Head cases

THE WHITE HOUSE

“There is no poetry in death,” Mrs. Tanser said. “Only loss and rot, stink and waste. I never could understand those gothic romantics who celebrate the dark and lust after the cycle of decay.”

The little girl in front of her didn’t say a thing, but nodded creamy, unblemished cheeks as if she understood.

“I suppose that doesn’t make much sense to you,” Mrs. Tanser continued, running a powder-coated finger up the girl’s cheek. “You came here hoping to sell cookies and to visit my nieces, and here I am talking to you about death! But I can’t deny death, mind you. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing.”

The older woman laughed, and stood up from the table. Her plate of thinly sliced apples remained untouched, uneaten, the brown creep of time already shadowing the fruit. The girl’s plate, however, glistened with the juice of apple long gone.

Mrs. Tanser ground a pestle into a tall bucket that squeaked and shifted on the counter as she worked.

“Well, I'm sorry my nieces Genna and Jillie aren’t here any longer. They only came for a visit, so I'm glad you got to meet them. Perhaps you’ll have the chance to be with them again soon. But I talk too much and time passes. Too fast, too fast. Eat my apples dear. Waste not, want not.”

The plate slid across the table. Mrs. Tanser raised a silver eyebrow as it did.

“You are afraid of this house, aren’t you?”

The child nodded, slowly. Her eyes were blue and wide, and the reflection of the older woman’s methodic grinding and pummeling of the substance in the bucket glimmered like a ghost in their mirror.

“I can’t say that I’m surprised. Quite the reputation it has. I didn’t realize that when I moved in, but now it makes sense what a steal it was. I knew there was something wrong when the realtor quoted me the price-you could see it in her face. She was afraid, that silly woman was, not that she knew why. A beautiful old mansion like this, perched on the top of the most scenic hill in town? I have to admit, I didn’t care what was wrong with it-for that price, I thought, I could fix it. And then I moved in, and started teaching down at Barnard Elementary, and I found out why that girl was scared. You know, she wouldn’t even walk into the house past the front foyer?”

Mrs. Tanser laughed. The pestle clinked against the top of the bucket, and a hazy cloud puffed from the opening like blown flour.

“The one warning that woman said to me was, ‘You know, it’s a bad place for children.’ I didn’t even ask why. ‘I don’t have any,’ I told her. That shut her up. Or maybe it didn’t, I didn’t care. I walked up those gorgeous oak stairs that wind out of the living room and up to the boudoir. I wanted to see it all, with or without her help. She didn’t come with me.”

Mrs. Tanser stopped her grinding then and considered. “Would you like to see the upstairs?” she asked.

The little girl shrugged, and the older woman dropped the pestle.

“That settles it. Genna and Jillie aren't here, but I can still show you the house. Come on upstairs. I’m going to show you the most beautiful four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen. The girls loved it! It may be the only four-poster bed your little eyes have ever seen.”

The girl rose from the table, hands held straight at the sides of her red and green striped skirt. She wanted to leave, felt embarrassed that she'd been coaxed into staying somehow. Her freckles threatened to burst into flame as she waited for Mrs. Tanser to wash her hands in the sink.

“C’mon then,” Mrs. Tanser said at last, and led the girl back towards the front door she’d come in. Her backpack from school still lay abandoned on the floor nearby. Mrs. Tanser put a foot on the first varnished step, and then paused.

“What’s your name again then, young lady?”

“Tricia,” the girl answered, in a voice high as a flute song.

“Tricia,” Mrs. Tanser announced, waving at the crystal jewels of the chandelier above, and the burnished curves of the banister on the second floor landing above.

“Welcome to White House,” she said. “Welcome to the House of Bones.”

At the top of the landing, Mrs. Tanser stopped again. “This house was built in 1878 by Garfield White,” she announced. “I looked it up. He was a railroad man, made his living helping folks move their steel and wood and food and such from one place to the next. Why he settled here, in the middle of nowhere, I’ll never know, but there you go. Every thing has a place, and every place a thing. He built this place, and put his wife here in it to raise their son. Maybe he thought she’d give the boy a good upbringing here, away from the corruption and sin of the cities.”

Mrs. Tanser motioned the girl to follow her down the hall to the dark rimmed doorway of a room.

