The clatter the accident caused was a magnificent noise, the shattering of the window reverberating throughout the neighborhood. Every child playing stickball in the street groaned, except for Hal. Hal’s mouth hung open in stupefied horror, watching the last few pieces of shattered glass hold onto the window frame that sat in the Becksworth mansion.
The home would only be called a mansion by children, three stories tall and bristling with peaked roofs and dormers. But standing behind its wrought iron fence and neglected brown lawn of scrub and weeds, mansion was the best word the children could use around adults and know that it also meant haunted. Using this coded language the children had established rules around the house. The first and most important was that anyone willing to sneak into it at midnight would automatically be a hero and would go down in legend.
No one had done this.
The second rule, was the person who kicked, hit, or otherwise waled any variety of ball into the scrub-infested yard was the one who had to retrieve it. Bat in hand, Hal watched with growing dread as he realized he was the first to have the dubious honor of crashing through one of the mansion’s windows.
It was not the first time that a ball in the children’s play had broken any window in the neighborhood, though. So a silence descended on the group as they hoped that, despite the mansion’s seemingly abandoned exterior, that the customary adult would emerge from the home. The angry yelling or plaintive requests for honesty would surely be preferable to the unassuageable silence that emanated from the mansion.
No one emerged from the Becksworth home.
That sealed Hal’s fate. Normally, the other children would have jeered as the offending bat-wielder approached the victim home, but now only a cloud of silence descended on the group. This was replaced by a sharp intake of collective breath as Hal strode to the house’s fence. Laying hands on the gate and opening it to enter the yard would have been enough to gain the respect of his peers, but Hal breathed deep and strode down the walk to the front door. A knock on it produced nothing – no muffled voices or telltale footsteps came from within.
This only made Hal more afraid. The rumor was that the Becksworth family had died in a car crash and now their spirits haunted the mansion. While adults told the children that it was silly to think the home was haunted, no one ever denied that death had occurred. And in all of the hours of their street games, no one saw anyone enter or leave the residence. Which left Hal with the one option of the window.
The ball had taken out a window on the first floor and Hal approached it as if it might grow teeth. Careful of the broken glass, he stood on the tips of his toes to look inside. In the center of the room’s wooden floor sat the ball, in between a fireplace, couch, coffee table and grandfather clock. A breeze through the window caused the ball to roll a bit, but nothing else stirred.
Hal let out a tentative, “Hello?” before reaching up to stand on the sill so he could step through the window. Despite the summer heat, he found himself cold. The yellow rays of the sun that filled the house didn’t touch his skin.
Once his foot hit the floor, he was freed from hesitation, moving to snatch the ball and escape. Only the voices stopped him, drifting from another room, familiar like an old television show. As with all youths, Hal was attuned to the possibilities of the future, and the voices spoke to that, until he uttered another hesitant, “Hello?” and followed the trail of the spectral voices.
Peeking around the door of the adjacent room, Hal first thought he had found an old man watching his shows. A tall-backed leather chair sat in the room with a blanketed figure in it, across from it a glowing image. The details his brain quickly gathered, though, told Hal there was more going on. The blanket lay across legs that left skeletal impressions in it, the light from the glowing picture didn’t emanate from a box of any kind, but leapt back and forth between two metal rods, positioned in a V like some old antenna.
Uncertain and afraid to say anything, Hal’s eyes focused on the moving pictures being rendered in the air, and saw a family going about the business of being a family. Sometimes they were happy, sometimes angry, sometimes stricken, but a family nonetheless, the father often wearing a pair of dock shoes that resembled those on the legs sticking out from the chair’s blanket. Hal felt his eyes widen as he watched, the children in the floating images rapidly cycling through different ages, the parents newly weds and then grandparents, all hinging on a moment when a car trip was decided against.
As Hal watched, though, these faded moments, were replaced with scenes of Hal – he saw himself growing up, doing well in school, doing poorly, his father living to see him graduate, of dying in a cancer ward. There was college, a war, prison, one special girl or many women. All of these dazzled out between the antenna, swirling before him like a kaleidoscope.
Only when Hal dropped the ball he had strived so valiantly to retrieve did the figure in the chair stir. It might have said something, but Hal would never be sure. He ran, he ran faster than he ever had around a baseball’s diamond or through the streets of his town. He ran from the shimmering possibilities that hovered in the Becksworth house. He wasn’t certain who sat in that chair, but after a second of seeing what he beheld, Hal knew what held him there.
And Hal wanted none of it. One future would be enough for him.
See the author’s published work here.
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