The House on Jeden Street

by Wayne Martin

If it was Dunedin they would have torched the house soon after the murders. But this was Auckland. Besides, the son who survived – supposedly in Hamilton that weekend – wanted to stay living in the place. None of the neighbours knew why, but none of them knew what it was like to have a parent and three siblings shot dead in their beds in the house you grew up in. Most survivors would put it behind them, move away, make a fresh start. But Daniel was different. As the years passed, he became more entrenched, while around him the paint peeled, weatherboards rotted, foundations crumbled, and the leaking roof rusted out. They say the carpets and walls were rimed with mould and the house reeked of neglect, but no-one knew for sure what it was like in there. Daniel never left the house. The insurance meant he never needed a job. It was all done remotely; mail orders, grocery deliveries and rare house calls from doctors sworn to secrecy. Welfare-checkers and real estate agents were spurned, while Mormons and the like eventually got the message.

Those that glimpsed the strange occupant of 65 Jeden Street reported the physical decline of the slim, bright young man whose face had made the papers all those years ago. The decline seemed to transcend the mere measurement of years. I heard a psychologist talking on a podcast about the case. He compared Daniel’s situation to Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic masterpiece The Fall of the House of Usher. How a dwelling and its occupant can share a journey to ruin. I knew the works of Poe well. After twenty years in prison, I had read everything he wrote. Most of it I could recite verbatim. Some people called me obsessed.

Prison changes people. Even those locked up for the most serious crimes can find God and emerge as worthwhile members of the community. But what of those who enter prison as decent men, selfless followers of the Lord? Wherein lies the direction of their change? What does twenty years of dehumanisation, misplaced martyrdom, and misdirected love do to a good man?

That night still haunts my dreams. I know the fifth bullet was reserved for me. Yet I was the obvious culprit. It was my gun. Mary and I had been estranged for years. Finding God had taken me on a journey she couldn’t share. Some read my conversion as the kind of fanaticism that can lead to irrational deeds. And as anyone who watches the crime channel knows, it’s usually the father.

When you are old and harmless you acquire a veil of anonymity, even among those charged with your supervision. The day may come, as you near the end of your term, during supervised outings in the community, before ankle bracelets and restraining orders are in place, when you can simply wander off and melt into the grey-haired wilderness.

Finding a handgun was easy. In prison you make contacts. The 9mm Beretta had a 15-shot magazine but I only loaded one bullet. A neat touch of symbolism. Another thing they teach you in prison is how to break into a house, though the word ‘break’ didn’t seem to fit. This would be an easy and quiet operation. The house at 65 Jeden Street was no Fort Knox.

It was long before dawn, but the ghosts of the coming day silvered the far rooftops. As I approached my former home on foot, the House of Usher analogy came back to me; the ‘vacant, eye—like windows,’ the ‘minute fungi overspreading the whole exterior,’ and a feeling of ‘insufferable gloom,’ just as Poe’s narrator had experienced on seeing the Usher mansion for the first time. The night was cold and the clouds oppressively low. As I hesitated at the roadside my imagination conjured more Poe; the notion of a strange atmosphere enshrouding the house, ‘a pestilent and mystic vapor…faintly discernable and leaden-hued.’

Soon I was in the hallway. The musty stench of decay washed over me. A strange grey light showed blackened drip stains on the peeling walls, a low and sagging ceiling, and at the far end a formless shadow against the wall.

Daniel was standing there, thin and broken, silent but for his rasping breath. Again, it was a vision that might have been lifted from the pages of Poe: the ‘cadaverousness of complexion…the ghastly pallor of the skin.’

We walked slowly towards each other. Floorboards creaked like the timbers of a doomed galleon. Neither spoke. Close up I saw fear and recognition in his eyes. Still there were no words. We each had served our time, yet the story was unfinished. Four was always one number short.

I handed him the gun.

— Joint third place, Open category, Anna-Marie Chin Architects Writing Competition 2023.