On May 20, as part of her Artist of the Year Profile Performance, Laurie R. King performed the high-wire writing act she calls Writer's Improv: writing a short story, bringing it into being before your very eyes, based on prompts submitted earlier by members of the public and received by Laurie minutes before she begins to write.

Here is her finished product.

The House

“All I’m saying, is that names are important. You know, if you’re Bruce or something you’re really stuck with that, like, forever.”

We were outside the house, looking at it. Which felt stupid but, you know, going inside, that wasn’t something you did without thinking.

And there was a lot to look at. The house was probably the oldest building in the area, maybe in the whole county, and it had been standing there in its field, falling to pieces, for longer than anyone could remember. My Granddad said that it had been haunted when he was a kid, and that was like a hundred years ago, because he died when I was a little kid and he was really old then.

The house had been built back when houses had what they call gingerbread (there’s another name I don’t know what it means), all kinds of trim and towers and windows. And it wasn’t haunted, exactly, just weird. Which is why we were talking about names.

It was called the Weildman House, anyway that’s what the paper called it when they had articles about the people trying to restore it, and that’s the name on the old photographs in the local museum where they drag us every couple of years. Except that maybe there was a typo, or maybe it was only logical, that one letter changed it and gave it a name.

Bee shook her head, disagreeing with me like usual. “That place would be weird even if it had been called the Smith Place, or Casa Thingumy. Weirdman comes from the place, the place’s vibes don’t come from it.”

Bee uses words like “vibes,” words I never hear except from my mother, who never recovered from the Sixties. Bee uses lots of words no one else knows, except maybe me, only I never use them in the open, and she does.

Can you guess we’re the geek squad at school? Can you guess who is still hanging around the computer lab when the last bus pulls out of the driveway?

Yeah: Bee, and me, I’m Brad, and AJ always, and the Tim twins sometimes if they don’t have music lessons or something. And some others, but mostly us.

And right now, Bee and AJ and I were sitting just inside the bushes that grow in a square around Weirdman House (what was, once upon a time when actual people lived in the place, a garden—sometimes one of the wild bushes bursts into flower, and you suddenly realize that it’s a rose or a daffodil or something and not some California version of the Amazon.) AJ had brought food, I’d brought drinks, and Bee had brought herself.

“So why Weirdman?” AJ asked. He had a mouth full of some disgusting candy called Snapquick, he always brought gross food but never seemed to gain an ounce.

“You don’t know the story?” Bee asked.

“Which one?” I commented.

“Is there more than one?”

“I know three,” I said, which was an exaggeration, but not much. “You tell the one you know.”

“Well, the place has been deserted, like forever,” she began. “The last Weildman just disappeared in the Fifties or something. The mail piled up, the dog began to howl, finally somebody called the cops and asked them to check up on the old lady. And they never found her.”

“Yeah they did,” I told her. “She had the Altzheimer’s and she wandered off, and they found her down in Monterey and put her in a home.”

“Really?”

“That’s what my mom says.”

“Yeah, but your mom probably wants to reassure little Braddy so he doesn’t have bad dreams.”

I would have punched Bee then if she’d been a boy, but she wasn’t, and besides, she hit harder than most boys. And she was probably right, anyway. My mom was always trying to keep what she called my imagination under control. Maybe all single mothers did that, trying to do two jobs at once.

Anyway, there we were, and there was Weirdman House looking at us looking at it.

“You want to go in?” AJ asked.

“Nah, not right now,” I said. “It’s nicer out here.”

“How do you know?”

“I been in there,” I told him. “Lots of times.”

“Twice,” Bee said. Really, I was going to hit her. Except I wouldn’t, because her father did and there was no way I was going to be like him in her life, no way at all.

“So let’s make it three times,” I said loudly, and I stood up and walked towards the house.

Weirdman House was just plain weird. It sat by itself out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of fields no one farmed even though this was farming land, surrounded by roads that didn’t seem to have any view of it. Mom and I were about the closest neighbors, half a mile away, and the fact that I’d only been inside the place twice tells you something about its, well, its vibes.

