“Will we be home soon?” says the boy.
“I hope so,” Croft replies. “We should be, if a bus comes quickly.”
He does not look back.
THE HOUSE ON COBB STREET
Lynda E. Rucker
Concerning the affair of the house on Cobb Street, much ink has been spilled, most notably from the pens of Rupert Young in the busy offices of the Athens Courier; Maude Witcover at the alternative weekly Chronictown; and independent scholar, poet, and local roustabout Perry “Pear Tree” Parry Jr. on his blog Under the Pear Tree. Indeed, the ink (or in the case of Parry, the electrons) — and those from whose pens (or keyboards) it spilled — are all that remain today of the incidents that came to be known locally (and colloquially) as the Cobb Street Horror. The house itself was razed, its lot now surrounded by a high fence bearing a sign that announces the construction presumably in progress behind it as the future offices of Drs. Laura Gonzales and Didi Mueller, DDS. The principal witnesses in this case did not respond to repeated enquiries, and in one case, obtained a restraining order against this author. And the young woman in question is said by all to have disappeared, if indeed she ever existed in the first place.
I wanted to embed the YouTube video here, but it looks like it’s been removed. It was uploaded by someone bearing the handle “cravencrane” who has no other activity on the site. Shot in low quality, perhaps with someone’s cell phone, it showed a red-haired woman in a gray wool coat — presumably Felicia Barrow — not quite running, but walking away from the lens rapidly and talking over her shoulder as she went. “Of course Vivian existed,” she said. “Of course she did. She was my friend. That hack would print anything to make his story sound more mysterious than it was. Roger St. Lindsay, that’s not even his real name.” And then she was out of the frame entirely, and the clip ended.
The snippet purported to be part of a documentary in progress known as The Disappearance of Vivian Crane, but little else has been found about its origins, its current status, or the people behind it, and it is assumed that the project is currently dead. Felicia Barrow was located but had no comment about either the project or the fate of the Cranes.
Vivian wakes.
It is a night like any other night and not like any night she has known at all.
The heart of the house is beating. She can hear it, vessels in the walls, the walls that exhale with that life’s breath that is just as sweet to the house’s groaning floorboards and arched doorways and soaring cupolas as her own breath is to her; she can hear it, heart beating and moaning and sighing and “settling.” That was what her mother used to call it, in the other old house they lived in way back when, her a skinny wild girl; and maybe “settling” was the right word for what that old house did, that old house that was never alive, never had a pulse and a mind and — most of all — a desire, but “settling” was the least of what this old house did. Vivian knows that if she doesn’t know anything else at all.
This old house is not settling for anything. This old house is maybe waiting, and possibly thinking, and could be sleeping, even, but never settling.
This house is getting ready for something.
She can feel that like she can feel the other things. She has watched cats before, how they crouch to pounce, their muscles taut, rippling under the skin it’s said, and she thinks it now about the house — even though it’s a cliché (phrases become clichés because they’re true, she tells her students) — this house is doing it, tense and expectant, counting time, ticking off years and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes and seconds and fragments of seconds and fragments of fragments and soon time itself degrades, disintegrates, and dies.
And then the alarm is screaming, and Vivian wakes for real.
Waking for real had become an important benchmark, and sometimes it took as many as several hours for her to be certain she had done so. She would be standing up in front of a class of freshmen who exuded boredom and eagerness in equal parts, talking about narrative point of view in “A Rose for Emily,” and the knowledge would grip her: I am here, this is real, I am awake. And then she would drift, like one of the sunlight motes in the bright windows, and the class would wait — their professor was weird, a lot of professors were weird, I’m still wasted from last night, can I borrow your ID, did you hear, did you, did you—and the dull cacophony of their voices, familiar and banal, would bring her back, but past that point she could never bring them back, and often as not had to dismiss the class to save herself the humiliation of trying and failing to reengage them.
That the house was haunted was a given. To recite the reasons she had known this to be the case from the moment she crossed the threshold was almost an exercise in tedium: there were the cold spots, the doors that slammed when no breeze had pushed them, the footsteps that paced in the rooms upstairs when she knew she was at home alone. But Chris had been so pleased, so happy to be moving back home. He’d found the house for sale and fallen in love with it, shabby as it was, battered by decades of student renters and badly in need of much repair and renovation but a diamond in the rough, he was sure, and how was she to tell him otherwise? It wasn’t just that neither of them believed in such things; that was the least of it. But to suggest that the house was less than perfect in any way was to reject it, and, by extension, him.
Chris, as it turned out, had noticed those things as well.
Authorities have ruled the death of thirty-eight-year-old Christopher Crane a suicide, resulting from a single gunshot wound to the head.
Crane shot himself at approximately two a.m. on Thursday, July 22, in the backyard of the house on Cobb Street in West Athens that he shared with his wife, Vivian Crane.
According to Chief Deputy Coroner Wayne Evans, investigators discovered a note of “mostly incomprehensible gibberish” that is believed to be Crane’s suicide note.
Crane was born and raised in Athens and had recently returned to Georgia after seventeen years in the Seattle area.…
–“Crane Death Ruled Suicide,” by Rupert Young, Athens Courier, July 29, 2008
When you watched those movies or read those books—The Amityville Horror had been her particular childhood go-to scarefest — what you always asked yourself, of course, was why don’t they leave? Why would anyone stay in places where terrifying apparitions leapt out at you, where walls dripped blood, where no one slept any longer and the rational world slowly receded and the unthinkable became real?
Countless storytellers worked themselves into contortions and employed ludicrous plot contrivances to keep their protagonists captive, and yet the answer, Vivian learned, was so much simpler: You stayed because you gave up. You succumbed to a kind of learned helplessness that convinced you that the veil between worlds had been pulled back and you could not escape; wherever you went, you would always be haunted.
You entered into an abusive relationship with a haunted house.