Driving Felicity to the airport in Atlanta at the end of her visit almost saved her. Almost. She remembered thinking that — remembered the hard and beautiful reality of Interstate 285 with its multiple lanes of frantic traffic, the billboards and the chain restaurants and the warehouses and the mundanity of it all. At Hartsfield, the busiest airport in the world, she stood in line at the check-in counter with Felicity and thought about sleek planes bearing her away to someplace, any other place, a place that was safe and faraway, and then she saw Felicity through the security gate. Afterward, she sat in the atrium in the main terminal for a while and chewed on a pesto chicken panini from the Atlanta Bread Company and thought about what to do next.
In the end, it was all too overwhelming: where would I go how would I explain to people what would happen to me my job my life my belongings I don’t know any other way.
And she got in her car and she drove back home again.
Chris’s death had branded her as much as the Ouroboros symbol ever would.
So now she wakes to the silence of infinity. She has a singular thought, to leave the house, and it is so strong she wonders that she has not thought it before. She has been sleeping in a T-shirt and a pair of yoga pants (she used to take yoga, long ago when she also used to be a real person); to change, to even find her shoes would delay her disastrously, and her feet hit the floor with a thump and she is running down the stairs; she half expects the corridor to stretch out forever before her like a horror movie or a dream but the corridor is normal and the door springs open to her touch and outside the stars are reeling and she gasps lungfuls of air that are not house-air and she is free; it is so easy, she need only not go back inside again. She doesn’t have her keys (no time) so she cannot take the car, but she can run now, up the street, she can run forever if she has to, because even the simple act of breathing and running is an act of living and not one of extinction.
But here is nothing but silence. A dead, dark street, familiar houses blank and empty, no sound of traffic from the busy street a block away. No dogs barking, no sirens, nothing.
She will run back into the house and reset it; this time it will work.
Back inside the house. Deep breaths on the house side of the front door, and how has she not noticed the corrupted air, the choking rot and decay? Again she opens the door; again she steps outside; again and again and again and again and she never imagined eternity like this, isolated even from her fellow ghosts, an infinity of repeating the same futile action again and again until time itself does die.
It is Athens’s very own urban legend, one of short duration and dubious provenance, a tale of a woman who disappeared not only from her own life but from the lives of all of us. There is no record of her employment as an adjunct instructor at the university, though a few former students claim to recall taking her class. Chris Crane lived and died alone in the house on Cobb Street, although many insist this was not the case; some say his wife stayed there after his death, the wife in whom no one can quite believe or disbelieve in any longer. Some say it was she who was haunted, not the house, and she brought the haunting to all of us. Some say memory is forever shifting, never reliable; we take it on faith that we have lived all the days of our lives up to this moment.
But the handful of students who claim to remember Vivian Crane all produce the same account of the last day she turned up to class.
“She was going on and on about a snake eating itself, about time turning itself inside out and what would happen if you got caught in something like that, and where would something like that come from — God or another human being or just a natural force in the universe. And then she showed us this weird tattoo of the snake on the palm of her hand,” says one young woman, who asked only to be identified by her first name, Kiersten. “And she said, ‘What would it be like if reality had to constantly readjust itself in order to make things fit — what would it be like for the ones left behind?’”
This story is roughly the same as that told by two other individuals, both of whom asked not to be named or quoted at all. A fourth former student, who recounted a similar tale (with a few variations), has since recanted and asked not to be contacted again. When I attempted to follow up with the others, I was unable to find anything about them. I did contact the recanted student despite his request, but he would not speak with me and indeed purported not to know me.
And so it goes: the mystery appears to be solving itself by scrubbing out its own traces until there will be no mystery left at all.
But Chris Crane was a friend of mine; we grew up together, we went to college together, we did stupid things together, and had he gone away for seventeen years and come back with a wife, surely I would be one of the first to know about it?
She cycled home from campus that day as fast as she could, like she was outrunning something, even though she knew whatever it was could never be outpaced. She thought briefly of taking refuge in a church on the way; she had not believed in so very long that she was surprised at the tiny seed of comfort that began to unfurl deep in her chest when she thought it, but the only church she passed was the Southern Baptist one with the all-trespassers-will-be-towed sign in their parking lot and a dubious reputation with the progressive neighborhood in which it sat, and she imagined its doors would be locked literally, no need for the figurative.
She rode as fast as she could but it is not possible to ride fast enough when infinity itself is at your heels.
A small assortment of reporters and curiosity-seekers were on hand today for the planned demolition of the house at the center of what has come to be known as the Cobb Street Horror. The house had, in recent months, following the disappearance of Vivian Crane, become a major nuisance for law enforcement and neighbors, as several self-styled “urban explorers” broke in to photograph the bizarre signs and symbols — purportedly left on the walls by Ms. Crane — and a series of mounting disturbances were reported in the vicinity. Said disturbances included the sound of a woman screaming, day and night; the sight of several little girls running from the front of the house; and a figure whom no witness could adequately or consistently describe in terms of sex, age, or appearance crawling about the perimeter of the house.
Although the “urban explorers” spoke of signs and glyphs and drawings of the now-famous Ouroboros throughout the house, none of them ever produced any identifiable photograph from inside. A number of photography methods were experimented with, from top-of-the-line digital technology to old 35mm film and even a Polaroid at one stage, but neither the least nor the most sophisticated technologies produced any images. Save for one. One resourceful young woman went so far as to construct a “pinhole” camera out of a cardboard box, and with that captured a single image: in a low right-hand corner near the front door, written in very small letters with a ballpoint pen (as the woman described it), were the words “This house erases people.”
Paranormal investigators assert that the existence of this photograph supports the idea that Vivian Crane herself was trying urgently to convey something important to those who read it; if so, however, it was that one time only, for while others who entered the house reported seeing the graffiti, no one else was able to reproduce the pinhole camera’s photograph, not even the photographer herself.