Dwarfing Heights

There was a bleak house that sat on a dark hill outside the town of Summerville. The outside of the house was trying to be an off white color, but most of the paint had long since peeled off. A man was living in half of the house, because there were some rooms even he did not want to go into. The rooms that he lived in were the kitchen, where he made his food; the bedroom, where he dreamed; the dining room, where he ate; and the library; where he came to be alone. He did not think of the other rooms in the house, but he dreamed about them, and those dreams were always nightmares. In his nightmares, the rooms spoke to him. They told him important things, but these were always forgotten in the morning. He only remembered that he had been entrusted with something important, although he could never remember what. He kept his rooms tidy, but the others were falling apart. He did not see this , he made sure he could not see anything of the forsaken rooms. Even when he traveled from and to the five places he thought of as his house, he closed his eyes. Even then, he did not want to be in darkness, so he carried a lamp a few inches from his face, letting the light bathe in through his closed eyelids. He could not see, but he was not in darkness.

The man who lived there was not expecting a visitor, but one came. She came on a beautiful day, although you wouldn’t know that from looking at the house on the hill. There was an aura around the house, and whether the aura was of the owner’s fright, the house’s malevolence, or the house growing malevolent after years spent with the owner’s fear, the visitor didn’t know. But she did know that while the rest of the landscape was enjoying a beautiful spring day, the house seemed permanently stuck in mid-October, when the final leaves were hanging on desperately for something resembling life, and the air had a chill to it that made you shiver even more than if you were stuck in a snowstorm. The woman walked up to the house, along a crooked, stone path made more of angles than curves. She went up to the front door, although the door was so small she had to bend to reach the brass knocker. The woman hesitated a moment, and motioned as if she was about to knock on the door, but she stopped, mid-way through, and withdrew a large ornate key from the back pocket of her jeans. She unlocked the door and opened it, letting her see a decrepit waiting hall, with furniture at least three times as old as she was.

A noise came from the bowels of the house, a small sound, as if made by a mouse. She didn’t rush in, she stood hovering by the invisible line that separated the house from the outside world. She started to knock on the door that wasn’t really there, but stopped herself and knocked on the white, wooden frame. The silence that emerged after she had knocked seemed more profound than the silence she had encountered before she walked up to the door.
“Hello?” Her voice echoed through the hall. Once again, the woman heard the small sound. She didn’t call out again, but stood waiting patiently for her brother to answer her. The woman did not have to wait long, as a very, very, short man appeared before the door.
There was a terse period of silence before either one of them could remember how to speak. Both the sister and the dwarf remembered at the same time, and what they were trying to say got confused in a meaningless jumble of words. They both smiled at this, and the awkward silence resumed. The sister looked at her brother, she hadn’t seen him in years, but still the changes surprised her. He had always been short, reaching four feet when he was sixteen, and never growing taller, although he had hoped for a growth spurt until the age of twenty-two. He had dark hair, and looked like he was in the process of growing a beard. He had deep brown eyes and a roman nose, and would have been called handsome if he had grown taller than the waist of anyone who might want to call him that.

As the sister was staring at the dwarf, the dwarf was in turn, staring back at her. She was a very pretty woman, and was about nine years younger than her brother. She resembled her brother in the way she carried herself; at any given time, both of them gave the appearance of wanting to be anywhere other than they actually were. They both were giving off this appearance now.

The sister stood waiting outside the house, waiting to be asked in. The dwarf gave no appearance of wanting to do so. They stood there, gazing at each other, aware that the appropriate time to start talking had long passed, waiting for the other party to break the silence, neither wanting to do so themselves. If you have ever been to a party, and had a long, awkward pause in conversation; then you know absolutely nothing about the silence between the two siblings. In those types of pauses, you have a type of out of body experience, you know what’s happening, but your vantage point is that of a distant observer, you feel embaresment, but it seems as if there’s someone else by the same name who looks and talks and acts exactly like taking all the embarresment away from you, acting as a buffer to the world outside. This silence was nothing like that, both participants did not have the option of an out of body experience. Instead they felt more attune with themselves then they had in a long time.

So from the vantage point inside himself, the dwarf looked at his sister and registered, not without some shock, that her lips were moving and she was trying to start a conversation. The dwarf didn’t register her exact words, but he recognized the tone. She was probably saying something about how good it was to see him, and he realized that once his sister’s lips stopped moving, he would be required to make a response. The dwarf knew that he should invite her into the house, and tested the barrier between the house and the world outside. He could sense the house did not want her to come in. The house was unpredictable, and the dwarf knew from experience to consult it before he did anything.

His sister’s lips stopped moving.

“It’s such a beautiful day outside, why don’t we sit out on the patio and catch up?” The response surprised his sister, she had not thought he would even want to talk to her.

