hands, and used the bones of his wife and son as the grout between the rocks. Mrs. Martin followed his lead. The paint you see in here? The reason the room is so white? She ground up the bones of those two kids after carving them up for lunchmeat here in this room. She used the dust of their bones to paint this room an everlasting off- white.”
Tricia stared in horror at the walls. “The paint is…their bones?”
Mrs. Tanser nodded. “It seemed a sacrilege to paint over the remains of those poor souls, so the room has been left exactly as it was when Pastor Martin sat down here in the middle of the room and… well…there’s no delicate way to put this. He blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. Lord knows where he got it, a man of the clergy and all. Someone wiped down the ceiling and wall over there…” She pointed to a shadowy stain to their right.
“But all in all, the bones of those children are still right here, chalky and white, for anyone to see.
“Oh my dear, you’re trembling; you’re white as the walls. Come here, I’m so sorry. I’m an old woman and talk too much. I forget myself. And you, just a 10th grader and all. Let’s have us a soda pop, hmmm?”
Mrs. Tanser pulled the wide-eyed girl from the room and bolted the lock once again.
“Don’t need any of those summer breezes or restless ghosts getting in,” she mumbled, and then shook her head. “Darn it all, there I go again.”
The massive door opened with a long squeak. Mrs. Tanser peered through the foot-wide opening with a suspicious look on her face. Then her eyes lighted on the tousled hair of Tricia.
“You’re probably here to see my nieces, aren’t you?” she asked.
The girl shook her head. “No, ma’am. I don’t know them.”
“Don’t know them?” Mrs. Tanser looked confused. Then she slapped a palm to her forehead. “My oh my, that’s right. They came a-visiting awhile before you came a-visiting. And you’ve been too polite to correct an old woman before.”
She opened the door wider and motioned Tricia inside. “Sometimes it’s all a blur,” she confided, and pushed the door shut.
“I remember now. I’ve been giving you the history of the house, and fattening you up on apples. Not the best choice for fattening, I’ll give you, but it’s what I have. No chocolate cakes up here on the hill!”
Mrs. Tanser motioned her into the kitchen.
“Where were we last time? I told you about the Whites and the Martins…There were others, too. But then in the ‘50s, they turned the place into an orphanage.”
Mrs. Tanser laughed. “I know, it sounds ridiculous. A house where children kept dying in horrible ways. A house where children’s bones actually painted the walls white-and they turned it into an orphanage. But there you go. I wonder if they ever even saw the irony.”
The rhythmic sound of a knife on stone filled the kitchen as Mrs. Tanser cut the girl an apple.
“Here we go,” the older woman said, pushing a plate in front of the girl. She stared at the ceiling a moment and then grinned and nodded. “Forty-seven.”
Mrs. Tanser scooped the core of the apple and a couple seeds from the counter and threw them in a waste can. “Forty-seven children in all disappeared while this house was an orphanage. That’s what I found out down there at the village hall. God knows why the town didn’t have this place bulldozed, but, then again, who cares so much about orphans?”
The old woman shook her head in obvious disgust and then motioned for Tricia to follow her.
“Grab an apple,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
Mrs. Tanser led the way past the dining room and a dark hallway and the horrible room of bone paint, with its locked door. She stopped at another door, this one painted dark as a 2 a.m. shadow.
She pulled a ring of keys from the depths of her apron and explained, “Sometimes at night, I hear voices from in here. Terrible voices. Men howling. Children screaming. When I open the door, they’re never there…but I keep it locked anyway.”
She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Tricia followed, though hesitantly.
The room expanded to fill the eye with a vista of beautiful stonework and a floor of intricate mosaic. Like most of the house, the predominant color was no color. The room hurt the eye in its melding of cream and vanilla and starving, emaciated white. It also ascended three stories in the air and ran as deep as a football field.
“Over here,” Mrs. Tanser called, and led Tricia to a corner. She reached down to the floor and pulled on a small cord that poked out from beneath the shards of tile. A hidden trap door opened upwards at her pull.
“Look,” Mrs. Tanser pointed, and Tricia leaned in to stare down into the gap. The trap secreted a small cubbyhole, maybe 18 inches deep and a foot wide. Its bottom was hidden by dozens of small white pebble-like shards. They covered the bottom and stacked on top of each other like a pound of gravel.
“Hold out your hand,” Mrs. Tanser said. As Tricia did, her arm visibly shook.
The older woman squeezed her outstretched palm and grinned. “It’s okay. They can’t get you here. There time was a long time ago. Now. You see these?” She turned the girl’s hand palm side up and ran a finger across the top joint, on the other side of the fingernail.
“I’m not sure what they intended, but I believe that little stack of bones down there are the top joints of all those missing orphans’ fingers.”
Tricia ripped her hand away and gasped.
Mrs. Tanser shook her head. “They say down in town that those orphans disappeared, but it’s no mystery where they went.”
She let the trap fall down with a smack that echoed through the too-still room.
“Just look around you,” she said and gestured at the intricately laid floor. “Those kids never left this room. Their bones are here, laid into the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Those kids built this room.”
Tricia’s eyes had now widened so large that the whites of her eyes were circled in red.
“Yep,” the old woman sighed. “You’re standing on them.”
The girl screamed.
“Just bones,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I wanted you to see, to understand. This house has a bad reputation, and rightly so. I’m sure those voices I hear coming from this room are from all those innocent orphans who had their fingers cropped off, and their bones ground down to shards of decorative tile.”
“It’s this house,” she said and shook her head, pulling Tricia closer. The girl didn’t fight her embrace. All she could think of was that she was standing on the chopped-up bones of dead people.
“Everyone who’s ever lived here has felt the need to add to the house,” Mrs. Tanser said, and pulled the girl towards the back of the long room.
“The White House was large by the standards of the 1800s when Mr. White built it, but there have been many rooms added since. I showed you the draughty room last time you were here. And this room-which I think was probably a gymnasium for the orphans-was built over a long period. There are others. In the basement is a small closet that I believe was painted in the paste of a child…its colors are faded and dulled now, but it looks to be a mad swirl of mud and blood and bone if you stare closely. There’s a shed on the back of the property that has window frames that are rounded and made of what looks to be rib bones. And the lock on that shed is a primitive thing, but it seems to be made of an arm or a leg bone that drops into place and holds the door fast.
“There's no way the realtor could have warned me,” Mrs. Tanser said. “There’s no way she could ever really have known-she wouldn’t even stand inside this house. I wish she could have told me what I was in for. But the house…once you’re here…”
They walked across the long bone mosaic room, and the chatter of Tricia’s teeth began to reverberate through the silence.
“It’s okay, child,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I just want to show you one more room.”
At the back of the long white room she stopped, and reached out to turn the latch on a door that only announced itself as thin seams set in the wall. It opened outward at her touch, and a cool breeze hit them as it did.
“I think that some of the rooms people added to the house were afraid to show their real colors,” Mrs. Tanser said. “The people knew what they were doing, on some level, and they bleached the bones and carved the bones and crushed the bones into paste and mortar and paint.
“But when the house told me…when I realized what I would have to do, I made a pledge to myself to be true to the children who came here. The people who grew this house. They shouldn't be hidden in pieces, I said to