“That woman spent her time in here, so the stories go, day after day after day while her Garfield rode the rails making his fortune. He stayed out on those rails more and more, hoping maybe to gain his son an inheritance.”

The older woman stepped with a click and an echoey clack into the room. The walls were papered in a pattern of whirling pinks and blossomed yellows. But the garish sidelights did little to detract from the majesty of the enormous mahogany bed that dominated the center. Its rich posts rose from lion claw paws on the floor to taper in spears to within inches of the faded ceiling. A translucent gauze of yellowed lace hung between the posts and darkened the space with ghostly light.

“The more her husband stayed lost on the trains, the more his wife stayed lost here, in this very bed,” Mrs. Tanser said. “Go ahead, sit on it yourself and see why!”

Tricia stepped into the room but stopped at the edge of the mattress, which was nearly as tall as her.

“Use the step,” Mrs. Tanser said, pointing to the dark wooden box near the girl’s feet. “In those days, you wanted to sleep as high above the ground as you could. Rats, you know.”

Tricia hopped up on the step with the mention of rodents, and rolled her body onto the heavy down mattress, smiling at the caress of the silken blue comforter that covered it.

“They called it the White House, and not because it was in Washington, D.C.,” Mrs. Tanser said. “But it was anything but white inside. Mrs. White kept all of the drapes pulled shut, and spent more and more time here, in this bed. They say she was trying to make it feel like nighttime inside, so her son would sleep. Had the colic, and cried all day long. But pulling the drapes did nothing to calm the boy, and after awhile, Mrs. White went a little bit mad, I think. Day after day, night after night, her baby cried, cried, cried and she paced this floor with him, pounding his tiny back and begging him to burp and then screaming at him to burp.”

Mrs. Tanser shook her head.

“That boy never saw that nest egg his father was out putting away. When Mr. White came back from one of his long trips down the rails, he found the house dark, and all the shutters pulled. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, you being a young girl and all-but you’ve probably seen worse on TV. Oh the things they show on that tube.” Mrs. Tanser shook her head brows creased in dreadful sadness.

“When Mr. White came home that day, he walked up those same stairs you and I just did, and knew right away something was wrong. I won’t say more than this, but the smell was in the air, and he was no fool. He rushed to the bedroom and threw open this door and…”

Tricia’s eyes widened as the story unfolded.

“…when the light streamed into the pitch-black room, he found his wife and his son, here in the shadows. Only they were in no condition to leave. The poor boy was hung from his tiny neck right off of that pole there,” Mrs. Tanser pointed at the right pole at the foot of the bed. “Mrs. White had tried to quiet him by wrapping a sheet around his head-but when he didn’t quiet, she’d finally snapped. She hung him by his tiny neck like a Christmas ornament at the foot of the bed, and when he finally quieted, she laid down on the pillow and went to sleep. When she woke, and realized what she’d done, she took her own life, using her husband’s straight razor.

“If I took the sheets off this bed you could still see the marks of her blood. Nobody’s ever changed that mattress. She laid down right there, where you are, and cut her self again and again and again until she couldn’t cut or scream anymore.”

Tricia leapt from the bed as if it had turned to a stove burner.

Mrs. Tanser grinned, wrinkles catching at the corner of her eyes like broken glass.

“She used that blade so much, they say she had to have a closed casket. Can’t imagine cutting your own face with a razorblade myself, but, I can’t imagine hanging your own baby, neither!

“There’s a reason they started calling this place the House of Bones. But that came later. Mr. White kept this place for almost 30 years after his wife killed their son, and herself here. And he never remarried. In fact, he may have been dead for a year or more before the town grew the wiser. He was gone for long periods at a time on the railroad, and it was only when the spring winds brought a tree down on the west wing of the house that someone from the town realized it had been months and months since Mr. White had been seen. When they looked into it, they found out that he hadn’t been out on a rail for more than a year, and that’s when someone thought to look in the basement.”

Mrs. Tanser looked at the trembling girl and shook her head.

“I’m sorry, I’m scaring you. My home does not have a cheery history, I must admit. But it’s fascinating too, don’t you think?”

The old woman shook her head. “C’mon downstairs, and I’ll buy some of those Girl Scout cookies. A lady needs her vices, huh?”

