent youth he recognized in Joshua. He wanted his son to be a boy while he could, and to fend off the cold realities of the world in which they lived for as long as possible. America was full of injustice and cruelty, and Joshua would inevitably learn the daily tedium of working for a living and the weary thanklessness of common existence. Joshua would eventually have his own bills to pay and his own trials and failures, just like everyone else. But for now, Jaden wanted his boy to daydream and delight. He wanted him to go on whimsical adventures and imagine terrible monsters in haunted houses. The real world would catch up with him sooner or later, so he should play and be free while he could. Everyone grows up too fast. One day Joshua would probably be meeting with lawyers and bankers, tending to the same jejune tasks to which Jaden dedicated himself now. He could foresee his son as a grown man, years in the future, administering his own duty in function of his father’s funeral.
Jaden unlocked the door to the home of his youth and stepped inside. The house was eerily quiet and tenebrous with the shadows of late afternoon. He was soberly heartbroken to see his father’s personal effects on the sideboard by the door, right where he had left them. There were the keys to his truck and his leathern billfold. The kitchen table still held the day’s mail, splayed by his father’s favorite chair, unopened. There were limes in a bowl on the counter by the stove, tinged ever so slightly with nascent splotches of putrefacient brown.
Jaden took care to lock all the windows and secure the outer doors. He made sure the electricity was turned off and the pipes were drained. He tossed out the leftover food from the refrigerator and sealed the basement bulkhead. Every time he turned a corner in the old house his mind was stimulated by echoing memories from yesteryear. The burn mark on the counter where, as a teen, he’d placed a hot pan. The cabinet near the sink which never closed all the way. The spot where he’d always sat and done schoolwork. The marks on the stairs he routinely sidestepped. The light in the hall his mother would turn off last at bedtime. He could hear his father’s voice and he could see his mother’s smile. The parade of remembrance while Jaden occupied the home was inescapable and deeply affecting. The sting of what was lost was grievous and inexorable.
Jaden couldn’t bear to sleep in the main bedroom upstairs, where his parents had dwelled. And his boyhood bedroom had long since been converted into an office and storage room. So he went to the linen closet to find clean sheets and a blanket that would fit the living room couch. His roller bag was stationed by the door and his early flight would necessitate a minimum of dilly-dally in the morning. Tomorrow was the first day of the month, and he had a schedule to keep.
He called Ariel to ask how everything was going back home. She didn’t answer and replied with a text instead. “Sry can’t talk – taking J to practice and were 5 min late”
Jaden was getting hungry so he picked up the phone and ordered a pizza.
The soporific combination of a belly full of pizza and a house with no lights on conspired to make Jaden eager for some sleep. He still felt a boyish disquietude from the slow darkling of autumn’s gloaming in small-town Michigan. The branches of the oak outside the window looked gnarled and disfigured. The noiselessness of the village seemed eerie and foreboding. The saturnine rise of the crescent moon felt ominous and dire. Jaden found himself staring at the house next door and his curiosity was piqued. Who owned the property? And why was it perpetually uninhabited? More importantly, how much was it worth? Jaden anticipated listing his parents’ house on the market once the title was amended in the trust. Surely the value of the house next door would have some bearing on what his property would fetch from prospective buyers. He typed in the address for the neighboring house and called up its publicly available history of ownership.
Remarkably, the home had not changed hands in recent years, going as far back as the online aggregator had records to supply. And no name was listed as the proprietor for the lot (though that was a common discretion for an online real estate compiler). The only information Jaden was able to find was the official landmark designation bestowed upon the house by the historical society. There was a link to an old, digitized microfiche with a headline about a “disappearance,” but the article itself was hidden behind a paywall, and Jaden wasn’t that curious about it.
As he gazed absent-mindedly through the living room window at the lurking mansion next door, Jaden noticed a tiny, but unmistakable light. When he had observed the house in the light of day he thought all the curtains in the windows were closed shut. But now he descried one window on the ground floor with a slender lacuna between the blinds. Jaden thought to himself, obviously whoever owns the house is keeping the electricity on. He could see, through the gap in the curtains, a small red light, like the cathode of an AM radio. Or perhaps it was a charger, or the pilot light on an appliance. And it had a twin, another beady pinprick of red light next to the first. It could be a thermostat or a motion alarm, Jaden reasoned. He squinted in the gloom to see it more clearly, but the strain on his eyes was irksome and he rubbed his temples with his palms to alleviate the tensity of seeing in the dark. When he took his hands away again he couldn’t even see the lights anymore, and it actually looked like the curtains were closed.
He texted Ariel to ask if she and Joshua were back home yet, and waited for a response. But none came.
