The Brekker House

By Ananya Ohri

It was in the spring, in the months that are meant to clean what winter had left in its wake, the months where the barren tree branches clothe themselves with green leaves and buds grow into flowers, that I finally broke into the Brekker house.

Whispers around town informed me that the Brekker house only appeared abandoned, that inside, there was an entire ghost family, and that if you stood at exactly the right place, you could hear their footsteps. The implication of these rumors followed me everywhere I went, planting a rotten seed of curiosity in my mind that grew and festered as more and more people around me speculated about the house.  After being tortured all winter, I decided to see for myself if the folklore was true.

A lingering chill burned me as I stepped outside that March evening, turning my cheeks a stinging shade of red. Anticipation made me clumsy, causing me to trip as I hurried up the uneven cobblestone to the Brekker House.  I soon reached the base of the hill where it sat on its perch before the land descended into town. The building was worn; the windows and doors were boarded and half of the roof shingles were missing. On shaky legs I climbed the hill to come face to face with the wooden bars that hid the door. With one sharp tug, they came right off, and the nails that had been holding them to the house fell down and embedded themselves in the rich earth. 

I turned the handle and discovered that the door was unlocked. Gathering my courage, I pushed it open, and warm air suffocated me as I stepped on the blue carpet inside.

I was surprised to find that the interior of the house did not match the exterior in the slightest. The furniture was polished and well-maintained. Sconces with lit candles lined the walls, their flames flickering weakly, painting the room a jaundice yellow. Upon sticking my finger into one of the lights, I felt a pinprick of pain and discovered the fires were real, not electric. A perfect vase of orchids sat on a table beside a dustless fainting couch. The flowers were real as well. Pristine white petals crinkled in my fingers as I pulled them off.

I felt a sharp tug on the sleeve of my jacket just then and whipped my head around to find a little girl. 

For a moment, I thought she was my sister. 

The girl was ghostly pale, with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, thin arms reaching up to grasp my clothes desperately. “Have you come to kill me?” She wailed. 

Fear shot down my spine and through my feet, planting me in my position as the girl shook in front of me. “You’ve come to kill me, have you not? I know it! You’ve been sent to kill me! Don’t hesitate!” She brandished a glinting knife from under the skirt of her stained white dress, which was falling in tatters down her body. “Use it! Kill me!” She wrapped my limp fingers around the knife, boring into my soul with black eyes that were full of an emotion that no child her age, or even mine, could understand. She stood back and spread her arms like wings as if preparing to ascend to heaven. “Kill me!” She screeched, her hoarse voice cracking. 

At this moment I was not thinking correctly, and my nonsensical mind did nothing to stop my body as it plunged the knife deep into her chest, the blade disappearing beneath her skin until only the hilt was visible. Bile rose in the back of my throat as thin, sticky blood ran down her dress and welled at her lips. She fell backwards, lying on her back, limbs outstretched as she convulsed, preparing to die. With shaking hands I covered my mouth, backing away slowly until I hit the wall, and then I watched before my eyes as she pulled the knife out of her torso and the blood that came out of her body retreated back to the orifices that it had trickled down from. Her skin stitched itself back together, and she clawed at it, trying to get it to reopen. “No!” She screeched. “It was meant to work! I was meant to die!”

“Who are you?” I asked, suddenly finding my voice, though it was quivery and hoarse.

“I don’t remember my name anymore.” A deep, hacking cough shook her body. 

“What are you? A ghost?” 

“No,” she grimaced. “Time got mad at me. I was dying, so I asked him to live forever.” She trembled violently, pressing her bony fingers into her hollow cheeks. “I wanted to live forever. Instead, I’m dying forever! He won’t let me die!” She stood suddenly, her ebony hair falling over her face. “I just want to die! Just kill me!” She cried. “I can’t leave, I can’t live, I can’t die! I’m stuck here!”

