The Haunting of Randall Loveless

by Gary Cottle

A branch scraped the side of the car as I made my way down the long wooded drive, but I didn’t care. It startled me, but once I realized what it was, I didn’t give it another thought. The Honda was bought used, and it was already beat up. I was excited about the weekend, and it was going to take more than another scratch on my old car to bring me down. I giggled at how jumpy I was and felt a rush of adrenaline as I anticipated the thrills to come like a kid waiting in line for a carnival ride.

When the abandoned Straub house came into view, I gasped in awe. It was a large, stately red brick place built about 1910, after the Victorian era, and sort of a cross between Prairie School and Craftsman. There were two floors capped by a hip roof covered in terracotta tiles with a dormer window in the center. Eric claimed it had nearly five thousand square feet of living space, plus an attic which could be used as a “bonus room” and a full basement that could be finished if the new owners wanted a family room without altering the footprint. It was going on the market the next week, but that weekend it belonged to me.

My friend Eric was a realtor, and he had left the back door open. All he asked was that I not mention his name if I got caught. Eric knew I liked architecture and old houses, but that’s not the reason he offered to let me stay in the Straub house. It had a history, and I was a big fan of horror movies and ghost stories. Minnie Straub shot her husband Clarence in one of the bedrooms and then killed herself in 1945. No one knows why. Some say Minnie caught Clarence cheating with the maid. A few claim she caught him with the yardman. Their daughter Edith was sixteen at the time, and she continued to live in the house after her parents died. A maiden aunt stayed with her for the first few years, but then she died. Edith was a quiet woman who kept to herself. She never married, and she only went into town twice a week. On Saturday afternoons, she went grocery shopping, and she attended church on Sunday mornings. She stayed on at the old place until she died the year before. Distant relatives inherited, but they had no use for it.

When I walked across the threshold, I suddenly felt like a trespasser. I stood there a second half expecting someone to pop out and challenge my presence. “Hello,” I said, trying to sound as innocent as possible, but, of course, no one answered.

I couldn’t come until I finished my shift at Kroger, so it were late in the day, but there was a couple of hours of light left. There were no draperies on the windows because the house had been stripped bare. Everything had either been sold at auction or thrown away. So I could see well enough. I took the opportunity to explore. Spooky scenarios gave way to appreciation of the simple elegance. Edith had not changed a thing. The house was a perfectly preserved specimen of its time. There was a large living room with a fireplace, a formal dining room, a good sized study with another fireplace, a big kitchen and a maid’s room. The master bedroom upstairs had its own bathroom and dressing room. Two other bedrooms shared a bath. Wood paneling was everywhere. I could see myself moving in permanently. I’d feel right at home.

Before it got dark, I sat up camp in the living room. I brought in a cot with a thick foam mattress, a couple of blankets and pillows, a camp chair, a folding table, a camp stove, a box of food, a cooler and a couple of five-gallon containers filled with water. I also had my expensive backpacking sleeping bag in case it got too cold. It was mid-October, so there was a chance the temperature could drop into the thirties.

I invested in a bunch of overpriced backpacking equipment when Ryan came into my life. He was twenty-five, athletic and outdoorsy, and I wanted to keep up. I tried backpacking a couple of times. Then I decided to let Ryan do that with his younger friends. I bought more car camping equipment, but Ryan said that kind of camping was suburban and lame. This was right after I got the promotion, so I could afford to buy a five hundred dollar sleeping bag, along with cars for Ryan and myself, and a brand new house. At fifty, I finally had the life I wanted.

I slipped off my shoes and pulled on my National Geographic fleece vest. I could no longer zip the vest because I had regained all the weight I had lost before meeting Ryan plus an extra twenty pounds. Thankfully, the pizza I had brought with me for dinner was still warm. After I had my fill, I put on my headlamp and began reading Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It was a great distraction, but I kept thinking of how it would be nice if someone were there to talk to. I decided to go to bed early. It’s surprising how sleepy you get when there aren’t any electric lights or bright screens around. As I was drifting into slumber, I wished I had the money to buy the Straub house. Just five years before, I could have. Even after I lost my job, I might have been able to keep the place by renting out the spare bedrooms. I pictured a couple of fit young college students running downstairs for breakfast in their underpants.

