At the turn of the 20th Century, a man set out with his family investing in oil futures in the great state of Kansas. By his own hands he built a house in the plains, a tall, black, box-like structure of ornate Victorian decoration. Some time later, the house passed down to the man's son, and although his intention was always to keep it in the family, he had disappeared, along with all but one of his children. Due to these naturally strange circumstances, the grand black house had passed in and out of ownership, but had mostly lain forgotten both because of its isolation on the Great Plains and superstition regarding the disappearance of most of the family.
The current owner, in actually in name only, was a woman named Julia Mondegreen, who was essentially squatting, because she had no formal right to the land, but she was of substantial wealth, so other claimants to the house found it difficult to argue with her and her team of lawyers. This did not daunt one lawyer who had recently graduated from the University of Kansas named Melissa.
Melissa had always had an interest in the house, having lived a ways down the road as a child but never allowed to venture inside. She knew of Mondegreen's private use of the house and thought she had no right to just claim what she wanted just because no one would get in her way. It took some time, but Melissa discovered the family's surname, along with the last remaining heir, a woman named Kristen who lived outside of Philadelphia.
Now, when Melissa first sent a message to Kristen, it was ignored. Why would she travel across the country to see an old house where her grandfather lived and disappeared? Her father had been the only child who seemed to be still remaining and he had passed away years ago. Kristen was not completely eager to dredge up this past, most of which she didn't understand herself. Melissa, in her digging, though, had also found why the family had been able to build and live on the land - their investment in oil had paid off and Kristen was due for an extremely lucrative inheritance. This, more than any sympathy or nostalgia, drove her to travel across the country, by rail, because she was cheap.
Melissa met her at the train station and drove her to the house. Melissa was somewhat overweight but bursting with impossible energy and enthusiasm. Kristen was naturally hesitant when this plump sprite bounded towards her and gleefully took her bags and ushered her into her car. Kristen was cynical, thin, and jaded, a product of her father who had disavowed the family's wealth and instead built himself up in Philadelphia from blue collar roots into the middle class. Kristen spent the car ride in equal states fear and hope - fear for her family, and hope for her own future if everything went well.
The black paint on the house was heavily peeled but it still loomed over its surroundings like a tombstone in the early morning dew. A gray fog rolled over the rolling brown fields and a stark wind blew across the lands, unabated by trees or buildings to slow its chilliness. Melissa parked the car on the dirt outside, for there was no real driveway due to the house being built before Kristen's family owned a car. Melissa spoke a little of the house as they walked up the steps to the porch.
"This is really exciting! No one's stepped into this house for like sixty years. Are you excited?" She asked, tugging on Kristen's sleeve.
"Yep. So wait, you've never been inside, either?"
"No way, I was waiting for you. I'm not even sure that Mondegreen went in now, if you look through the windows, you know," Melissa went to a window and wiped some smear away with her sleeve, "If you look inside, look - see, it looks completely undisturbed."
Kristen peered inside and saw dusty shelves, old books, cans, and furniture, seemingly untouched for decades. Maybe Mondegreen really never did go inside. Melissa took a big ornate silver key out of her pocket and handed it to Kristen. Kristen didn't even seem to know what to do at first, but then stuck it in the slot, turned it, and with a jumbled, forced click, the door opened. The two ladies went inside.
"Wow, would you look at this place?" Melissa immediately had her eyes everywhere, the high ceilings, the ancient black bookcases, the old furniture. The inside seemed as black as the outside, although an extremely fair amount of dust hung on every spare inch, which softened and grayed up the place quite a bit. Immediately next to the entrance was a large mirror, probably for hat-adjusting along with a little bowl where callers deposited business cards. Melissa began flipping through and saw the names of many prominent businessmen of the day.
"Check this out! A lot of people came through here. Big names. These...these were the players. Big names here," she said to a Kristen who wasn't really paying attention. Kristen began exploring the rooms on the first floor.
"So, all this is mine, now?"
"That's right. I'll have you sign some documents when we're done looking around."
"I've never really owned a house before. That's kind of cool."
"Hey, I never asked you, I didn't know if was a sore subject, but do you know what happened here? To your grandfather, I mean?" Kristen glared at her, but then shrugged. "I didn't mean any...oh jeez, I'm sorry for bringing that up, I'm sorry. Pretend I never did that, man."
