13. The Fall of the House of Hellerman （Ryan）
Chapter thirteen
The Fall of the House of Hellerman (Ryan)
“ W here are we going?” Melissa asked timidly.
“You’ll see,” I said. My eyes were on the road. This was not like the drive we had taken to the harbor the other night. This was something else: a drive down memory lane, as it were. No Mercedes or Lamborghini was fit enough to drive on this road. This was a job for a good old Range Rover.
Despite whatever it was they said about upstate New York, the roads in the outskirts were not meant for those with frail hearts and low cars, especially the road from Westport to New Haven.
But we were not going to stop at New Haven. We were going all the way to the heart of Hartford County. Thankfully, there was still an hour’s drive ahead, which gave us plenty of time for me to talk and her to listen.
“I am scared,” Melissa said.
“Well, deal with it. So am I,” I confessed.
“I’m scared because you’re driving at breakneck speed on a dark road winding into further darkness. Why are you scared?” she asked.
“Because after I do this whole show and tell business, things won’t be the same between us.
I don’t know how it plays out. On the one hand, I am afraid to lose you; and on the other, I am afraid that if I don’t share this secret, I’ll lose you anyway.
So fuck me and fuck this conundrum I am in,” I said, slamming my hand on the steering wheel.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be this angry. It wasn’t your fault that you were there.
It was my fault that I chose to entertain those buffoons to begin with. ”
“After the day I just had with my own friends, I can understand that friends can be dicks,” she said.
“Those guys aren’t my friends. I can see it so clearly now. They were leeches who stuck to me back when I was in college. They have been leeching off of me ever since, filling me with poison all the while,” I said.
“Is that why you punched one of them?”
“I punched Brady. He’s going to be fine,” I said. “It’s not the first time I have punched him, though, it probably may as well be the last. I don’t think we’ll see them again. And good fucking riddance.”
“Isn’t it something that you could have told me over coffee while we were still back in New York?” Melissa asked, looking behind. “We can still turn back and make it to New York before the Starbucks near my apartment closes.”
“This is different. It’s a tale of woe, and I won’t be able to tell it back in the city.
I need to be in the vicinity of where it happened, if that makes sense,” I said, my eyes on the dark road.
This was wild country. A deer could suddenly pop out at any moment, get caught in the headlights, and then later in the grill of the car.
As hasty as I felt, I did not want that to happen.
“It really doesn’t make sense to me,” Melissa protested.
“Then I need you to trust me!” I insisted. “I know you don’t have any reason to right now, not after you caught me talking with those snakes. Not after I’ve already hurt you once. I need you to trust me. Can you do that?”
She sighed deeply and took another deep breath before saying, “I can.”
“Then it’s about damn time I told you the whole story.
I have never told it to anyone before. How my friends, if I can even call them that, know about it is a mystery to me.
This is not public knowledge. I am trusting you with my life here,” I said as I began telling her the tale that had made me the man I was today.
It’s the kind of thing you hear about and say, “Oh, jeez, it’s just like what happened to Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne.” It beggars belief, but that’s life, stranger than fiction and more sorrowful than a Poe poem.
Have you ever seen a mollusk and wondered why they have such a hard shell on their back? Take an oyster, for instance. It’s got these clamps that save it from the crushing pressure of the ocean. A snail counts on the gastropod exoskeleton for shelter, support, and protection from predators.
In that regard, I am like a mollusk. The hard shell I have around me evolved as a result of the unbearable pressure I have had to deal with. The version of me that you saw that day and your friends think I am — shallow, curt, materialistic, harsh, uncaring, unflinching — that’s my shell.
There used to be a time when I had no shell.
I was Ryan. Just Ryan. Dr. Joseph Hellerman’s only son.
My mom, Naureen, was this elite socialite who prided herself on the balls she hosted at our house.
You think Hoffa’s house is big. Wait till you see my childhood home.
It puts the White House to shame. Hell, my ancestral home predates the White House by almost fifty years.
