While remodeling the basement of our newly bought house a few years ago, I found a Japanese screwdriver behind a wood-paneled wall. It was oddly slim and precisely designed, but there was nothing scary about it. I added the screwdriver to my toolbox.
That’s my most recent haunted-house story. It’s true and it sucks.
What my screwdriver story lacks is a nasty origin myth that the eldest dwellers of my new neighborhood know about but we don’t. The myth could be rendered creepier by us first moving into the house and then being unnerved by the presence of something that shouldn’t be there. Is this something just something we can’t find, or is it ... us?
What would make the story even better would be the arrival of a mysterious stranger who shows up to claim this something from the house. As we turn the stranger away again and again, we’d sense that something in the house, something we couldn’t find, was trapped. So we’d begin an ill-advised remodel, stumble into the myth while fumbling for an explanation, and things would go bad.
But that’s not my story. My story is that I found a perfect screwdriver in a shoddily constructed wall, and I kept it. As I mentioned before, my story sucks.
British writer D.K. Broster’s story about an unsettling object, “The Pestering” from 19321, has everything my story lacks. It’s got the myth that new homeowners gradually uncover. It’s got the stranger, a polite but foreboding intruder, who keeps showing up at the front door asking for “the chest.” What’s in the chest?
It’s scarier than a screwdriver.
The story’s final punch is set up masterfully by Broster, who slowly but surely sizes up British manners. Early on, the author explains that the poor-ish, unsuspecting owners got the house – aptly named the Hallows – on a deal that seems too good to be true:
All the Setons’ friends who came to see it spoke enthusiastically of the extraordinary bargain which Ralph and Eve had picked up. ‘Poor dears, they needed it!’ More than one made the remark [ ... ] that the extreme picturesqueness of the place almost called for the title of ‘Ye Olde’ – something or other; and it was left for Ralph Seton occasionally to wonder at the fact, which the title-deeds revealed, that Hallows had so often changed hands after comparatively short periods of occupancy or ownership.
Such a politely British way of foreshadowing doom, don’t you think? Setons, you fools: get out!
I won’t spoil your read by saying much more, but there is this: Broster’s haunted-house story was originally published in Good Housekeeping. Oh, how magazines used to get irony. Do you think Real Simple might spare a page or two for my new story, “Only the Devil Chooses a Flathead?”
Alex keeps getting better and better! Love his reviews.