House Down the Hill, Part 9

I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I know, I can hear cars in the distance, and people talking about homework. The light through the floor is the soft gray of a cloudy day.

“Help!” I shout. “Please help!”

It crosses my mind many people will bolt the moment they hear the screaming, but I just need one person to call. Call 911, DPS, even the duty phone. I just need one person to call.

Somebody called. The ambulance, the makeshift ramp, being rushed to the hospital for x-rays and other health exams—it’s all a blur of sheer gratitude. My leg is broken in three places and Catherine chides me for running off. She calls my parents and lets them know I’m safe and alive because I ask her to. They won’t be happy with me, but they’ll hire the lawyer to reduce the charges to something minor and help coach me on handling the University conduct board.

The court requires me, among other things, to see a therapist. The psychiatrist tells me I had been going a bit crazy from the Diethylpropion. When I explain I had stopped taking the diet suppressant toward the end of the first week, the doctor merely says traces of the drug had likely stored in my fat bodies to be dispersed in the blood stream. I’m not sure I buy into his explanation; while it is possible, I feel like the hallucinations wouldn’t have been as powerful or lasted as long as they had. But who knows? By now, the drug is flushed from my system entirely. Though I try to accept this rationale and move on, I still feel some apprehension as I hobble past the house on my way to and from classes.

After that night, they re-boarded the window and posted “danger, no trespassing” signs on the yard. Since then, they have also erected a fence around the property. One of those cheap rent-a-fence things anyone can slip past if they really want. For weeks, it sat with its fence and its signs, quiet and still.

Today a bulldozer is sitting outside the house. Sometime between when I leave for class in the morning and come back in the afternoon, the house has been leveled. All that remains is rubble and the cement walls of the basement. I stand a while, watching the machine scoop up the chunks of wall and brick, dropping each load into a giant dumpster. In a couple more weeks, the hole where the basement had been will be completely hidden under dirt. But even before that, rumors of a shadow start circulating. The shadow is something big and angular, staring at the place where a house used to be. It makes me wonder if I hadn’t imagined it after all.