possessed house

SOMETHING WAS WRONG with their new house. They told me that it was “possessed.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I went over to see for myself. It was down one of the older, zigzagging walking streets in the Old Town. The interior hadn’t been refurbished since the Imperial Swedes had the run of the place. When I walked up the steps into the kitchen, I noticed how musty and dreary the house was, but that hadn’t stopped my father-in-law and his wife from acquiring it. He was there by the sink, but looked different. His cheeks were pink and rosy. His eyes had turned orange or yellow, and his pupils were white instead of black.

He did seem in good spirits as he involved himself in some mundane task. His wife came over and kissed him on the cheek, but her eyes were also orange-yellow. I looked at him and said his name, but he cocked his head as if he had never heard it. “Don’t you know what your name is?” I asked him. He was almost too jolly. My father-in-law, or former father-in-law, was not especially known for jolly moods while undertaking renovation. He was a taciturn, quiet sort of man. He chuckled loudly and the white wisps of hair around his ears made him look comical.

I walked up to him and pushed his chest. “Don’t you remember your name?” I said, pushing him. He seemed taken aback. “You need to wake up and remember your name,” I said. I pushed him so hard he fell on the floor, and in that dizzying instant, I saw his orange-yellow eyes flicker to a light blue again. He wiped them and looked around the kitchen, dazed and blinking.

“What is going on here?” he said. “Where am I?”

It was true then that the house was possessed. But where was the ghost? I was waiting for it to make itself visible, to manifest, appear, but as I searched it from top to bottom, I saw nothing, only cobwebs and dust. Maybe the entirety of the house was possessed and so it would be impossible to see just what was possessing it. From the outside of the house though I noticed I could see a white bird flying on the second floor of the building. The bird hovered there as if to land and then fell dead on the floor. Then through a ground floor window, the scene repeated itself as a white bird went to land in the kitchen and fell dead into the kitchen sink.

My youngest daughter then came skipping out of the house. She said, “Daddy, I want to go to town.” I hoisted her up on my shoulders and said, “Good, because I want to get the hell out of this place.” We went walking toward the center of the town, past rows of English hedges and fieldstone walls. Windmills twirled in the distance. Eventually, the main street sloped down, just like the road into Tallinn, Estonia, and we came down the hill, by which time we were at an intersection that looked like Sörnäinen in Helsinki. Where even was this place? There were some young families seated on pink blankets over the tram tracks. They were having a picnic.

It was a sunny day in a northern city, whatever city it happened to be, and the white clouds were beautiful and enormous. My youngest daughter told me that we should stop and sit a while. It felt good to be away from the possessed house. That episode already felt like a dream.