Pittman Place

The Pittman Place by Ed Chaney
Moses and Jakob passed the old Pittman place every day on the way to school. It was a tall, narrow building that seemed to loom out at them over the great overgrown rose bushes in front. These rose bush obscured windows on either side of a porch. They stood out from it, making the porch and front door more cave-like than welcoming. These bushes were so large, that the boys wondered how the mail man got through to slide the mail into the slot.
The building was tall too. It stood three stories tall and had a steep, pointed roof. At the topmost corner, where the two sides of the roof met, there was an old rooster weather vane; that swung this way and that, following the boys as they slouched passed the house.
They didn't ever look up into the windows, merely slid from under their gaze until they were well enough away. Only then would they look back, the sun obscuring the panes of glass so they could only see the sky reflected.
They were both very afraid of the house. Everyone in their grade was. Every now and then some new wise guy would get up and try and lobby his invincibility. This joker would beat his chest and tell the other boys, leaning over their hamburgers and french fries, about how he wasn't scared of nothing. Jakob would think of Moses.
Kids are always scared of something, and that thing was the Pittman place.
When Jakob had been younger, before Moses and his mom had moved in next door, Jakob had heard stories of the power of the Pittman place. In the third grade, he had been sitting at lunch, munching on a peanut butter and jelly and slurping his milk, a bunch of fifth graders had rushed passed him. They all piled in on the table next to his and began to talk rapidly in hushed voices.
“Tonights the night,” one said. He had a gleam in his eyes. Jakob was so small and the boys so intent on their plans, they didn't notice him listening.
But he watched them look around at each other, five in all he counted, each promising to meet up tonight. He wanted to ask them where it was they were so excited about going, but he didn't think the bigger kids would play him straight.
In the end, the boys got up and took off as fast as they had arrived.
When Jakob walked home that day, holding his older sister's hand, he glanced at the Pittman place. It seemed open, ready. It was waiting for something. Jakob shivered and squeezed his sister's hand.
“Ow! Jakob!” She said and let go.
He had a strange feeling then which he couldn't put into words. He was afraid and felt like something was tugging at him, that he was afloat in a current. He started to look over at the house. He felt the house pull at him and tried to grab her hand. She let him take it and he was relieved. He looked up at her to see if she had felt it too, but he couldn't see her eyes behind her sunglasses.
“I'm sorry,” he said.
“It's fine Jakob.” She replied and they walked on.
The next week at school, one of his classmates came in and started talking adamantly to the kids still hanging up their coats. They looked at him in alarm. Jakob tried to listen in, but the kid was too far away and the class was too noisy. The teacher started to call kids to their desks and Jakob forgot about it.
Later, on the playground, Jakob saw the same boy surrounded by a circle of people listening intently. Jakob remembered and ran over in that way that all little boys seem to. He joined the circle, listening to the story already in progress.
“He did not.” A boy with a backwards cap said.
“Did too!” The boy in the middle cried.
“No way. No one goes in the Pittman house. My uncle says that it 'condemned', which means the devil lives there, so..”
“WELL your uncle is wrong! My brother is best friends with Tommy Clifton and he says that all five of them went into the house.”
The boy with the cap shrugged and looked around.
“Your brother is a liar. My uncle works for the police department. He knows everything about everything, and he says that the devil lives in the Pittman house.”
All the kids shivered at that. One of the girls walked away, looking hopefully for a friend to play basketball with. Her leaving seemed to break the power of the circle. The boy with cap sauntered away and the kid in the middle looked dejectedly down at his sneakers. Jakob asked him what had happened to the boys. The boy looked up hopefully, but saw it was only a little kid.
“Aw c'mon, I don't want to give you nightmares, kid.”
“But I want to know.” Jakob replied.
The kid heard Jakob's voice tremble and looked up at the gray sky hanging overhead.
“What happened to them?” Jakob asked again.
“They went insane, kid. Totally bonkers. Looney tunes.”
Jakob and Moses stood in front of the house. They tried to look at the gate, not at each other. They hadn't planned this. That was the point. Jakob looked to Moses for strength. He thought of the nightmares. Moses gave him a quick, hopeful glance and pushed the gate open.
