It all started innocently enough somewhere near the summer of 1969.
What a terrible opening line but it fits. It was all innocent. We were all innocent.
I think it is safe to speak for all of us and say what we were about to experience was never even the slightest flicker of a thought in any of our minds.
I had lived in the house on Justin Street for my entire life; all eight plus years. With my older brother and two older sisters I had heard the stories often about them growing up while it was being built. My industrious father built the house himself for his new wife, and as you can imagine an endeavor like that took time. I particularly recall one story about a rainstorm when the roof wasn’t quite yet finished which led to hijinks with the suddenly indoor slip and slide that appeared in the kitchen. All of their memories were there and so were all of mine.
I learned to walk there, cross a street there, ride a bike there. I started school while living there. All of my friends were there. It was my safe place and my refuge. So imagine the surprise when my father announced that we were moving.
The fear and uncertainty of the move was mitigated somewhat for me by the fascinating place we would be moving to. It was literally just down the road so it wasn’t all that foreign. It was also a brand-new tract house in a development of what were, for all intents and purposes, the 1970’s equivalent of today’s McMansions.
The large spilt level had been the model home for the development and as such was decked out to the max with all of the lavish touches of the day: a huge yard, built in gas barbecue on the spacious entertainment ready patio, an above ground redwood decked swimming pool, green, red and gold flocked wallpaper throughout the house and a Minute Man statue in the middle of the front lawn complete with musket. I was thrilled about the pool, of course, but I was equally thrilled and fascinated with the wallpaper. Oh that wallpaper! Velvet for Pete’s sake. Surely we were moving on up in the world.
Looking back, it’s easy to see the signs were there all along. But to us, the innocents, there was nothing untoward just the mayhem that moving house brings. Boxes gone missing that suddenly were there again, talking to the person you swear is there that really isn’t. The crazy door knobs that had no locks but sometimes would lock. Nothing strange that being in a new house and the stress that goes with it couldn’t explain.
If you counted the basement as a level we now had a four-level house. That’s a lot of space and a lot of stairs. Strange stairs. That goes for the hallways too. Normal looking hallways but strange nonetheless.
And then there were the shadows.
The Fat of Now 