This House is Alive

This house is alive. Not in the metaphorical sense that people use when it is filled with people and families connecting with each other, the sound of children giggling as they play, the clinking of wine glasses over steaming turkey and stuffing at Thanksgiving, or the tell-tale sign of paper being carelessly torn from presents at Christmas. Not in the sense that it surrounds life taking place. No, nothing so analogous to the idea of happiness being contained within a wooden box of sorts. This house, this prison, is actually, literally, undeniably alive. And I don’t know what to do about it.

            The first sign that something was wrong was when I heard the house, well, breathing. Not settling, not creaking. I know what those sound like. Those are normal sounds. Wood expands and contracts, etc. etc. Joints get old and make noise. The air conditioner kicks on with a hum that stays and settles in your brain like a blanket. The TV receiver starts up on its own because it’s a sonofabitch who won’t stay quiet. The printer howls in defiance of God’s will. You know, all normal home noises. No, this was different. I was sitting at my computer, trying to find the words that would make my life okay when I heard an exhale. Not quite a sigh but not not a sigh at the same time. I was home alone. My cat was upstairs sleeping. And yet, I heard it. I stopped my typing and waited. I heard it again. I grabbed the aluminum baseball bat near my desk that I keep purely for home defense and began stalking around the house. If there was an intruder, he was going to get 34 inches of metal right to the teeth…but there was nobody. Nothing.

            I was hearing things, clearly. As I made my way to the stairs, though, I heard a cough. Well, heard isn’t the right word. I felt a cough. The house rumbled – almost like an earthquake – and I had to brace myself against the wall to avoid falling over.

            That was the second sign.

When my hand touched the wall, I nearly fell down the stairs with how quickly I jumped back. I expected to feel paint over drywall, the gentle scraping against my palm that all walls have. I did not feel that. I felt something soft yet sturdy, something more like muscles under flesh. I felt the warmth and the pulse of blood under skin. I yanked my hand back and saw the unmistakable ripples of something moving. Ants? Termites? My mind raced to make sense of it but I knew it wasn’t insects. Insects don’t flow like that. Insects don’t feel that temperature.

            I couldn’t go back downstairs. I don’t know why, but I knew I couldn’t, so I stayed upstairs and tried to make myself a sandwich to get my brain reset. The fridge wouldn’t open. It growled at me. Growled. The floor shivered as I walked. The curtains on the windows fluttered like eyelids. I think that’s when I fainted the first time.

            When I came to, I was on the carpet near my living room. Everything seemed normal, at least at first. I had had a breakdown – that was it. I had been working too hard and something just snapped and now I was fine. That happens to everyone, I told myself. Time to take the rest of the day off. Maybe go for a drive, hit a bar, or play a round of golf. Something out of the house to reacclimate me to society. I snagged my keys and went to enter my garage. The doorknob snapped off in my hand. Not in the way that something corroded snaps off. You know, with that little puff of rust and the sinking feeling that you are going to spend way more money than you expected today. No, it was more like when a lizard has its tail caught by a predator and it simply sheds the tail in order to escape. I guess it wasn’t so much a snap as it was a detaching. Which was much worse.

            The breathing around me started again. I felt hot and weak and everything began to move at once. I sat down on a chair and it yelped at me. I stepped on a rug and it thrashed. The hum of the air conditioner metamorphosed into something screaming unintelligibly at me. The windows slammed open and shut, sending hot gusts of wind in my direction. The microwave and stove beeped and roared and banged. Blasts of heat poured from the appliances around me. And the breathing, the breathing never stopped. Calm, heavy, constant. It dug into the bones of my ears and sat there, squatting like a frog. It was oppressive, it was weighty. It was too much. That was the second time I fainted.

            So, here I am. I’m sitting on the carpet, trying not to look too closely at anything around me. I don’t know what’s happening or why, but it is. I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if there’s a knob to twist or a dial to break or anything. I don’t how to hurt it. I don’t know how to kill it. I don’t even know if it can be killed. I am, simply put, stuck inside my house. That isn’t the worst part, though.

            The worst part, the part that really scares me, is the fact that I’ve been hearing rumbling in the last half hour or so. Not rumbling like the house shifting.  Not rumbling like there’s a big truck going by outside, a big truck that could rescue me in some fashion. No, it’s a familiar kind of rumbling. A bad kind. Rumbling like I get when my stomach needs something in it. Rumbling like hunger pangs. Rumbling like it is distressed and needs something to settle the emptiness inside.
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            I’m worried that the house needs to eat.