The patio was on the same side of the house as the front door, and was covered by a large overhanging. There were two small tables made of metal and glass, each surrounded by four chairs. Around each table, there was one seat specially fitted for the dwarf. To the sister’s eyes, it looked like a kiddie-chair, the ones you find at fast food restaurants for children to young to sit on the same level as the rest of the family. The dwarf sat in the pseudo-kiddie-chair and motioned his sister to sit across from him. The sister sat down and was put off by the dwarf’s toothy smile. The last time she saw her brother, he was not the type of person that enjoyed smiling. Even at family pictures, after her father had put the camera very far back so the dwarf could be in the frame, the dwarf was the only member of the family who didn’t show any teeth.

The sister smiled back at her brother, happy that he had finally learned how.

“So, uh, what have you been doing with your life?” The question did not surprise the dwarf, but he still had no honest way to answer it.

“Well, I’ve been taking care of the house.” The dwarf smiled and the sister looked in through the window at the dust covered remains of what once might have been called furniture. The house did not look cared for.

“I know that. What else have you been doing? Have you finished your script?’ The dwarf had been working on numerous writing projects since the age of fifteen. He had yet to complete one of them.

“Well, I’ve sort of been having writer’s block. I seem to have a terminal case of it.” He laughed a little at his own joke, but the sister noticed that the smile had gone from his face.

“You must go to town though, it seems so quaint, like something out of a Norman Rockwell picture. Do you have any friends?”

“The town gets old after five minutes, and have you ever seen a dwarf in a Norman Rockwell painting?”

“So you stay here, alone?” Worry was creeping into her voice.

“Not really. The house is really its own character.” The dwarf smiled as he said this, although to his scared sister his smile retained nothing of its original warmth.

“Why are you still here?” The question did not come as a shock to the dwarf, although he had anticipated it later in their conversation.

“What do you mean by that?” The dwarf still had to keep up the pretense of surprise.

“You know what I mean. The house is falling apart. You say you’re looking after it, but the house looks abandoned. God knows you could do better. You could buy a mansion with the interest on the inheritance money.”

“I’m not going to touch the money.” The dwarf’s eyes were boring holes in her skull.

“Why not?”

“BECAUSE I CAN’T!” Spit flew from the dwarf’s mouth as he spoke. The sister looked at her brother after he was done talking.

“If you’re not going to touch the money, fine, then just leave the house, nothing is keeping you here.”

“They are.” The look in her brother’s eyes was not something the sister ever wanted to see again. They were the eyes of a corner preacher on times square, as he told you the end is nigh, that the archangel Gabriel had come to him in a dream and told him so in a language that wasn’t English, but that he could understand anyway.

“Who are they?” The sister didn’t want to hear the answer to the question, but she did have to ask it.

The dwarf took a deep breath, then released it through his nostrils. His eyes were still crazed, but they had taken on a paranoid undertone, a schizophrenic in a decrepit mental hospital. “I don’t know who they are.” The dwarf paused and looked even more intently at his sister. “There are places in this house that they won’t let me go. It started out that I couldn’t go into the study, and I never went there anyway, so I didn’t care. Then it was the basement, and that was scary even before the voices came, I never even wanted to go down there. Then the guest bedroom, the attic, and the conservatory.” The dwarf stroked his beard. “They fell, one by one. Now I only have four rooms left. I don’t know what would happen to me if I did go into one of the forbidden rooms, but… I really don’t want to find out.”

He slumped in his kiddie-chair, exhausted. His sister sensed that this was the most energy he had spent in years. She didn’t know how to respond to her brother’s madness. She knew that if she left him here like this, the house would eat him alive. If she left him, he might survive for a few more years, but in the end he would die, consumed by the house and his insanity.

“I’ll go in there; in one of your rooms.” The words were out of the sister’s mouth before she was aware of them. She didn’t want to go into the house, she wanted to leave with her brother, leave and never look back.

“No, no you WON‘T.” The dwarf’s eyes had resumed their fire and brimstone psychosis. He leaped from his chair, and ran in front of the house.

The sister got up and made toward the door. “If you won’t go, come with me. My car is at the bottom of the hill, and we can just drive away and” As the sister was walking up, the dwarf pulled back his fist and punched his sister on the kneecap. It was pathetic, but it hurt. The dwarf ran into the house, and closed and locked the door. The dwarf ran in front of the window, and began to shut the curtains. The sister had been yelling at him, but it didn’t seem like he was listening. The dwarf had almost finished closing the blind as he and his sister made eye contact. The sister looked down at the dwarf, and the dwarf looked up at the sister. The sister looked into the dwarf’s eyes, and saw in there nothing that was, or ever could be her brother. The sister brushed back a tear, and walked away, leaving the dwarf; a fevered mind in a sick body.