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Chapter 1: What is the mystery surrounding the artist's actions?
Spectre Vision Radio. Should you enter into a romantic relationship with a poltergeist that's haunting your house? If thoughts like these spin around your head like a UFO or a UAP to use the parlance of our time, then you're in good company. Tune in to Monsterful's podcast every Monday and Thursday, anywhere you get your podcasts.
starring Carla Gugino, Catherine Isabel, and Lou Taylor Pucci, opens in theaters July 3rd. Written by Justin Yofi and directed by Daniel Stamm. My name is Phil Parisi. This story is about the only girlfriend I ever had who tolerated my presence post-breakup. Tess was an artist, a good artist. She spent years trying to make a living at it, but she always had to have a main hustle, like me.
Our stronger bond, I think, other than the money struggles that extended deep into adulthood, was our mutual appreciation of old school sci-fi shows that not many other people liked. Stuff from the 80s and 90s, mostly. We once got her through a different breakup by watching the entire run of Sequest DSV. So that's what we were like.
Some years ago, Tess inherited some money from an uncle she had not liked. And she put it toward a house. First time home buyer at 48. I don't know what I was expecting when I went out there to see it. Probably some small bungalow on a creek or something. Ivy all over it maybe. But instead, it was this plain, cookie-cutter place in a brand new development with no trees.
All the houses looked pretty much identical. White, sterile, no distinctive features whatsoever. But she got her deal on it as they tried to get these things occupied for the optics of it in the early going. The point being, there was nothing in the least bit creepy about it, and it had no history at all yet. She showed me around a little. She'd just moved in.
She'd start looking for roommates soon enough. She was taking a month off before having to start doing more gig work. And she really wanted to start in some new paintings, but she kept getting distracted. For example, she'd found this chair on the side of the road she wanted to strip down and refinish, repaint. Beautiful little chair she showed me. I guess it was beautiful.
What do I know about chairs? The next week, we were on a Zoom call with some fellow starving artists, all of us just yakking about what we were up to. I myself was struggling with bleak urban cityscapes done in charcoal and working at another call center to make ends meet. And Tess confessed she'd developed a real thing for chairs, suddenly.
She'd gotten two more from a thrift store and was having fun restoring them, her new little hobby. She said she might give the best one to a very proud homeless woman she'd become aware of, who lived mostly in the woods behind her development.
Problem was, Tess really just felt like playing around with restorations, and not the work that defined her life, so she laughed about that and made us swear that if she ever brought up the chairs again, we'd slap her wrist, tell her to get on the stick. She wanted to blame it on watching too much Downton Abbey and eyeballing all that great old-school furniture.
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Chapter 2: How does Tess's relationship with her art evolve?
I just texted back something kind of frivolously complimentary. But I looked at those hands a few times and never stopped finding the image odd. There was a strange hint of mortality in the image. There was no good way to bring this up, so I dropped it. When Tess didn't appear on Zoom for the weekly artist's chat, it wasn't the most surprising thing in the world.
We all had intermittent obligations and couldn't always make it. But one of the people there mentioned she was confused by the appearance of a couple of old junky chairs on her porch a few days before. They'd been accompanied by a note from Tess that simply said, I don't need these. This was someone Tess had only been acquainted with through the Zoom group for about three months.
Maybe, this woman theorized, she'd been picked for this job. odd gift because she'd once said she appreciated restoration projects. I heard myself apologizing for Tess, telling everyone on the call that I'd text her and see what was up, which I did as soon as I disconnected that night. There was no response. I immediately decided to drive over to her house, no waiting till morning.
It was getting on nine o'clock when I pulled into the driveway beside her car. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer, though a light was on in an upstairs window. I kept up with knocking, but finally I turned the knob to find it unlocked. I poked my head in and called out for her and heard nothing in response.
At the risk of titanically embarrassing myself and giving Tess an unpleasant shock, I went inside because I was somehow convinced something was very wrong. I took a few steps, called out her name, took a few more. The living room was empty, even of all those chairs, which made me feel just a little better.