It’s built in the same neoclassical architecture and even had a bit of a gothic tint to it thanks to the architect’s personal taste. ”
“It had always been the Hellerman House. When we were kids, we called it Hell House. Har-de-har-har, so freaking original. But indulge me for a moment and imagine that you’re a child living in a house so grand, vast, and ancient that despite all the brimming energy of your childhood and the friends you brought home to play with — even though you and your sister loved racing each other around the terrace — and despite the love and warmth your parents showered you with, it always felt empty and haunted.
It was pregnant with lingering memories of all the people who had ever lived there. ”
“They looked at us from behind their portraits, their faces frozen forever in time. Those disapproving stares meant that no matter what I did, I’d never be able to live up to their expectations. Oh, and Melissa, you will shit bricks when I tell you this part.”
There’s a fucking cemetery on the grounds.
For that reason, the house cannot be taxed by the government.
Every Hellerman who ever lived is buried there alongside their wives and children.
Yes. Even mine. I’m getting there. We’ll, in almost half an hour, we’ll get there.
Oh, I don’t want you to misunderstand me.
I never had a wife or any children. No. My mother and father are buried there. And my sister…”
Ah, my sister. That’s what it’s all about.
It’s about one night, back when I was nine and she was eight.
I have never loved another person the way I loved Sara.
She was my everything. We used to sleep in the same room, listening to the same stories that Dad used to read us every night.
The house was big. We each had our own rooms. But at night, when it got dark, the walls of those rooms became projector screens for all of our worst nightmares.
So, we slept in the same room, a guest room, on two separate beds. ”
“Our parents never really objected to it. Besides, we were kids. Sometimes, Dad told us the stories. Sometimes it was Mom. It was never the case where one parent was close and the other was distant. I had just about the most privileged childhood a person can have in this country. I had everything.”
“Until I lost it. When our parents were away, we’d stay up for the rest of the night, telling each other tale after tale so we could survive the long spell of dark, clinging to each other — protecting each other from the imaginary demons that roamed the halls and lurked behind the walls of the house.
But we did not care as long as we had each other.
We read each other everything. All of Enid Blyton, the Hardy Boys, Goosebumps, you name it.
There was a rule against the TVs in our house.
No TV past ten o’clock. Of course, the rule only applied to us two. ”
One night almost thirty years ago, a distant wing of the house lit up with colors, people cheering, dancing, drinking, and partying.
Mom and Dad were hosting one of Mom’s classical parties.
It’s the shit that rich people do, particularly the Hellerman people.
The generational wealth that kept us going.
Dad didn’t need to work. He just did it for the heck of it. ”
“Anyway, where was I? It was one of those balls, and we had been given orders to go to bed. How could we? I mean, can you really sleep when there’s blaring music nearby?
When you know that you’re missing out on a party in full swing in the ballroom.
No, and it was like that every other week.
We were too young to join the party. Too old to join the rest of the toddlers the partygoers had dropped off at our nursery in the west wing. ”
“That night, Sara, who had recently discovered that the grounds beyond the cemetery in the south were, in fact, ours, asked me something. ‘I saw a Peppermint Palace today,’ she said mischievously. I should mention that being just eight years old, she had a tendency to name everything alliteratively, rather creatively. The kitchen was called Candyland Cove because there was a cabinet with candies in it. The car park was High and Dry Hall. She told me that she could not pronounce the word Hyundai. Our mom had a Hyundai Grandeur Saloon because it drove better on the streets of this county than any luxury vehicle we owned.”
“The chauffeur dropped us off at school every day in that Hyundai. There was a chapel on the grounds too, complete with tinted windows and sculptures of the archangel Michael and Gabriel. That was her favorite place out of all of them. She called it the Crystal Cathedral. So, the Peppermint Palace had either to do something with peppermints or it smelled cool and fresh. Either way, I was intrigued.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s across from the graveyard.”