I came back to myself then, and, turning on my heel, I bolted out the door, ignoring her weak cries of “Kill me!” that followed me as I stumbled down the road. I leaned against a bench overlooking the river that ran through town, breath coming in short gasps and hollow, throaty noises. The sound of madly rushing water filled my ears, and my skin crawled as I was transported back to the worst memories of my life. . Memories of my sister as her arm slipped out of my grasp. Memories of the splat of red on the river boulder. Gulping air, I banished these thoughts from my mind as best I could. Slushy snow, a remnant of the winter months passed, made me lose my balance as I continued to rush home, trying to get to safety and as far away from the Brekker house and its immortal resident as possible. 

I burst open the front door to my house and a chilly gust of air washed over me, speckling my skin with goosebumps. The blue model car was still there, on the floor. Still untouched as it had been for years. My sister was the last person who had touched it. I made sure no one else did, not even me. 

The encounter at the Brekker house had shaken me up so much, though, that I decided to finally inspect it since that fateful night when she visited me. My mind was filled with images of the girl in the house, of my sister in that river. My head was still spinning, and all I could think about was her, of my sister in this corner, the sound of her laugh as she dragged the car’s wheels across the floor.  I needed to touch it as she had done those years ago. I needed to let myself live in the past for a fleeting moment. Carefully, I bent down and pressed my finger to the small car, and the world around me started crumbling. 

I stood suddenly as the ground started to shake, pressing my cold hands into my arms to calm myself. Black cracks tore through my vision, bleeding into ink that turned me blind as I attempted to keep my balance. I squeezed my eyes shut, rubbing them, desperately trying to regain my sight, and when I opened them, I discovered that I was back in the Brekker house. The little girl was curled up in the corner, kissing the knife that I had impaled her with. Dread knotted in my stomach. When the girl saw me, she stood abruptly and rushed over to me. “How did you return here?” she demanded. “How? How?!”

I didn’t answer. Her eyes went to the shut door, and she carefully picked a candle up out of its sconce. Its light seeped through her skin, making her sickly blue veins even more prominent. She grabbed my wrist suddenly and I yelped as she held it to the flame. The heat embedded itself in my arm, creating an angry red mark. She pulled up my wrist  to inspect it, and the pain subsided slowly. She showed me the side which she had burned. The mark was gone. “You’re stuck with me,” she whispered. “You’ve angered Time.”

I shook my head, refusing to believe it, but the girl slapped me, screaming, “You’re stuck with me! You’ll never die! You’ve angered him! You’ve angered Time!” She slapped me again.

I pressed my hand to my cheek where she had hit me, soothing my skin, though the pain was already fading. “How do I fix it?” I cried. “How do I stop myself from becoming you?”

She coughed violently before answering, “The mirror. I used the mirror when I asked to live forever. I’ve tried to go through it again, but it won’t let me. You can try. Maybe it’ll let you.”

She spun around and started walking away briskly, looking over her shoulder repeatedly to see if I was following. The floorboards creaked under me as I trailed behind her. She opened the door to a children’s nursery, where a small crib was pushed against the wall and a full sized mirror with silver framing hung behind the door. “In there.” 

I turned to watch my reflection. I looked so different from the person I was before I entered the Brekker house for the first time. 

“Ask him to kill me, okay?” Without warning, the girl pushed me into the mirror, and I braced myself to hit the glass. Instead, a cooling sensation covered me as I passed through the frame and was enveloped by an empty blackness. 

No sound filled my ears except the rapidity of my breathing and the blood pounding in my temples, which was now deafening due to the absence of ambient noise. The air lacked moisture; every ragged breath felt like inhaling sandpaper.

I thought I was blinded again, as I had been after I touched the model car, but I glanced down and could see my fingers, which seemed to glow in the void. I turned and couldn’t see the mirror which I had entered from anywhere. I had to return to the Brekker house. I was alright with being trapped there so long as I wasn’t trapped here. I started to run, not sure where I was going or how to get back to the house, for a long time, until I saw some light.

I drew closer to find a man sitting in a blue velvet chair, watching billions of tiny little television shows on just as many floating miniature screens, which were emanating the light I had followed. 

“You were bound to find me sooner or later,” the man spoke, voice laced with mocking pity. He kept his eyes trained on the screens in front of him. “You were so obsessed with getting your sister back.”

