It was dusk when the distant house met my sights. A dilapidated three story home of southern style, uniformly tinted a faded, pale blue entered frame. I didn’t remember how I had got there, and I had no prior memories of the house, but it looked familiar. It looked like it might be comforting.
As I approached, rusted, broken down trucks from an age past were placed all over the yard and gravel driveway with the patterned chaos of a minefield. I emerged from the woods and wound through the impromptu maze of vehicles looking for a door. The house filled the night with darkness and quiet. On the far side of the house was a large carport, the ceiling extending far above, keeping company with the house’s third floor.
With little resistance, I flapped open the screen door and steadily tried to turn the knob to the side door. It was locked.
Molly saw me from the kitchen window and made untranslatable hand motions at me. Next thing I knew, the door popped open enough for me to slip inside, and I was sucked in as if I were lint trying to flee a humming vacuum.
All of the doors were locked. Most of the furniture had an abandoned, neglected look to it. Not a single light was on in the house. Most of the windows blinded, or barricaded from the outside world by curtain. As I slid a chair out from under the kitchen table, she urged me to sit down. She meant the ground. I slunk from the chair and took a resting position on the linoleum floor.
“Anton Chigurh,” she explained. He and Justin Hurley had a falling out. Everyone had taken refuge here while they waited for things to pass over, but during those weeks, a man with an explosive personality, and an unstoppable force had clashed. In the turmoil, everyone left; some fearing for their safety, some out of unspoken allegiance to one of the combative men.
Molly told me about how she hid in a box filled with curtains and sheets for 4 days, waiting until everyone was asleep or preoccupied to sneak around for basic necessities. As everyone continued to filter out of the group, they all took her for being the independent, loner-type she was known to be, assuming she had long decided to look for a better situation than the fog of conflict that infiltrated their house.
I then remembered where I had been before. It was some coastal town, lined with cobblestone streets, and a villagefront downtown that was tiered in elevation. I was running from someone, or rather, I was being followed or pursued in some manner, so I discretely had been spending a few days trying to get out of there. At the bottom of the town, I saw a white Volvo station wagon. It was the first car I had seen in days. The windows were down, so I hopped into the driver’s seat through the window. The car was already running. As I got in, I sensed whatever had been trying to find me rounding the corners of the town streets, so I put the car into reverse and forcefully impressed the gas pedal.
Tunneling backwards, I hit a weathered-down white railing. The backend of the car was poking out with no ground beneath it, as the front end seemed to frantically grip balance the small amount of Earth beneath it. Again, I hopped out the window, and saw a small football field, surrounded by dug-in bleachers. The stadium descended about 40 feet, but on the ground level, there was an asphalt running track, separated by the same railing I had hit with the Volvo. I started running down the long straightaway of the track, getting halfway, arriving to meet with the three Hill children, Jonathan, Ana, and Jared.
I apologized for wrecking the Volvo, and told them we need to go to their parents house and eat dinner. We left together, but the only other memory I have of the Hills was dropping them off at Tim and Prisca’s and watching the three of them lay on the ground and try to roll up their steep front yard hill.
I was back at the house. Molly was gone. She told me she was leaving to go work in the city for a few hours, but I suspected that she was hiding back in her usual spot, fearing that my arrival had brought too much attention to the lonely house in the countryside. I needed to sleep, but I had a feeling that my dad was looking for me– trying to find me, so I fought sleep.
Being alone made me realize how large the house was. With its eight legs and sinister nature, a dread crept into me. I wondered if Anton or Justin had been here all along, in the upper hallways of our shelter. Maybe Molly knew and didn’t tell me. I had only been in the kitchen, afterall. Given their agitated state, either man was dangerous, despite our friendship.
On the floor I sat facing the far wall of the kitchen. All of the walls painted the same pale blue. That wall led to the exterior and part of the driveway. Besides the cabinets, there was a small, arched window that was far too high on the wall for anyone to see in or out of. Right next to me, the small, cheap kitchen table; the kind of table you’d regrettably buy at a yard sale. Beyond that, the side door that I entered, bolted and locked, and to the left of the door, a long countertop that extended a good 12 feet to the far wall and included a dual sink. In the other direction was a locked door. It was sturdy, and had small paneled windows on it. It looked like it went to a study and also had stairs in the room, but it was dark and hard to make out. Behind me, was a similar looking locked door. The walls that separated the kitchen and what appeared to be a living room or den had large windows on them.
I was surrounded by doors I couldn’t trust and unfamiliar rooms.
Taking it all in, I realized that Molly rarely left the kitchen for fear of someone else being in the house, often sleeping on the floor under the table. I walked to the living room door, unlocked it and entered.
As if the room itself were exhaling, a chill hushed over me as I entered. I could hear a ticking grandfather clock and a faint, infrasonic buzz. I closed the door, not wanting to leave any vulnerabilities or traces of where I had been– just in case. I tried to sleep on a blue couch with bloated, spongey cushions lined with a scratchy wool-like blue fabric, but I kept hearing soft, nearly imperceptible thuds and rhythms that hinted of movement on the third story of the house. I sat up and listened for a long time; looking at the stairs and up into the darkness of the second floor hallway.