Jakob had nightmares just like the boy had said. He thought of the kids running from the house, but, in the dream, he was one of the kids. He was too small and they ran past him in great bounding steps. His feet seemed to run in mud and he scrambled to get off the front porch. He heard the front door swing open behind him and his terror overcame him. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he would get off the front porch, only to be caught in the rose bushes. The bushes would grow around him until he was trapped. He would push and push, kicking up dirt as the thorns tore his clothes.
If he stopped for long enough, he could hear something rustling behind him. It chased him and in the end, it was always the same. He would wake up in his bed. A deep feeling of fear would come over him and he would reach for his bedside lamp. Between his hand reaching and his fingers touching the switch, his imagination would fill all of the dark corners of the room. Finally, the light would come on and he would sit there panting, staring at his closet and dresser.
After a while, this nightmare began to happen so infrequently, he felt comfortably talking about it. He didn't tell his mom or sister, but instead, he used it for an assignment in class. It was in the fourth grade, he had to right a short story which they would then illustrate. He wrote “The Rose Garden”, in which a little boy becomes trapped by menacing thorns while a tiger roams around the garden looking for him. He watched his teacher read it and saw her mouth turn down slightly.
When he got home that night, his mother asked him about it. He told her he had heard stories about the Pittman place. She told him that it was nonsense and that it was nothing to be afraid of. He said he understood. He told her he had just wanted to write a good story. She gave him a big hug and put his story on the fridge.
The kids at school heard about it and some older kids started to tease him. They called him scaredy cat and said the house was out to get him. He shrank away from them on the playground and hunched over his food at lunch. The other kids thought it was strange, but most understood in their own way. They didn't chat with him about it or make friends, but he could sit with them
“Hey do you want to come over to my house?”
Jakob looked up from the sidewalk. He saw a boy sit down on the curb next to him. The boy had short hair and dark eyes.
“What's your name?”
“Moses. Like in the Bible.”
“There's a Moses in the Bible?”
“Course there is.”
Moses looked at his hands. Jakob watched him for a moment and went back to drawing lines with the orange side of his chalk. He heard Moses shuffle his feet.
“What's yours?”
“Jakob. With a 'k' not a 'c'”
Jakob and Moses sat for a while. Jakob let Moses use his chalk and they drew cartoons and space ships and explosions in the sidewalk in front of Jakob's house.
Moses went to a different school than Jakob, but they were both in the same direction so they started walking together to school. Jakob's sister was glad because she had a new job and needed to get to work all the time. Every time Jakob saw her now she was running for the door, her keys in her hand, a pop tart hanging from her mouth. She'd pull it out and kiss him on the cheek.
“Mmm, you taste like a pop tart!” She'd say. He laughed at that.
Moses hadn't lived next door for very long, but he seemed to know a lot of stories about the house. He told them to Jakob, who was eager to listen. They fueled his imagination somehow. They scared him and he had nightmares sometimes, but he wanted to be scared just the same.
“One time,” Moses said, “there were some crooks who decided to hideout in the Pittman place, way way back, a long time ago. Three guys. They hid there for a week. Finally, the cops tracked them down to the house, but when they broke down the door and went inside, all of them were dead.”
Jakob would walk on normally, but a shiver would dance down his back.
“What happened to them?” He would inevitably ask.
“They had killed themselves by eating the money. They ate until they choked.”
The house made them do it! Jakob would think, shivering all the more. Unconsciously, he would sometimes reach for Moses' hand, but he always knew it would be just as cold as his; and that's never any comfort.
Moses lead the way down the path to the porch. Jakob followed behind him, watching the boy's feet move across the ground. He looked up and saw the house for a moment. It was open. Even the rose bushes seemed to separate. It's getting ready to take a big bite, he thought.
“Who is Moses?” Jakob's mother asked him.
He had just brought home his grades. She looked at them and frowned. The paper sat lightly in her hand, but Jakob was shifting from foot to foot. Just sign it, he thought.
“He's a friend of mine, Mom.”
She looked over his grades and again and looked up. He hoped it would be to ask him for a pen. Instead, she leveled her eyes at his.
“You can do better than this, Jake. I know you can. You're a smart boy.”
