Calling It Curtains

The Ramsey family had just moved to a countrified residence off a narrow highway, a mile from a northwestern suburb of Des Moines, Iowa. Just up the road were two farms, one operated by a kindly couple who allowed Britt and Kevin to accompany them when they gathered eggs from roosts in the chicken house, or ventured into the fields to load hay bales onto wagons. Their house was a mile from the small town, which had one school for kindergarten through high school. The school did not provide bus transportation.

Britt was seven, Kevin nine. Each morning, after their dad had left for work in the city, they walked to school, and trudged back in late afternoon. On the way, they passed an old, abandoned, two-story house. The harsh Iowa winters and hot, humid summers had curled the gray paint in spots, and the windows were broken or missing. The wood-frame structure stood halfway between the school and the modest Ramsey home.

Britt and Kevin’s schoolmates said the house was haunted, and the two boys stayed on the other side of the highway to avoid disturbing the evil spirits they suspected were present.

After a few weeks of seeing or hearing nothing occur at the dilapidated house, the two boys mustered the courage one day to walk past it on the same side of the highway. After several afternoons of repeating the route, they began slowing their pace as they passed it, staring to see if they could glimpse movement inside. Nothing happened, and they became ever more emboldened.

Finally, on a late-spring afternoon, they ventured onto the yard, where sundry weeds had poked out of the ground, as if testing the warmer weather that had followed winter. The weeds’ verdancy contrasted with patches of bare soil on which the weeds gradually encroached. As the boys neared the rickety porch with two columns supporting an overhang, Britt stopped, and the taller Kevin looked down at him.

“I heard something,” Britt said.
“What?” said Kevin.
“Kind of a whistling noise. I think we’d better leave.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Kevin said. But Britt could see his brother was just as scared. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

The weekend came and went. On Monday, they walked slowly past the house, staring and listening. The next day, they walked onto the yard to their previous spot, stopped, and looked at each other without saying anything. Kevin turned and crept closer, Britt following two steps away.

Almost at the porch, they mounted the three steps leading to the sagging platform, and stood, hearts pounding. Nothing happened, and they stepped closer to a shattered bay window to the right of the door with cracked, grimy glass. Peering through the large window, they could only make out the outline of a staircase and bare, gray walls. But that was as far as they dared go.

Two days later, the ebullient Britt had to stay an hour after school for having spoken up three times with the answers to spelling questions when the teacher hadn’t called on him. Kevin didn’t want his younger brother to have to walk home alone, and played on the playground monkey bars to pass the time.
They set out on their trek, the sun descending ever lower in the western sky, where it cast an orange glow on the peripheries of flat, purple-gray clouds. They stood in front of the old house.

“It’s getting darker,” said Kevin. “That’s when ghosts come out. If we want to know if this house is haunted, we have to look inside now.”
Britt looked at his brother wide-eyed. They stealthily crossed the yard and onto the porch, which startled them when a board creaked. Stepping close to the bay window, they gaped in wonderment, spying a large white sea shell lying on a bare wood floor. A tattered blue-gray sofa sat in the living room at a disorderly angle to the worn wood staircase. They stared, open-mouthed.

From around the other side of the staircase, across the room, came a soft, high-pitched whistling sound, and the two boys saw the tip of something white and flimsy flutter just inside their view, as a strong breeze swept in from the south.
Scared out of their wits, they bounded off the porch and across the yard, running down the side of the highway for a hundred meters before they felt safe enough to walk.

In the three weeks remaining in the school year, they stepped up their pace while passing the house fearfully on the other side of the road, convinced that ghosts did indeed exist.