For Rent



She was on the couch when we found her.

The house had a long history of occupation by unstable women, and Dorothy was just the latest tenant, but from what I knew, very few of its former occupants turned up dead in the living room. My parents certainly hadn’t found any stiffs since turning the place into a rental property.

A few days prior, one of the neighbours contacted my mother regarding strange behaviour on Dorothy’s part. Allegedly she had been silently wandering between lawns every night for a week or so, so the neighbour decided to do the logical thing and call her landlords. My mother registered the complaint out of courtesy, and relayed the information to my father, who filed it away with the rest of the things he couldn’t care less about. Three days later the neighbour rang again to inform my mother that whatever she said worked—Dorothy hadn’t been seen outside since.

My parents were naturally concerned, but still not enough to actually bother investigating, and since I was home for the weekend, I was dispatched to the scene.

Good thing, too.

Reminiscing briefly about my days in the neighbourhood, I got out of the car and walked up to the door.

Knock-Knock.

As I waited for a response I noticed that the house itself seemed dead… no, not dead. Dormant.

I knocked again, waited, tried the doorbell, waited, contemplated talking to neighbours, decided against it.

Finally I took the set of keys my mother had given me and unlocked the door.

I was barely in the door when I noticed the smell. It was vaguely metallic, like iron, with a hint of what could have been ammonia. Undeterred, I pushed the door open and immediately realised why Dorothy didn’t get up to let me in.

She was strewn out on the couch wearing a sweat suit, her head hanging off the side so that it hovered above a dry pile of vomit. Urine stained the white fabric, and her forearms were posed almost unnaturally, as if she wanted to exhibit the jagged vertical slashes on either wrist.

Dried blood was caked along her arms, and dark trails of it led from the couch into the next room, with a few thin, haphazard lines which made me imagine that she was swinging her arms.

The coffee table had been kicked askew, knocking over an empty handle of vodka and two bottles of hydrocodone. She couldn’t have been dead for more than 36 hours.

As could be expected, I was a little taken aback by the grim scene, but a morbid curiosity told me to stick around. Opposite the mess was the television. It was on, the screen showing “No signal.” On a shelf under the TV set, she had a VCR—old, predating the combo VHS/DVD deal.

Something compelled me to press the eject button, and with an unhealthy-sounding WHIR, the machine spit out a VHS tape.

“Silence of the Lambs.” Nice.

Following the strings of blood on the carpet, I proceeded into the next room. The room was empty save for a set-up for her computer. The computer itself seemed tremendously outdated: a bulky, khaki-coloured monitor perched on a very plain wooden desk; equally cumbersome keyboard flecked with blood. I noticed that there was no chair in the room, but in spite of this, there were indents in the carpet. One appeared as a white square in a circle of brownish-red, suggesting that her wrist was against the chair leg as she sat.

It was clear that she died via overdose, but why she’d been walking around so much after such grievous self-injury was lost on me… and I had a good amount of experience with suicide and self-destruction.

Sparser paths of dark stains on the carpet led down the miniscule hallway into a spare bedroom.

Curiously, there was a separate unpleasant stench in the room.

I pulled the top of my shirt over my nose and glanced around. Nothing.

Well, nothing except for a tiny cage, the kind one would use to take cats or small dogs to the vet. There was some newspaper around the cage, but no sign of whatever animal it held.

As I turned to leave, there was suddenly a scratching from the closet. I took a moment to recover from my miniature heart attack and stepped over, tentatively sliding the closet door open.

A small dog—a dachshund—was cowering in the corner. The opposite corner contained a pile of dachshund shit. Immediately the little dog ran from the closet… and into the cage.

After about a minute spent trying to coax it out, I’d had about enough of that fucking house. I strode back down the hallway to the living room, trying my damnedest not to look at Dorothy, and headed out the front.

I phoned the proper authorities, told them about the grisly scene inside, and about the dog.

-

A week later my mother contacted me at college, telling me to come home again for the weekend so that I could help her and my brother remove the blood-stained, shit-streaked carpet.

During the process, I made a few off-hand remarks about the nature of the situation. I mentioned the dog in the closet, the missing chair, and “Silence of the Lambs.” My brother said “weird.” My mother remained stoic until the job was finished.

-

That following week, I returned to the house of my own accord to walk around, trying to remember any specific events from when my family lived there.

Unfortunately, though, even with my photographic memory, it was difficult to dredge up things that happened when I was two years old.

Certain rooms did trigger certain memories, though: I remembered being in first grade, playing with some toys as my mother showed the place to a potential tenant.

I shuddered realising that I had been in the exact spot of Dorothy’s missing chair, but another thought popped into my head…

I remembered who moved in after that—an absentminded French woman named Marie…but who the hell was renting before her, and why did they leave?

Unable to assemble a timeline in my head, I was reabsorbed into my memory.

I had been playing primarily with X-Men action figures, imagining some story involving a giant spider, when Iceman’s arm broke off at the elbow.

