Metamorphosis (v2.0)
Some people swore that the house was haunted. Now, they'll say that about any house that remains untenanted long enough; but the yarns repeated about the old Bateman place were more unsavory than most. It was said that the farmer who'd built it had shotgunned his wife and children in a drunken rage before putting the barrel into his own mouth. It was said that one night a gas leak had killed in their beds two college kids renting the place (or three or four, depending on who was doing the saying). It was said that the skeletal remains of two elderly sisters had been found within canyons of festering compost up in the attic. With every telling, horrible new details would emerge, ever more lurid, ever more frightening, until we came to see the House as an incarnation of Evil itself.
We lived just up the road from it. For as long as I could remember, it had squatted there half-hidden behind sumacs and lilacs run amok. My pals and I would convene in our backyard, passing the time talking about the budding girls in our class until the subject of the House arose. Then we'd take turns recounting and embellishing the stories we'd heard, amping ourselves up into a delicious frenzy of horror. The inevitable challenges would be made. With all the prepubescent bravado we could muster, we'd make the short walk to the rank, overgrown lot and creep through the verdure under the baleful stare of the House's black, sightless eyes. We imagined the weeds wrapping around our ankles to be its claws grasping at us. At the base of the steps to the rotting porch we'd dare one another to ascend and venture inside. I think Lennie actually got as far as the front hall once; but we couldn't see him from where we crouched, and we didn't dare come any closer. At any rate, he'd turned and bolted, screaming something about a headless ghost wielding a shotgun, and we ran, shrieking and laughing with terror, back to the safety of our gated, manicured worlds.
Until the day that an occupying army arrived. Drawn one morning by the buzzing of chainsaws and the crash of felled timber, we assembled a ways off to watch the invasion. Hard-hatted workmen were clearing brush and cutting trees for a cavalry of bulldozers and front-end loaders to push and haul to the edge of the lot. The House gradually emerged from the shadows, for the first time in our lives showing itself for what it actually was: the sad, crumbling remnant of an old 6-room farmhouse. Before our eyes, grunting backhoes stripped the House of its protective cloak. Our favorite bogeyman, revealed to be a charlatan, was being led away. It reminded me of a shackled prisoner of war, subdued and humiliated, manhandled by his captors. I wouldn't have expected to feel grief, but I did, as well as an angry flash of resentment towards the occupiers. I glumly turned away and trudged home. One by one, my pals followed.
By nightfall, the house had been reduced to a pile of rubble in the middle of an empty lot. The fire department came the next day to torch the remains, and some weeks later, another construction crew arrived to pour the concrete foundation of what would become a modest two bedroom home. By the end of the year, a retired couple had moved in, and there was talk of paving the street.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