The doorbell rang. But there was no silhouette showing through the stained purple glass in the front door of White House.

Mrs. Tanser answered the ring, nevertheless, and smiled as she saw the pale features of the girl on the landing, shivering and yet waiting outside. So small, she couldn't even send her shadow through the glass.

“Come in, child,” she insisted. “You’ll catch your death of cold. I don’t believe your mother lets you go out like that in the fall chill.”

Tricia entered the house again, driven by a feeling she could not have explained. The house scared her to death. Mrs. Tanser was strange. But interesting. A welcome diversion after a boring day at school.

“I didn’t think you’d come back after the story of Mr. and Mrs. White,” the teacher exclaimed. “Sometimes I feel like I am just the steward for this house. I have to give its history, no matter how twisted it may be.”

She motioned the girl into the kitchen, a room colored in orange walls and burnished counters.

“You're probably hoping for my nieces, but I'm afraid they're not around to play with you right now. Can I cut you an apple?” Mrs. Tanser asked again, and Tricia nodded.

“Good.”

After awhile, the older woman went back to her grinding, pounding work at the counter, and talked to Tricia from across the room.

“Hmmm…where did we leave off last time? How it all began, I think. Yes. I suppose you’re wondering, what happened after the Whites lived in White House?”

The girl nodded, and Mrs. Tanser barely waited for that response.

Mr. White was found in the basement. I won’t go into how his disposition was, other than to say that the bones of Mrs. White and Baby White were found with him. The house was eventually sold to another family, and life went on-for a time.”

Mrs. Tanser brushed the dust from the lapels of her maroon collar. It smeared like dried milk across her chest.

“You can’t hide the past,” she said. “Nor can you hide from the past. What is, is, and what was, was. The next people who bought this house pretended that the Whites hadn’t killed themselves here, and as a result…”

Tricia looked up from her slice of apple with a keen gaze of expectation.

“Well, they didn’t consider the fact that they might also spend their lives-and deaths-here.”

“Sometimes,” Mrs. Tanser said, eyes looking far, far away. “A mother’s love is not endless. In fact, it doesn’t even really begin.”

The older woman rubbed a tear from the wrinkles at the side of her eye, and forced a grin. “Silly old woman I am,” she said. “You’re just a girl and you can’t even begin to understand the twists and cul de sacs of a mother’s love. I had a tough one, is all, and even now I can hear her scolding me. I’ve met your mama at the PTA, and she’s not like that. Not like that at all. You’re a very lucky girl.

“So where was I? Oh yes, the next family. A pastor, the father was, come here all the way from Omaha. Why here, again I’ll never know. This must be the end of the line for some folks, and they just don’t know it. Hell, why would they come here if they did? Something draws them though, because no matter how many young folks try to escape this town after they graduate, the place keeps growing. Back in those days, before the Great War, there were just a couple hundred here, and the Martins moved into this house with a huge welcome from the townsfolk. For a time, Pastor Martin even held services right here in this house-in the sitting room, I believe-until a proper parish chapel could be built down in the center of town.”

“All that holiness didn’t settle things apparently, though, in White House. Because the pastor and his family came to a similar end as the White’s did. Things were happy here for a few years, and the Martins had two children, Becky and Joseph. But, just like Mr. White, Pastor Martin’s vocation began to consume him, leaving Mrs. Martin here in the house all alone with the children day after day. The story goes that Mrs. Martin got bit by the green bug, and started thinking that Pastor Martin was spending far too much time down at the new chapel in town. There’s no telling if it’s true or not, but she thought the pastor was making time with a pretty little hussy in the back pew, while she was trapped here, in this old, cold house with two screaming kids.

“I’m talking too big for you, aren’t I?” Mrs. Tanser said noting the confused expression on the girl’s face. “The pastor’s wife thought he had gotten a girlfriend, is the thing. And he was married to her and she didn’t want him to have a girlfriend. So she started locking little Becky and Joseph into a small room at the back of the house. Someone, probably Mr. White, had added on, and built the room by hand. It wasn’t completely true. Sometimes, Pastor Martin would come home at night and hear those kids screaming in the back of the house, and when he’d let them out, they’d tumble into the house proper shaking and blue with cold, because none of the seams of that room were level. The outside could leech in easily, you could see the grass waving in the wind through the gaps and the draughts on this hill in the winter are something horrible, I have to tell you. Even asleep in that big four-post bed upstairs, I put an afghan on top of the covers in December. Can you imagine how cold it must have been for those children when they could actually see the outside through the cracks in the walls?