Jakob wanted to groan. He wanted to stamp his foot. He didn't want to have to wait here for this. It's the other kids, he wanted to say. They won't leave me alone! I can't concentrate. But, instead of doing this, Jakob simply stood there. She watched him for a moment.
“Promise me you'll try harder, okay?”
Jakob breathed out. He watched his mom grab a pin and sign off on the report card. She finished with a flourish and handed it to him. He turned and ran to the door. He put the card in his backpack and grabbed the doorknob.
“I'm going to start checking your homework, young man! I wanna see straight A's!”
Jakob turned the knob and dashed outside.
They stood on the threshold. Jakob looked at the rusty handle and the clouded glass in the doorway. No boy's rock had made it this far to try to knock in the small panes, so they remained perfectly square in their fitted spaces. But they were clouded. Clean glass covered in who knows what.
The door was old and large, but solid. It didn't have any small splinters to catch on children's thumbs. Nor did it seem set strangely or off kilter in any way.
Jakob thought of the boys running out, leaving their minds behind. He thought of the men stuffing their faces with money. He could picture the tears running down their faces as their mouths opened wider and wider.
He didn't have to look at Moses to know that he was waiting. Waiting for Jakob to put his hand on the worn, rusted looking doorknob and turn.
“The house is haunted, I'm telling you!” One boy said to another.
They were sitting at lunch. They huddled together against the cold wind. Normally, Jakob was fine in his jacket. It kept him warm and made him feel safe. Safe enough to keep his distance from the chatter, but still sit with people.
But today he had forgotten it in the classroom. He meant to ask one of the teachers to let him back in to get it, but he was hungry and so he forgot it all the more in the rush of warm bodies going through the cafeteria lines. It wasn't until he sat down at the table that he began to feel cold. He shivered from it and looked to his right. There was a girl there that he knew, so quickly scooted closer to her. Immediately a boy sat down on his other side. He sighed with relief and began to warm up between the two.
“No way. My big brother says that it's just ugly and old and dirty.”
“Your brother doesn't know! He spends all his time with girls!”
“Does not! He just knows them is all...”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
“Doesn't make the Pittman house an haunted-er!”
Jakob perked up at that. He knew something about the house. He looked at the boys. They looked at him for a moment, then down at their food. One was grumbling. Jakob felt uncertain whether he should say anything. He was warm and close and secure; he didn't want to lose that by running into something and getting eaten up for it. He shivered.
The girl next to him looked over. She smiled at him and he smiled back at her.
“Aren't you cold out here?” She asked.
He nodded shyly.
“Here,” she said, “My mom packed me some cocoa to keep warm. You can have some, if you want. Just don't drink it all.”
Jakob smiled and took the thermos she handed him. He took a few sips. He got a taste of something warm and sweet. He took a gulp and handed it back.
“Thanks a lot.” He said. Hot chocolate ran down the inside of his chest and curled up like a kitten in his stomach. He nestled around the ball of heat, protecting it from the cold air; savoring it.
“No one knows nothing about it! Not your brother or his girlfriends!”
“Does too! Everyone knows!”
Jakob looked up quickly. One of the boys saw him and pointed.
“Even Jakob knows, right Jake?”
Jakob was stunned. The kids turned to him. The girl with the hot chocolate looked at him over the rim of her thermos.
“Yeah...”
One of the boys opened his mouth to say something, but decided not to. The table went quiet. The boys looked around, searching for another volunteer.
“I know stories about the place, I heard them from my friend Moses.”
The boys turned back to him. Everyone turned to look at him again. Go on, their eyes said.
“He...his parents, they've been around for a while. They know all about the house and what happened in it. He tells me about it sometimes. He tells me stories about what happens when people go in there...”
It all came out in a rush, but Jakob knew there was more. He knew all about it. He just couldn't figure out what to tell.
“Like what?”
“Well, he says that one time a family moved in there and they unpacked and then they went to bed. Well they had a little kid, right, and he couldn't sleep 'cause it was all new and so he got out of bed and went out into the hall...”
Every child sat waiting.
“And disappeared.”
