New Story!

So, I thought I might try some more Patreon-related fun. Here's the next (solo) story from me, as I write it. No firm title yet, but it is all plotted out. Enjoya nd let me know what you think!

The house stood alone, well apart from the city streets of nearby Bear Falls, which itself stood apart from the busy cities and interstates criss-crossing the area. To get to Bear Falls, one would need to take highway 51A to a crossing road called Crescent. From there, you can ride Crescent all the way into the heart of Bear Falls. 

Most of the younger people from Bear Falls would strike out on their own for college or the promise of better work in the larger cities. Others remained and made their livelihoods in the same places their parents had. The ones who returned for holidays and marriages, they would comment on how Bear Falls never really changed. Sure, some of the older folks passed away, and the a few of the kids, now grown, would have vanished into the great expanse of America, but the hardware store still stood on Fairway Drive, and town matters were still settled by a group of four men and women who met at the Rotary.

Rory Wiseman had not set foot in Bear Falls since he was a boy. For a single summer, Rory stayed in Bear Falls with his Aunt Cindy, who inherited the house outside town from her grandmother, a scandalous figure in bear falls’ history. 

Nora Klein’s husband began construction on the house in the spring of 1922. Final construction was not completed until the summer of 1923, thanks in part to the flood in the fall of ‘22. The other factor was the disappearance of Rueben Klein, who vanished from the face of the earth somewhere around Christmas of that year, though no one could know for sure. Nora said she woke up one December morning and the man was gone, leaving behind a fair fortune and confused business partners.

Police searched the house, which was only partially built, though the main hall and bedrooms were livable, and so Nora and her husband were residents until the time of his disappearance. Reuben would be declared deceased in absentia the winter of 1930, when Nora finally inherited the remainder of his estate.

Despite the fact that no body had been found, rumors swirled, as they do in a small town. Some believed Nora had poisoned old Reuben, and dumped his body in the churning waters of the Yakonkwe River, though no corpse ever washed up on the banks downstream, caught in a thistle of branches. Some believed she buried Reuben somewhere on the grounds, though no disturbance in the earth was found. Bear Falls boasted hard ground, and little of substance grew in the rocky soil. 

Most seemed to take Nora at her word, that Reuben had gone out for the proverbial pack of smokes, never to return. The men of Bear falls could scarcely believe such a thing, given Nora’s renowned beauty. The women in town, having spent much of their lives with men, knew that no matter how beautiful one’s wife might be, there was always room to wander when it came to a man’s attention. 

When Nora took up with a young woman, her housegirl Catherine, the gossip surrounding Nora swelled and waned, as time marched on and no further reason for Nora to be in the forefront of minds in Bear Falls was given. 

The one tidbit that remained unproven, though Rory secretly hoped it was true, was that Nora operated an exclusive brothel from within the mansion. Likely this was the work of overactive imaginations at the time, men who were eager to claim they had spent an evening with the ravishing Nora. Aunt Cindy shrugged when Rory suggested it could be true, that their ancestor might have been a notorious madam. 

“All I know for sure about your Great-Aunt Nora,” she said, removing a tray of cookies from the wide over built into the kitchen wall, the bricks around it radiating an unpleasant heat in those summer months, “is that she was richer than sin. If it weren’t for her not frittering away everything that old rake Reuben made, we’d all be out on our keisters.”

But now, Aunt Cindy was gone, along with her cookies and the rosy cheeks that gave her the impression of being cold even in the depths of July.

“You think you’ll keep it?”

Rory found Sara’s eyes, now turned away from the scenery rolling by. Tugged by the wind, her light brown hair’s long waves whipped around her, reminding Rory of tales of Medusa and her mane of serpents.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what sort of shape it’s in. The last time I was here, I was seven years old. The place looked like a palace then. It’s probably a bungalow, and I just imagined the rest.”

“I don’t think so. Unless this town has more than one mansion in it.”

She nodded ahead of them, and there it was. Highmore Street led out of town, and curved with the angles of the Yokankwe. There stood the ancestral home, which sounded aristocratic in his mind, but if it wasn’t that, what was it? The house was at least two stories, though the high peaks suggested a big attic, or maybe extra rooms in the cupolas on either end. High windows with arched peaks stared back at them, the wide double doors at the entrance like a primly closed mouth. A round drive circled at its base, extending to Highmore with wide swaths of tall grass on either side that would need to be tamed soon before the weeds choked out the greener grass. It was a big, gray-black thing, and Sara would never have said it to her boyfriend for her love of him, but the first impression was how could such a house not be haunted?