“Anyway, Pastor Martin yelled at his wife many a time for how she treated those children, yelled so loud the people a mile down the hill in town could hear him and mark his words. And she’d yell right back and accuse him of taking the Lord’s work to the devil, not to mention that tart Beatrice Long. She thought he was making time with a church whore.”

Tricia put a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn, and Mrs. Tanser pushed the plate of apples closer to the girl.

“I’m going on too long, aren’t I? Let me speed it up for you some. An old woman can go on. One day Pastor Martin came home and for once, the house was quiet. His wife told him the kids had gone to stay with friends in town for the weekend, and he heaved a sigh of relief. The noise had really begun to get to him, and that, as much as anything, was why he’d been spending more and more time at the chapel. The Martins reportedly had a lovely dinner, and even broke out a bottle of wine to celebrate their brief ‘vacation’ from the children. Pastor Martin tried to get romantic with his wife, but she waved him off of that. ‘You wouldn’t want to make more of the little screamers, would you?’ she said.”

Mrs. Tanser paused, looking quizzically at Tricia’s moon-round cheeks. “That probably doesn’t mean much to you yet, does it? Hmmm.”

“Well, it came to Sunday, and Pastor Martin spoke after the church service with the folks his children were supposedly staying with, thanking them for their hospitality. But they looked confused at his thanks, and told him that they would be happy to have Becky and Joseph over any time, but they hadn’t seen the kids these past few days.

“Pastor Martin was upset by that, and after the last service, headed home in a rush. He wondered if he’d gotten the family wrong that the kids were staying with. When he entered the house, for the third day in a row it was completely silent, but Mrs. Martin waited for him at the table.

“‘Sit,’ she insisted. ‘Eat.’

“He sat, but asked her where the children were. Mrs. Martin smiled sweetly, and ignored him, fixing herself a sandwich and then pushing the plate towards him. ‘Light or dark?’ she asked.

“‘Both,’ he said absently, and as she put the meat on his plate, along with a long crust of bread, he asked her again. ‘Where are the kids?’

“Mrs. Martin smiled that strange little grin again and nodded, as he lifted the bread to his mouth and chewed.

“‘You’re eating them, dear. Becky’s light, and Joseph’s dark.’”

Tricia’s eyes went wide and she set the piece of apple she held back on the plate, uneaten.

“Horrible, hmmm? Apparently Mrs. Martin had used that back room to turn her children into cold cuts. When he screamed and beat on her for her horrible crime, she only smiled and smiled, and told him to make more with Beatrice Long. Back then, in a town this size, they didn’t have asylums, and so Mrs. Martin never actually left this house. Pastor Martin locked her in the room she’d killed her children in and fed her meals at morning and night. She never came out of there again, and whenever he’d break down and cry and ask her ‘Why?’, all she would say was ‘The house needs strong bones.’”

Mrs. Tanser grinned. “Creepy, hmm? Want to see the room?”

Tricia’s eyes widened.

“Oh, don’t worry, the Martins are long gone from there. Come along, I’ll show you.”

Mrs. Tanser led Tricia through a hallway and a long, dark sitting room to a white door. She turned a latch and a metal bolt clacked audibly before she turned the old round knob.

They stepped through into a small, dark room. It had no windows at all, but still was lit. The sun beamed in through hairline cracks in the grout between the stones that had been shaved and stacked to form the addition. Shadows played like anxious ghosts on the walls and dust motes rained in lazy dances as the wind shifted and groaned outside.

“This is it,” Mrs. Tanser said. “The infamous White room. They think that Mr. White built it with his own hands, and used the bones of his wife and son as the grout between the rocks. Mrs. Martin followed his lead. The paint you see in here? The reason the room is so white? She ground up the bones of those two kids after carving them up for lunchmeat here in this room. She used the dust of their bones to paint this room an everlasting off-white.”

Tricia stared in horror at the walls. “The paint is…their bones?”