There's a moment of hesitation. Jakob looks back over his shoulder. The rose bushes hem him in, blocking a view of the entire street. He looks for a soul, anyone. He wants an adult to run over and chide him, tell him that he should stop what he's doing and go home and work on his homework. Anyone.
He looks and looks.
Nothing moves. The leaves on the rose bushes, not pruned in innumerable seasons, twist around in the slight breeze. This breeze is like a gentle nudge, pointing him towards the door; pushing his hand down on the knob; trying to suggest he turn it just slightly. His hand quivers, the knob shaking ever so softly. This shake turns it for a moment.
There is a loud click.
“So you've been inside?”
“No...”
“You don't know then!”
“I do! I do know!”
The boy looks around like a lawyer on TV. This is all circumstantial, your honor.
“If you've never been inside, you don't know, and that's 'cause you're a scaredy cat. You guys are all scaredy cats. I came from the city and I know that there's no such thing as a haunted house.”
Jakob stared at the table. He was shivering, but not from the cold. He was angry. He was so angry that the boy wouldn't understand. The place is haunted, he thought.
The warmth seemed to evaporate from the group of children, and soon the bell rang, calling them back to their classes.
“Moses can I ask you something?”
“Sure, Jake.”
They were sitting on the sidewalk. Jake pulled his hat forward over his forehead, then back out of his eyes. He stared at the little rocks in the sidewalk cracks. He looked at the weird foam that was between some of them. It was brownish black and looked like fungus. He examined the tiniest cracks in the square he was sitting on and wondered what could have made them.
“Have you ever been inside the Pittman place?”
Moses looked up at him. Jakob couldn't see, but Moses looked at him strangely. His eyes shone slightly while he looked at Jakob questioningly. He looked back to the sidewalk.
“Oh yeah, sure I have. Loads of times. There's nothing to it, Jake.”
Jakob continued to fidget. He touched a little rock, attempting to roll it out of the crack without touching the strange fungus foam.
“Nothing ever happened?”
“Nah Jake, I just ducked in and out really quick. Nothing ever happened.”
“So it's safe?”
Jakob dropped the rock, distracted by the conversation. He returned to it trying to look uninterested.
“Well yeah, it's empty. And besides, I went in the daytime and nothing ever happens while the suns up.”
“So we could do it some Saturday or something? Maybe?”
Jakob sneaked a glance at Moses. Moses was turning over his shoelace absently. Jakob wondered at the talk. He had worried about it at school, after the boy had accused him, but if it was true that Moses had gotten in and out...
“Well the thing is, it's better not to plan it. I think the house is a lot like a cat, sorta. You can't plan something on it, you just have to sort of do it. Out of nowhere.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, see, 'cause that's what went wrong with everyone else! They plan it and some how the house knows. But if you surprise it, you can go in and out, no problem.
Both boys looked up at each other. They watched in tandem for a few moments. Jakob dropped his rock and put his hands on the ground.
The knob turned back and the door began to swing open. The breeze that had been there before, pushing him forward, was gone.
The boys stood and looked a moment longer, then started to walk. The rocks in the cracks left in their places like childhood toys discarded on a playground. The neighborhood was still and quiet, each scuff of their shoes echoing on and on into the suburban landscape.
Jakob was unsure of Moses' prognosis, but couldn't bear to speak his fears. He was muted by an inner belief that speaking them would alert the house and bring upon them all sorts of misfortune.
They walked to the edge of Jakob's yard, Jakob carefully noting the seam which split his house from the Pittman place. He always noticed it. It was as if the lines you see on maps were actually there, and this one in particular separated the real from the surreal. Regular life from its horrible antithesis.
The door swung open. Moses went in without a look back. Jakob felt the wind like a gentle hand on his back. He stared at this new seam which marked a new sort of separation.
They walked to the edge of Jakob's house and met the fence, and later the gate.
This seam was not a division of abstract concepts or of metaphysical quandries. These seam represented something raw and strong within Jakob and as he crossed it...
Moses touched the gate and looked to Jakob. Just next door, so quick, so easy.
He felt the crossing much more powerfully than the walk from his house. He had moved not from real to unreal or belief to disbelief, but from safety...
Just next door.
“Do you want to come over to my house?”
To danger.
The door closed.