“Wow.”

“You said it,” she agreed. “How much you think it’s worth?”

“Not as much as it would be in upstate New York, but not nothing,” Rory mused, making the left to turn into the drive. 

The Chevy sedan bounced as it fell into ruts in the drive, leading them to the front steps. 

“I feel rich,” Rory said, craning his neck from within the car, looking up to the dark eyes of the place on the upper floor.

“I hate to break it to you, babe, but I think you are rich.”

He laughed at that, meeting Sara’s eyes with a dopey grin spread over his thin face.

“I keep forgetting that. Holy shit. I mean… Holy shit!”

“I know!”

His excitement infected them both, and they spilled out of the car, chasing each other to the front door.

While no cartographer would be necessary to navigate the house, a few well-placed ‘You Are Here’ markers wouldn’t have been unwelcome. 

The first floor contained the wide entry hall and a grand staircase leading to the second floor. To the right upon entering, one found the dining hall, complete with seating for sixteen, and, behind that, the grand kitchen that looked strangely modern with its stainless steel appliances and accessories Aunt Cindy furnished, right down to a top of the line juicer. A number of pantries and closets were scattered about, including an under-the-stairs cubby, perfect for storing cleaning supplies or boy wizards.

A back hall led to the other side of the house, with a high-ceilinged library, a separate study, a parlor with a polished wood bar and stocked liquor cabinet, and a bathroom. 

The upstairs was a patchwork of guest rooms, one with its own dressing room, a feature of the master bedroom as well, a nursery, an entry into the library from the second floor and balconies accessible from nearly every room. 

“I used to play hide and seek with some of the kids from town,” Rory told Sara as they made their way through the upstairs corridors. “We’d spend hours chasing each other through this place. I spent months here and I swear I may have gotten us lost.”

Sara turned him toward her, slipping her willowy arms around his waist and hugging him close, he was six inches taller, and she liked that she had to look up into her man’s face when she kissed him. 

Rory took her face in his hands, marveling at how he had ever come to have a woman like Sara Long. She was beautiful, with a lean body and high breasts, the figure of a dancer. Her wavy hair spilled down her shoulders and midway down her back. Following her length of hair, one would inevitably arrive at a shapely ass, one that Rory would never admit had seized his attention when he first saw her. ‘Your grandma had the best ass,’ didn’t sound like the kind of tale to tell the grandkids, but Rory hoped like hell to have grandkids around with her at his side.

He kissed her, and she pressed more firmly against him, making a happy sound. 

“So, Mr. Wiseman, what room should we christen first? They say a home isn’t yours until you have sex in every room.”

“Whoever said that?”

She laughed and shrugged, looking playfully askance. “I dunno. I heard it somewhere. I think maybe it’s just an excuse for couples to have a lot of sex when they first move into a house.”

“What an outrage!” Rory exclaimed, feigning his shock with a hand to his heart.

“Truly. How about we pick our bedroom and get started. We have a lot of rooms to go.”

“Deal, Miss Long. If we can only find our way back to the master bedroom…”

They didn’t quite manage to christen each room, but a valiant effort was made. Sara was finishing classes online, ending work on her masters degree in psychology. She claimed the study as her own for classwork and her evenings sitting cross-legged in one of the high-backed chairs, her laptop lighting her face, thin glasses perched at the end of her nose. 

In the meantime, Rory explored the house and tagged a few of the inherited furniture pieces for sale. Most he intended to keep, but a few of Aunt Cindy’s additions were not quite the rustic manor he had in mind. All of the pictures he kept, though. Mostly of Aunt Cindy and his mother, Ruth, some from when they were only girls and the whole world waited for them. They were both achingly pretty. In particular, a picture of his mother and aunt posing in swimwear before a dip in the river, coy smiles on their faces, made him tear up. His mother couldn’t know how young she would be when cancer took her, or how fast she would be gone. Neither did this young version of his aunt know how she would be responsible for a child while his father grieved alone, until he woke from that grief like he’d come out of a trance. 

And there were the pictures of Nora. The woman of rumor, who looked beautiful even in the sepia photos left behind. Her hair was dark, styled short and close to her head, as was the style of the day. She had big eyes and a thin mouth, and the look in every photo he found was suggestive of some secret knowledge only she possessed. Even in the playful pictures, there was something dark in the face of Nora Klein, and something weirdly sexual.