A Haunted House

I just came home from looking at real estate out in the country, something I do frequently. I am sure I drive my realtor friend crazy, always looking and never buying. I just keep thinking the perfect place, with lots of land, low taxes, easy access, and a self-cleaning house will pop up on the market. Though it is probably a waste of her time, since everyone knows I’ll never find low taxes, Harriet perseveres, calling me when she comes across new listings with the kind of acreage I have in mind. Today there were two that showed promise, and we went to see them both. The first was nondescript, and too expensive. The second home, on close to ten acres, was listed at an impossibly low price, with low taxes to boot. It sounded good, and as we drove to see it I wondered aloud about self cleaning.
"Well, actually," Harriet hesitantly began, "the house will need some serious cleaning." "Well, actually...fumigation," she admitted. "It was a foreclosure and repossession, and the people who were evicted left it in pretty bad shape."
"How bad?" I asked.
She proceeded to tell me. The people who had lived there hadn’t paid their bills for months, and finally snuck away one night, abandoning several pets in the house. With no food or water, out in the middle of nowhere; no one heard them, and no one came to help. They died there, horribly. Suddenly I had no interest in the house.
"They’ve ripped out all the carpets, and the floors are stained, but they don’t smell," Harriet assured me.
I was still picturing the "pets."
Were they dogs? Cats? Both? Young, or old? How many? I couldn’t stand it, no matter what the answer might be, and Harriet said she had no details, just that one terrible fact. Animals had been abandoned by the people they trusted and depended upon, and had waited and waited for them to return, but they never did. By the time the foreclosure people came to inspect the reclaimed property it had been to late for the pets, whoever they had been.
We pulled into the driveway and I saw a decent looking though obviously uninhabited home surrounded by old trees and rolling pastures, the property divided by a jagged creek. The house was light blue, built into a hill; a homey looking house, not the sort of place one imagines when trying to fathom a death trap for abandoned animals. Such a place should look dark and foreboding. I’ve read and heard about cases where animals are found neglected, abandoned, and abused, but I’ve never actually been to one of the places where such atrocities occur. When hearing of these tragedies my mind has always drawn a dark picture, like a setting for a Steven King novel. I envision sad, skinny dogs howling pitifully, with razor ribs and dead puppies; my mind has no mercy on me, and I worry the reality may even be worse than I imagine.
Light blue is too cheerful a color for such a sorrowful story, for a house with such a terrible secret. I didn’t want to go in, but knew I would. Harriet, knowing I was upset, made no attempts at small talk. We walked around to the back door, and as we entered I caught myself sniffing for the scent of death. Morbid; feeling obligated to know that it happened, to picture who those animals were, what they experienced. I looked at every wall, every window, trying to see the proof of the onset of despair and desperation, the need to escape. There were none; no claw marks, no scratches, no teeth marks. Just dark, ominous looking stains on the exposed floorboards in every room, where the carpets had all been removed.
These animals had simply waited, wandering from room to room, patient and good to the end. No signs of rebellion; they had simply died, all alone in a quaint blue home in the country. I apologized to their ghosts, whoever they were, and left their haunted house. I will never physically return, but I know my thoughts will come back to wander empty hallways with them for the rest of my life.