Hancock House

Prologue California, 1966 The best dirt-clod fights happen in spring, after a light rain, when the ground is wet but not soggy and the grass is tall and green. A handful of stems makes a nice wad of dirt at the roots, and they pull up easily and hang together in a big, tight ball. A good release is important, and if you swing the clod around your head, faster each time, and let go at just the right moment, the missile sails off like a comet, trailing its tail behind until it smashes into your target. We team up for dirt-clod fights, but nobody really wins. And we don’t stop until we’re so caked with mud we can hardly move, then we clomp to the stream- filled ditches along El Camino Real and let the water wash us clean while we hunt frogs. When we get bored with that, we explore the secret jungle across the street from my house, behind the high iron fence where we’re never supposed to go, but often do. This afternoon, two of us are called home, but we three who remain at large wiggle under the forbidden iron fence, our thin, young bodies fitting neatly in the space we’ve made by scraping away the dirt with rocks. Behind the overgrowth of vines, trees, and thick, prickly shrubs is a mansion that takes up the whole block. The old Hancock House, Dad calls it, and it’s locked up tight, but we know how to get inside. Around the back, below ground level, is a basement with a broken window, and we slide through the narrow opening and land on the cement floor amid a pile of old canvas tarps and drop cloths they used to cover the furniture upstairs. The first time we came here, we were spooked out of our wits, but now it’s routine, an adventure for a lazy afternoon, a secret hideout from parents and shopping trips. We have flashlights and soda pop and a box of crackers in a brown paper sack that we stashed on a shelf. The basement is like our own private fort, and from here, we set out, and every time we explore Hancock House, we discover new things. It’s as if the owners went out one day and never came back. Dirty laundry sits in the washing machine, the refrigerator door stands open, a supply of rotted food clings to its shelves, clothes hang in the closets, and the calendar on the kitchen wall is turned to October 1958. The mansion is three stories plus an attic; the attic windows are the only eyes that remain free of the crawling, green foliage that slowly swallowed the rest of the house. Today, as we prowl the third floor hallway, we discover an old wooden trunk with a rounded top, and when we open it, taking all three of us to lift the lid, we’re disappointed to find only papers instead of pirates’ gold or treasure, but then, why would one leave treasure behind? We creep on, up a flight of narrow, creaking stars to the attic, a hot dusty space that smells like stale bread and dried newspaper. Beams of light filter through the windows in the roof, and the dust particles disturbed by our footsteps dance in their shafts. We don’t need our flashlights up here, so we click them off and stick them in our back pockets. Breathing the stale, hot air is uncomfortable, and I have to take deep breaths to fill my lungs. I feel dizzy, like I’m going to pass out. I look at Annie to see if she notices, because I love her, and I don’t want her to think I’m a sissy. Annie is smart and pretty and nice—probably too nice to call me a sissy anyway, no matter what—and even though she’s a year older than me, I think she likes me. Her hair is the color of the poppies that grow wild along the creek beds, and it curls around her face and makes her eyes look as blue as the sky. She smiles a lot, and sometimes she holds my hand when we hunt for frogs. I don’t think she knows I love her. Nobody else knows either. It’s my secret. Finally, the dizzy feeling goes away, and I can breathe again. We push past sealed boxes and old chairs and tables covered with the canvas cloth, and then Harry bumps into a birdcage, tipping it onto a carton of old milk bottles. The noise scares us at first, but we know it’s just us. And then we see that it isn’t just us, for sitting in a rocking chair, looking out a window, is a human skeleton. We think it’s real, but we’re not afraid, because it’s dead. We agree that whoever it is must have been there a long time, for all that’s left are bones and a lump of gray hair that sits like a Brillo pad on top of the head. Harry steps forward and touches the arm bone. “It’s a real one, Andy,” he says to me. I touch the jaw. It has all its teeth, and it looks like it’s smiling, but all skeletons look like that. “It’s real all right, but why do you think it’s up here?” I ask, and no one has an answer. Annie, the smartest among us, says it might be a teaching skeleton like doctors use to learn about the human body. That sounds good, and we think she’s probably right, but it looks like it would fall apart if we tried to move it, so we don’t. Of all the things in the old Hancock House that we have discovered up to now, this skeleton is the most exciting, and we decide not to tell anyone about it except our friends who had to go home early today, and definitely not our parents. So we sit around looking at it for a while, and then we slip out of the house the way we came in, wiggle under the fence, and go home. After dinner, Harry and I meet at the big tree in the middle of our block and climb up into its branches. High up where the limbs fork, leaving a flat space, we’ve made a fort, and we sit there discussing the skeleton and what to do about it. We name him Louie, though we have no reason to think it’s a man, but we have to call it something, and a woman would most likely have been sitting in the kitchen, we figure, not in the attic. Halloween is almost here, and Harry thinks it would be fun to dress Louie up and sit him on a porch somewhere, but there are problems with that: number one, he’ll fall apart; number two, we’ll have to explain where we got him; and number three, we’ll get in trouble for sneaking into the Hancock House in the first place. I say we should leave Louie in that chair, and that’s what we do, visiting him less and less, for we have school and sports, and he’s just an old, dead skeleton. The best we can do for Louie is keep his secret and bring him kids to scare once in awhile, and that’s fun, but they have to swear never to tell about him, and no one ever does. So Hancock House sits decaying behind the iron fence, Louie its only inhabitant, and as the years pass, we go there less and less, for we are outgrowing its eerie fascination. As far as we know, nobody ever visits, and the thick, tall vines that cling to its walls grow heavier and more dense, covering the shuttered windows and tugging at the board and batten, trying to pull it down, and no gardeners come to trim the undergrowth that swallows the walkways, obscuring the structure from the road. My father, Melvin, who works for the local land title company, checks the tax rolls periodically, for doesn’t he have a vested interest in knowing what’s going on across the street? Someone is paying taxes on the place, he says, and it’s still deeded to Lester Hancock. Dad has wholeheartedly approved of the abandonment from the get-go, for it means no more noisy parties to wake him in the middle of the night. So the status quo is established, and I seldom pay attention to the vast greenery across the way as I am preparing to graduate from high school and embark upon a college career at Northwestern University in Illinois, my first time away from home and California, and as it happens, I settle there in the snow country after graduation, and it isn’t until 1998 that everything changes.