Chapter 1: “The House at 1307 Tanner Court”
Some old houses have a history that you can feel. It’s almost like an aura, or a spiritual resonance that you can sense the moment you enter one, and you automatically know that you’re in the presence of a home that has a story to tell. And if you listen carefully enough, you can even hear those stories in the expanding of old pipes, the creaking of warped floorboards, the moans and complaints of weathered support beams on a windy day, or the rattling of loose bricks and rusted nails that have weakened over time. Oh, the sights these houses have seen: families come and gone; entire generations raised within their walls; decades of holidays and birthdays celebrated, which added warmth and good energy to the very foundation; memories on which these houses are built. And sometimes, an echo of the past is left behind to memorialize such an occasion, like a yearly footnote of a child’s height and age marked on a wall or door frame, or the children’s palm prints that were pressed when newly poured cement was laid on the basement floor, commemorating the turning of a new generation. The house itself, and even the street it’s on, becomes a forgotten little piece of history, like a loop in time that few have ever seen or passed through.
Some houses have been lucky enough to withstand the test of time: surviving hurricanes, flash flooding, bone-chilling winter storms, or even been spared a tornado or two. Sometimes, entire neighborhoods have fallen victim to such disasters; families upended and left homeless, entire blocks turned to rubble, pets lost or killed, homes demolished, and peoples’ lives turned upside down in the blink of an eye. But every once in a while, there’s a sole-survivor: a single home that is left untouched among the debris, somehow spared the devastation to live another day, another decade, another generation. Were these homes just built better, tougher, made of stronger stuff, or was there something more supernatural at play? Maybe some homes are blessed by a priest or rabbi, or perhaps a coven of witches had once dwelled there and cast an invulnerability spell on the very foundation itself. Or maybe there’s a simpler explanation. Maybe some homes just get lucky, or the universe decided that their day had not yet come.
Then there are some houses that are just plain hard to find, or difficult to get to, almost as though they didn’t wish to be found. And maybe that’s why people build their houses on the edge of a cliff, or deep within a canyon, or on a deserted island, or in the middle of the woods where it is both difficult to reach and damn near impossible to find. But then there are those that defy explanation; the ones that are found in average, mediocre, workaday neighborhoods, which can somehow exist in plain view, and yet, not be seen or noticed, or draw any attention whatsoever—unless, of course, it wants to. And it is here, at the end of a dead end road, halfway around a cul-de-sac, where the subject matter of this story takes place: the house on the edge of town, sequestered in the backwoods end of a block that gets no traffic, no visitors, no birds or crickets, and no attention: the house at 1307 Tanner Court. And it is this house that Katie and Ross Wozniak have been trying to reach for the last three hours.
—David Allen
Volkuros Prophesies 