The House with No Doorbell

Trigger warning: this story includes sexual violence, and substance abuse.

The House with No Doorbell 

By Brent Bosworth

The house at 13 Sycamore Street is an ugly, falling-down bungalow with peeling brown paint. The storm door doesn’t shut all the way, and where a doorbell used to be, there is now just a hole in the wall. Even from the doorway, it smells musty, and I’m overwhelmed by mildew as soon as I walk in. I turn and run to the banister just outside the door, and lean over it just as I can no longer hold back the vomit. 

When my grandfather died, he left the house to me. This came as no surprise, as I was always his favorite in the family. We tell ourselves that we don’t pick favorites like that, but deep down we all know that’s not true. It’s just one of many pretty little lies we tell ourselves. It was not received well by the rest of the family when it was announced that I was the new owner. We all grew up here. This place is full of memories. It’s also full of ghosts.

The ghosts are both figurative and literal, if you believe in that sort of thing. I wanted to believe, but never saw any of them. To date, six people have died here that I know of. All of them died terribly, and only one of them deserved it. The first three were long before my time, and I really don’t know much about them. They lived here right before my grandparents bought it. They were all murdered in their sleep by the wife’s ex-lover. All of them had been hit in the head with a sledgehammer. The son was only eight years old. 

The next man was also someone I never got to meet, although I have pissed on his grave, and I feel like I know him well. On July 4th, 1993, my family hosted a neighborhood cookout. They did that a lot up until then, but this would be their last one. One of the neighbors wandered into the bathroom while my mother was getting changed. He was wasted out of his mind and decided to have his way with her. My grandfather caught him in the act because he heard my mother’s screams. The man looked at my grandfather and said, “Come on, John, we were just having some fun.” My grandfather took out the hunting knife he always had and buried it in the man’s forehead. It was too late, though. Nine months later, I was born.

The next victim of our house of horrors was a man I loved very much. My uncle, Johnny, was one of my best friends. He was always very sweet to me, but he had a handful of really bad problems that I couldn’t possibly understand at the age of nine. He struggled with bipolar disorder, and when he would go low, he would go lower than the ocean floor. Around these times is when he said he saw the ghosts. When he’d go through these episodes, he would turn to his old friend, heroin. My grandparents did everything they could to help him, and always treated him with empathy. In the end, it didn’t matter. He took a lethal dose, but that was just to ensure that his actual plan didn’t fail. He had hung a noose in the basement and wrapped his neck in it, and kicked the chair out from under him. 

The sixth and possibly the most tragic was my sister Heather. My mother did a home birth, not by choice, but because everything happened so fast that day. I was ten this time, so I was starting to understand things a little better. I knew something was wrong right away because when Heather came out, she only cried for a minute, and then silence. Not just from her, but from everyone. She was born with a rare disorder where some of her organs were missing or not fully developed. Apparently, there had been too much pressure on her one underdeveloped lung, and she suffocated to death. There was nothing anyone could do. 

While reminiscing on these tragedies, I begin cleaning. First the walls, then the floors, and that will be good for today. It also occurs to me that I understand now why my mother was the only one who was not upset about not getting the house. She has the most demons here. For a moment, I consider burning it down for her as an act of love, and also selfishness. After all, I am an extension of her. Her suffering is mine as well, in a way. The thought does not last long because I really don’t like being in my thirties and sleeping on random couches every night. 

After I finish the chores I set out to do, I make my way to the master bedroom. This room has been perfectly preserved, and there is no weird smell. Everything is covered in plastic, so I begin tearing it off, revealing pictures and furniture that take me right back down memory lane. This time though, it’s the good memories. Family pictures line the walls, mostly of me and my cousins, but some of them are much older. There are people in some that I don’t know, but the family resemblance is uncanny. 

The largest framed picture in the room is one of my senior pictures, and the love it makes me feel is almost too much. Our family might have had its problems. Most of us had at least a little bit of a criminal record, and even more of us struggled with some sort of substance abuse problem, but the love was all real. That sort of thing matters more, I think. We were perfectly imperfect together. The picture itself takes me back too. That was a good day. I lost my virginity to my first girlfriend that day. That was my first brush with romantic love, and even today, I still feel something for her. I think about her often, even seventeen years later. Sometimes I think your first love is really your most important. 

I finally rip the plastic off the bed, and it looks brand new. Part of me wonders if they ever took the original plastic off. It’s stripped, of course, but I know they kept all of the bedding in the large wardrobe in the corner. Upon further investigation, I find everything I need inside of it. I make the bed as nicely as you’d expect from a single man in his thirties. It has been a long day, and it is time to relax, but first it’s time to take drugs. As I said, in this family, you don’t grow up without substance abuse problems. First a Percocet to help get me right, then the acid. I don’t typically do acid, but when I was making the trip here, I thought of Johnny and his ghosts. “We’ll see about these fucking ghosts,” I say to an empty room, and I lay back on the bed. 

