The house was dangerous; that much I knew. From the moment I had stepped from my run-down Chevrolet into the damp, chilly, Scottish soil, it had been clear. I pushed back the brim of my felt brown bowler hat, taking in my newest client with narrowed eyes.
She was a tired old mansion, brooding and Victorian. Faded windows cut eyes into her stony face; the breeze gently nudged her veil of wind-blown ivy.
A rusted fence, seemingly held together entirely by cobwebs, let out a half hearted screech as I pushed it open. Ascending the overgrown pathway to the door, I shivered in the damp, despite my heavy trench coat. Smiling gently at the looming house, I spoke to it, “You’ll be mine soon, dearest. Don’t you fret. I’ll get you good and fixed up.”
Lifting the hand free of my thick black briefcase, I knocked on the solid wooden door. For minutes, I waited, slightly awkward at the absence of an answer. Maybe no one was home, and I would have to return to the city empty handed. But what a shame that would be, seeing as I had come all this way. And it looked abandoned; surely it wouldn't hurt just to take a peek.
With some difficulty, I twisted the rusted doorknob, leaning my shoulder into her swollen entrance. With all my might, I heaved, until I found myself disgracefully sprawled on a slightly questionable Persian rug. Dust floated from where my fall had displaced it, and I coughed, spitting into the darkness.
Rubbing my battle wounds, I inspected my surroundings. I was in a sparsely decorated parlor, void of decoration except for a broken rocking chair that looked as if it hadn’t moved for years. Then there were the books, hundreds of books, stacked on the floor almost to the ceiling. Their number astonished me. I was sure I had never seen so many books in one place in my entire existence. A grandfather clock ticked monotonously in the corner, keeping time to the quiet dropping of a discolored leak from the ceiling. 
I lifted myself from my place on the floor, carefully making my way through the mountains of literature. A glint of light reflecting off something glass on the wall to my right caught my eye. The cracked plaster beside me was covered in faded black and white pictures, featuring snippets from memories made long ago. In one, a man was sitting on the back of a wagon, a look of repressed boredom on his face. In his hand he gripped the reigns to a horse pulling the black-and-white wagon as it waited to transverse this black-and-white world.
Another held a miniature family, dressed in their Sunday vests, staring into the camera with a rigid determination, stiff from the strain of sitting still for so long. A small girl that couldn’t have been more than five years old sat in the lap of a beautiful woman with dark hair and piercingly light irises; in an iron chair next to them sat the same man that was driving the wagon, holding the little hand of the girl between his thumb and forefinger. In this one, he looked almost happy.
I turned my attention to the rickety spiral staircase that lay to my left in an inlet in the wall. With my curiosity whispering encouragement, soon my legs were propelling me gingerly up the crumbling stairs. I reached the top without incident, and started down the hallway that stretched lazily before me. It was menacingly dark; I felt in my pocket for the red matchbox that I carried with me, and, setting down my briefcase, struck a match into life. Cradling the small being with one cupped palm, I directed the light of the dancing flame into the surrounding void. It illuminated several doors, painted a yellowing white that fell off the molding wood in slivers, their brass doorknobs black and corse with disuse.
My old friend Curiosity had ceased its whispering; it now screamed its excitement to my hands, and they silenced the flame with two short flicks of the wrist. I pushed the first door open and struck another match. What the fresh light revealed behind it made my heart skip a beat.
The room behind the door was completely charred, everything in it covered in a thick later of black. The floor had fallen through in the middle, revealing crumbling boards and a breathtaking drop. The smell of something that had burned long ago filled my nostrils, gagging me. And the worst part was not my narrowly avoided death falling through the compromised floor, nor the putrid scent of rancid ash. No, the most horrifying detail of this scene was that the room had once been a nursery.
The painted rocking horse fused to the floor would never again rock, the paper carousel hanging in tatters. The wooden posts of the crib had made excellent kindling; all that was left of them now was a melted iron support. Traces of a wallpaper patterned with pink hearts peeked through the destruction. The absolute wrongness of everything my eyes touched filled me with nausea. I slammed the door shut, shivering at the crunching sound it produced. My match flickered out.
I cursed, scrambling in the dark once more for the blessed matchbox, a cold panic seated in my gut. My wife is fond of telling me that my smoking habit will one day kill me. I like to remind her that it saved my life that day. Another tiny light came to life by my hands, and I pressed my back to the wall behind me, my widened eyes never leaving the flaky door. My heartbeat roared in my ears, my breathing constricted. I needed to leave. This was too much. This house was obviously cursed, and me with it, if I did not turn tail right now and run.
I took a deep breath. This was silly. A natural occurrence. House accidents happen all the time; there was no evidence that anyone had even been harmed, let alone cursed. I was just here to check out the mansion before I bought it to flip. Then my wife and I could spend the rest of our days in happy retirement, the prime of the Scotland countryside as far away as the opening of a window. There was nothing to fear here.
The next door called me, a square jaw waiting to open and grant me passage. I braced myself and, for the third time that day, turned a corroded doorknob. The hinges of the heavy door groaned under the pressure, and, making sure this time that the floor would hold true with a few hesitant taps of the toe, I stepped inside.
