The Condemned House at the end of the Road
An allegory of navigating hard truths and unfamiliar places
I don’t know how long I had been in the room. Seemed like forever. I used to believe that I came from this place but in truth, I had been sent here a long time ago. I used to believe that I came from this dark place but I remember the meadow, the sun, the picnic table, and the others around.
I have a small flashlight, it shows me small decrepit detail throughout the room but there is no other light. I can hear the howling wind outside the window, the tree branches scraping against the window glass panes, or so I tell myself because the alternative of a monster outside my window is too terrifying to consider, particularly since the inside of the house doesn’t seem safer. Every time I approach the door to leave the room, I hear the loud pounding on the door and shouting from the other side, like there are 20 people in the hall waiting and they don’t seem safe.
I try to seek refuge in the closet but every time I touch the rusted pull knob, I hear a loud animalistic noise. Like the danger inherent to a jaguar’s roar and the boom of an elephant. I retreat to the bed and throw the covers over my head and go back to sleep; the noises stop immediately and I dare not elicit them again.
But not today. I peer out the window and behold a light, it’s a full moon. The wind is still and the branches of the tree sway gently with the promise of leaves appearing, nodules signaling to my mind that they require care. I try the bedroom door and I am immediately greeted with the sound of the throng. I reach for the closet door and pry it open with fervor. Sitting on the floor of the closet is a child, no more than ten years of age. They look at me with inquiring eyes and I ask, “Why are you making those sounds?!” The child quietly replies, “It wasn’t me, it was the doors.”
I extend my arms, instinctively to give protection. The child feels familiar to me but I’m not sure why. They seem to need me. The child climbs into my arms, shivering. It is quite cold here in the room. And the noises are growing in volume and intensity; the closet doors now howling, shrieking, and roaring. The throng outside the bedroom door is growing louder and louder.
The child looks to me with insistent eyes and says, “Open the door.” I tremble, “I am scared.” “Are you scared of the sound, or the threat behind the door?” At this point, I’m not sure. “We’ve never seen anyone behind the door. I don’t think they’re really there.” With determination, I steal myself, place my hand on the bent door handle and rotate it ninety degrees to the axis. With a total crescendo, all sounds cease.
The closet has quieted and the throng outside the door seems to have vanished. I pry open the ancient door and reservedly scrutinize the hallway, assessing for sources of danger. Little did we know, there HAD been a throng. The hallway was littered with the bodies of the departed. They look asleep. The child unreservedly checks each body, and when rigor has been confirmed, kisses each on the forehead, each evaporating into the heavens. The walls and fixtures which seemed to be decaying began to transform. Inch by inch, I observe as the path we have walked is slowly converted to what amounts to a rather average suburban home, at least as far we can tell from the hallway and the bedroom prison.
The child and I continue down the hall to a flight of stairs, which upon our descent take us to the main level. I had not remembered the main floor. I always thought that I was close to the main floor, despite the evidence of the tree branches upon the window.
As we continue through the main floor, we both take note of the walls, which seem to be heaving in and out, seemingly constructed with a celluloid material, rubbery and cold, like gelatin. The ceiling rises and falls in response to the walls almost percussing the top of my head. As we run our hands upon the walls, they solidify. We trace the curves of the wood grain along the wall, giving ourselves reassurance that the house will indeed stand.
The main floor is considerably larger than one would anticipate. While we still hear the terrifying sounds in the distance, they grow quieter and quieter until they hush completely. After a few hours, the child states they need to rest, and indeed so do I. We sit on the floor to catch our breath and consider our predicament.
There’s no way that this house can take two hours to cross. I slowly crawl perpendicular from our original direction toward a wall. I reach the corner and feel for the intersection of the floor and the wall. The floor was moving like a conveyor belt, pulling us back toward the inside of the house. In desperation, I jump to my feet and run back to the child to find two creatures closing in on our position. I clutch the child in my arms.
