In America, it’s rare for a small town to not have a haunted house. Kino, Indiana is no exception to this rule. For as long as anyone could remember the Astor House sat on the outskirts of the town. Slowly growing older as the rest of the town stayed young with its occasional facelifts. But it stayed up. Despite the weather and the pressure of time. Miriam pressed backward on the pedals of her bike, bringing the thing to a rough halt a little ways outside. She’d have to continue on foot for the rest of the journey. She’d grown up in the town and she knew just about everyone had some story or another about the Astor House.
One day, she had asked Beatrix about it and she’d told her about the house’s maker. The supposed founder of Kino, Homer Astor. She had put on her best impression of Sam Spade when she talked about the providence of Astor and his wife.
“He found that she was having an affair,” She’d said. “So, he dragged her into the living room and strung her up. Then he walked out to the front yard and blew his brains out in front of the neighbors.”
Ryan Murphy’s story was her favorite, though. It had everything someone could ask for from a tall tale. He told her about how his older brother was sacrificed in the backyard by robed Satanists. But the brother’s name changed with each retelling of the tale.
All in all, she didn’t believe either of them. But she and everyone of their age had grown up hearing such stories. Either from their older siblings, friends, or their parents. Miriam’s mother didn’t care for the stories either, she’d frequently told her that it was simply an old house and people who made up stories about it simply could not accept the chaos of a derelict building continuing to stand. But, that didn’t account for her. Miriam had not thought about the house outside of the stories until the dreams started.
Her first dream that guest starred in the house started off like any other forgettable dream. She was in her kitchen with her father and he was knitting a scarf with his bare hands. But behind him she could see the Astor House.It was blurry at first, but it was all she could focus on. Before long, dad vanished into the haze and Astor House came into view. Clear as day, an intense, awful thing. 111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpBj8t0BG5a
When she woke up, it was all she could remember from the dream. She didn’t remember dreaming of her dad, but she could remember the house. It was the beginning of an awful trend. Ordinarily, she didn’t remember her dreams, and that suited her just fine. Her mother once told her that you should discard information that isn’t wholly necessary. She likened it to an attic. You have to clear out your attic of trash to make room for things that could be of use. However, she quickly learned that the house wasn’t so easily put out with the rest of the trash. So, she decided to do away with it in a new way. She was going to go inside of the Astor House to exorcize it from her mind.
Her walk from the bicycle ended and she found herself at the ancient wrought iron gate. Between it and the house was a forest of overgrown grass. Not even the town cared for the lawn of this ancient place. She forced herself through, squeezing through the bars on the fence and marching through the jungle to the porch. As she stood on the front step of the house it seemed bigger than what it was. The house was a two story farm house covered in peeling, sun bleached paint. But for whatever reason it seemed impossibly tall. She guessed there was some quirk of the architecture that did it. It reminded her of something a teacher had said about the trends of architecture in Nazi Germany. They’d said that one of the main ideas behind government buildings of that era was to make the single person feel small and insignificant in comparison to the structure itself. She didn’t really understand it, architecture was not something she cared to know about. She figured maybe Homer Astor had a similar mindset when he built the place.
She opened up her bag and performed a final check. Flashlight, energy drink, and knife. All present and accounted for. She unlocked the door and stepped inside and turned on her flashlight. She’d expected a dust covered living room, full of sheet covered furniture. Instead, her eyes were met by a room full of broken furniture and a floor strewn with trash. She politely shut the door behind her and without thinking about it, she cast her gaze up to the ceiling. There were rafters and just beyond them, she could see that someone had painted a big three hooked symbol of some variety in the dead center of it. The lower ends of the hooks near the center were lined by a broken circle. She figured it was some manner of swastika. Some shit kicking skinhead had probably gotten bored and wandered into the house, thinking it’d be a good spot to deface. She couldn’t imagine why it had three hooks. You’d think if you devoted your entire mindset to something so stupid, you could at the very least learn to get the symbol right.
She wandered around downstairs, the air smelled like mildew only finding more trash. Discarded spray paint cans that were coated in rust, a handful of dead birds. The same nonsense you could find in the woods. When she found that this didn’t produce any kind of satisfying punctuation that she wanted she made for the stairs. She crept up the stairs, her feet coming down with slow deliberation. If something were to break, she didn’t aim for the whole structure to take her with it.
