In the Shaw House: a short story

Through the narrow slats and swarm of weeds close to the height of the younger children, they peered at the house. It squatted derelict yet undisputed master of its block, like a rotten tooth in the placid gums of suburbia. The long summer day drew them as much as curiosity, although the more they stared the more mysterious and alluring it appeared. And getting over their initial fear they found themselves joking about it like they would joke about one another.

Adolescents with that invincibility of youth that have never broken a bone, been in a real fight, or experienced a hangover; that have never lost a job, backed up a threat, had a bluff called, or had their hearts truly broken.

Boredom coaxed Mick to stoop and fish about the coarse brown grass for a stone and fling it at the house. His sister, one of the only two girls in the group, grabbed his arm and gave a small gasp as the missile hit the splitting pale blue siding of the front porch. A couple of the other boys reached down for rocks. Soon the whole cluster were barraging the front of the house except for the two girls and the youngest boy, whose older brother had hurled the first stone and whose sister had protested.

When their arms got stiff their volley petered out. “I guess no one’s home,” someone quipped. 

“Let’s go,” said the sister, tugging her brother’s arm.

“Well then go on, Molly,” someone else said.

“Don’t talk to her that way,” said Mick, her brother.

“I’ll talk however I want.”

“Hey Mick, why’d you bring your kid sister out here anyway?” someone else asked.

“She’s alright.”

“She’s bugging us and being a worry-wart.” 

“If she’s alright she can go up to the house,” another boy jumped in.

“Shut up Stu,” said Mick.

“I will go home,” said Molly. She took a few steps away, but when no one else said anything she stopped and looked at them.

No one moved for some time. They listed before the rotting white-tooth fence, looking in windows that breathed age and decay and, it seemed to them, malice. 

“Well, who’s gonna go?” Ned demanded. 

“You’re the oldest,” said Stu. “You go first.”

Ned turned to him with a sneer. “I’m the oldest, so I don’t have to do anything. You keep talkin’ smart and you can go up there, smartass.”

“You’re scared,” Mick muttered.

“What was that, prick? You say somethin’ to me?”

“I said you’re scared,” Mick growled.

Ned laughed. “I’m not, but you should be. You know what’s in there? You know who’s in there?” He turned his back on the house and draped his arms back on the slivered fence, his left foot propped up on the crossbeam behind him. “Y’all are too young to remember the newspaper. I still have it. At home.” He cocked his head toward the house as if listening.

Once upon a time the others had challenged his assertions, it being over a decade since the events Ned was about to regale them with had transpired and he still a toddler at the time. Still, the few of the others who were around way back then had been in diapers, so they were no contenders to his knowledge. Someone, no one remembered who, had seen the yellowed newspaper clipping Ned kept in a shoebox under his bed and had at some point vouched for his story. No one openly disputed the facts he laid down.

“It was several years ago, no one really remembers when,” he recited. Mick rolled his eyes at Betty, the other girl in the crowd, but she was looking at Ned. “This was back before there were even very many people with cars in town. Not even all the houses had electric. The Shaw house sure didn’t. At night you couldn’t even see it because there weren’t no lights in the windows or nothin’. 

“It was just Mother Shaw, as they called her, and her son. She was old, old and mean. Some people said she was a witch. Her son was Seamus, about the age of some of you. He went to our school. A couple classes above my brother Charlie. He was a weird kid, weirder than most of you. He didn’t have any friends and didn’t play ball Saturdays, but sometimes you’d see him watching through the fence and see his footprints leading away. One time he broke someone’s arm for teasing him.

“Everyone knew old Mother Shaw was scared of her son. Not even she could control him. They said she’d lock him in the basement when he was bad. You’d hear Seamus at school talking to himself about it. He’d say, ‘I’m not going home if you’re just gonna lock me in the basement again. You can’t do that to me. I’ll kill you.’ They said that putting him down in the basement was the only way she could protect herself. You could hear her hammering nails into the basement door, and screaming coming from down there at night.

“Then one day she died, no one knows how. She was buried, but not in a church graveyard. Some say in this yard here. That night you could hear screams louder than ever from below the house. They didn’t stop the next day, nor the next night. They kept right on going. Then, after a week, they stopped. And no one ever saw Seamus again.”

