Golden Blonde

CW: Death, grief, family trauma, violence, mental health issues, and psychological horror.

On a Monday afternoon in October, I called a taxi from the airport to take me to my grandparents’ house on Harrow Court.

The perfect suburban cul-de-sac was lined with large houses that looked as though they had been lifted from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens 1987, each set back behind perfectly paved driveways. Their lawns were crowded with elaborate Halloween displays and expensive mechanical decorations. Tall skeletons loomed among the trees, hay bales were arranged with the precision of a department-store window, and pumpkins spilled down the stone steps.

I hadn't understood it as a child in the 1990s, but a street like this didn't stay perfect by accident. It took money, time, and a willingness to keep certain things hidden.

When we arrived at the front door, I reached into my bag to tip the taxi driver. For a brief, childish moment, I hoped he would think I was coming home.

I'm sure he could tell I wasn't. My ripped wool coat looked strangely out of place against the limestone steps.

As the youngest of four daughters, it had fallen to me to prepare the house for the auction the following month. I was the one without a steady job. The ballerina-turned-painter who hadn't had a regular paycheque in years.

My sisters had built lives of their own. Careers. Children. Mortgages. Lives that made it difficult to simply drop everything and return to the place we'd spent our lives trying to leave behind.

My dad and stepmom were away in Mexico for the foreseeable future, enjoying their vacation home with their golfing friends, Spencer and Martha, who always seemed overly interested in asking what job I was currently working.

I opened the door and was immediately met by the smell of my childhood: chlorine from the pool and the soft, rose-scented soap my grandmother had discovered in a restaurant bathroom in Palm Springs sometime in the early 1990s.

I removed my shoes and felt my feet sink into the white carpet, its vacuum lines still perfectly intact. I assumed the housekeeper had been there that morning, or perhaps the afternoon before.

After my grandmother died last August, my family insisted that the gardener and the housekeeper continue coming every other week, just as they had since the 1980s. Stopping the routine somehow seemed unthinkable.

I walked into the kitchen and was met by the same California blinds, white cabinets, and dark wood countertops that hadn't been updated since my childhood. I found it comforting, the familiarity of an interior that had refused to move forward with the rest of us.

The backyard still looked like a 1960s postcard: a blue kidney-shaped pool, white metal loungers, and a striped umbrella that would cast a perfect layer of shade across the patio.

By then, the house had become strangely dark. The last of the orange sunlight stretched across the fireplace as dusk settled outside, and somewhere beyond the front windows, the wind had begun to howl.

I turned on a few lamps and headed upstairs.

One by one, I went through the bedrooms. The beds had all been dismantled and removed. It was strange to see the spaces without the things that had made them bedrooms.

The room Hannah and I had shared was exactly as I remembered it. The same floral wallpaper, pictures and curtains.

Only the two beds were gone, and their frames had left deep grooves in the carpet, dark impressions where they had sat for our entire childhood.

And then I remembered.

Hannah and I coming in from the pool, dripping wet and racing upstairs, wrapped in bath towels covered in sunflowers.

Christmas mornings, my sisters and I running upstairs to play with our new toys, leaving discarded wrapping paper scattered across the hallway.

The smell of chlorine still clinging to our hair.

For a moment, I could almost see us there again, four little girls moving through the house as though it belonged entirely to us.

Before we understood that it belonged to someone else.

I went back downstairs and ate the cold pizza I'd brought with me from the airport. The silence of the house was almost deafening. Without the usual hum of the television or the faint noise of someone moving around in another room, I could hear every small sound.

I tried to connect to the Wi-Fi, then remembered, stupidly, that it had been disconnected months ago.

I switched to data and began doom-scrolling, hoping the bright little screen would keep me company. For a few minutes, it worked. I watched videos without taking any of them in, letting other people's lives fill the space around me.

Then I felt it.

A cold draft moved across the back of my neck, followed by the unmistakable sound of something moving below me.

I looked around.

I sat very still, listening, waiting for it to happen again.

Nothing.

There’s no one there.

I went back to my phone.

I dreaded the thought of sleeping in the cold basement.

There were no beds left upstairs, and the sofas had already been wrapped in heavy plastic, ready for pickup.

I turned on the basement light and headed downstairs, leaving the lights on behind me, as though I could trick myself into believing my family was still upstairs, my grandfather making tea, the television murmuring in the background, the familiar sounds of a house still awake.

At the bottom of the stairs, I turned right into the spare bedroom.

Except it was no longer the spare bedroom.

