The Crying House [+16]

Word count: 2460

Our house cried at night.

I even thought that maybe it felt lonely, since the closest neighborhood was two miles away, and then when I got a little older I thought it was haunted.

It was a large house, mostly made of wood, built by my great-great-grandfather in 1876 with the help of his brothers. It was considered a great achievement by him, the tangible result of his years as a banker and his intentions to continue with a farm. It housed all future generations with its seven rooms filled with beds and secrets.

At the time, all the land for the first acre was ours, where we grew corn, but that changed when my grandfather lost much of the land in a chance-game, and now we only had 1⁄4 of the acre. We stopped growing corn, and now we had a large barn full of dairy cows, which provided milk for us and several families around the small town. Fresh and nutritious, many stopped buying from markets to buy from us, and eventually even people from out of town came to try them.

The Silva Milk Farm was famous: we had the tastiest milk, of the best quality and everything was natural. My grandmother, Romilda, came up with the idea, who almost divorced Grandpa Fish when he lost his land. But it only really took off because of my father, who always worked very hard every day, giving the best treatment to our cows. "Good milk is made with love", is what he always said, and he treated the cattle better than he treated my mother.

I had nothing to complain about. I liked the farm, the cows, the silence and peace of living far from any big city, and I liked fishing with grandpa, who didn't have the nickname Fish over nothing. He felt a lot of guilt, but he never lost his sense of humor, and he taught me how to take care of the boat, always telling me to follow the fishing route and leave the house, but it wasn't for me. I liked it there.

The only problem was that I couldn't sleep well. The crying was unbearable, the pleas of terror that came from the wood seemed to curse me.

— Do you hear that? — I asked my cousin Eduardo. He had always been a bit disturbed, he just picked fights over everything,but we got along well. He looked at me with his big, teary eyes, twinkling in the dark, and didn't respond.

Maybe he was like that because he didn't have a mother. I mean, he did, but it was a complicated story. When my aunt Catarina was 24 years old, she got pregnant, and simply disappeared because she didn't know who her father was and Grandma Romilda wanted to kill her. We never saw her again, but about seven months later, Eduardo appeared at the door of the house, in a little basket, with a note from Catarina saying to take care of him because she had no money.

Grandma Romilda didn't like it, but she wasn't going to let the baby die. This was around 1962, two years after I was born.

And it was when I was about six years old that I started to notice that the house was crying. Why it only cried at night, I didn't know. But it was practically mooing with a palpable, almost maddening sadness, so when I was about nine years old, fed up with my theories, I went to question my father.

— It's the cows, my son. They get very sad at night because we are not there with them.

It made sense. That's why it sounded so much like mooing. The barn was relatively close to the house, so it made sense that I would hear them so loudly. I accepted the answer, and started treating our cows even better, so they wouldn't be so sad at night. It didn't do anything, however, but just knowing that it wasn't a ghost helped me sleep better. Nowadays, I wish it had been one.

I explained it to Eduardo, and he also felt more relieved, but we agreed to go sleep in the barn, just to see if the cows would feel calmer with some company.

And so we did. On one of the hottest nights in January, everyone went to bed around ten at night. We weren't even going to try to ask the older people to sleep in the barn, as they obviously wouldn't let us, so it was a secret plan. We took lamps, blankets to cover the floor and our pillows and sneaked through the second floor corridor, tiptoeing down the stairs.

We walked around the house, fearless, and finally arrived at the barn. The view, which was already beautiful during the day, those long chains of greenish hills cutting across the horizon, became even more beautiful late at night. The infinity of stars and the full moon like a slice of cheese decorated the haunting darkness of that field, which seemed much more intimidating now. The buttery light from our lamps illuminated the large barn as Eduardo pushed open the heavy door, and revealed our peacefully sleeping cows.

We placed the blankets on top of the dry grass, and lay down, after greeting the cows one by one. We let them know we were there to keep them company.

