seen

When I was very young we lived in a small house in an older part of town.  All the houses around were small, with small yards, and some had a porch kind of on the side.  There wasn't much traffic on our street so us kids could play in all our yards at once pretty much, and out in the street too.  It was like a big playground.  Two blocks down the street from my house was a perfectly square, red one with an open porch.  Most of the porches had screens to keep the bugs out when people were on them during the summer, but that house didn't have anything.  There weren't any chairs or a swing on that porch either, although sometimes I saw a woman pacing slowly back and forth when I would walk by on my way to the library, or the drug store where they sold old fashioned sodas.  I never paid too much attention, even though some of my friends said there was a crazy man living there.  I never saw a man around the house.  Just the neighbor who mowed the lawn, but he was a high school kid.  The house wasn't run down or anything, and the outside light went on and off like everyone else's, but I never saw any lights on inside the house.  Somebody shoveled the walk in the winter too.

One day towards the end of the school year - I must have been in about 1st grade - we got a lecture in class about being friendly.  So that afternoon when I passed the house on my walk home and saw the woman pacing the porch, I called out, "Hello!" and waved my little hand.  The woman stopped and frowned a little, looking more perplexed than upset, but she didn't look at me.  After a second or two she went back to her measured walk back and forth across the porch.  She hadn't even lifted her gaze from the floor.  A little flustered and embarrassed by the failure of my first attempt at excessive sociability, I just kept walking towards home.  I didn't say anything about it to anyone, at first out of lingering embarrassment, and then because it was such a small incident that I just forgot about it.

A week or so later I was walking by with a friend on our way to buy sodas and I decided to try my luck again for some reason.  I kept my eye out for the woman, but didn't see her as we passed the first time.  Then, coming back with our desired bottles in hand, I thought I saw her silhouette going around the corner of the house.  On impulse I yelled out another greeting and my friend gave me a weirded-out look.
"What are you yelling at the haunted house for?" she asked me, "My sister told me there's a family of vampires there and if you go ring the bell, they'll come for you that night when you're in bed."
I rolled my eyes saying, "So now there's vampires living there?  What happened to the crazy guy?"
"Well, that's easy," my friend replied confidently, "The vampires killed him when they moved in.  They sucked his blood and now they're crazy too."  We made up a bunch of 6-year-old's jokes about mentally ill vampires all the way to her house and then got absorbed in Scooby Doo.  Once again, the house and the strange woman on the porch were forgotten.

