Some of you may also glimpse something more, however. An actual figure rather than simply the implication of one—back bent, hands and face obscured, draped in what looks like a length of lightish coloured cloth. Its frame will be unmistakably human, yet disturbingly thin; it enters the mirror sidelong, from an unwatched corner, to hover by your own image in an obscurely threatening pose. Turning, shoulder outthrust as though its arm were about to rise, its shrouded hand about to reach, to touch—to lay itself, suddenly, upon the unwary supplicant’s all-unwitting shoulder—
Or not. The effect doesn’t manifest itself for everybody.
Yes, those sconces near the ceiling are for gas, and provided the bulk of the house’s emergency lighting until only a few years ago. No, I will not be lighting them tonight.
Yes, there will be an explanation.
I must ask you to enter into the house’s interior single-file, now—one by one, with a minimum of straggling. You may well wish to muffle the lower part of your faces while you step across the threshold; this part of the house is not very efficiently ventilated, frankly, and visitors often find the smell somewhat disturbing until they have a chance to get used to it.
Now just keep close, if you please, while I shut . . . and lock . . . this door behind us.
* * *
One of the most enduring tales told about Peazant’s Folly long pre-dates Dr. Peazant’s subsequent remodeling. It implies that Edmund Peazant, the house’s original builder, buried the first of his five children alive in its foundations so that the baby’s death-agonies would help keep the structure strong and erect. This rumor has never been substantiated, though it may explain why Mrs. Peazant later—after so many births, plus a few more “miscarriages”—chose to commit suicide by first thrusting her head through the stained-glass window of her husband’s study, then slitting her throat from ear to ear on what shards of glass still adhered to the frame.
The true reputation of Peazant’s Folly, however, only began to grow after Dr. Peazant reduced his grandfather’s home to a shell behind which he could arrange things to his own very particular, semi-arcane specifications. Periodically, its status as Canada’s least-habitable residence has since been challenged by reporters, historians, parapsychologists, exorcists, businessmen, the unwary of all stamps and stripes. Few have emerged from the experience unaltered . . . but such a place will attract tourists, even so. Even now.
Outside, then, all as expected. Inside, however—
—the flashlight’s beam choking to a dim glow, its lens a windowpane clogged by insects’ wings—
—a sudden snap of wrist-deep dust, filling your throat to bursting—
—panic narrowing your chest as you cross the doorsill, and that smell, that SMELL—
* * *
So here it is, at last: Peazant’s “Folly” itself, in the truest sense of the term. A plaster and limestone reproduction, built to scale, of that Mephitic Temple Dr. Peazant himself discovered in a series of caves near Delphi—“Mephitic,” meaning “up from underground,” underside of the Apollonian, most mysterious of all Mystery religions. Like their more legitimate neighbors, the Mephitium had its oracle too. But while the Delphic oracle merely squatted over a crack in the earth and breathed in the sulphurous, volcanic fumes which produced her prophetic trances only when she was directly requested to, her Mephitic sister-seers lived their lives out in the same cavern from which those gases were produced.
The fumes in here, however, are somewhat less than natural, let alone sacred. As my employers eventually discovered, not so very long ago—after they opened the Folly to visitors in order to defray rising property taxes on the one hand, while cutting local incidences of vandalism and trespassing on the other—the smell you’re reacting to comes from the gas-sconces Dr. Peazant’s grandfather once installed, way back when. Dr. Peazant had them soldered permanently open, so that they would admit a steady stream of near-fatally pure methane mixed with hydrogen sulfide from the (only partially drained) swamp old Mr. Peazant built his house on top of. I could take you down to the basement right now and show you what’s left, but I wouldn’t advise it . . . it’s really not a pretty sight.
Here, then, is why I’ve been instructed not to turn the sconces back on, let alone light them. This is the invisible contagion Dr. Peazant infected his family’s home with, hoping its influence might convert whoever was unwise enough to live here into a modern-day Mephitic priest or priestess whose constant oracular trance would doom them to live—and die—in the same eternally-receptive state as their predecessors: Perpetually open, perpetually God-possessed.
But by what God, you ask? Another good question. Not Apollo, certainly; Apollo had no truck with the underworld, even in his less—appealing—aspects . . .
Ah, but if we knew, it wouldn’t be a Mystery. Would it?
* * *
After thirty years of incident, recorded and otherwise, some patterns do tend to emerge. The 1983 Jay Expedition case is particularly typical of what would become known as the Peazant’s Folly “experience”: Two parapsychol
ogists (Drs. Jay and Jay, husband and wife) plus a mental medium (the late Guilden Fisk) vs. two scientific skeptics—an archaeologist (Dr. Meulendyk) and a forensic psychologist specializing in suggestion-induced psychoses (Dr. Lean.) Each team had publicly vowed to expel, or expose, the house’s secrets before the other could finish its initial diagnosis. They entered Peazant’s Folly en masse, but left it one by one . . . in body-bags, straightjackets, or simple police restraints.
Whether their tenure ended by murder, self-mutilation, suicide or insanity, however, each survivor told a strikingly similar story. Approaching the Folly in accordance to Dr. Peazant’s instructions, they had reduced themselves to playing the part of worshipers at the Mephitium’s figurative altar; they had passed through the hallway and over the inner threshold single-file, making a ritual pilgrimage from the above-ground world of the living to some all-purpose underground Land of the Dead: Hades, Styx, Acheron, Elysium, Heaven and Hell all rolled into one.
So: Imagine, if you will, this disparate group wending its collective way down that long bronze hallway like a trip through the birth canal in reverse, watching their reflections split and blur and peel away before their very eyes—cracking their civilized shells open, just as instructed, in order to render themselves more properly amenable to the Mephitium’s inherent range of—suggestions.
They all say they saw that faceless figure hovering behind them, eventually; saw it reflected in each other’s eyes, if nothing else. Even the ones who, like Meulendyk and Lean, had taken as great a care as possible NOT to research the house and its various phantoms beforehand, for fear of tainting their on-site findings.
Maybe a God. Maybe a ghost. Maybe something else, something specific to the house itself. Self-created, maintained by a steady stream of fresh minds to infiltrate, fresh dreams to occupy . . .
Given enough of a head-start, a house like this probably becomes its own haunting. Don’t you think? I mean—
* * *
—don’t you?
Please excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I appear to have let my thoughts run away with me.