For fear of everything I didn’t know, I silently crept back into the kitchen, locked the door and put curtains on the windows in the walls that separated the kitchen and the living room. Molly was back, and she told me that she saw my dad outside a while ago, but he didn’t seem to think anyone was around, so he went back to Hawaii to be in the sun.
As soon as she told me that, they all started arriving. First the outside door unlocked from the outside and opened. It was sone girl I didn’t know. Then the far-side wall of the kitchen slid open like a garage door, turning into a patio roof of sorts. It was Amy pulling up the wall. She had a smile on her face like she was happy that everyone was here at once. She told us that she brought the whole gang. Down the driveway you could see a small fleet of cars rolling in as the chorus of tires flattening the gravel swelled.
Within thirty seconds, a third of my high school class must have been congregated in the kitchen and the newly transformed patio. A black low rider truck was the last to pull up. The tinted windows rolled down, and there he was, Justin, in the passenger seat as some scrawny, methed-out looking kid with a straw in his mouth sat the wheel. He started barking orders to people and announcing how good of a time we were all going to have that night.
Pulling my attention off of them, I saw a figure out of my left. Sweeping my vision across, I saw the living room door sitting open as the air from the room breathed a chill over everyone. Silently, Anton stood next to the door inside the kitchen. He was gusseted with sweat that had been slowly building up the entire time, yet calmly breathed as his eyes fixed on a man he wanted to kill. Justin, much in his manner, cursed at Anton and everyone else unfortunate enough to be in his line of sight. He made a motion at his lackey and they peeled out, back up the driveway the came. The last audible noises being something about promising to come back and put Chigurh in his place once and for all.
All the girls were crying, as everyone, silently and subvertedly horrified, whisked away into the woods in scrambled paths as quickly as they had arrived. I told Molly to sleep in the study and lock the door that enters it, and left.
Much later, I was on the porch of my old house on Totty Road. It was deep night. My dad and I had been inside talking. Neither of us were supposed to be there, and we knew that if our current tenants caught us sitting in the living room that late at night that they would be deeply disturbed. The front door opened, and he joined me on the porch. As he did, the distant sound of reckless machinery appeared down the road as if a bloodthirsty ogre grunting violent threats. As the streetlights briefly hit the machine, I could make out a spinning vehicle.
Round and round, a backhoe twisted and caromed down the cul-de-sac street, accelerating its pace until it smacked directly into the front of my Toyota Camry parked in front of the house on the side of the street. A bald-headed figure plunged into the ground from the now immobile vehicle. It was Justin again, presumably fleeing from a conflict he and his posse just had with Anton. As he hit the ground, he landed like a baseball player sliding into home plate, minus the sliding part plus all the friction of a paved road. A hardhat tumbled loose from his head and flundered down the street, and a small bag of cocaine plotted itself next to him from his jacket pocket.
My dad and I didn’t want to deal with it, or be exposed as having been intruding in the house, but we didn’t know what to do about my car. We dragged Justin up the hill, across the lawn and placed his partially conscious, beat up body on a rocking chair on the porch. Sounds dribbled from his mouth, and his eyes slunk down with a blank stare, his attention trapped on some point in the ground as if he were a curious kid intently observing an ant hill. We were considering walking away and back to the large blue house when several of the girls from the house congregation showed up. They told us they had been learning nursing and they need to patch Justin back up before Anton shows up. It struck me as odd that they said learning and not studying.
One of them, who everyone called Mary, pulled out a small box of band-aids, and gently placed one on his left elbow. Another girl told her that she needed to put rum on the bandage first to sterilize it. The third one pulled out a flask, telling her it was only bourbon but to do it anyway. Frantically, they soaked a second band-aid and slapped it on his elbow as it partially overlapped the first, dripping beads of what smelled more like gasoline than anything else.
I suspected they were actually going to try to set him on fire, then blame it on Anton. One of them was covering his mouth and eyes with damp white cloths. I had already witnessed more of this horrific event than I wanted to. So I just started thinking about getting back to that three story house in the woods, joining Molly in the study, and sleeping on the floor in the corner of the room in quiet, warmth, and transient peace. I thought harder and harder as I could feel my presence slipping away as the chaos around me faded, but I saw him standing next to me. I didn’t want to leave my dad. I hadn’t seen him in so long.
I didn’t see him, but I knew Anton had just arrived; perhaps all the way down the street. If I could have seen it, I probably would have seen an elongated shadow that impossibly stretched itself down the entirety of the road. The mopped head centered in the cul-de-sac, and roping all the way up to a darkened figure in a denim jacket, calmly watching as the houses on the street behind him smoldered and crumbled apart in flame.
I didn’t get to the dilapidated blue house. I didn’t stay with my dad. I didn’t watch anymore of the awkward nurses suspiciously patching up my friend, and I didn’t see the dreadful figure of Anton coolly observing us. Instead, I woke up.