I looked on in disbelief.

It was my mother’s bedroom, exactly as it had been when she was a child. I had seen this room before in photographs.

The colours, the furniture, and the almost psychedelic decor felt like a childhood preserved long after it was supposed to disappear, as though I'd stepped onto the set of The Brady Bunch.

As I crept into the room, my feet sank into the burnt-orange carpet I was certain had been removed years ago. Butter-yellow curtains covered in enormous flowers framed the windows, matching the bedspread and the heart-shaped cushion sitting neatly against the pillows.

On the desk was a hairbrush with strands of golden blonde hair still tangled between the bristles.

I picked it up.

The hair was fine and pale, the kind of hair my mother had before I knew her. Before she was my mother. Before she was anything other than a girl who lived in this room.

I put the brush down and walked to the closet.

Inside, her dresses were perfectly hung, one after another. Small frocks in shades of blue, brown and cream, some floral, others checkered, their little collars and buttons still perfectly in place.

I ran my fingers along one of the sleeves.

It was soft.

Not dusty. Not brittle with age.

Soft, as though someone had worn it yesterday.

On the desk sat a perfume bottle. I picked it up and sprayed a little onto my wrist. It smelled sweet and powdery.

There was also a diary, open to a page dated July 13, 1971. My mother had gone roller skating with Melinda. She wrote about the heat, the music they listened to, and how they stayed out until the streetlights came on.

The handwriting was unmistakably hers.

I stood in the doorway.

I knew this room, but I had never actually seen it this way. Not in my lifetime.

Everything was exactly where it should have been.

But how could this be?

My stomach tightened.

Had the property managers arranged all of this while I was away?

But why would anyone go to the trouble of recreating a little girl's bedroom from the 1970s?

I looked around the room again, searching for something modern, something out of place. A label. A price tag. A note from the estate agent. Anything that might explain it.

As I stood there in shock, the door at the top of the stairs slammed with such force that a woven tapestry of a large-eyed chipmunk fell from the bedroom wall.

I jumped back, knocking into the small pink desk and sending the plastic flowers tumbling from the mirror.

I began breathing quickly as the room seemed to shrink around me.

I turned away and crossed the hall into what had once been the den, though over the years it had been reduced to a large storage closet.

I stopped at the doorway.

This room was also different.

Everything in the room was white, pink and black, exactly as I remembered it from photographs of my parents on Easter and Christmas when they were young.

I could picture my family here, sitting on these exact white leather sofas.

Every part of me went cold.

I ran for the stairs.

I took them two at a time, my hand sliding along the banister as I climbed. At the top, I reached for the door and turned the handle.

It didn't move.

I tried again.

The door was locked.

I pulled harder, then banged my palm against the wood.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

I crouched down and looked beneath the door.

No light came through from the other side.

The house upstairs was completely dark.

I pressed my ear against the door, and a wave of burning heat moved through me, spreading from the top of my head down my body.

I pulled my phone from my back pocket and tried to connect to the internet.

Nothing.

No signal. No Wi-Fi.

I was completely cut off.

I tried calling my dad. The call wouldn't even connect. I tried again, then again, watching the same message appear on the screen.

No service.

I headed back into my mother's bedroom and dragged the small wooden stool from beneath her desk. I carried it over to the window and climbed onto it, reaching for the latch.

It wouldn't move.

I pushed harder, then pulled with both hands. The window felt as though it had been sealed shut.

“Come on,” I shouted, as the window latch dug into my palm, breaking the skin. Blood began to spread across my hands.

I climbed down and looked around the room for something heavy.

On the desk was a large dance trophy dated 1968.

I picked it up and carried it to the window.

I struck the glass, but it didn't break.

I hit it again, harder.

The sharp edge of the trophy dug into my palm.

Still nothing.

I stared at the trophy in my hands, then at the window.

The glass hadn't even cracked.

It was as though the window wasn't made of glass at all.

I ran to the bathroom at the end of the hallway and pushed open the door. I flicked on the light and immediately turned on the tap, cupping cold water in my hands and splashing it over my face.

The room was unbearably warm.

I looked up.

A large jacuzzi tub sat beneath a panel of glass bricks, its surface roiling with steaming water. The jets churned methodically beneath it, filling the room with a low, mechanical hum.

Heat pressed against my skin.

I hadn't seen that tub since I was six.

They removed it after Sally almost drowned.

I stood there as the sound of the jets grew louder and louder, the low mechanical hum becoming almost unbearable. I couldn't understand how it could be running.