It was upsetting. Through to the kitchen, I found myself nineteen years gone, listening to my mother speaking on the phone with someone—a lawyer.

My dog at the time had bitten the neighbour. Strange, as I seemed to remember him being very warm and affectionate… any display of violence was out of character.

As I brought myself back to the present, something troubling dawned on me: I had no memories of the dog from that time period. Every memory took place at my current residence.

Immediately I connected the dog’s behaviour to his location.

Come to think of it, I had a cat then, too. He was old, possibly fifteen when I was born, but even as he got older, he was a fighter. He was fearless.

…when we were at the new house.

My father once related a story of a sudden thudding noise that scared the cat out of the house entirely for three days.

I cleared my head of the Stephen King-style sentient house theories and left the kitchen.

A walk down the hallway failed to summon any memories, but I nonetheless progressed toward the bedrooms.

At the threshold of the room where I found the dachshund, my mind glitched.

Any knowledge that remained of the house’s floorplan had fled my mind, and the layout suddenly seemed very labyrinthine.

Most unsettling of all, I no longer had any memories of living there, only a hazy sense of familiarity, like the fragments of some distant dream.

The space past the doorframe was dizzying to the point of vertigo. I looked back down the hallway, the way I came. It had changed in the same outlandish manner as the room before me, and as I gazed past opened doors leading to the kitchen, I felt as if I was looking over the side of a building, judging the distance between me and the ground.

Move. Walk. Just lift one foot, put it in front of the other.

Focusing on the top of my shoe, I raised my right foot from the ground.

With some effort, I took a step forward, bringing me through the threshold and into the room in front of me.

Just as startlingly as it changed, the environment shifted back to normal. I was still staring at my feet, and noted a dark stain on the wood of the floor, previously hidden by the suicide-soiled carpet.

It was relatively small, but its presence was annoying. That, and it could have signified a mold problem.

My eyes were fixed on the spot for a second as I imagined my mother bitching to me about mold in the wood. Soon enough, though, I noticed another blemish on the hardwood… and then another.

I finally brought my head up, my vision following the stains. They formed a line with a distinctive pattern—the pattern of footsteps.

I tracked the source of the dark blots to the private bathroom, which was notably adjacent to the sliding closet where Dorothy apparently stashed her dog.

With no door-stopper, the wood ended abruptly, jarringly, into the tiled floor of the bathroom. Sure enough, a few inches onto the tile, there was a splotch.

When I caught sight of it, my hand involuntarily shot to my mouth and I took a step backward.

My suspicions had been confirmed: the stains were actually footprints. An infant’s footprints. Tiny soles with baby toes. The ball and heel of certain prints were inconsistent, fading inwards as they proceeded, which I supposed would make sense if the child was tracking in some kind of liquid.

Disturbingly, the prints continued forward into the shower, circled around one side of the tub, and then finally stopped as they led directly into the drain.

I knelt down and scraped at one of them with my fingernail, but the mark might as well have been burned into the surface. I reached toward the faucet to turn the water on.

The pipes coughed and sputtered like a dying automobile, paused for a second, and began unsystematically spitting rusty water.

Predictably, the water did nothing, and I turned the faucet back to the off position. This time it made a sickly gurgling noise. After another short delay, the murky spray stopped.

As I watched the liquid form into little whirlpools around the drain, I had a vision of myself in the same spot, perhaps twenty years prior. When I was an infant.

With so many other mysteries accumulating, I was unwilling to dismiss this as a coincidence, but I pulled myself away from the tub and cleared out from the bathroom.

A quick walk into the other bedroom produced nothing interesting, meaning that there was only on place I hadn’t revisited: the basement.

Before I had both feet back in the hallway, my determination to investigate the basement was cut short. Something was wrong… the old house didn’t have a basement. Did it?

This house had no answers. Only questions upon questions.

-

Finally I gave in and returned to my family’s current residence to see if my mother could provide any insight. As it happened, her knowledge of the house’s history was rudimentary at best, but she had a mental record of every tenant since my family had moved, including the reasons they’d left.

My first thought was to ask about the woman who was renting right before Marie.

The answer left me somewhat shaken.

The woman’s name was Mary-Anne, and she lived there for about a year up until the accidental death of her infant daughter.

My mother was able to speak to Mary-Anne briefly after it happened, but Mary-Anne was almost catatonic, continually repeating “She had just taken her first steps.”

According to the police, the daughter drowned in the bathtub.

My second question was in regards to Dorothy, and my mother informed me that there was an update on the case.

Very shortly before her estimated time of death, Dorothy had sent an e-mail to her parents apologising for what she was about to do, explaining the blood on the keyboard.

It went on to explain that she secretly had an abortion, and she was wracked with guilt to the point where she was having “hallucinations” of a baby girl giggling and playing in one of the bedrooms.

After finally hearing this, there were only two major things that continued to bug me.

One was that I still had no idea where Dorothy’s chair had gone.

The other was that I could faintly remember taking a bath in the old house, probably about six years before Mary-Anne moved in.

There were already footprints in the bathtub.