That scary house

I'm sure I'm not alone in having a house from childhood that haunts the memory no matter how many years and miles away it may be.
Just such a house was my father's Mother's house. Once upon a time, about 1900 or so, it was considered a mansion. By the time I was introduced to it in the early 1960's it had a terrifying resemblance to the Bates family manse in "Psycho".
It brooded on the corner of the block, the paint long since faded to a nondescript dust-bunny grey. The trees were withered and sickly and the grass had given up growing, no flower bloomed in this sullen space, nor did children scamper gaily with jump rope or bicycle. Animals wisely gave it wide berth; even the automobiles, no matter how new and shiny looked abandoned in the shadow of this place.
The windows were wavering and dull; rheumy eyes into a world of mildew, dust and rot. The curtains hung tiredly within, the velvet drapes limp and greyed, the furze slowly falling away from the fabric. The lace beneath was of the same stuff as the eternal cobwebs on the high ceilings.
Creaking, scuffed floors of faded hardwood planking seemed barely able to support the weight of Persian rugs, worn to their burlap backing from countless feet over the years. The furniture would have looked perfect in a daugerrotype, with the frozen faces of the barkeep and the local madam in front of them.
Enter into this, if you dare, from a narrow, coffin-sixed front stoop with the skeletons of long-dead wisteria still caught on the pillars. There we were, my brothers and I; it was Sunday, time for 'visitation' with the father that didn't wish to be one.
While he slumbered on the old wingback sofa, like a brooding manatee, we explored the verboten realms; the shadowed and maze-like basement and the upstairs... oh that upstairs.
The basement was more than enough to frighten the most stolid of children, stacks of old magazines had become mounds of... something dank and slimy. The sort of thing that made one scrub their hands on their clothes, over and over till the skin burned. Furniture sank in on itself, black holes of decay under the sickly light of dusty, flyblown low-wattage bulbs, much too far apart for comfort.
Through the haphazard warren we explored, trying to ignore the home canned food that was so old all the colour had leached out of the flesh within, giving them the appeartance of monstrous foetuses suspended in formaldehyde. And always, always so careful to avoid that room.
The room that housed the long-forgotten well. The door had rotted from its hinges and there was no cap on the well. I dared a look down it, once. That is still indelible in my memory. The smell of stagnation slithered up from a round hole, just large enough to swallow an unwary child. The bottom and sides were unseen, from the rim of the dirt floor onward it was blackness impenetrable; it was too easy to imagine a passage straight to the depths of Hel in that well.
The old laundry sinks and spare shower were the colour of old blood from rust, the floor was gritty and uneven, as if to pitch someone into the waiting maw of... what???
The second floor should have been a relief after the basement, but it was not to be. The wax on the hardwood planking had long since been absorbed into the wood and the grain was splitting from itself. Whatever the original colour had been will remain a mystery best left be.
None of the high narrow windows had curtains, there should have been light a-plenty, yet even the sun dreaded visiting this place. The rooms' doors were closed tightly and opened slowly screaming in protest through rusted hinges.
Empty, empty empty were the rooms, sad and forgotten. Most of the rooms had lost their memories before my brothers and I explored this place of troubled dream and failed rest. A few still cried out under the burden of their pasts.
When the upstairs had been a boarding house, in the era of grandmother's childhood, there was a large communal kitchen. All that remained of it was a sink, and the ghost-patterns of icebox and wood stove on the scabrous linoleum. This room held a deep shame, terror and pain that echoed in the silence.
What surely must have been the grandest room for rent boasted its own bathroom, I never ventured far enough in to see the fixtures. This room still glowers in my memory, silent screams ricochet in my subconcious.
For many years this house held such terrors I could not even speak of it to anyone. It was close to 20 years before I could tell my mother of our wanderings. I told her of the rooms that frightened me so,even in their dying emptiness. My mother's tanned and rosy face became sickly and her eyes were like a frightened horse's. "Tell me again," She said. "Which rooms these were,and where were they?"
I answered her, still remembering the feel of buckling floorboards under youthful feet. She paled even more and crossed herself (I have seen her do this only that once outside of church).
"Oh my God Gwen Marie..." Mum took hold of my hand with her shaking one. "The kitchen that frightened you so, your grandmother and great-aunt wsere raped in that room!!"
"The bedroom you couldn't go into you were so afraid, that was the room where one of the boarders committed suicide. They found him in the tub, soaking in his own blood."
I still must fight a shiver when I think of that house. I sometimes wonder where the ghosts went when it finally collapsed in on itself from old age?
I'm afraid to know where.