Page 124 of The Staircase in the Woods

The House Wakes Up

A house, at first, is not a home.

At the start, a house is just a house: It is a structure designed for the purpose of someone to live in it. Perhaps you! You move in. You bring your things—all your most preciousstuff. You pack into this place your whole life—and that effect is multiplicative. Life makes life, a fungal efflorescence of existence begetting existence. You bring in a spouse, you have more children, you get one pet, another pet, a dog and a cat and now a bearded dragon; it’s where you learn to cook and fill the house with wonderful smells; it’s where you rest your head and give birth to dreams that are ambitious and strange. And it is in all this that a house becomes a home: You imprint yourself upon it, and it imprints itself upon you in return. It becomes a part of your very identity—your house, yourhome,is part of the tapestry that is you. You carry it with you, in your heart, to the end of things.

That, of course, is where the saying comes from:

Home is where the heart is.

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The other thing about a house—ahome—is that it is a private place. It has walls. You can draw curtains over the windows. You can lock the door.

And in that place, you can be you and do whatever it is you want to do.

You pig out on ice cream. You masturbate. You fuck. You sing in the shower. You take a shitmultipletimes a day. You watch the very worst of reality TV. You plunder the liquor cabinet. You talk absolutetrashabout people you know, people you work with, people you love, and others you hate. You get your hands tied behind your back, you get bent over a desk, you take a gag in your mouth and a cock—real or artificial!—wherever you so choose, done consensually, with a loving partner, or two, or three.

This, too, is part of a house’s purview: a home away from prying eyes where you can finally drop the mask, lose the pretense, and be who you need to be.

It is necessary and it is good.

Until, of course, it’s not.

That privacy also keeps hidden the fights you have. The cruel words, sharp as a tack, stuck in those you purportedly love. Your house is where you rage and punch drywall. Where families fight. Where relationships start to rot like fruit left long on the ground. It’s where kids learn to hate their parents. Where wives learn to hate the men they married and wish instead they’d fucked off to the woods and taken their chance with a bear. It’s where bad habits take root: too much drinking, too much eating, too many trips to the medicine cabinet, too much hoarding, too much sitting in the dark drunk-texting someone or trolling people on social media or flicking through the pics of an ex. Little seeds of neglect and pain, thumbed into your fertile dirt—seeds that grow best not in the light, but in the dark.

And if allowed to grow, to flourish, these invasive vines tangle—a braiding mat of suffering begins to form. A man hits his wife. A mother speaks the cruelest words to her child. A teenager pops all the pills in his parents’ bathroom and dies in the tub. An angry loner drinks beer, beats his dog, doxxes someone on the internet whose identity he hates. A whipping belt. A gun under the bed. A knife in the knife block. A computer archiving grotesque images of children. In the deepest dark of a house, of ahome,hate and pain and sufferingcan fester. All that effervescentrage. All that crushingdespair. Flourishing. Festering.

Dreams curdling fast into nightmares.

It’s where home stops being where the heart is.

Home is where thehurtis.

Where thehorrorlives.

Home becomes another name for that place where monsters go to hide and do their terrible work.

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In the secret dark of such a place, sometimes, something awakens.

Something new.

Something terrible, with eyes open wide and a powerful hunger.

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Enter: Dan Harrow, the man behind the Harrowstown planned communities of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

It was 1945, and Dan was in his favorite drinking hole in Philadelphia, sitting at the bar, sipping an Irish whiskey, doodling pictures of houses. Dan loved houses, having grown up in a cramped West Philly apartment in a crowded apartment building. He loved that single-family homes felt likeislands—a private oasis, a retreat from the world. He sketched Craftsman style and single-floor Spanish Colonials and funky little Art Deco bungalows (though these were a bit too extreme for Dan, who really liked the confidence of clean, straight lines). That’s when a man sat down next to him, a fella who introduced himself as Eddie Naberius, and Eddie, well, he clocked right away that Dan was down on his luck. (Perhaps not too hard to clock, Dan figured, since he was drinking whiskey at an Irish bar at half past two on a workday.) Dan had in fact been fired from his architectural job for wanting to do more than work the damn mail room—he’d been there for five years, and he had ideas, why wouldn’t anyone listen?

But this fella, Eddie, he says after hearing Dan’s story, “You know, Dan, the G.I. Bill passed last year, it’s gonna change things. War’sover—not formally, but it’s all over but the crying.” Dan made a face at that and then Eddie said the most curious thing: “Right, that one’s not out yet, is it? Ink Spots, keep your ears out. Anyway. Point is, Dan, gonna be a lot of soldiers coming back from the war with money stuffed in their pockets from Uncle Sam. And they’re not going to want to live in the cities, no sir, not with all that racket, all the smoke and those people. They’re going to want some peace and quiet. I think you could be the man to give it to them with your—” Here, Eddie tapped the doodles. “Nice little houses here. Houses for good men with nice wives and lovely children. Soldiers. Upstanding fellas. The kind of people who upheld the dignity of this country. Whorestoreddignity to the world. People who are American as an apple pie. And I think we can repay them. Don’t you, Dan?”

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(It was only later that Dan realized: He never told Eddie his name.)

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