The Carpenter's Tale

Andre Infante
Halloween 2009 


Stop.


Picture a house.  It is not a new house, but no amount off time at the county office will put an age on it.  The walls are gray.  The windows are dusty.  It sits at the end of our street, with its blue double-doors.  The roof is half-stripped of tiles.  Within the house, the walls fold like card paper.  They say there are hallways built for dwarfs, staircases to nowhere, hallways that rotate a hundred and eight degrees and in in a room with carpets and chairs and a set dinner table on the ceiling.  They say the architect had materials delivered to him, and adventured into the house, building as he went.  They say he built the house around himself, folding and chasing and bending back into himself.  They say he's still in there, folding wood around his madness, hammering and sawing and cutting until...

        But why listen to gossip?  The house is solid enough, and everyone knows that horrors do not persist in daylight.  If you approach it in the daytime, on a dare maybe, or because you are in a strange town with no money and have nowhere to sleep.  If you go with a friend or two, perhaps new friends met at dawn that morning, also strangers, what then?  The gate is only ever a gate, just wrought iron.  The lock is a physical thing, the work of a moment to pick.  The dead grass is so much cellulose and the windows are only silica.  Even the gray boards are just wood.  What harm in that?  If you were to take a bet, you could hardly be blamed.  Not even your fault.  Your friends pressured you into it, and if you couldn't have known.          

We entered through the front door.   It wasn't locked.   It seems to me now that the house breathed.   Not much, just a little flutter of air around my arms.  I can't forgive myself for not turning back there.   There were so many opportunities for it.   We walked into a room lit by skylights.   There is so much light.   Every line illuminated.   Ben called the upstairs bedroom and ran up the spiral staircase.  Sarah called the couch and ran into the next room.   I 
turned around, inspecting our new find.  I had not expected such accommodations.  It was a fine old house.  


I lay my pack on the ground, unrolled the sleeping mat in front of the grand fireplace and opened my pack, from which I removed a water bottle, a steel flask, a picture frame, and my -----.

Satisfied, I left to look for Ben and Sarah, shattering sunbeams with my stride.  I took the stairs slowly, pausing to dwell upon the grain of the wood beneath my fingers, upon the piled carpet and the eyes that reflected in the wood.  

I took the last stair onto the floor and began to search for Ben.  I heard a distant hissing, and followed it.  I heard the sounds of footsteps falling in the distance, and accelerated.  

Some distance away,  I wasted moments chasing a shadow.  Too many moments.  I ran for a longer time, and a longer, feeling lost and having no sense of direction.  The sun seemed to come from everywhere.  Just as I felt too hopelessly lost, I saw a shadow around a wall, and turned.  I
saw Ben round the corner into the upstairs floor.  He raced along, taking the stairs two, three at a time and ended up in an open area, larger than you would think.  


He set about looking for things, and found a toy chest and a child's room, set as though the day it was evacuated, and a broken pipe, softly hissing.  He walked softly on the thick, dusty carpet, rounded corners and found himself standing before a vast staircase that rose straight into the ceiling.  He heard a noise behind him.  I 
watched Sarah round a corner, and begin down a long hallway.  She walked for a time, and ended in an abandoned nursery.  She decided that she would live here.   She opened the window to the air, though there was none, cleaned up the scattered toys.  She took off her yellow jacket and wiped the dust from the shelved.  She took some time to read a book with a picture of a clock on the cover.  The wall behind her began to bulge and ripple, but she took no notice.  


Then she left the room, making a note
rounded a corner and found him beside the staircase.  He wordlessly pointed upwards.  He grinned at me.  


Weird, huh?  Maybe it's a secret passage.


I laughed, but he mounted the stairs, ducking low and began to knock vigorously against the panels.  After a few seconds labor, a hollow sound returned like distant triumph. 


