The Spite House(83)

They always met with Eleanor and Owen in groups of three or more. Eleanor turned twelve not long after arriving back in Degener for the first time since she was a baby, but carried a cynicism well beyond her age. She wondered if even the orphan children understood why they felt compelled to always outnumber the two Masson children. “Your uncle is dead. I saw his grave. I touched the marker.”

“You live in a ghost’s house.”

“If you live there, how do we know you’re not dead, too?”

The orphans had more in common with Uncle Peter than they realized. He didn’t like Eleanor and Owen either. He fed and sheltered them, but hardly said a word to them beyond what was absolutely necessary.

“Dinner,” he grunted at them each night when food was ready.

“Breakfast,” each morning, said almost grudgingly, like a judge ordered him to make sure he gave the children a chance to feed themselves.

Never so much as “Come and eat.” Never a mention of what he made. Just an austere announcement, as if he didn’t really care if they ate or chose not to.

On most Saturdays, Uncle Peter went into town and came back with what they needed from the general goods store. He would also bring home an even sourer mood than what he’d left with. The rumor that the orphans picked up from eavesdropping on the Sisters was that Scary Old Peter spent part of the day visiting a lawyer in town, trying and failing to devise ways to evict them and reclaim his family home.

Uncle Peter’s vindictiveness contaminated the walls, fouled the floors, molded the wood, and grayed the windows of the house. The building reeked of his anger. It made Eleanor restless at night, wondering when Uncle might go mad and do something awful. She often heard Owen stirring in his sleep as well.

One night Owen knocked on her door, then entered her room before she answered.

“Can I sleep in your bed?” he said, and took her silence and shift away from the center of the bed as a yes.

As they lay there, Owen on his side and Eleanor on her back, an unexpected thought popped into her head. Before she could think better of it, she said, “Don’t you think it might be fun to play a joke on one of the children from the Arms?”

Owen didn’t answer for a long time. Had he never answered, she might have let it go, and all that followed might never have happened. Or maybe it would have only been postponed.

“What kind of trick?” he said after so much time passed she thought he had fallen asleep.

“They all think that Uncle’s dead and the house is bad and we’re bad for living in it, don’t they? They’re scared of us, even though they act brave around us because there’re always so many of them around. But what if we caught one of them by themselves and made believe like we were just as bad as they say we are? We could pretend to drag them into the house, and tell them it really is a ghost house, and that they were right all along, we’re ghosts who’ve been pretending to be alive. We’ll say that once they get in the house they’ll disappear, and no one will ever see them again unless they learn to be nice to us. Then, if they’re nice enough, we’ll teach them how to be like us. Ghosts pretending to be alive.”

Owen shuddered. He pulled the covers tighter around his shoulders and pressed his head harder into the pillow. “I wouldn’t like that trick. It’s mean.”

“No it’s not. It would be fun. And even if it is mean, it’s fair because of how they treat us.”

Owen stayed quiet until Eleanor fell asleep, which took some time, as she had to quell a newfound resentment she felt for her younger brother, whose rejection of her idea made her feel even less seen and loved than Uncle Peter and the orphans could.



* * *



“You don’t have to believe me. That doesn’t stop it from being true. This house really can make you disappear.”

“Stop saying that,” Owen said, on the verge of tears. He had heard this same thing from Eleanor every day for weeks. She was getting meaner, and he didn’t understand why. He was starting to hate her for it. Not the childish hate that’s just a word directed at foods they don’t like or a parent who has told them no. It was legitimate hatred that was a coin’s width away from love.

It was mid-January. Christmas came and went without Santa finding them. The Sisters from the orphanage brought small gifts, but Owen couldn’t live off that single act of tenderness for the next twelve months. He needed Eleanor to be loving and consoling again. He hated this new version of her who hissed, “Be quiet,” or, “No one wants to hear it,” when he said he missed their parents and cousins.

He especially hated her taunts about the house. She kept saying it could make someone vanish if they stayed in it too long.

“You need to let me teach you how to stop it from happening before it’s too late,” she said. “If not, you’re just going to be gone one day.”

“You’re lying,” he said, his voice cracking. “Prove it.”

“I can’t demonstrate it myself,” Eleanor said. “You’ll just say it’s some kind of trick I pulled to fool you. But if I showed you with someone else, you’d believe it then.”

“I told you I’m not doing that.”

“It would be very easy, Owen. We pull one of those rat children from the orphanage into the house—”