The House.

The story I’m about to tell you really happened. Whether it really happened for real or I made it up for real is not quite clear. Ask my sister, she would probably know.

After I’d been living in this small village in Bas St-Laurent for two or three years, my friends and I, on a very dark, cloudy afternoon, stumbled upon quite a fascinating feature in the forest, about half a kilometer (kids – the most talented and accurate at guessing distances, true fact!) in the woods, right behind my house.

We were doing what we usually did on such afternoons: arguing about who was the leader – I would assume since I was the oldest kid on the street, I got to be the leader, you can ask my sister about that, too. We were fumbling around our usual “path” and checking out our surroundings, everybody yapping at the same time and pushing each other around. There were five or six of us. We had left the young ones behind to guard the “entrance” to the forest. We always did that. The forest was our land. We owned it. And the younger kids got the shit job.

All of us stopped at once. (Insert here: short film of children in a file, all bumping into each other as they stop.) There it was, in this clearing we swore we had played in dozens of times. There it was, amidst the autumn leaves on the damp ground. It seemed to have been standing there for a very long time. It almost seemed it was many hundred years old. (Again, kids: most experienced human beings at evaluating the age of a building in the middle of the dark forest.)

The house. For a long while, which was probably more like ten seconds, we stood there, in our raincoats, with our colorful little rubber boots and stared. We were positively terrified. “That house was not there last week!” shouted one of the girls. She always assumed she was right. (Or did I always assume she was wrong? Hmm.) So we argued about that. I think we crept away from the house so slowly and with such subtlety that it never noticed we had discovered it. Which is probably a good thing. Creepy house notices terrified younglings? Not good. Even the movie would be crappy. And scary. But crappy.

We never went back. Not that close, anyway. We sort of observed it from a distance, though, on two or three occasions, and decided it was probably haunted. So then, we never went back.

This is not a picture of the actual house, but it sure looks like it. I got it at: http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Norway/photo120524.htm