I’m not a nervous kind of a person. I read a lot, sure, but my imagination pretty much shuts off when it’s on its own, unlike AJ who lives in a dream most of the time. And so a few weeks after we’d moved in, one day when Mom was off shopping or something, I wandered down the road and sort of pushed my way in through what had once been the front gate.

A place like that, you’d think a thousand teenagers a week would find their way inside, older kids with bottles and girlfriends, younger kids with cigarettes, all sorts with things to hide. But even though the doors didn’t look very sturdy and I could see one of the windows open from where I stood, it didn’t look to me like anyone had broken in.

But I did. Well, not break in, just sort of sidle around the place for a while until a way in kind of appeared.

That sounds nuts, I know. And I suppose what happened was that I hung out long enough to get used to the looks of the place, and noticed that there was a small door just set into the side of one wall. But what it felt like at the time, and ever since then, was that the house decided to show me a door.

Not to get all Stephen King on you, but it should have been crazy creepy, that feeling. I mean, a house inviting you in is a house with teeth. But again, it just didn’t FEEL like that. What it felt like was a big, lonely place that decided I wasn’t about to set it on fire, so it tugged back a kind of mental curtain and showed me how to get inside.

That first time, I didn’t go in very far. The door I’d found led into this strange boxy space that took me a while to figure out was a storage place for firewood, next to a fireplace big enough to roast an ox in, or a pig anyway. The room with the fireplace had been the living room, I guess, and wasn’t in bad shape, considering. The windows were covered with spiderwebs, of course, and there was so much dust on the floor that my feet left tracks, but the wallpaper was still mostly up, only a few corners peeling away, and the fancy chandelier overhead looked all in one piece. Which, considering this is earthquake country, was just about amazing.

That first day I walked through the living room and found a sort of library next door, although the shelves only had a few books on them and they were so thick with dust even I didn’t want to pick them up. There was another room further on that had the remnants of curtains on the windows, although you couldn’t tell what color they had been, and I thought that if I so much as touched them, they would fall to pieces.

I followed my tracks back and found the kitchen, which looked like something from the museum in town, and was about to go into the next room when I heard something from outside.

I went over to the window, and heard it again: My mother’s voice, a long way off, calling my name.

I scrambled back to the living room, and found the wood-box, but it took me a while to locate the latch for the door I’d found. I guess I was sort of panicky, because I knew Mom would have a cow if she found out I’d been in here, and I hadn’t expected her to be home for a couple of hours yet, so that’s why my hands were sort of fumbly and I couldn’t find the latch. It was so hard to find, I had this weird feeling that the house didn’t want me to go and was hiding it, but as soon as I thought that, my fingertips found the piece of metal, and the door opened.

I made sure to push the door shut, and ran across the wild garden to the place I’d gotten in. When I looked back, the door was hidden again, its seams in the shadow of some of that elaborate trim.

Mom was on the road, halfway between our house and the Weirdman place, her back to me. I ran hard, circling around this sort of warehouse that stands near the main road, so when she finally saw me, she’d think I was coming from there and not the house.

She gave me hell for poking around the warehouse, made me promise never to go there again, and took a while to settle down.

Because the really weird thing? She’d been gone for two hours, and she’d been looking for me more than an hour after that, and in that whole time, I’d found a door and walked through four rooms.

The second time I went inside the house was about six months later. The first time it had been summer vacation, when we’d first moved here, and then school started and at first it was awful like usual, and then I made friends with AJ and then Bee found us, and the Kim twins, and it was okay. But the house was just sort of…there, in the back of my head, and so during the Christmas vacation when AJ was off seeing his family in Mexico and Bee was off someplace in Europe (her father’s the manager of a bank, which explains a whole lot about why he gets away with what he gets away with) and Mom was working all the hours she could at her temp job at the mall, I found myself standing at the gate again, looking for the wood-box door.

No one had been inside since I’d been there in July. My footprints wandered up and down, and no others. But the house was dim now, since it was winter and the sky was cloudy, so I couldn’t tell if there were older footprints, just mine.