As summer vacation began, my friends and I took to catching lightning bugs after supper, filling jars with little globs of intermittent light.  It was a weekend night, when parents were laxer about calling us in for baths and bed, even though school was out.  For some reason, the bugs had congregated a few blocks away from my yard and we congregated too, all the kids running over to Donohue's front yard.  Finally, we released our captives and split up to return to our own houses.  I had to walk passed that house, totally dark by now.  Earlier the outside light had been on, but now everything was deep, dark shadow.  It was looking a little rough around the edges at that time, since the boy who took care of the lawn was apparently busy with other things.  The grass had grown long and shaggy over a couple of weeks.  It looked more than ever like an empty house, or one occupied by some lunatic, or even a monster.  A couple of friends were walking with me, Silvie and Emma.  Silvie smacked my shoulder and said, "Bet you won't ring the doorbell."
"Why would I anyway?  There's nobody home."
"The crazy guy never leaves.  He's afraid to turn on the lights."
"Why would he be afraid of the light?  Aren't you supposed to be afraid of the dark?"
"Yeah, but he's crazy."  Stunning grade school logic.
"Come on, you guys," whined Emma, "I don't like that house.  Let's just go!"
"You're such a baby!" snapped Silvie, and then she turned back to me.  "Well?  Are you going or not?"
"Why should I go?  Why don't you?"
Silvie turned as if to keep walking down the street to her house, shrugging her shoulders, and she said airily, "Oh, I would go, but I dared you first."
"So what!  That doesn't mean you can't go first!"
"I dared you and you aren't going.  Chicken."
"Am not!"
"Are so." She was speaking so calmly, in that infuriating kind of sing-song that kids use when they're goading somebody.  I didn't actually think it was such a bad thing to be a chicken about some things, but her tone was really pissing me off.
"I'll show you who's a chicken," I muttered as I stomped up the sidewalk.  As I got closer, though, my resolve started to evaporate.  The dark house loomed before me, even with its single story.  The windows gaped at me like huge, empty eye sockets.  My steps got slower and smaller until I was right in front of the steps leading to the door, and I looked up at it timidly.  The wooden steps were worn down, with only a few flakes of white paint left on them and the door frame was in the same condition.  The screen door was tight against the inside door and the screens themselves looked like they were in pretty good shape.  I looked for the doorbell, but didn't see it.  Puzzled, I climbed up the steps for a closer look, thinking maybe the shadows were hiding a black or dirty button.  But, even up close there was no bell or buzzer.  Even the inside door didn't have so much as a knocker.  I was confused and started back down the sidewalk to the street. Silvie was positively gleeful, jumping around and squealing.  "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you went up there!" she shrieked.
"Well, I didn't ring the bell, they didn't have one." I regretted saying it the second the words left my mouth.  Silvie's cool, teasing superiority returned in a heartbeat and she said, "Well, I knew you wouldn't."
"I would have if there's been a bell!  I went all the way up on the porch and you stayed here!  I don't believe you would go up to the steps!"
"But I dared you."
"Well, I'd dare you, but I know you wouldn't even go!  You're the chicken!"

I saw a look of uncertainty flash across Silvie's face and I knew I had won that round.  Her eyes slowly traveled up the sidewalk behind me to the house, and the weight of what she had to do descended on her.
"I don't wanna stay here anymore!  I'm going home!" cried Emma and she ran off.  Her departure didn't save Silvie, though.  I kept staring at her, with my arms folded across my chest.  Little kid logic and honor demanded that she go to the porch at least, or be branded a chicken, a scaredy-cat, or worse for the rest of our school days.  Finally she bit her lower lip and started off up the walk, slowly and with resignation.  I was feeling both smug and afraid for her, but of course I quashed my worry and let the smugness take over.  In fact, my fears decreased with every step she took and I just felt better and better about being the one to put her in her place after all the teasing.  I was feeling gleeful myself when she got to the steps and stopped, looking lost and small in front of the porch.  It was almost unnaturally dark in my memory now, like a living, impenetrable blackness had covered it.  Maybe it wasn't like that in reality, maybe it's just my mind more details in, based on what I know now.  Silvie's hesitation lasted many long seconds and I was growing impatient, about to shout at her to get a move on, but then she lifted her left leg and placed her foot unsteadily on the first step.  She kept her arms at her sides as she climbed, like she didn't want to risk touching any part of the house with her bare skin.  She managed to get up to the door and stood looking all around it like I had done.  I could see her fists clenching and unclenching with nervousness, and I thought her mind must have been racing to find a way to one-up me with no bell and without touching anything.  Finally she turned slowly to her left and stepped carefully down the porch.  Just in front of the window, she turned her head with a jerk, like an automaton.  She was completely still for about a second and then she came tearing back down the sidewalk towards me.  She wasn't sobbing, but tears were streaming down her cheeks and her brow was all knotted up.  She ran right passed me and down the sidewalk towards her house, without even looking at me.  I stared after her, not sure whether to follow her or not, and if I did follow her, could I gloat at her fear or should I be a concerned friend.