I was about to go up a half-light of stairs and call out one more time when I thought I heard something shift or squeak from far away. I went into the dark kitchen and the sound came again. The basement, that was it. That's where she was. The door to it was open and I stood at the top of the unlit stairs, calling down.
She didn't answer, even though I could now hear clearly that someone was down there. So I descended the rest of the stairs. Her basement was big but completely unfinished, nothing but an expanse of grey cement floor and bare bones overhead lighting. Tess was standing in the middle of that expanse, amidst a sea of chairs, spread out over a profusion of white sheets that had been laid all around.
She was wearing the same clothes as I'd seen her in last. She was aggressively wiping down a new piece, kneeling on one knee, her head bobbing, her hair falling over her face. There must have been 40 chairs of all kinds in various states of restoration. Torn rags lay everywhere on those filthy sheets. I asked if she was all right, and her head turned sharply toward me, and she said,
looked at me like I was an intruder she didn't recognize. She looked pale and thin, and she said, no, very flatly and plainly. I took a couple of steps toward her and suggested, trying to sound casual, that we get out of there for a bit, as if I'd simply just noticed it was a lovely evening for a stroll. She said, I'm afraid to stop. She didn't move, stayed kneeling, gripping her chair hard.
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Chapter 3: What unusual changes occur in Tess's behavior?
She couldn't bring herself to speak as we left her neighborhood. She sat slumped against the passenger side door as if lightly drugged, uninterested in offering any response to my questions beyond refusing medical attention with a couple of limp shakes of her head. My mind became cluttered with confusing options. In the end, I chose the simplest one.
I let her drift in silence behind closed eyes and drove us back toward my apartment, a 15-minute ride at that time of night. In the parking lot, I helped Tess out of the car and guided her down a hall to where I was living with my fiancƩ.
They knew each other some, and I told Kristen that she needed to watch Tess close for about an hour, make her comfortable, while I went back where I'd just come from. I said I'd have to give her the details later. Right now, I had a powerful feeling I shouldn't wait any longer to go back and make sure nothing was wrong at her house.
Tess, as visibly exhausted as I've ever seen a human being, managed to rouse herself just as I was headed out the door and looked up at me with big, watery eyes. I don't think I was even restoring them at all, she said. I think I was just washing them. Over and over and over. My hands hurt a lot. Kristen went to her, and I went back out into the night.
Lighthouse Passage 2 was so orderly, so neat and carefully presented. I knew that if I reached out and touched the apparently wooden sign near the plain gazebo the property management company had installed beside the turnoff, depicting a little lighthouse with a straight yellow beam projected out over calm blue water,
I'd find that the letters weren't really wood at all, but probably some synthetic material designed to never have to be repainted. Nothing in a place like this could ever be haunted. Not with this painfully predictable landscaping and the HOA making sure the names of the cul-de-sacs were not in any way off-theme. It was with that conviction that I pulled back into Tess's spotless driveway.
At the curb of the house next to hers, the top of a big fake Christmas tree poked out of the oblong box it had come in, a box with the Target logo on it. It had been taped up messily, dragged down, and balanced diagonally and precariously against a trash can. Holidays in the suburbs. I pushed on Tess's front door and went back inside. I turned the foyer lights on first thing.
I took a turn through the living room, looking for anything dramatically out of order, but didn't see it. Then it was through the kitchen where I steeled myself for a moment before opening that basement door again. It had been only about 45 minutes since I departed it the first time. If the slightest disturbing sound had risen from below, I would never have gone down there.
But the silence held, and I descended. I then stood at the bottom of the steps, struggling against my fight-or-flight mechanism as I became frightened in a way I've never known before or since. The chaotic assemblage of chairs had been well corrected. The sheets on the floor were no longer there,
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Chapter 4: What happens when the narrator visits Tess's house?
Stay.