I stood in the living room, looking at that humongous fireplace and trying to imagine what it would look like with a fire in it. The thing was about six feet across, plenty of room for me to lie down and stretch my arms out without touching the bricks. You could put whole trees in it. And the heat from it—that would make it impossible to sit nearby, wouldn’t it?

I tried to picture the family, maybe three ladies with needlework and a bearded man, and oil lamps maybe on the walls. What would you do, without TV or video games? Books, sure, but how many hours a day could you read?

I couldn’t picture it, not very well, so I turned to walk out of the room, when out of the corner of my eyes a flame suddenly leaped up in that cold fireplace, and I heard a sort of creaking noise that reminded me of my grandmother’s rocking chair.

But when I whipped around to see, there was nothing, and no sound.

The same thing happened in the kitchen, when I had finished looking in the empty cabinets and started to walk out the door: a sudden feeling of warmth at my back, a gust of frying onion and some spice in the air, and the briefest snatch of conversation tickling my ears.

Then it was gone, and the stove was empty and rusting, the air still and stale.

The third time the ghostly voices came, I ran.

And then today, with AJ and Bee, in the sunshine, during spring break.

Maybe the house wouldn’t show us the door, I thought.

But it did. The outline was right there, tucked under the edge of the peeling paint of the trim. You could even see the dent in the ground underneath it, where I’d hit when I came crashing out last December. I could feel my heart beginning to speed up, just remembering.

“This is your door?” Bee asked. I jumped when she spoke, because I’d been so wrapped up in myself.

“Yeah. We don’t have to go in.”

“I think we do,” she said. “If we don’t, this is going to bug you forever.”

“I think it’s going to bug me forever even if we do,” I told her, trying to joke, but she just gave me that look and stuck her fingers under the edge.

The door hesitated, then gave way. She pulled it open, and we looked in: a box, lined with metal, nothing more. She crawled up, I boosted AJ, and followed.

We found nothing that day, although we got all the way through the house, a lot more than I’d managed on my own. Most of the rooms were empty, though there were bedframes in a couple of the upstairs rooms, and one mattress that was a condo for mice. I began to calm down, and decided that whatever I’d seen that time, it had been my imagination. Nothing else.

I was standing in the middle of the living room again, the empty and silent living room, when AJ said, “It’s getting dark, and I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry,” I said, but when I looked at the window, it was true, the entire day had gone. It felt like a couple of hours, but when we dropped from the doorway, the sun was low and the air cold.

“You didn’t see anything this time, did you?” Bee asked me as we clawed our way out through the bushes.

“Nope.”

“Maybe there was too much activity, with three of us.”

“Maybe there was nothing there the first time.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a reason this place is called what it is. And the place does feel strange.”

This is why I like Bee: she makes me feel like there are two of us in the world. “You felt it, too?”

“Sure. And like you said, time in there seems to move really fast. I’d have sworn it wasn’t even lunch time.”

“But it doesn’t make sense.”

“Expectations don’t make sense. When people die, where does there energy go? When a house holds a family and the family disappears, what does the house think?”

“There’s a video game,” AJ piped up. I’d more or less forgotten he was there, which is about usual for AJ. “It’s got this device like a projector that sends characters from the game out into the real world.”

“That was a movie,” Bee said.

“Yeah, but it was a game too. You could call up people out of history and use them in real time, or anyway the game’s real time. Like if you were having a war and you needed Alexander the Great or something, you could troll through history and snag him. Maybe that’s what Brad did, snagged the Weirdmans and put them in the house for a second.”

“Weildmans,” she said.

“Whatever. But I mean, people don’t just go away when they die, do they? It doesn’t make sense. It’s like when you accidentally dump something on your computer, it’s there, if you know how to find it. Same with live people, don’t you think?”

“Stands to reason,” Bee said.

“Man,” I said, “it’s really late. You guys finished your projects yet?”

“I told my parents I was working on it here,” AJ said.

“Well, we better get on it.”

“What insane teacher assigns middle school kids a paper on toxic plants?” Bee muttered.

“I think the idea is so we avoid them, not so we use them,” I said.

“Still.”

The weekend went by, and the following week, and the next Saturday we found ourselves back in the jungly garden.

That time, we met the Weird Man.

[to be continued…]