My head felt tight with anger at the mention of my sister. “Who are you?” I demanded.

The man stood to face me, towering over me at a height impossible for anyone to reach. “Time,” he said simply, as if it wasn’t an outrageous concept. 

“You imprisoned that girl,” I accused fruitlessly. “You… You…”

“I can give you your sister. It’s clear that she is what is on your mind. All your years of mumbling her name in your sleep….” He smiled languorously, dangerously, the hazy blue light from the screens washing over him. The screens were not displaying shows. Each one was a life, and Time was watching them all. 

“Let that little girl die,” I breathed. 

He turned back to the screens, brushing his fingers against one of them. I watched as the Brekker girl’s body crumpled to the floor on the screen after he touched her silhouette. My breath caught.

Time turned back to me. “She’s dead.”

Dead–dead! With one tap of his finger, the girl who was so obsessed with dying had finally gotten what she wanted.

“I’ve made you suffer enough,” said Time, shrugging a shoulder. “Let me make it up to you. Let me take you back to your sister.”

“You don’t know anything about me or my sister!” I yelled. 

He shook his head in a chastising manner. “I know everything about you and your sister.” He stepped closer, pointing to one of the screens, which was slowly expanding. It was her. Her in that horrible, horrible river, being torn away from me by the current. Bursting her head open as a jagged stone interrupted her path, thin blood mixing with water and making it sticky. “Two weeks after her funeral, you saw her in the corner of your room, playing with your blue model car.”

My hands flew over my ears and pressed down and I squeezed my eyes shut.

“You swore she was a ghost,” he continued. His voice wasn’t muffled at all by my palms, in fact it felt louder. It seemed to be in my head. “You became obsessed with finding proof. Finding proof that ghosts existed.”

“Stop!”

“I can send you back!” He roared, suddenly frustrated rather than amused. He ripped my arms from my ears. “I have the capacity and the will. I can freeze you in time with your sister.”

“Why?” My voice came out shaky. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Well, now that you’ve met me, I can’t in good conscience let you roam around like any other human,” He grinned. “But it’s not just for me. It’ll make you happy. You’ll have your sister again. Don’t you want to see her again?”

Trembling, I nodded. Lies seemed obsolete. He turned back to his screen and enlarged one of them. It was my house. It was her, my sister, at seven years old, playing through the sprinklers in our yard with eleven year old me. Before I could say anything, Time pushed me into the screen, and I was eleven again. She was there, skin damp, laughing and jumping.

I’ve forgotten everything about my old life other than that fateful day in the spring. I don’t remember how old I was when I found the girl in the Brekker house. I don’t remember the taste of my favorite food or the tune of my favorite song. I don’t even remember my own name anymore. 

My sister is here with me, frozen at seven, and I am eleven forever. I thought that Time was good for bringing me back to her. I thought I’d be happy with her. I thought I’d be happy as long as she was here, my beautiful baby sister.

Instead, I’ve come to resent her.

She spends every still second like the last, leaping through the sprinklers and giggling with unabashed joy. I spent a while mirroring that sentiment, ignoring the life I had lived in order to preserve this moment. Relishing being eleven again. Relishing being with her.

Now I’ve become just like her, just like that pale, sickly girl in the Brekker house.

I tried to use a knife on myself, but my skin stitched itself back together, just like her. I tried to leave, but something keeps me from exiting the yard in which my sister forever plays. Her squeals which once endeared her to me now compel me to sit huddled in the corner of the yard, fingers jammed in my ears. Her smile has become a recurring visual hole. I can’t shake the bitter feeling that this is all her fault. If her ghost hadn’t shown up that night to play with my model car, none of this would have happened. I would be living, not stuck here, frozen.

Now here I wait, just like the girl in the Brekker house, sitting in the corner of the yard, kissing my knife. My knife, the one thing that can end my misery. The one thing that can bring me peace. I wait for someone to find me. Someone from the future to enter the yard. Someone who can kill me, or convince Time to kill me like I convinced him to kill the girl. I wait here, helpless, trapped in the past.