By Chris Scott

A haunted house lives forever. She knows this before she knows anything else. The thought forms, clear and obvious, inside the slowly developing skull of her foundation while a dozen some-odd men construct her, brick by brick, beam by beam. By the time her walls are erected, her roof complete, her rooms fully furnished and ready for occupants, it is her all-consuming and sole obsession. A haunted house lives forever.

Her first family is a bust. She’s encouraged by their chilly demeanor, their seeming lack of concern for each other. The mother and father hardly talk. They mostly ignore their restless daughter. This is, she hopes, a recipe for disaster. Some burgeoning nightmare hidden there, just beneath the surface, concealed by a polite façade and setting a course for a violent and irreversible outburst. It isn’t to be. The family moves away after just a few years.

They are replaced by a rotating cast of increasingly confounding disappointments. The next family is more lively and boisterous, more uncoordinated with their play and activities, more susceptible—she imagines, she hopes—to some tragic accident. A young child drowning in the bathtub unattended perhaps, or the father haphazardly flung down the stairs on account of some ill-advised prank. But they eventually leave too, perfectly content and none-the-wiser.

The years pass. Her anger builds with each near miss. A husband suspects his wife of having an affair, and his suspicions are proven correct when he discovers the two of them together, undressed and shining with sweat, in their bedroom—in her bedroom—and she watches the confrontation unfold, eager with hot anticipation. Yet he doesn’t scream and strike her. Or him. He doesn’t take the brass poker from her fireplace and end them both, before ending himself with the gun she knows—she knows—he keeps in their closet. He cries. The other man leaves. He forgives her, bizarrely. They grow closer than ever, insanely. Happier than ever, in fact. It’s too much for her to bear.

Decades of this. She watches with powerless astonishment as a teenage girl with a psychopathic disposition is provided with behavior-altering prescriptions and life-changing therapy and—she almost can’t believe it—familial love and support. Another young boy years later kills a wounded bird just outside her walls, crushes it with his foot, but much to her dismay, he regrets it immediately. He rushes through her front door to confess everything to his older sister, who helps him give the bird a proper burial and promises not to tell their parents. He cries himself to sleep every night for a week. Killing a small, helpless animal is a prelude to no further sinister urges in this instance. It presages nothing. There is no evil in him.

Her foundation begins to fail, and the repairs become more expensive, prohibitively so. People cycle through her walls still, but she knows her time is running out, and her desperation grows with each passing day of nothing. There are no murders, no violence, no cruelty. No blood beyond the occasional mishap with a kitchen knife or a stubbed toe descending the basement stairs. No deaths beyond one elderly man passing away peacefully in his bed. A simple man who had, somehow, no regrets or unfinished business in his ridiculous life. A useless man whose soul only flitted through the house for a few seconds before departing to wherever it is these souls go, these souls that should be hers, that should be filling her rooms with their quenchless thirst for closure, their rage and terror and revenge, giving her eternal life.

And now this, a final indignity. A dozen some-odd men taking her apart, brick by brick, beam by beam. Erasing over a century of her being, like she was nothing at all. She wonders if they can feel her fury pulsing outward, trying desperately to collapse a wall onto an unsuspecting worker, mustering all her strength to drop a sizable chunk of roof onto a fragile skull or two. One last grasp at forever. But the men joke and go about their work of dismantling, unaware.

And then she realizes: She doesn’t need them. She never needed any of them, any of these small people who came and went, unimportant and forgotten. The only hatred she ever needed was hers. The only violence she ever needed was hers. The only revenge she ever needed was the revenge she will exact upon whatever they build here next. Because a house can haunt too, and she will. She will terrorize and traumatize, she will spill blood and chase away—screaming in unchecked horror—everyone who dares to live and love freely here, when all she ever wanted was her shot at immortality, to be feared, to be remembered. She will make them all pay. You just wait and see.