"It's alright. It's only annoying to me because I don't have an answer. But everyone seems to think that I do, or my father should have. We don't know what happened here. I didn't even know this place existed until you called me, to be honest."
They moved from the parlour to the living room, which featured bookcases with glass doors covering the books. Next to this was a desk with green felt and papers that seemed to be abandoned in haste. The center of the room featured a table with old sepia-toned pictures surrounded by comfortable chairs with Romanesque feet. It was all lavish yet seeped in neglect and the wares of time. Kristen took a shining to the pictures, some of which featured her father as a small boy, along with her aunts and uncles that she had never scene before. Finally, her grandfather and grandmother were there, a wedding photo on the mantle of the fireplace.
Her grandfather looked stern, but loving and her grandmother seemed full of joy, which was tough to do in old pictures, because taking them sucked. She was interrupted in this moment of nostalgic introspection by Melissa hollering from the kitchen.
"Hey you think these cans of corn are still good?!" she bellowed. Kristen walked into the kitchen and was taken aback at all the recipes hanging from the ceiling. Dangling from string were probably forty or fifty recipes written on bits of red paper, each step on a different shred, connected by string.
"What is this?" Kristen said while poking one, dust flittering off as it spun by the first human hand to disturb it in a half century.
"Apparently your grandmother didn't have a recipe book. But this one-" Melissa said, grabbing one that was still spinning around her head "-sounds like a great gumbo dish, I was wondering if these cans were still good."
"I'm going to guess that nothing here is good. Wow, would you look at all this stuff? I think you're right, Melissa, no one has been here in years." The kitchen was full of old cooking tools, mostly strange cranks and levers that confounded the pair. Suddenly a bright light caught Melissa's eye.
It wasn't a light as much as it was just another room, perpendicular to the living room and on the other side of a stairwell that cut through the middle of the kitchen. This room was bright and red in contrast to the dim, dark wallpaper that covered the rest of the house. The ladies walked in and saw a very fresh room with a large flatscreen television, an exercise mat, some small weights and medicine balls, and a Wii Fit attached to the TV.
"Well it looks like someone has been here in the past sixty years," Melissa sighed.
"What is this?" Kristen asked.
"I'm guessing it's Julia Mondegreen's exercise room."
"Huh. Would you look at that."
"Well, you want to look upstairs?"
"Yeah. So she only used this room? She didn't touch the rest of the house?"
"Apparently." The two women headed upstairs through the kitchen staircase. Each step creaked as if the whole house groaned. Kristen hesitated, almost feeling trepidation from the house, as if it was warning her. She ignored it, thinking of how much time Julia Mondegreen spent sweating downstairs and how this would all be hers. She thought of selling the furniture, or maybe keeping the furniture in remembrance of her family, rehabilitating her family's image. She had never thought she would move out here and leave Philadelphia, but this could be remodeled and she now had the money to do it. That's it, she thought, she would update and restore the house but remain faithful to its original vision. She could suddenly see herself living out here, and maybe everything would be okay.
The upstairs was mostly bedrooms and all but one door was open. At the top of the stairs was Kristen's father's bedroom. She could tell by the pictures on the dresser inside. the bed sheets were flung open, which Kristen thought was somewhat weird just because she always pictured old images of bedrooms to be very near and her father in her own youth had always instilled a sense of tidiness and proper bed-making. Other bedrooms she could tell belonged to her father's siblings. Kristin was pleased to learn she had had two aunts and two uncles who had lived with her grandfather, grandmother, and what looked like a maid or governess' quarters. Her father had his own room but the other children shared, with one room for the boys and one room for the girls. Judging by the pictures it seemed like her father was the oldest, and she surmised that was the reason. The bed-sheets in the other bedrooms, in all the other beds were also distraught, some thrown on the floor.
As Kristen lingered, soaking in the images of her forgotten family and imagining how they might have lived, how they might have gone about their day, Melissa made her way to the closed door at the end of the hallway, which was the Master Bedroom, positioned directly over Mondegreen's exercise room. She opened the door and stood paralyzed. She barely squeaked out a call to Kristen.
"K-Kristen? Kristen?!"
"What is it?"
"Um...come...over here." Kristen walked down the hallway with each step creaking and echoing throughout the house. She joined Melissa at the door's threshold and beheld a terrifying sight.