Ned got down off the fence and took a few steps away from the house, rubbing his arms but going on with a sneer, “People said she locked him in the basement the night before she died, and no one was there to let Seamus out. At night you can sometimes hear him, still screaming in the basement.” He grabbed one of the younger boys. “Do you want to go let him out? Do you?” The boy tore himself away, and Ned seized another with a harsh laugh.

“Stop it,” Mick snorted. “I don’t believe a darn word of your story. It’s B.S.”

“If that’s what you think, go on up and knock on the door.”

“That’s—that’s stupid,” Mick spluttered. “There’s nothing in there. Why would I go up and knock? No one’s gonna answer.”

“Then there’s nothing to be scared of.”

“You go first.”

“I already did.”

“When was that?”

“Last summer.”

“Who else was there for that?”

Heads turned and looked at one another, everyone shrugging.

Ned’s smile shifted to one side of his face. “I went alone. No one to back me up.”

“Like heck you did.”

“I don’t give a shit what you think. I did it for me. And I know none of you chickens will go up there like I did, so you all can suck eggs.”

Stu cleared his throat. “What did—when you went up there, what did you see?”

“I—” Ned stopped, considering. “You’ll just have to see for yourself.”

“He didn’t go,” Mick said loudly, but he wasn’t sure. And he could tell by how the rest looked at Ned that they were leaning toward credulity. Some even looked at Mick with resentment. How dare he challenge Ned? In a minute they would all be against him, they too daring him to go up there. 

“What do you think, Stu?” he said loudly to divert attention from himself. Let them target another scoffer. “Have you heard Shaw in the basement?”

“Oh yeah, lots of times.” Stu’s head bobbed like one of those stupid toys Molly had on her dresser. 

“How much to go up there?” Mick jerked his head at the house, aware of Betty looking at him.

Stu grinned. “You couldn’t pay me. Anyway, you’re the one who’s got to go. You’re next oldest. Ned already went.”

Ned clapped Mick on the back and guffawed in his ear. “That’s right, yellow belly. Your fate is calling.” Mick wanted to smack the smug off his face. Come to think of it, he wanted to smack just about everyone whose voice demanded with Ned’s that he go up to the Shaw house and rap on the door.

Still, it looked like he would have to go. There was no way out of it.

“Alright, alright,” he said over their clamor with as big a sneer as he could manage, a sneer that he hoped put Ned’s to shame. “If you’ll all shut up for a minute.” Gratifyingly, they cheered. Betty didn’t smile but her eyes were at least glued to him now.

“Mick, Mick, don’t do this,” Molly pleaded. She was hugging herself and had water in her eyes. “I’ll tell mom.”

“Grow up,” Mick snapped. “There’s nothing to be scared of. Stop being a baby.” Her eyes threatened to overflow, which made him feel worse and more mad. 

“You going or not?” Someone shouted.

“Yeah.” Mick faced the house. Between it and him lay a yard thick with yellow bracken and an ancient tree with a rope hanging from a limb that overshadowed the warped front porch. It wasn’t that frightening, really. The windows and their faded pink curtains that shifted in the faint breeze were the worst part, but it was a short walk up and back from the front door. Besides, nothing ever happened in broad daylight. Of course nothing would happen. 

He reached over the gate, lifted the rusty hasp. The gate swung open and decapitated some dandelions that reached tall on the other side, the only color in the yard. Mick jammed his hands in his pockets so they wouldn’t fidget and stepped into the yard, noting the harsh quiet behind him as he made the long short walk up to the front step. His ears craned for any sound from the old house—the groan of a floorboard, the scratch of a nail, the creek of the basement door yawning open into the depths of... “Shut up Mick,” he whispered to himself, clearing his throat. Was it his imagination, or was it getting darker? 

He looked back to make sure they were there. Molly clung to their younger brother like the rag doll Mick made her leave at home. Ned wore his sneer. Stu and Foster and Louie and the others watched his every move as if he were the ghost. Betty’s looked on with a mixture of awe, distaste, and fear. 

But none of them thought for a second he wouldn’t come back. They knew it could as easily be any one of them, and never could they imagine anything worse happening to Mick or any of them than a bad scare. And it was that thought of limited scope he knew was in each of their minds, the viewpoint of the watchers that he fixed as his own gaze that enabled Mick to go on.

A foot up on the porch step. The other joined it. Up to the next. Here we go. Creekingly. The door so big in front of him. Curtains floating at the windows bookending the frame. A sagging knob in his fingers. Mick paused, thinking better. He raised a hand, softly rapped on the peeled paint.