Mrs. Tanser nodded. “It seemed a sacrilege to paint over the remains of those poor souls, so the room has been left exactly as it was when Pastor Martin sat down here in the middle of the room and… well…there’s no delicate way to put this. He blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. Lord knows where he got it, a man of the clergy and all. Someone wiped down the ceiling and wall over there…” She pointed to a shadowy stain to their right.

“But all in all, the bones of those children are still right here, chalky and white, for anyone to see.

“Oh my dear, you’re trembling; you’re white as the walls. Come here, I’m so sorry. I’m an old woman and talk too much. I forget myself. And you, just a 10th grader and all. Let’s have us a soda pop, hmmm?”

Mrs. Tanser pulled the wide-eyed girl from the room and bolted the lock once again.

“Don’t need any of those summer breezes or restless ghosts getting in,” she mumbled, and then shook her head. “Darn it all, there I go again.”

The massive door opened with a long squeak. Mrs. Tanser peered through the foot-wide opening with a suspicious look on her face. Then her eyes lighted on the tousled hair of Tricia.

“You’re probably here to see my nieces, aren’t you?” she asked.

The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am. I don’t know them.”

“Don’t know them?” Mrs. Tanser looked confused. Then she slapped a palm to her forehead. “My oh my, that’s right. They came a-visiting awhile before you came a-visiting. And you’ve been too polite to correct an old woman before.”

She opened the door wider and motioned Tricia inside. “Sometimes it’s all a blur,” she confided, and pushed the door shut.

“I remember now. I’ve been giving you the history of the house, and fattening you up on apples. Not the best choice for fattening, I’ll give you, but it’s what I have. No chocolate cakes up here on the hill!”

Mrs. Tanser motioned her into the kitchen.

“Where were we last time? I told you about the Whites and the Martins…There were others, too. But then in the ‘50s, they turned the place into an orphanage.”

Mrs. Tanser laughed. “I know, it sounds ridiculous. A house where children kept dying in horrible ways. A house where children’s bones actually painted the walls white-and they turned it into an orphanage. But there you go. I wonder if they ever even saw the irony.”

The rhythmic sound of a knife on stone filled the kitchen as Mrs. Tanser cut the girl an apple.

“Here we go,” the older woman said, pushing a plate in front of the girl. She stared at the ceiling a moment and then grinned and nodded. “Forty-seven.”

Mrs. Tanser scooped the core of the apple and a couple seeds from the counter and threw them in a waste can. “Forty-seven children in all disappeared while this house was an orphanage. That’s what I found out down there at the village hall. God knows why the town didn’t have this place bulldozed, but, then again, who cares so much about orphans?”

The old woman shook her head in obvious disgust and then motioned for Tricia to follow her.

“Grab an apple,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

Mrs. Tanser led the way past the dining room and a dark hallway and the horrible room of bone paint, with its locked door. She stopped at another door, this one painted dark as a 2 a.m. shadow.

She pulled a ring of keys from the depths of her apron and explained, “Sometimes at night, I hear voices from in here. Terrible voices. Men howling. Children screaming. When I open the door, they’re never there…but I keep it locked anyway.”

She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Tricia followed, though hesitantly.

The room expanded to fill the eye with a vista of beautiful stonework and a floor of intricate mosaic. Like most of the house, the predominant color was no color. The room hurt the eye in its melding of cream and vanilla and starving, emaciated white. It also ascended three stories in the air and ran as deep as a football field.

“Over here,” Mrs. Tanser called, and led Tricia to a corner. She reached down to the floor and pulled on a small cord that poked out from beneath the shards of tile. A hidden trap door opened upwards at her pull.

“Look,” Mrs. Tanser pointed, and Tricia leaned in to stare down into the gap. The trap secreted a small cubbyhole, maybe 18 inches deep and a foot wide. Its bottom was hidden by dozens of small white pebble-like shards. They covered the bottom and stacked on top of each other like a pound of gravel.

“Hold out your hand,” Mrs. Tanser said. As Tricia did, her arm visibly shook.

The older woman squeezed her outstretched palm and grinned. “It’s okay. They can’t get you here. There time was a long time ago. Now. You see these?” She turned the girl’s hand palm side up and ran a finger across the top joint, on the other side of the fingernail.