He reached up, and pushed.  A panel of wood fell away into darkness.  He climbed up into the passage, and began to crawl away, laughing.  As he went, I thought he was moving away too quickly, his laughter fading.  I laughed for a moment after, and then began to call for him.  His laughter         , and I began to panic.  
I launched after him to follow him, clawing down the passageway as fast as I could.  Shafts of light passed me at every turn as I wandered into the labyrinth.  I turned the corner and saw a Minotaur.  














                                                                                                                     I 
of where it was.  


She entered into a nest of hallways that seemed to fold in on themselves, chasing some vanishing point.  


As she ran, she found that she could not escape, for every turn led back to where she had begun.  After a time, she finally allowed them to lead her, turning, running faster and faster until finally she broke into a great bathroom.  It had a vast bath, five meters across, and a luxurious array of soaps.  She was tired and dirty, and she ran a hot bath and filled the water with perfumes and oils and salts until it smelled lovely.  


She undressed, and settled into the tub, relaxing.  There was a sudden crash, and I  
fell through a grating, landing on the ground between a pool of faded sunlight and a pile of musty towels.  She yelled and jumped, and I averted my eyes.  She climbed out of the tub, suds clinging to her hair, and pulled her clothes on.  After she was roughly dressed, I asked


Have you seen Ben?


No, she said.  


Oh, I said.  


She turned towards the bath, but the bath was gone.  


I think this house is haunted, she said.


Your hair is dry, I said. 
 










Oh, she said, after the whiteness had passed, and ran.  


I chased her down the long, l o n g,    l   o     n          g,               l                   o                       n                         g
hallway.  She turned the corner, a dozen corners, and suddenly the air was split and 
there was a white chasm between us, the faintest white gap.  I chased her down the hallway, lunging at the barrier, trying to penetrate it, to help her.  


On my side, the walls were folding at my touch, parceling themselves into smaller folds.  I lunged at the barrier, but only my
broke through, and only for the space of a word.  


I was repelled, and I watched as the txte bulrred, and the walls swallowed her up as she was terminated by the period.
she was running from me.  


She fled down the hallway, separated only by the barest of white margins.  She wound down twists and turns, through gaps and leaps and finally stepped into the child's room.  
The toys were hanging on twine from
handthe ceiling.  I must have already been through here.  


She fled the intrusion of my limb, and turned the corner.  The walls burned black and midnight, and sunbeams tore down the walls.  The tetx bgean ot urn nda hse slot ehrslef klie nBe dha.  nI a mmonte, hse swa on orm 



.  
I wandered into the labyrinth, moving, always moving, in shock.  Why?    The hallways began to
divide
into
smaller 


and

smaller
smaller 


and

smaller
into
smaller 


and

smaller
smaller 


and

smaller
divide
into
smaller 


and

smaller
smaller 


and

smaller
into
smaller 


and

smaller
smaller 


and

smaller
passages.  Then just passage.  I opened a door on my right, and stepped back into the parlor.


I crossed to my pack, and picked up, from the floor beside it, my hammer.  I drew the cap off it, letting a drop of ink land on the floor.  I turned around to the bodies of Ben and Sarah, broken bodies torn by the hammer.   I dipped the hammer in ink red as blood, and began to pound nails into wood, building the walls and myself and these words with strokes of ink.  As the day drew to a close, I rose in the parlor, holding my hammer in one hand, looking down at the aged rotting pack beneath my aged, rotting hands.  The photo frame, my wife and child, paged curling beneath my fingers lay splayed before me, mere words on which flesh was once hung.  


My hammer, my glory, my words did me no good.  It had happened again.  I stood over the inkwells, red stains spreading from their crushed skulls across the floor.  The inkwells bled and begged and the story was about to end, the last breaths of air escaping before I turned and returned to my home, building the walls behind me as I turned, over and over again into these words, my home at the end of the street.  



Start.  







____________________________________________________________________________________________

Author's Note:  

For this story, I (obviously) tried to play around quite a bit with typography and text layout here.  Hopefully you enjoyed it (and if you stuck around long enough to see this, you probably did).  It's not the story I mentioned last week, since that one came out more satirical than horrifying.   In any case, happy halloween.  Go scare an old person.  
Bookmark and Share