The skeletal remains of all four children, Kristen's grandmother, and the governess laid strewn about the room, bloodstains covering every inch of the floor, walls, and bed. Lodged in the floorboards in between a small skull and vertebrae was a large rusted axe, also covered in dust. Smeared on the wall in blood was a single message, perhaps a confessional: "I DID IT FOR THE MONEY."
The current owner, in actually in name only, was a woman named Julia Mondegreen, who was essentially squatting, because she had no formal right to the land, but she was of substantial wealth, so other claimants to the house found it difficult to argue with her and her team of lawyers. This did not daunt one lawyer who had recently graduated from the University of Kansas named Melissa.
Melissa had always had an interest in the house, having lived a ways down the road as a child but never allowed to venture inside. She knew of Mondegreen's private use of the house and thought she had no right to just claim what she wanted just because no one would get in her way. It took some time, but Melissa discovered the family's surname, along with the last remaining heir, a woman named Kristen who lived outside of Philadelphia.
Now, when Melissa first sent a message to Kristen, it was ignored. Why would she travel across the country to see an old house where her grandfather lived and disappeared? Her father had been the only child who seemed to be still remaining and he had passed away years ago. Kristen was not completely eager to dredge up this past, most of which she didn't understand herself. Melissa, in her digging, though, had also found why the family had been able to build and live on the land - their investment in oil had paid off and Kristen was due for an extremely lucrative inheritance. This, more than any sympathy or nostalgia, drove her to travel across the country, by rail, because she was cheap.
Melissa met her at the train station and drove her to the house. Melissa was somewhat overweight but bursting with impossible energy and enthusiasm. Kristen was naturally hesitant when this plump sprite bounded towards her and gleefully took her bags and ushered her into her car. Kristen was cynical, thin, and jaded, a product of her father who had disavowed the family's wealth and instead built himself up in Philadelphia from blue collar roots into the middle class. Kristen spent the car ride in equal states fear and hope - fear for her family, and hope for her own future if everything went well.
The black paint on the house was heavily peeled but it still loomed over its surroundings like a tombstone in the early morning dew. A gray fog rolled over the rolling brown fields and a stark wind blew across the lands, unabated by trees or buildings to slow its chilliness. Melissa parked the car on the dirt outside, for there was no real driveway due to the house being built before Kristen's family owned a car. Melissa spoke a little of the house as they walked up the steps to the porch.
"This is really exciting! No one's stepped into this house for like sixty years. Are you excited?" She asked, tugging on Kristen's sleeve.
"Yep. So wait, you've never been inside, either?"
"No way, I was waiting for you. I'm not even sure that Mondegreen went in now, if you look through the windows, you know," Melissa went to a window and wiped some smear away with her sleeve, "If you look inside, look - see, it looks completely undisturbed."
Kristen peered inside and saw dusty shelves, old books, cans, and furniture, seemingly untouched for decades. Maybe Mondegreen really never did go inside. Melissa took a big ornate silver key out of her pocket and handed it to Kristen. Kristen didn't even seem to know what to do at first, but then stuck it in the slot, turned it, and with a jumbled, forced click, the door opened. The two ladies went inside.
"Wow, would you look at this place?" Melissa immediately had her eyes everywhere, the high ceilings, the ancient black bookcases, the old furniture. The inside seemed as black as the outside, although an extremely fair amount of dust hung on every spare inch, which softened and grayed up the place quite a bit. Immediately next to the entrance was a large mirror, probably for hat-adjusting along with a little bowl where callers deposited business cards. Melissa began flipping through and saw the names of many prominent businessmen of the day.
"Check this out! A lot of people came through here. Big names. These...these were the players. Big names here," she said to a Kristen who wasn't really paying attention. Kristen began exploring the rooms on the first floor.
"So, all this is mine, now?"
"That's right. I'll have you sign some documents when we're done looking around."
"I've never really owned a house before. That's kind of cool."
"Hey, I never asked you, I didn't know if was a sore subject, but do you know what happened here? To your grandfather, I mean?" Kristen glared at her, but then shrugged. "I didn't mean any...oh jeez, I'm sorry for bringing that up, I'm sorry. Pretend I never did that, man."
"It's alright. It's only annoying to me because I don't have an answer. But everyone seems to think that I do, or my father should have. We don't know what happened here. I didn't even know this place existed until you called me, to be honest."
