The Guardian McKay
Everything was old,
just old. It was his family’s ancestral home, and it
was damn creepy; generations of McKays, of people he didn’t know, had lived and
died in this house. They were strangers,
they were dead, and their faded black and white faces stared at him from
antique portraits on the walls.
There
was a staleness in the air—it was still there even after he had thrown open
every window in his room in desperation.
It was musty, stifling, it was history—layers and layers of it. His grandparents hadn’t even tried to dust
off the house. There were armchairs that
had been sat in a hundred years ago, that he was afraid to go near. He felt unwanted in that house—like anywhere
he sat was someone else’s spot.
He
was stuck here for the summer, while his parents went on vacation. It had been his mother’s idea to re-live
their honeymoon twenty years later. They
had been saving for ten years to do this.
So now, he was stuck in some tiny part of Georgia while his parents
toured around the country. They would do
a clockwise loop, from tourist trap, to tourist trap. They would blow ten years of savings in just
one month, and feel like rugged travelers.
Once the money was all spent, his parents would be back in New England,
and they’d send for him. Then he would
be free—it would be a short flight up home and this whole thing would be done
with.
Just
a month—he could manage that.
All
his clothes had been stuffed into a suitcase that now sat awkwardly in the middle
of the floor. His laptop and the puddle
of wires that was his Ipod were mixed in with an old comb, hairbrush, and
mirror on the dresser—this had been a girl’s room. The walls were a peachy color, and the
dresser, the chair, and the small coffee table all had lace draped over
them. The worst thing of all, however,
was the china doll that watched him from the corner of the room. There were cracks that spider-webbed across
its white face, and it had the awful type of eyes that followed him wherever he
went. In addition to being scary, it was
also horrifically girly.
His
grandparents were financially able to hold on to the old house by giving
historical tours of it. Because of the
constant tours, he wasn’t able to do anything about the way his new room
looked. The house was always filled, not
just with the history, but with about twenty additional strangers a day. About half of these strangers were other
people named ‘McKay’, people with the same blue eyes, and who knew the names of
the antique faces on the walls. If he
heard a tour coming up the rickety stairs, he had to throw all of his
belongings into his suitcase and hide it under the bed. This included the fifty-pound portable
generator he brought with him, because the house had never been wired for
electricity. It had been a family-owned
historical museum for decades.
It
was about a week before he found that he could no longer sleep properly. His eyes only stayed closed for two or three
hours at a time. Although he would never
admit it to anyone, he had the awful suspicion that the house was haunted. There were too many strange things for it not
to be. The floors creaked when no one
walked on them, drafts blew doors shut, and sometimes he thought he heard
voices talking. But it was an old house,
and, after all this time, the floorboards were allowed to squeak.
He
started to explore the house and the grounds on his second week there. There wasn’t much of a ‘grounds’ to explore
though—just a giant lawn and a few scattered clumps of trees—and it was hot.
This confined his wanderings to the house. The first place he explored was the china
cabinet; the most interesting thing he found among the shelves was a
silver-looking goblet from 1873.
After that, it was
the basement. It took him a few attempts
to successfully get down the stairs—each step he took resulted in a symphony of
creaks and groans that filled his imagination with notions of a fall to his untimely
death.
Of
all the places in the house, the basement was the one that felt the
oldest. Going down those stairs was like
descending into the past—it got progressively mustier and creepier. He couldn’t help but wonder: how many people
had gone down these steps before he had?
The
basement was where he found it—the photograph.
It was lying face down in the farthest corner from the stairs. There was writing—in a loopy, slanting
cursive—on the back, but it was so badly faded that all he could make out was
two words: “Kayleigh, 1886”.
It
was a picture of a girl—maybe the same girl that had lived in his room and used
to play with the creepy china doll. The girl
stared out at him from the past—she had big eyes, and held her head high. He felt that this photo had been lost for
years before he’d stumbled upon it—maybe he was the first person to see it
since 1886.
For
three nights, that photograph lay on his dresser and he didn’t give it a thought.
But then, one morning before dawn, his
grandfather ventured into his room to wake him.
When the old man spotted it, his eyes grew wide.
He
pointed at it, “Where…?”
The
boy looked up, “Oh, I found it in the basement.”
The
old man went to it, and held it up gingerly.
“The basement, you say...This was my grandmother.” He looked on the back, “Eighteen-eighty six.”
“Yep…looked
like it had been down there for ages.”
“How
lucky, that it wasn’t destroyed.”
There
was silence for a moment, somewhere, a door creaked on its hinges.
“She
was a remarkable woman,” continued the old man “secured our family fortune, and
took care of the house when no one else would—saved the family, I suppose.”
He
didn’t give much thought to what his grandfather had said until he was loading
his suitcase into the back of a taxi cab, destined for the airport. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman
smiling and shaking her head. The woman
was old, and he thought it was his grandmother.
With his hand raised in a goodbye-wave, he turned and looked back at the
old house. His grandparents were on the
porch, waving back at him. The woman in
the window was gone.
It
was an inexplicable feeling, but suddenly, it didn’t seem like he was going
home anymore.
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