I slept soundly that night, but I woke with a start. I heard a car pull up in front of the house, and I thought I had been busted. I jumped up and dressed, but when I looked out the window, I saw it was only Eric. He brought coffee and bagels. When I went out to greet him, he hugged me. It felt good to be hugged. It had been the first time anyone had touched me in months. We sat on the stoop and ate.

“Sleep well?”

“I slept great.”

Eric lowered his head and looked at me with a conspiratorial glint in his eye. “Anything unusual happen?”

The question embarrassed me a little because I was a man in my mid-fifties, and I was ghost hunting. “No. If the Straubs are around, they don’t seem to want to have anything to do with me. I got a little lonely last night,” I admitted.

“Ah. Well, I would have asked Chad if he was interested in doing this with you, but you know what his answer would have been. You know how he is.”

Chad was Eric’s husband, and yes, I did know how he was. He claimed to be a stone cold rationalist, but horror movies and ghost stories, anything like that, made him piss in his pants.

I shook my head and said, “I wish Ryan were here.”

Eric sighed and said, “You’ve got to let that go.” Then he added, “Chad saw him the other day. He just got back from London. Apparently, Jeffrey Belmont is his new Daddy Warbucks.”

Eric could not have stunned me more if he had thrown his coffee in my face, but I tried to hold it together. Jeffrey Belmont was even older than me, but he was a dentist, and dentists aren’t downsized. His parents had left him some money, too.

“I tried to warn you.”

“I know,” I said with an undercurrent of hostility.

Eric sized Ryan up the first time he met him, and he freely expressed his opinion the next time we were alone together. We had a falling out over that. I didn’t talk to Eric for two years.

“I’m sorry, Rand. This isn’t the time for I told you sos. It’s just that I think you deserve better.”

We were silent a moment. Then Eric said, “When an older man has a relationship with a younger man, people often worry about the younger one, but it’s been my experience that the older one is more likely to get hurt. I mean, if it doesn’t work out. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but I’m always skeptical of a young guy’s motivation when I see him with someone old enough to be his father. When you’re young, you have time to bounce back. Guys our age are running out of time, and if our financial resources have been drained, too…”

When Eric left, I took my camp chair out into the yard and continued reading The Haunting of Hill House. When I was finished, I moved on to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In a way, I enjoyed myself, but I kept thinking of Ryan. I had foolishly entertained the idea that Ryan would come back to me, but Eric had ruined that little fantasy. I wouldn’t have that to fall back on anymore. I was fifty-five and alone. Five years before, I had felt age creeping up on me, so I decided to join a gym. Within months, everything seemed to turn around. I felt trim and fit for the first time in years. Then I got the promotion and met Ryan. Now what did I have?

Later in the day, I decided I should give myself a sponge bath before it got dark. I sat on the edge of the cot and bent over to wipe off my feet. That’s when I saw it. The sun was low enough to shine directly through the living room windows, and a beam highlighted the back of my left calf. There was a mole back there that had expanded and turned purplish. For a moment, I couldn’t move as my heart flopped in my chest. I knew it wasn’t anything to get excited about. I’d make an appointment on Monday, and the doctor would cut it off. That would probably be all there was to it. However, I knew someday, something like that might be the beginning of the end.

I didn’t sleep as well that night. After rolling around in a stupor for a few hours, I decided I needed to sit up for a while. I wrapped myself up in my expensive sleeping bag and went outside to sit on the front steps. Immediately, I had a flashback. Six months before, I got up in the middle of the night. This was a couple of weeks after we had moved into the trailer. I found Ryan sitting at the kitchen table.

“Anything wrong?”

“There’s something I need to tell you. My therapist and I decided I needed to be honest with you.”

I had a vague notion of what was coming, and it pissed me off that Ryan was going to use the therapist as a crutch. I was still paying for those sessions even though I could no longer afford it. But I sat down across from Ryan and let him have his say.

“I’ve loved you, and I don’t want to do any harm, but you have to understand that I need a man who is…financially solid.”

“We all want to live well, Ryan.”

“Don’t belittle me. Don’t make me sound shallow. It’s more important than that. I need to be with a man who has some money to feel safe and loved. And I need to find a man like that before it’s too late for me.” With undisputed anger, he added, “I’m almost thirty. I gave you my youth, and now I’m living in a trailer.”

Remembering those words made me cry.

As I was driving out the next morning, that same branch scraped my car. I jumped again, but this time I didn’t giggle. Nothing happened that weekend. It was the scariest weekend of my life.