They are the Jikininki and Dybbuk. Both close in on our position snarling, breathing loudly, scraping their postmortem nail growth across the newly healed floors. In Japanese mythology, the Jikininki, translated as a human-eating ghost, is a person filled with greed in life, cursed to consume human flesh for eternity in death. The Dybbuk is far more terrifying to us both. The child tugs on my sleeve, crying and shaking, and says, “It wants inside me.” The Dybbuk wishes to inhabit the child as Dybbuks long to do, as it is a disembodied human spirit that seeks to deal evil through a living host.
We close our eyes tightly nestled together, as I will not permit the child to suffer the dangers of the monsters. At that moment, where seemingly any chance of escape had faded, a loud boom comes from the front of the house. The door has exploded into shrapnel, somehow missing me and the child, perforating the evil entities threatening our safety.
We can now see it. From blinding pure light, enter three beings of the divine. A man and two women, adorned with unadulterated white robes with a cast of glowing light around their faces, seem to hover over to our spot in the room. Their faces are colored with concern, care, and are familiar to me. The child runs to the older woman and asks, “Are they really gone?” She replies, “They were never really here.” The child, confused inquires, “So they were just in my head, from my imagination. They weren’t real?” The woman, with a kindly expression and a gentle sweeping gesture, reassures the child, “If they were in your head, then they were real because of your fear of them.”
“But I’ve never seen them before.” The older woman looks to me, crestfallen, and says, “YOU know them. Why did you create them?” Struggling to breathe, and no longer withholding I lament, “I was scared of leaving the house! I haven’t been in the good place in a long time. I didn’t feel like I deserved to leave!” She leans down, cradling my chin in her left hand, my left hand in her right hand, and she says, “But why? There must be a reason?”
I stare into her eyes and feel my eyes strain to bear witness to the truth. “Because the house was a gift from my parents! If I abandon it, they will think I don’t love them!” The second, younger woman and man come forward to hold my back and support me while seated on the floor, I look into their eyes, their expression telling me to hold on. I look to the child with tears in my eyes, and sobbing declares, “I am so sorry. I should have kept you safe.” The child’s small hand reaches to mine and they reply, “You got us this far. I will speak for your heart now.” The child looks to the three and commands, “If we cannot remove them from the house, let’s remove the house from them.
All the work I had done trying to make the house a place to live when all along I should have considered simply leaving. I hadn’t done a great job fixing the house either. The rust, the peeling walls, the overgrown tree scraping the window, and finally the evil I let in had ruined the home. It wasn’t a failure to help the house be good, it was futile because the house was committed to evil. I ran back up the stairs to find the transformed hall and bedroom had reverted to their original condition.
The bedroom door slammed shut, the yelling and pounding on the door resuming, the closet door emitting its horrifying sounds. Suddenly, in another brilliant flash of pure white light, I found my feet firmly planted on the ground outside but somewhere far away from where I had been. I was back at the meadow, the sun creating a swift sunset, colored of pink, purple, red, orange, yellow, and blue. I saw the picnic table, the child, and three people seated around the table.
The corpses of the dark creatures burning in a bonfire in the distance quickly snapped me out of my confused state. “You must never return to that place, dear one for you are a citizen of this land. That house is now condemned and will be destroyed for the danger it poses to you,” the older woman gently declared. “You must live here, and be whole and happy and quiet for a time, then you may build a home here, with them.”
I look to the child and the people sitting at the picnic table playing games and eating snacks, the child laughing at knock-knock jokes, the man and woman smiling at each other, then back at me beaming with hope and pride. I felt the color and air returning to my face. I was transformed by the journey.
For some years now, I have dwelled in the house with the child. Playing, creating, talking about hurt feelings, and helping when the nightmare starts to feel too close again.
The house is ours; it is familiar and will stand for some time. The divine ones visit from time to time but they know that the hardest part will not be finished. So they stay for the day when their good work has been accomplished, the redemption of the horror that transpired is complete so that this house will care for many to come until the end of days.