“I’m not sure what they intended, but I believe that little stack of bones down there are the top joints of all those missing orphans’ fingers.”

Tricia ripped her hand away and gasped.

Mrs. Tanser shook her head. “They say down in town that those orphans disappeared, but it’s no mystery where they went.”

She let the trap fall down with a smack that echoed through the too-still room.

“Just look around you,” she said and gestured at the intricately laid floor. “Those kids never left this room. Their bones are here, laid into the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Those kids built this room.”

Tricia’s eyes had now widened so large that the whites of her eyes were circled in red.

“Yep,” the old woman sighed. “You’re standing on them.”

The girl screamed.

“Just bones,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I wanted you to see, to understand. This house has a bad reputation, and rightly so. I’m sure those voices I hear coming from this room are from all those innocent orphans who had their fingers cropped off, and their bones ground down to shards of decorative tile.”

“It’s this house,” she said and shook her head, pulling Tricia closer. The girl didn’t fight her embrace. All she could think of was that she was standing on the chopped-up bones of dead people.

“Everyone who’s ever lived here has felt the need to add to the house,” Mrs. Tanser said, and pulled the girl towards the back of the long room.

“The White House was large by the standards of the 1800s when Mr. White built it, but there have been many rooms added since. I showed you the draughty room last time you were here. And this room-which I think was probably a gymnasium for the orphans-was built over a long period. There are others. In the basement is a small closet that I believe was painted in the paste of a child…its colors are faded and dulled now, but it looks to be a mad swirl of mud and blood and bone if you stare closely. There’s a shed on the back of the property that has window frames that are rounded and made of what looks to be rib bones. And the lock on that shed is a primitive thing, but it seems to be made of an arm or a leg bone that drops into place and holds the door fast.

“There's no way the realtor could have warned me,” Mrs. Tanser said. “There’s no way she could ever really have known-she wouldn’t even stand inside this house. I wish she could have told me what I was in for. But the house…once you’re here…”

They walked across the long bone mosaic room, and the chatter of Tricia’s teeth began to reverberate through the silence.

“It’s okay, child,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I just want to show you one more room.”

At the back of the long white room she stopped, and reached out to turn the latch on a door that only announced itself as thin seams set in the wall. It opened outward at her touch, and a cool breeze hit them as it did.

“I think that some of the rooms people added to the house were afraid to show their real colors,” Mrs. Tanser said. “The people knew what they were doing, on some level, and they bleached the bones and carved the bones and crushed the bones into paste and mortar and paint.

“But when the house told me…when I realized what I would have to do, I made a pledge to myself to be true to the children who came here. The people who grew this house. They shouldn't be hidden in pieces, I said to myself, but celebrated. After all, every thing has its place. And every place, its thing. The things that build this house have their place. They had life, and in death…they grow the White House in rooms of bone.

“And this house…must have its thing. These days…that’s me.”

Mrs. Tanser picked up a hammer and raised it above Tricia’s head. She breathed deep as the girl squealed and tried desperately to run. Her screams rang out like bullets scraping metal. But Mrs. Tanser’s other hand held the small girl fast. A trapped animal.

“You’ll live here forever,” she promised. “And I promise you’ll hardly feel a thing. I can’t believe the torture some of these kids must have gone through. I could never be so cruel.”

Tricia screamed again. A horrible, larynx-shredding sound. But she couldn’t break free of the old woman’s grip. Mrs. Tanser lived only for the house now, and Tricia had never felt such desperate strength before. The veins of the woman’s hands stood out blue and serious above the small girl’s reddening fingers. “I came to this town because I loved children. Genna and Jillie didn’t want to stay here either,” she whispered. “Look at them up there.” She nodded at two tiny skulls shrieking in silence on the wall. “But what could I do? I adore children. The house…This house…it never relents…”

“Hold still,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I want your face to stay this beautiful, always.”

Tricia twisted and turned, staring at the bone-white eye sockets and jaws of the handful of splintered skulls that lined the half-constructed wall of the small room like fractured masks. Those perfect, unblemished bone faces screamed silently in chorus with her, as Mrs. Tanser turned to make her kill.

“It’s going to take a long time to finish this room,” the old woman lamented. “But I will finish my room. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing. This room is mine.”

She brought the hammer down.