“She had no fun alliterative name for the graveyard. Sara had said that it scared the living crap out of her. It must have been one hell of a place for Sara to be so enthused to go there, even though it existed beyond the graveyard.
“I don’t know how I ended up being convinced, but there we were, the two Hellerman children in their night clothes, holding flashlights, our hands clasped together as we ventured into the deep, dark wilderness beyond the graveyard.
I wish I had never done that. I wish that I’d scolded her and told her to go to sleep and never go back to the Peppermint Palace.
But I was nine and excited to see this place. ”
“In her defense, it really did smell of peppermints, and being the budding botanist that I was back then, I did recognize the peppermint growing around the abandoned chalet. ‘Once upon a time, the Ice Queen lived in the Peppermint Palace,’ Sara had said as she took my hand and slowly walked over to the chalet’s entrance. ”
‘We’re not going in!’ That’s when I took on the big brother role as I tried to pull her back. But it seemed that my little sister was possessed or something. She just wanted to see the Ice Queen’s throne room. I was practically pulling her back as she tried to go into the house.”
“Can you imagine, Melissa? Being so alone that you invent your own god right there and start praying to him? I wasn’t a churchgoing kid.
Hell, I was never even baptized. But right there, as I pulled Sara away from the precipice of that haunted place, I started praying to god to send an adult to control her and bring her back to the house. ”
“But Sara being the obstinate kid that she was, broke free and went into the house. What choice did I have? I went in after her and tried to talk some sense into her, but she was undeterred. She kept on walking in that dark place from room to room, shining her flashlight on cobwebs and broken wood until she went into a room that was more dilapidated than the others.”
“You know what fucks with my head even thirty years later? The floor gave away under her weight. Sara didn’t even scream.
She fell and it was my fault. It was all my fucking fault.
I, on the other hand, screamed so loud that some workers on smoke breaks came running to see what the commotion was all about.
All I could remember was seeing the giant gaping hole in the ground, endless in its depth.
I shone my light into it to see where Sara was, but I could not find her in there. ”
“I never saw her again. But I did see the expressions of horror, blame, and disappointment on my parents’ faces.
They blamed me for what had happened. I made her fall into that hole.
They took me away. First to a hospital, where I was sedated, then to a boarding school!
It was made very clear to me early on that I was not welcome back. ”
“Sara didn’t die, but she was never the same.
She didn’t try to contact me. I was never given a chance to explain myself, apologize, and make things right.
Some things, you can’t make right…such as Sara.
She didn’t die that night. But she’s paralyzed from the waist down for life.
So, the punishment, in this case, fits the crime.
I have been banished for thirty years. I did everything myself.
Put myself through college and got seed money for my business from Hoffa.
Hell, I reinvented myself completely without relying upon my parents’ wealth and connections. ”
"That’s why Hoffa was so near and dear to me, you understand?
He took me in. He filled the father-shaped hole in my life.
I have never been able to forgive myself for what I did to Sara.
One particular psychotherapist was blatant enough to point out that the reason I lived so rashly, taking everything as a dare, is because I believe that something bad is going to happen to me sooner or later for what I did to Sara. ”
“She’s right. I do blame myself,” I said, parking my car by the side of the gravel road. “And that’s why I have this self-destructive streak in me.”
“Ryan,” Melissa whispered. “Where are we?”
“We are parked outside of Hell House,” I said.
“By the way, I didn’t tell you this part in the story.
My parents died a decade after the accident.
Dad because of pulmonary edema, and Mom from a stroke.
No one told me a damn thing. I haven’t even been to their graves.
I never got to apologize for what I did to Sara.
And now I never can. Every so often, I get the urge to go into the house, meet Sara, and say I’m, sorry. But I can never bring myself to do it.”
“All I can say is…” Melissa started, “If your sister is alive and well and in there alone, she misses you. You need to go in there.”
“Don’t you get it? I can’t!”
“Why not?” Melissa said exasperatedly and then got out of the car.
Not knowing what she was about to do, I went behind her, trying to stop her from going in, but it was too late.