Burgundy

“Sorry, I have to interrupt. I heard you talking about the Burgundy House, and I feel the need to correct some misconceptions that you’ve made. You said that it’s a place in the wilderness that people never return from, and that’s not entirely incorrect. It’s true that the place is dangerous, but many people have returned from it. If you want to know, I visited it at one time. Only once, and shortly afterwards I swore to do two things; number one, to kill the motherfucker that owns the property if I ever see him again, and number two, to never return to the place. I know that seems like sort of a contradiction, but if you knew anything about the place, you’d understand. You see, that place is haunted. Now, when I use the word “haunted”, I don’t mean that it was built on an Indian burial ground or that there are “ghosts” hanging out around it. Nothing like that. It’s haunted though. And it follows you when you leave. You already think I’m an old delusional geezer, so I’ll return to my whiskey, if you don’t mind.

“Oh, alright. Fuck. I don’t know what drives you kids to be so interested in these kinds of things. I never understood it, and personally I’d give something to forget about this shit entirely. It’s sort of like when you’re walking down the street in the city; you don’t want to constantly think about how there are sewers full of shit and subways full of miserable people just a few meters under your feet. You don’t know what I mean? Well, maybe you don’t understand misery. It’s better not to bring misery back to you, if it’s been graceful enough to leave you alone. That’s exactly what you’re asking me to do is to revisit the most fucked up days of my life. I’ll tell you what, you buy us another round of shots and I’ll tell you the whole story. Can’t promise that either of us will stay awake long enough for me to finish though. Alright.

“Good, you fucking pale cocksuckers. Though it happened about 30 years ago, I’ll give you the whole damn story, from the beginning. Ugh. So my memory isn’t perfect, but I have full confidence in my words. I’ve relived these memories a good many times, believe me. I won’t give you my full life story; let’s just say that back in the 80s I was working in a business that required a good amount of walking around in the woods. Any forest with a trail through it that also got a bit of foot-traffic was my home. Let’s just say that I was beginning to feel a bit tired one day in the late afternoon, after a while of scouting for business around Pinestone Park. Somewhere in between the park and that weird little town with no stores. Fucked if I remember the name of the town. The trails were real narrow, and there were lots of big rocks and inclines, you know, the type of trail that makes you tired to walk down it. I had just seen a Grizzly from a small cliff, just a skinny brown dot in the distance. The bear saw me and it started running towards me. Backed away slowly, and I started sprinting like a motherfucker, ha. It was late summer so everything was overgrown and there were a lot of intersecting trails around there; it was easy to get lost. I ran for maybe an hour, down trails that I didn’t know, just trying to get as far away from that hungry bear as possible. I sort of lost my bearings after that.

“The sun was starting to set when I stumbled onto a property that looked like it had been inhabited once but abandoned, maybe a few years before I found it. There were ferns all over the trails, even though they were obviously made by people. There were also some open spaces that looked like they had been lawns at one point, even the remains of a garden. Everything was overgrown heavily, and I had to leave a trail of whacked plants behind me, clearing my way through with a machete.

“I found a blood-red building that looked like a barn, probably a stable that’d been converted into a livable house. I circled around it, thinking that at least I’d check for signs of company before breaking in and crashing on a couch, as I was accustomed to doing. Now, as I was circling the house, I don’t know how to say this, but I felt like something was wrong. Not entirely sure what made me feel so creeped, maybe I caught a glimpse of something that looked like that Grizzly. Maybe it was just my natural instinct telling me to get some fucking sleep, and I wasn’t gonna sleep outside in the dark with a Grizzly, fuck that. Anyway, all the lights were off as far as I could tell, so I smashed in a window with my machete and climbed inside. The thing I remember clearest is the silence. Breaking a sheet of glass is a loud thing to do, and after I had climbed through that big picture window, and finally stood up in the room that I had broken into, I felt something strange. It was the silence of the place. For some reason it struck me as quieter than the inside of a stationary car. You know how when you sit in a car that’s not running, with the doors and windows closed, and all you can hear is a weird ringing in your ears? It was like that. The strange thing is that I had been hearing a whole clusterfuck of crickets, just a few minutes earlier, before I broke into the window. I don’t know. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong or something. Ugh. It’s not fun to think about this, man. How about another round? What? I’m fucking sober. It’s getting pretty late, I feel like I might hit the road anyway then.

