February 21, 2015, was the twentieth anniversary of the death of my brother, Jeffrey Thomas Benjamin Marcus. The following true story is dedicated to him, and it is one of many adventures in which he included me, and that I’ve never forgotten.
My brother Jeffrey and I used to walk to Del Mar Elementary School, and later to Portola Junior High School, both about one mile from our California home, although they seemed much farther away when I was a kid. I walked in a straight line, occasionally hopping onto a wall that I could balance on until it ended or got too narrow. Then back to my neat walk, serious little girl that I was.
Jeffrey did everything but walk, and instead danced, sauntered, and boogalooed, as he swung a huge wad of pink Bazooka Bubble Gum made from several pieces that he’d stuffed into his mouth. He’d pull on it, then stretch it out at least three feet, and then holding one end of it, swirl it around like a baton. With his flexible whirling pink baton, he cavorted and moved to a beat that only he heard. But it was loud, and he kept dancing. I remember some kid in a book who stuffed his unfinished gum behind his ear for safekeeping. It wouldn’t have surprised me had I noticed a wad stored there for later behind Jeffrey’s brown curls.
On that road which curved and sloped down to the back entrance of Del Mar School, perfumed by eucalyptus and oleander, there sat an abandoned house. We didn’t go into it more than once, yet fifty years later, I have a permanent memory of something eerie and exciting, something disturbing that drew us to it.
The house was never boarded up or torn down. Instead, it was left to sulk in its sordid mood, year after year, out of place, taunting the surrounding middle class houses, their neat gardens, mowed lawns and trimmed rosebushes. The house breathed and heaved, and its unlocked front door beckoned us to open it and peer into a room where torn curtains still hung, mottled with pond-green mildew. They blew back and forth on windy days, and when there was no wind, they still seemed to billow slightly as we went past. The glass panes were shattered, and a few jagged edges sparkled in the light.
We entered and walked downstairs, Jeff still lost in his dance, and I, terrified. But I followed him anyway with a couple of other kids. I saw the curtains, I saw them moving in the wind, and I stared at the dim staircase to the lower floor. And I remember, like an apparition, the most unnatural thing about the house: a single bed with a neatly tucked in white bed spread in the middle of what must have once been a bedroom. The bedspread had a whisper of pale green mildew that looked like what crept up our shower wall no matter how much bleach my mother scrubbed it with. The only piece of furniture left in the house, the bed still reclined on the hardwood floor, as if waiting for us to lie down on it.
Tarnished Canadian pennies, pennies we knew from having spent them in our hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia, were scattered next to the bed, their maple leaf designs curling up toward us like tiny hands. I heard little voices chant to me: “Touch us, take us, take us from here! Touch us, take us, take us from here!”
What most frightened me was the jagged hole in the wooden floor next to the bed, through which I could see dirt unevenly piled in a mound. At first, it smelled like a clean dirt smell, but it was mixed with something unidentifiable.
I reached down for one of the Canadian pennies. I couldn’t leave such an unexpected and attractively uncanny treasure, behind. But at that moment Jeffrey screamed something about someone coming, some shadow that we never saw, some sickening presence. I never saw him, but I knew that it had to be a bad man, a bad man in dark clothing, big overalls, with a stale smell–nothing like my daddy and his suits and ties and his daily smell of Old Spice that I loved so much–big shoulders, slightly bent forward, an angry man with a haggard scowl carved into his face.
We all screamed, and by then Jeff had flung aside his Bazooka Bubble Gum and was fleeing out the door of that evil house. And I had never run so hard in my life until that moment. Something about sheer terror turns you into the fastest runner on the block.
mmlifelines 