Then I looked at myself in the wall of mirrors beneath the pink glow of the lights.

My face seemed to shift in the glass. Younger. Smaller. The features I knew were becoming unfamiliar, as though I were watching myself disappear.

Then I screamed.

The sound echoed through the bathroom, vibrating through my body as it travelled around me. I screamed again, as loud as I could, until my throat burned.

I ran down the hallway and grabbed the lava lamp sitting on top of the old TV. I hurled it at the den window.

The glass didn't break.

The lava lamp did.

Thick, glowing liquid oozed across the white carpet, spreading slowly through the perfect vacuum lines.

I stared at it for a second, almost unable to understand what I was seeing.

Then I grabbed the baseball bat from the hallway and ran up the stairs.

I swung it at the locked door with everything I had.

The bat struck the wood with a deafening crack.

Nothing.

Not even a dent.

I swung again.

And again.

My arms began to ache, but I kept hitting it, screaming until my voice broke.

Finally, I dropped the bat.

I ran back downstairs and into my mother's bedroom, where I began tearing things from the shelves, throwing them blindly onto the floor.

Trophies.

Photographs.

Books.

Anything that might break the room apart.

I barely felt the sharp edge of a glass frame cut into my palm. Blood ran between my fingers and dripped onto the carpet, leaving dark stains behind.

I grabbed another trophy.

My palms were slick with blood now, coating the gold plastic gymnast.

I threw it against the wall.

Within minutes, the room was destroyed.

I headed back into the den.

The lava liquid had spread across the carpet, soaking through the pale fibres and pooling in places.

Then, one by one, the lights in the hallway flickered on.

My body stood frozen.

I could hear voices.

I looked up to see the television was on.

The commercials were old. Fast-food restaurants. Used-car dealerships. Local businesses I hadn't thought about in years.

Then the news came on.

I recognized the anchor immediately. He had been on television when I was a child, his face appearing in our living room every evening while my sisters and I played on the floor.

I noticed the date in the corner of the screen.

October 21, 1995.

The day after my mom died.

She was killed by drunk teenagers driving home from a Halloween party. They were still wearing their Halloween costumes. The driver was a ghost. His girlfriend, a cheerleader.

I stopped breathing.

There she was on the screen.

Her golden-blonde hair. Her bright blue eyes.

Without any warning, she was gone.

I remembered the phone call.

I remembered my sister's scream.

I remembered my father leaving the house and not coming back until sometime the next morning.

I had to pretend it all away.

Don't talk about Mom

Don't upset your father.

Your sisters don't need to hear about it.

I got up and, in a rage, threw a marble figurine at the television.

The screen shattered.

I ran into my mom's room and tried the window again. I pulled at it until my hands throbbed, until I no longer cared whether I broke something, the window or myself.

It wouldn't move.

My hands were purple and soaked in blood.

I wiped the blood across the bedspread.

Then I climbed onto the bed and screamed.

I screamed until the sound seemed to come from somewhere deeper than my body, somewhere beneath memory, beneath language, beneath anything I knew how to name.

I screamed until my chest burned.

Until my throat felt torn open.

I screamed so loudly that for one terrible moment I imagined I could simply scream myself out of existence.

And then the house screamed back.

The floor beneath me began to vibrate.

The butter-yellow bedspread rose around my body, wrapping itself over my legs, my waist, my chest. I clawed at it, but it only tightened, pulling me beneath its surface.

I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't see.

I could only feel myself being dragged up the stairs and through the house.

Through the rooms.

Through everything I had spent my life trying to forget.

Then I was pulled upward.

Through the hallway.

Toward the locked door.

And through it.

I landed hard on the pavement and unraveled from the bedspread.

I was outside.

I scrambled to my feet and began to run while screaming at the top of my lungs, afraid the house would drag me back in.

The sky was pitch-black, illuminated only by the pools of light cast by the street lamps. The air was cold against my face, and a sharp wind moved through the trees.

House lights flicked on as I ran down the street.

One by one, the neighbours began to wake.

Curtains opened.

I kept running.

Then I heard music.

A car was coming toward me, moving far too quickly for the narrow street.

The headlights grew brighter.

I knew the song.

I knew the car.

I knew what was happening.

There was no time to move.

The car struck me directly, lifting me onto the hood and sending me over the windshield before I was swung onto the pavement.

The music stopped and everything went silent.

The passengers climbed out.

I looked up at them.

One ghost.

One cheerleader.

Somewhere behind them, a porch light came on.

And for a moment, I could smell chlorine.