“Thanks. So where was I? Right, so I had just broken into the fucking place and I felt like the whole world had stopped making any noise whatsoever, except for the clomping of my shoes on that fucking floor and ringing in my ears when I stopped moving. At this point I was just groping around in the dark, using my lighter as a pathetic flashlight, when I realized that in the next room the front door was wide open. That door was really close to the window that I had broken, too. Made me feel like a fucking idiot, but now I just feel like a fool for not taking that door right the fuck out of there. Ugh. I decided that fuck it, I’m fucking tired so I’ll find a bed or a couch and finally get some sleep.

“I started to look around for a bed. The furniture in the house was pretty normal, except there were no couches anywhere, which pissed me off. Just these skinny wooden chairs; nothing I could sleep in. It was sort of unnerving that there wasn’t a TV or anything like that. There were some strangely realistic paintings on the walls, too. Just pictures of people. But the thing is that some of the rooms didn’t have any furniture in them at all. Nothing but tarps on the floor, folded in the corner. Gives me chills to think about now, god, I was an idiot.

“Nevertheless, it was a house that I could have lived in, even if the paintings on the walls gave me chills. But I kept seeing things out of the corners of my eyes. That doesn’t usually happen to me. I like to think of myself as reasonably sane. But it kept happening. I couldn’t stop seeing fucked up faces and shit, just at the edge of my vision. They were all different, except that they were all coloured red and pink. I mean like the colour of skin and blood, and when I turned to look at them, there was nothing there at all that could resemble a face. I could still see them when I shut my eyes, too. It was fucked. And it was still so horribly silent. You don’t know what sort of emotions I was feeling, but I had been walking for such a long time in the forest and I was tired enough that I thought that I could ignore my spontaneous schizophrenic episode if I could just find a bedroom. Wake up in the morning sunlight in a peaceful, empty house. Maybe leave some money on the kitchen counter as rent (fat chance, ha!), and continue on my way. That’s all I wanted.

“Well, I was still groping around in the darkness, feeling terror, man. I didn’t know what I was afraid of though. I was extremely tired too, and I was accustomed to getting a bit freaked out while home-invading. Overzealous conscience, I guess. Fuck. I came to a staircase, and I figured that maybe a bedroom would be upstairs. I felt almost drunk, the constant mental fuckery was getting to me. All I wanted to do was sleep. Stumbling up these really steep stairs in the dark like an idiot, panicking, probably making a lot of noise. I came to the top of the stairs, and there was just one door, at the end of a short hallway. It was slightly ajar; I pushed it open and shortly thereafter jumped back and fell all the way down the stairs, knocking myself unconscious until the morning with a fucked up wound in my leg where I had fallen on my machete. What I saw behind that door was something that I don’t want to describe in detail right now. Let’s just say that there was a lot of blood, and a lot of human bodies that looked like they had been skinned. He had been doing ungodly things to people in that house, man. He was in the room, too. The dead bodies were hanging on hooks and ropes from the ceiling I guess, and when I opened the door, he just pushed them so that they swung towards me. I can’t talk about this anymore right now. I’m serious. I’m shaking now just thinking about it, look at me. I just wanted to tell you the truth. No, I didn’t talk to the police. I don’t want to get into it. I have to go, alright? You want to hear more about this shit? Then I’ll meet you here next Friday. Yes, I know it’s 8PM. No, I don’t have Facebook. I’ll be back here Friday, alright. Yeah, you too.