Upstairs wasn’t much better, a series of old doors, some of which were only just hanging onto the hinges. But every single one of them was painted with more swastikas. The symbol ran along the walls and doors, and all in different colors too. A rainbow of swastikas. She still couldn't figure out why someone would sink all of their time into drawing the horrid things without getting the correct number of hooks.
“Fascism, now in five new flavors,” She said, shining her light on the colorful symbols.
And it was true, but in the light the color that came in the clearest was the bright yellow ones. The rest, she could tell, came in other colors, but despite it, they didn’t quite seem as real as the yellow ones. Like with more attention she paid to them, the less clear they seemed. Like it lost detail with focus. But the opposite was true of the ones in yellow. The yellow ones seem to stick out in her mind even without the aid of the light.
She took her eyes away from them, feeling ill just from looking at them. As she neared a room with an intact door, she heard the creek of the front door open up and quietly shut, followed by a faint light that someone was shining near the ceiling.She ducked the room and squatted down behind the door and waited. All the while internally cursing herself for going into the house in the middle of the night.
There was silence for a moment, then she could hear the sound of feet creeping up along the stairs. She dug around in her bag and got out her knife.
She then heard a voice that accompanied the flashlight, “Fascism, now in five new flavors.”
She peaked out and she saw herself, looking along the swastikas on the wall with her flashlight, before getting startled by the sound of the door again. Her other self and without thinking she sat back against the door like she had before. The other girl didn’t notice and vanished when she stood in front of her.
Miriam shot up and sprinted out of the room, only to find another Miriam, once again standing in the same spot as the other, staring at the other.
“Fascism, now in five new flavors,” said the other Miriam, before vanishing into nothing.The door creaked and she saw lights downstairs again, Miriam looked over the railing and saw herself looking at the big swastika on the ceiling.
When this other her went around the corner, she made for the door. She sprinted down the stairs. To Hell with the structural integrity, to hell with her plan of exorcizing Astor House from her dreams, she was going home. But when she tried to leave, the doorknob would not budge. She slammed against the door, trying to force the weather hunk of wood to come apart enough for her to get out. But nothing. She went down the hall, following her path through the living room and tried to break a window, but the window would not break.
She did not scream, she didn’t know what would become of it. She had to think. There was some rationale to it all, right?111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkuZkKnXSRD
The material facts were laid out in front of her simply: 111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnsngQL6FhM
1. There is the Astor House. 111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡykXDMwkJso
2. She was in the house. 111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkYyd6TWq3S
Then there were the immaterial facts: 111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUfBYjREkaZ
1. She was somehow able to watch her own path through the house.111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdw3vrH0Blf
2. The house reacted to the past versions of herself, but not her in the moment.That was something her mind couldn’t contend with. 111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPVhUEBbj3D
In the back of her mind, that yellow sign burned and she couldn’t figure out why or if it fit into the narrative she’d built. But she focused on it.
She thought about the way that the house felt. It seemed impossibly big, despite not being that big physically. She looked into her bag and dug around for a piece of paper. Then she began her walk. She retraced her steps along the first floor where the only. In the path from the door to the back of the door causing it to form an broken “S” shape.when circling back she found it formed the broken circle at the center of the swastika shape, with the final path being up along the stairs and to the spot where she hid. Making the swastika not a swastika at all. It was a map of sorts, her path through the house. When she came to the room where she first saw herself, she noticed that on the floor was another one of these signs, painted on the floor in gorgeous yellow spray paint. From the fumes in the air, it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes old and in the next room, she could hear the sound of a can’s hiss.
The room next door had once been a bathroom. Now it was a wreck of things. Of broken ceramic and the stench of copper. Miriam shined her light in and was met by a face of a woman staring into the bathroom mirror. At first the woman looked shocked, but her expression softened. She’d been spraying the sign into the wall beside the mirror. The woman was wearing some kind of strange uniform and her left arm was covered in plastic. No, no it wasn’t. It was a prosthetic of some kind. Intense yellow painted metal against black plastic. Miriam clenched and unclenched her left fist. If she hadn’t noticed her glasses, she might have mistaken the woman for her mother. But, her mom didn’t allow her hair to grow out like that. Never allowed it to become a halo around her head.
The woman walked past Miriam and vanished. Miriam then saw the can and set out to start to draw the yellow sign on all the surfaces she could.
111Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbAXrtgzJI5