A large maple bed frame, with dust and cobwebs to match the rest of the house, leaned in front of me, the skeleton of something once warm and well-loved. The floorboards creaked under my weight, and more dust clouded near them as I made my way through the threshold. The walls of the bedroom were bare, save the slivers of golden light escaping through cracks in the boarded up windows.
And by the windows— how did I not notice?— a heavy velvet chair, and in it, the shriveled shell of a man. The clothes of a gentleman hung off his shrunken shoulders, as if they were made for someone younger; in his knobby fingers he clutched a heavy yellowed hardback book. His skin almost glowed with translucence, veins tracing children’s doodles on his misshapen neck. His silver, thinning hair stuck from his freckled head at odd angles, his startlingly deep brown eyes were trained out the boarded windows, as if watching something down below.
“Ah, look how she plays,” he wheezed, addressing me without turning, “My careless little Adeline, forever playing. I wonder if she’ll ever stop.”
With considerable concern and confusion, I hesitantly replied.
“Sir, there’s no one out there.”
His piercing eyes slid slowly in their sockets, focusing on me. Expressionless, his voice carried softly above the wooden floors.
“I suppose.”
I chose to ignore this comment, clearing my throat. “How incredibly rude of me,” I remarked, “to barge in on you like this in your own bedroom! I’m embarrassed to admit I thought the place was abandoned. I was under the impression that it was for sale. It’s a beautiful house; with a little renovation it would be perfect for my wife and me.”
His eyes had retraced their movements back to the window while I was speaking, and he answered me with disinterest, “You were right, it is abandoned. But not by me.”
What a strange man, I thought. Grasping desperately at straws to relieve the heavy silence hanging in the air, I spoke.
“I see you like to read,” I said, “What’s that you’ve got in your lap there?”
“Hamlet,” he replied, eyes sliding down to the small printed words, “I’m especially fond of Hamlet’s father. How unfair it is that any possibility for the sweet closure of revenge dies with the murdered.”
A long pause caused me to take a breath, to change the exhausted subject, but before I could he continued sharply, “But Hamlet’s mother, entirely wrong. My beloved deserved better than the flighty persona of a fool.”
I wanted to ask what he meant by this, but decided against it. This man was obviously senile, beyond sanity by this point. I needed to ask the important question. The one I came here for. “So, is the house for sale or not?”
His dark eyes fixed on me once more, “My whole life happened in this house. Every important decision, every joy, every tragedy. My decision to buy it changed who and what I chose to love,” his wispy eyebrows suddenly knit together, the eyes underneath them darkening as he uttered the words that still send chills down my spine.
“Choose wisely.”
Having made his point, he turned back to the window. I stood for a moment, heart pounding in my chest.
“It was a pleasure to meet you,” he said then, holding out a skeletal hand as if offering a handshake. Hesitantly, I took it, and instantly drew back. His translucent skin was ice cold.
“I hope to do business with you soon,” I lied, smiling off my uneasiness. I told myself again there was nothing to fear, but I didn’t dawdle on the way down the hallway. Grabbing the briefcase containing the unsigned titles, I shot down the stairs and out the door.
As the sun sank beneath the Scottish horizon, I departed from the mansion of my dreams.
It was very late when the wheels of my Chevrolet dug into familiar gravel, and my beautiful wife greeted me at the door of the small independent hotel where we were staying. I was too tired to remember, but she swears I slumped into her arms and mumbled something about needing a beer.
So there we sat at the bar, a friendly looking redheaded bartender filling two glasses with the golden liquid that had served as a constant companion at the end of many a long day in my adult life: Guinness. She looked at me with amusement, a Scottish lilt in her light voice, “Hard day, was it?”
I looked up at her from the peanuts I was shamelessly picking off. “You could say that. I was checking out a run down mansion a few miles down the road. Looking to buy it.”
The bartender clucked, sliding a whisky to a portly man with a frizzy red beard a few stools down, “Oh, that’s the ol’ O’Harpy residence,” she said, now wiping the bar with a rag, “Tis a shame, the tragedy that happened there.”
I leaned forward on the stool, “Tragedy?”
She looked me in the eye, leaning back against the glass cabinets behind her, “Around 1910 there was a fire, they say it started in the nursery. Killed poor old O’Harpy’s wife and only daughter. Such a sad tale,” she shook her head, “Authorities at the time had no way of knowing what started the fire, they said it must’ve been a candle falling over or something like that. But as the story goes, Mr. O’Harpy was convinced it was murder,” she let out a hint of a chuckle, “Quite a likely story, eh? He kept saying he was on the cusp of diggin’ up proof. He went mad from the grief.”
“Well, that would explain a lot,” I replied, “I found Mr. O’Harpy to be quite the interesting fellow, if you know what I mean.” I downed the last of my beer.
  A look of confusion crossed her features. “Mr. O’Harpy? Mister, you must be mistaken. They found Mr. O’Harpy in his armchair three days after the incident. He was staring out the window, a book open on his lap, stone cold dead.”