They moved from the parlour to the living room, which featured bookcases with glass doors covering the books. Next to this was a desk with green felt and papers that seemed to be abandoned in haste. The center of the room featured a table with old sepia-toned pictures surrounded by comfortable chairs with Romanesque feet. It was all lavish yet seeped in neglect and the wares of time. Kristen took a shining to the pictures, some of which featured her father as a small boy, along with her aunts and uncles that she had never scene before. Finally, her grandfather and grandmother were there, a wedding photo on the mantle of the fireplace.
Her grandfather looked stern, but loving and her grandmother seemed full of joy, which was tough to do in old pictures, because taking them sucked. She was interrupted in this moment of nostalgic introspection by Melissa hollering from the kitchen.
"Hey you think these cans of corn are still good?!" she bellowed. Kristen walked into the kitchen and was taken aback at all the recipes hanging from the ceiling. Dangling from string were probably forty or fifty recipes written on bits of red paper, each step on a different shred, connected by string.
"What is this?" Kristen said while poking one, dust flittering off as it spun by the first human hand to disturb it in a half century.
"Apparently your grandmother didn't have a recipe book. But this one-" Melissa said, grabbing one that was still spinning around her head "-sounds like a great gumbo dish, I was wondering if these cans were still good."
"I'm going to guess that nothing here is good. Wow, would you look at all this stuff? I think you're right, Melissa, no one has been here in years." The kitchen was full of old cooking tools, mostly strange cranks and levers that confounded the pair. Suddenly a bright light caught Melissa's eye.
It wasn't a light as much as it was just another room, perpendicular to the living room and on the other side of a stairwell that cut through the middle of the kitchen. This room was bright and red in contrast to the dim, dark wallpaper that covered the rest of the house. The ladies walked in and saw a very fresh room with a large flatscreen television, an exercise mat, some small weights and medicine balls, and a Wii Fit attached to the TV.
"Well it looks like someone has been here in the past sixty years," Melissa sighed.
"What is this?" Kristen asked.
"I'm guessing it's Julia Mondegreen's exercise room."
"Huh. Would you look at that."
"Well, you want to look upstairs?"
"Yeah. So she only used this room? She didn't touch the rest of the house?"
"Apparently." The two women headed upstairs through the kitchen staircase. Each step creaked as if the whole house groaned. Kristen hesitated, almost feeling trepidation from the house, as if it was warning her. She ignored it, thinking of how much time Julia Mondegreen spent sweating downstairs and how this would all be hers. She thought of selling the furniture, or maybe keeping the furniture in remembrance of her family, rehabilitating her family's image. She had never thought she would move out here and leave Philadelphia, but this could be remodeled and she now had the money to do it. That's it, she thought, she would update and restore the house but remain faithful to its original vision. She could suddenly see herself living out here, and maybe everything would be okay.
The upstairs was mostly bedrooms and all but one door was open. At the top of the stairs was Kristen's father's bedroom. She could tell by the pictures on the dresser inside. the bed sheets were flung open, which Kristen thought was somewhat weird just because she always pictured old images of bedrooms to be very near and her father in her own youth had always instilled a sense of tidiness and proper bed-making. Other bedrooms she could tell belonged to her father's siblings. Kristin was pleased to learn she had had two aunts and two uncles who had lived with her grandfather, grandmother, and what looked like a maid or governess' quarters. Her father had his own room but the other children shared, with one room for the boys and one room for the girls. Judging by the pictures it seemed like her father was the oldest, and she surmised that was the reason. The bed-sheets in the other bedrooms, in all the other beds were also distraught, some thrown on the floor.
As Kristen lingered, soaking in the images of her forgotten family and imagining how they might have lived, how they might have gone about their day, Melissa made her way to the closed door at the end of the hallway, which was the Master Bedroom, positioned directly over Mondegreen's exercise room. She opened the door and stood paralyzed. She barely squeaked out a call to Kristen.
"K-Kristen? Kristen?!"
"What is it?"
"Um...come...over here." Kristen walked down the hallway with each step creaking and echoing throughout the house. She joined Melissa at the door's threshold and beheld a terrifying sight.
The skeletal remains of all four children, Kristen's grandmother, and the governess laid strewn about the room, bloodstains covering every inch of the floor, walls, and bed. Lodged in the floorboards in between a small skull and vertebrae was a large rusted axe, also covered in dust. Smeared on the wall in blood was a single message, perhaps a confessional: "I DID IT FOR THE MONEY."