Before I realize what happened, I’m waking up, and my initial thought is that I’m annoyed because I probably slept off the drugs. I glance at my watch and see that it’s just now turning midnight. I sigh and go to lie back down, but I notice an unfamiliar shadow out of the corner of my eye. Then I realized the room was no longer silent either. I could hear sniffling. Someone was crying over in the corner. 

I shot out of bed and backed against the wall at first. The crying grew louder, from sniffling to loud wet sobs. I worked up the courage to inch forward, and saw a small figure hunched over two long lumps on the floor. As I got closer, I saw that it was a man and woman with both of their faces caved in completely. Their mouths were sunken in and void of teeth. No nose was visible at all, and there were just black holes where their eyes should have been. “Please help me, mister,” the boy said in between his sobs. “It’s my parents. They won’t wake up.” He turned to face me as he asked again, “Can you help me?” I gasped and stepped back. From the neck down, he was a normal eight-year-old boy, wearing a retro Superman shirt and tattered pajama pants. His face was more terrible than his parents' because his one eye was still visible, but was falling from its socket. Also, where normal tears would have been, there were blood drops. He took a step closer to me. This time I actually screamed and ran past him, out of the door. 

I came to a halt in the hallway after almost colliding with a man exiting the bathroom. He was just standing there, looking back and forth with a confused expression, and a knife sticking out of his forehead. He turned to me and said, “Hey boy, have you seen your mom? We were just having a little fun.” I felt years of rage fill my body in a split second. I yelled, “fuck you,” and tried to punch him in the face. As soon as my fist touched his face, cold filled my whole body; there was a swooshing sound, and he vanished. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop my fist from making contact with the framed photo on the wall behind him. Glass shattered, and blood began spilling from my hand immediately. I went into the bathroom and found some gauze and tape, and was able to wrap it quickly, but it was already turning red. 

Before I could think of what to do about my hand, I jumped at the sudden loud music that came floating through the house. I stumbled out into the hallway and began to follow the music. The instrumentals were loud and grungy, and then Kurt Cobain’s voice came next. I’d recognize that voice anywhere, but I couldn’t make out the song. It was almost like it was muffled. Come to think of it, everything had been kind of muffled since I woke up. I know where it’s coming from, and where to go next. Nirvana was Johnny’s favorite band. I don’t really care to see how Johnny looked at the end of his life, but I feel like I’m no longer in control of my body. I’m just along for the ride. 

The music got louder as I walked down the steps, and it bothered me that I still couldn’t figure out the song. When Johnny’s ghost saw me, he shut the radio off, and it was silent for a moment as he stared at me. He turned and stepped on the chair, and placed the noose around his neck. I could see the needle in his hand still, so he must not have done the drugs yet. He looked at it and then looked at me and said, “Want a shot, bud?” I stood there in silence. “What? You’re clearly not new to drugs anymore. You see the ghosts now too, yeah? You look like you do.” He laughed as he said that. “The boy with the eye got you, huh? Yeah, he fucks me up too. Well, I hate to cut this short, but I have prior engagements.” He stuck the needle in his arm and kicked the chair away. His ghost begins to struggle, and I stand still in shock. Eventually the swooshing noise happens again, and he’s gone. 

After a few minutes, I can walk again. I know who I have to face now, and I can feel tears filling my eyes already as I begin walking to the living room to see Heather. There is a bassinet in the corner that I know is not really there. I walk up to it and realize for the first time that my heart is beating really fast and there is a faint pain, aching in my chest. I am ready to get this over with, so I look into the bassinet. The dead baby is lying there. Her chest is sunken in, and she has already turned blue. I begin to cry, but I think if this is all this one is going to be, then I can handle it. Suddenly her eyes shoot open, and she jumps to her feet and grabs the side of the bassinet. Her face is now inches from mine. “It should have been you,” she said, and then started crawling out of her bassinet, continuing to say it over and over. I was backing up now, and she started running as soon as she hit the floor. I turned and ran to the door. I get out and turn to see her and hear, “It should have been you,” before I slam the door in her face. 

I fall to my knees, clutching at my chest. The pain is immense now, and there is something else too. A feeling I haven’t felt since childhood. It’s fear, I think. No, not just fear, but true terror. “Something in the way,” I say out loud even though I just meant to think it. That was definitely the song, though. It had been muffled, but everything I heard is clear now, and I think I know why. As I sit here, having a heart attack, I will inevitably become the next ghost at 13 Sycamore Street. I choose, “I should have fucking burned it down,” as my last words. Then I glance at the hole where the doorbell should be, and see Heather’s big pale blue eye. It blinks, and then my vision fades to black.