Adventures in house-hunting:
The Marsellus Wallace incident
Looking at houses is always pretty fun. I think it might be a bit more fun if you’re not the person signing the huge honking checks…but still–a good time.
But I didn’t realize that it would be such a thrilling event.
So there’s this house. Same street-name as the ill-fated Knightdale house on 2 unperkable acres. Huge, but in a strange configuration. Cheap. Total wild-card weird shot-in-the-dark. You know: just the sort of crazy-ass thing I’d like.
It’s older–the site says 1981, but the first deed on the place is from ‘79. And the flooring and windows and doorways and such say the place is older than that still. It’s a brick house, built into the side of a hill. The upstairs weighs in at a fully respectable 1500 square feet. The fully-finished basement/storage area underneath has similar square footage–it totals 2500 or so. The upstairs is shown in photographs, described. The basement? Not so much.
We pulled up. It looked vacant. There was a guy way out in the back yard, mowing the lawn on a loud riding mower. He probably saw us drive up, but made no move to come investigate. Most advise that sellers not stick around, so we headed for the lock box.
Once inside, we were standing in the living room–a long carpeted room. A doorway straight ahead led into the kitchen–the room I usually head for first. Here it was huge, and had a fireplace. We poked around in there a bit, opening cabinets and doors gingerly. The w/d connections were tucked in an alcove that, by the busted up track left behind, had once been a closet. A door that the agent figured was a pantry or closet turned out to be a very narrow set of stairs that descended into the darkness. Likely to be eaten by a grue, indeed.
The agent seemed a bit nervous, but shook it off once she found a light switch and the footing had a visual. The three of us headed down the stairs and into the musty dimness.
The stairs emptied around a corner and into a small room. We all sort of blinked, looking around. The smell wasn’t stifling, but it was pretty gross. Musty, dank, sweaty. The spot we were in had several doors–some probably exits in to other small rooms, others closets–and no windows. The agent and K, at about the same time, commented that the place was way too Silence of the Lambs for their personal comfort. I laughed, more curious than cautious.
But, seriously? A serial killer has this kind of basement.
I was totally ready to explore this freaky house. So far, I hadn’t seen anything really wrong with it, and it was a great deal for that price. Huge amount of work, but damn–I could have a darkroom!
So K and I checked out the first room on the right. At this point, I started to agree that it was getting pretty bizarre. It was another small room, maybe with a small window, I’m really not sure. On the floor were piles of dirt and change, other odds and ends one might find under somebody’s bed (if the room was never ever cleaned). It was like someone had started sweeping up the room, but quit halfway through. One corner of the room was taken over by an air mattress, stained and dirty. Stained and dirty in a vaguely human-shaped way. A denim jacket was casually tossed across one end, and a scrap of blanket lay where a pillow might normally be. The room was awash in trash, other dirty clothes, and general filth and sloth. We backed up.
Again, we briefly questioned our commitment to curiosity-seeking. K decided she simply couldn’t look anymore. The agent sort of nodded sickly in agreement and turned away. I hesitated. We were standing at the next door. K finally reached out and took the knob. “I’ll open, you look,” she said. She sort of half-hid behind the door, and pulled it open.
She asked what I saw, but I could pretty much only stare in shock. This wasn’t the closet we were expecting. I was standing square in the doorway, and could see straight into a fairly large room, with some weak natural light (Door? Window? Hell if I know.) coming from the one side. I could see filthy brown and orange shag, a ratty couch in the same 70s shades–probably that scratchy plaid shit–and an old television. It was on. And there was a man sitting in front of it.
Now, we had been down here for a couple of minutes at this point. We had made no pretense of being quiet, what with the realtor shouting “REALTOR!” down the stairs and all. We had been talking quite loudly and, in fact, almost as soon as the door was opened K asked in outside voice if there was anything in there.
Apparently I paused a second or so, frozen. This is the point where the realtor opened her eyes, I think. She said she took one look at my face and knew it was time to get the hell out of there.
I’m not sure who moved first. Someone slammed the door (K?) and someone said “Let’s GO” (me?) and we raced up the stairs and into the kitchen.
Strangely, we stopped once we hit the sun-lit landing upstairs. We didn’t hear anybody coming up after us, and really, the guy probably didn’t move an inch. And not in a natural way. He was rigid and straight up, a large brown bald head, with a thick gold hoop in each ear. His shoulders were bare, and as far as I know, he could have been naked, sitting there in that funky scary basement in the middle of the day.
As we looked nervously around the sunlit kitchen, laughing at ourselves, we joked that perhaps he wasn’t the killer. Maybe he was the victim, pinned to the chair and unable to respond. I described what I thought I saw to K and the agent and, grasping for a similar reference, named Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction. That didn’t make our wild story seem less likely, really.
We half-heartedly poked around in the upstairs bedrooms, talking much more quietly this time. Each of us listened closely for any sound from below. In very short time, we all decided there was really nothing left to see and quickly exited through the front, making a beeline for the car. We passed by the primer gray industrial van parked out front; the one we had assumed on the way in belonged to the man with the mower. That man, though, had moved quite a bit away.
We walked beside the vehicle and down the driveway. Though we didn’t pause a second, each of us registered the type of van it was: the kind with no windows in the back and what looked like a thick metal cop-car barrier behind the driver.
We didn’t break into a run, but nobody lingered for a cigarette. On drive out of the neighborhood, the agent nervously asked, “So, that’s a ‘no,’ then?”
April 16th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Holy shit. That’s really fucked up. Part of me likes to think that I would have tried to get the guy to respond, but that’s the really stupid part of me. The rest of me would have been up those stairs so fucking fast…
Grats on the housing!
April 16th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
Um…………….yikes.
April 16th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
We talked about it afterwards. The part that wanted to see what was going to happen next was the part that also likes horror movies. And realizes that the plot-continance device of sticking around when things are obviously not cool… is a really bad idea in the real world.
Did raise some questions, though. The listing mentions a ‘long-term tenant.’ The realtor said that, on the realtor’s listing, it remarked that the tenant had been evicted. It didn’t warn that the dude might not leave.
Weird. And by weird, I mean creepy.
April 18th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
So… OK, here’s the part of me that’s paranoid and has seen too many horror movies. When you say “and not in a natural way,” do you mean he seemed… well, not to put too fine a point on it, are you sure he wasn’t dead? I didn’t smell the smell you, uh, smelled (I need a thesaurus), but you say it was musty and sweaty and heavy in the air. I’ve lived at The Hall, so I think I know an approximation, but I have to wonder…
On the other hand, I suppose he might have been sitting in resignation, thinking y’all were the ones there to serve him his eviction papers, or something…
Still.
You know, I really want to go to that house now. Like, really badly. If you decide to go back, I totally want to go. I know you’re done looking and all, but just FYI, if you do go, I totally want in on that.