I looked back at the dim and vaguely menacing porch, and my heart almost popped right out of my mouth when I saw the woman standing there.  She was looking right at me this time, leaning forward a little on the railing of the porch, right in front of the window Silvie had looked in.  Even though the rest of the porch was too dark to make out much detail, I could see her features perfectly.  She wasn't glowing or anything, it was more like there was a light shining on her, without hitting anything else around her, not even a little.  I was so stunned to see her have appeared out of nowhere like that, I didn't even consider the illumination until much later.  She didn't really have any expression on her face, not angry or laughing at our daring; maybe the best description of what it was is "alert".  She was looking right at me, and I was looking back at her, watching her face get closer and closer.  I was almost at the porch steps before I realized I was moving.  With a start, I tore my gaze from the woman and looked up at the door, stopping dead in my tracks.  I looked back at her timidly.  She was just as emotionless as before.  She turned her head slowly, seeming to gesture towards the window behind her, and I couldn't prevent my feet from climbing those steps one at a time and moving foot by foot closer to the window.  It was like I was hypnotized, or in a bad dream.  I had a vague feeling that I was going to see something horrible, but I couldn't stop moving towards it or cover my eyes.  I came up to the window and looked in.  In spite of the darkness outside on the porch, I could see the outlines of the furniture inside: a couch and chairs with a coffee table in the middle.  Everything looked perfectly normal and undisturbed; I couldn't even tell if the place was covered in dust in the dimness.  Puzzled by Silvie's reaction to the absolute normality, I turned around.  The woman was gone.  Like that, the spell was broken, and the terror of being on the "haunted house" porch exploded in my soul, and I ran.  I guess I ran like Silvie did, with tears but without sobs, and when I burst in the back door of my house and Mom asked what was wrong, my voice didn't shake at all when I told her nothing, I just had something in my eye.

Thankfully, I didn't have any dreams that night, that I remembered.  I went out to play the next morning, like normal, everything about the house the night before feeling like just a fuzzy memory of a weird dream.  I didn't see Silvie for several days.  People said she was sick in bed.  Maybe she was.  When we did see each other finally, neither one of us mentioned anything about the house or what we had seen.

It was about 15 years later and I was home from college for a visit.  The drug store and the sodas were long gone, but I still wandered around the neighborhood resurrecting childhood memories from the houses and trees.  When I got to the "haunted" property, I was shocked to see the house had been demolished right down to its foundation.  I felt a twinge of frustration, like some plan had been foiled, but I really didn't have any plan to do anything if the house had still been there.  I walked home, thinking I would ask my parents what they knew about the fate of the old place.  Just as I got in the door, my mother called from the kitchen, "Oh, Erica, come meet our new neighbor!  She's moving into Schuman's old place, behind us.  Her family used to live around here too."  I went into the kitchen, where the new neighbor was drinking her coffee, and stopped short to see the woman from the porch all those years ago!  She went a little pale too when she saw me.  I managed not to blurt out anything while my mother was there, but as soon as she went out of the room, I was going to ask this woman what the hell she knew.  Soon enough, Mom left for some reason or other, and before I could say a word, the neighbor leaned over the table and said, "Do you have a little sister?"
"Um, no.  Just two brothers."
"I swear I saw some girl who looked just like you at my uncle's house.  But about 5 years old.  She would come up on the porch and just look at the door.  And then she would disappear."
"What?  When was this?"
"A couple of months ago.  It got so creepy, we decided to demolish the house and put up a new one.  I was lucky the house behind yours was for rent, this is such a convenient neighborhood for me."
"But this girl, what did she do that was so creepy?"
"She didn't actually do anything but look and the door and sometimes she would look in the front window.  It was that nobody else saw her that made it creepy.  I haven't seen her since the demo.  I think other people have seen other things, though.  There's a lot of resistance to having anything to do with that property.  All because of some old stories about witches and whatnot.  The men across the street told me he had seen a witch walking around on the porch years before.  It took months to find a crew willing to knock the house down!  Can you believe it?"
Mom came back in at that moment and our conversation was cut short.  I went back to school the next day and spent the night looking for Silvie's contact info online so I could ask her what she had seen when we were very young.