Just then he heard a guttural bang and a resonant thud. Oh no, Jaden thought to himself. He could have sworn the water heater was turned off and emptied, but now he wasn’t sure. It was a plangent sound that shook the walls, like the noise of the house’s superannuated plumbing coming to life. Jaden used the flashlight on his phone to see his way to the basement stairs and inspect the status of the plumbing below.
His examination of the water heater confirmed what he had determined earlier in the day: the pump was off and the pipes were dry. He scratched his head and checked the furnace, considering the sound could possibly have been the heating vents activating. But no, the furnace was similarly decommissioned and Jaden determined that nothing in the basement could have been the source of the noise. The last thing he wanted to deal with was water damage from a frozen or leaky pipe. And he did not relish the prospect of delinquent heating bills for a furnace that was inadequately deactivated. But his reevaluation of the innards of the house was satisfactory and he felt assured that all was as it should be. He wondered at what the clamor had been, but it was probably just a large truck that went by, or an inattentive motorist went over a curb.
Before Jaden returned up the stairs he caught a glimpse of something through the small basement window that looked out on the lawn. From his subterranean vantage point, the grass was at eye-level and the yard was dark through the glass of the pane. However, he could see the discarded soccer ball laying on the sod. It was severely deflated, owing to a puncture in the material of the sphere. Jaden could barely see in the darkness, but the soccer ball had a long, slender gash running down one side. It was shorn through thoroughly, from the casing to the inner bladder. The damage appeared to have been made decisively, in one sharp cleave. Whatever tool had come into contact with the ball must have been extremely sharp, like a sickle, or a claw.
Jaden was mildly perplexed once again. He had taken especial notice of the ball earlier in the day upon his arrival at the house. It looked to him at the time to be nearly new, and certainly undamaged. The answers to life’s microscopic mysteries were an endless curiosity and, as everyone knows, a man could lose his mind trying to determine the minute nature of all things. Where do unaccounted items come from or go? What is the source of a noise far away? Why does the air smell like reptilian mucus? Sometimes there’s simply no way of knowing.
Jaden returned to the living room and prepared to get some sleep. He used bottled water to perform his ablutions and, once his teeth were brushed, he cozied up under the blanket on the couch and lay his head on the pillow. The creeping silence of the house then crowded in on Jaden uninvited. His grief at the loss of his father converted into a heartbroken sympathy for the terrible experience he must have endured in his final moments. The man’s wife, and mother of his child, had just died two years prior; he was learning to move on with his life and live by himself; he was old and weakened by inferior health; and he endured all that only to clutch his chest one night and experience the same agonizing fate that had befallen his wife. The coroner told Jaden that the end had been mercifully swift for his father, but he also described the look of horror that was frozen on his face. And why shouldn’t the man have been scared? Jaden presumed his father had seen his life flash before his eyes in his final moments. The same was probably true for his mother. She had also been painted with an expression of terror when she died. Heart attacks were a tragic business, and Jaden considered the gods to be cruel for taking away both his parents in such devastating fashion.
The dread with which his parents must have been consumed, both of them, at the very end was awful and unfair. Jaden was not easily frightened, but he knew what pure fear felt like. He’d been in a disastrous car accident years back and in the split second when it happened he was mortified to his core. And when he was a younger man he’d gone bungee jumping on a lark, and he‘d been similarly petrified. He didn’t like to see death staring him right in the face. Jaden was of the opinion that death, if the world had any justice at all, was best delivered in the placidity of sleep, in the calm hours of night. He was loathe to imagine the internal desperation of feeling one’s heart abruptly turn off. He could only guess how panic and fright must shatter the mind when the end of life is within arm’s reach. He could see his father’s terror-stricken face, his mother’s too. It was awful.
There was that frumious noise again. Jaden tensed up. What could it be? He heard the distinctive rasp of nasal panting, and realized that it was his own hyperventilation. He tried to calm his nerves. Maybe junk food for dinner had been unwise. He could feel the grease from the pizza clogging his arteries. Or maybe it was the jet lag that had him on edge. What had ever happened to his friend Kyle anyway? Where was he now? Jaden’s teeth were chattering and they sounded like the clacks of ungues on tile. The coarse fiber of the blanket on the couch felt like bristled scales. Jaden’s brow was damp with trickling beads of cold sweat. He drew his feet closer, under the covers, and tightly curled up into a shivering ball. It was so horribly dark now he couldn’t see anything around him. He thought he’d locked the door. But had he locked the door? He could feel the air around him now. The house was full of a pernicious miasma, the blood-curdling stench of death. Jaden’s bosom was heaving up and down, his head was pounding and spinning. His unseeing eyes were peeled wide open. His hands were shaking beyond control. He could feel the mortal heart in his chest beating harder and harder and faster and faster.