“Knock louder,” Ned demanded. “He won’t be able to hear you from the basement.”

“Shut the hell up,” Mick snarled, proud of the manly edge in his voice and the courage swearing brought him. 

He slammed on the door and recoiled as if from a hot stovetop, surprised by the force of his own hand and the noise that resounded from it. He thought he heard something shifting like someone turning over in bed, then footsteps shuffling down a long hall over floorboards that had not felt feet in over a decade. The curtains billowed at the disturbance of the stale air within. Mick’s knees gave as a hand on the other side of the door grasped the latch and—

Nothing. He heard nothing but the stage-whispered speculations from his friends at the gate. Mick could have laughed at them and at himself. He saw it all now, saw what Ned evidently had seen for many years. And now he knew it too, had smashed his monopoly of terror and power. There was nothing in the house. Just for show he syncopated the door with the knuckles of both hands, relishing the gasps of the others. 

“So you came up here and did this, right Ned?” he challenged, swinging around to put his back to the door and his face to the crowd. He tapped his shoes on the porch like Fred Astaire. Ned’s face looked more like the others’ now as he watched Mick doing on the porch what Mick knew he had never done. There it was. The nail in Ned’s coffin. Mick had him beat.

But wait.

Not...not yet.

Now he knew what he had to do. There was more. More to make sure no one, not Ned, not Stu, not Foster or Louis or anyone could come after him and do more. 

He spun around and slung the door open. They gasped. Must and decay invaded his nostrils, but that was nothing. Cobwebs sagged in the corners of the door frame, but they were nothing too. There were black spots on the floor where water had dripped through the ceiling and rotted out the boards, and Mick thought proudly of what other kids might think those black spots were. “Ha!” he yelled into the Shaw house.

He stepped inside. It was much cooler here. Old furniture with animal droppings in the sitting room to his left. No television. An ancient telephone hanging off its bracket on the wall to his right with punctured spider egg sacs. Kitchen with yellowed linoleum and the smallest icebox Mick had ever seen. Curling wallpaper with fruits on it. A corridor led back into the rest of the house between these two rooms.

He stepped farther in, more mindful now of his creaking feet. The still present furnishings made him guess they had shut the house up suddenly and that no one had entered it since. No relatives, no friends, not even the police. That just goes to show you, he thought.

And then he took real notice of the door which stood in the kitchen between the sink and the icebox, opening into what he could not see except darkness, loose and hanging only from its top hinge and the doorknob nowhere to be seen, these details he had observed from the moment he entered the building now far from his mind as he took in the long, hooked, rusted forms of at least a score of nails that had been pounded through the edge of the door into the doorframe. The bold warmth that had flooded into Mick now receded like the tide.

Beside him on the living room side of the house stood a low table with drawers and nothing on top of it but dust, except in the middle of it where the unmistakable outline of a hammer stood out as clearly as if it had been traced there.

Slowly he began to back toward the door. Was it his imagination, or had something stirred down below? Something that felt him in its domain. Creeping on bare feet up the staircase. Watching him now through the gloom. Mick tasted bile in the back of his mouth, along with his heart. He turned and fled toward the door.

The others outside flinched at the scream that burst from the house, shuffled back to the other side of the street to get away from whatever would come out. They felt it would either be Mick, horribly maimed; or Shaw, thirst for blood unslaked until he spilled every drop of theirs. 

A figure streaked out of the house. They recoiled, some screaming, some fleeing several paces before turning to observe Mick, for it was him, in his dash for safety. He did not make for them, nor even for the gate, but leapt the fence in an incredible bound on feet that did not slacken until he was lost to sight around the corner of the houses on the next street. Molly and her younger brother took after him as fast as they could.

The rest looked back at the house for several minutes without moving until they were sure nothing else was coming out of it, not daring to dare anyone else to go in and see what had terrified Mick. Ned recovered quickest, belying his pallor by laughing and throwing an arm over Betty’s shoulders. “Well, now you all know.”

They did not see Mick again that day, nor any of the other days that week. When he did show his face it was to one or two of them at a time, but not as a group until weeks had passed, and then only seldomly. He did not tell anyone what he saw in the house, nor did he mention what tore a long scratch on his right arm that scarred after it healed. He did not approach the Shaw house again except in passing. He did not laugh at the tales of Seamus and his mother, stand before it and dare his friends to go in. He knew they would all go in and know for themselves eventually.