For a nine-year-old child, eleven at night was like a forbidden time, and we were both already feeling heavy-eyed when we finally lay down on our extremely uncomfortable makeshift beds. We were a little scared, too, so we held hands and watched the pair of birds that had settled in one of the barn's roof timbers until we fell asleep. But it was then that I came to the first frightening conclusion: the cows were calm, drowsy and didn't even make a peep.

And after my heart calmed down due to the courageous act of leaving the house, I could finally hear the same screams and cries, this time in the distance. Coming from the house.

— Eduardo — I called, but he had already slept. I swallowed hard, taking my time falling asleep, and little did I know that that would be my only decent night's sleep in a long time.

We got scolded from all the adults, but especially from my father, who was furious when I told him that it wasn't the cows that were crying. Suddenly his narrative changed, and he said it must be the wind howling through the wood of the house. No, those cries of despair could not come from the wind.

We were banned from leaving the house and going to the barn for a month, and every day, I didn't sleep anymore. I closed his eyes for a few minutes as soon as it became a little quieter, and woke up again when another painful mooing came from the house. I cried because I was so sleepy, and I started sleeping during the day. Mom noticed how sick I was getting, and she and Dad had a long argument one day.

In the end, she was convinced by him, because they were making a lot of money from milk sales, and that I would get better. I asked her if she didn't hear the house crying:

— When?

— At night.

— What are you doing up at night? l I don't listen because I'm sleeping.

— But it's the crying that wakes me up.

It took me months of insistence to get her to stay awake with me, so she could listen too. But she never wanted to.

On a day when I should have gone out to wash the entrance, when I was eleven years old, I heard a conversation between Dad and Grandpa Fish.

— Are you giving it to him? — Dad asked, in an accusatory tone.

— What?

— You know what. Why is he the only one staying awake?

— I'm not going to drug my grandson. Just say it's a ghost, make something up.

I had to stop listening because Grandma Romilda showed up to see my performance, and from that day on, it was Dad who made my hot milk before bed, and not Grandpa anymore.

And I slept like an angel. I didn't connect one thing with the other at the time, I hadn't understood that there was something in my milk, but fortunately, my grandfather had already had his last straw.

In the middle of the night one fateful day, I woke up with him on the edge of the bed, his eyes flashing with doubt and despair as he shook me awake.

— I hear it too.

I was groggy, but I knew what he was talking about. The fear he had on his face was contagious. I rubbed my eyes in an attempt to shake off the sleep, and shivered as the sound of crying hit me like an arrow.

— Did you tell Dad?

— He is not here. — His lip was trembling, so he took my hand and squeezed it. His hand was cold, and he pulled me out of bed gently. — Listen. I want you to wake Eduardo up and go to the truck, okay? And stay there.

— What is happening?

— Go to the car.

I simply did what he said. I had to shake Eduardo hard to get him to open his eyes, so I told him what Grandpa had ordered me and we ran out the back door, because the truck was always parked there. I wish I hadn't made that decision.

As soon as we turned through the door, we saw that the trapdoor to the basement was wide open. I had never gone in there, because Grandpa said that was where they kept materials for repairs, and that I could hurt myself with all the saws and sharp knives. Eduardo and I were also scared to death there, having rats and cockroaches according to everyone in the house, so curiosity never spoke louder. Most of the time, I didn't even remember that we had a basement. But more than open, an orange light came from inside.

Looking to the left, towards the front of the house, was the truck, almost shining and calling us — that's where we should have gone that damn night, but now the dead curiosity had been rekindled like gunpowder. Eduardo and I exchanged a look, then began to walk hesitantly in the wrong direction.

Our bare feet were silent on the grass, we almost lost our balance from trying to tiptoe, and everything was especially gloomy because it was a moonless night. In memory, I can only remember the hot contrast in that cold yard, and the moans of pain that sounded again.

Eduardo couldn't stand it and ran to the car, and maybe I should have done the same thing, but I kept walking, tilting my body to see inside the basement, but when I put my face inside, all I could see was a staircase. I felt a pang of despair when I realized that I would have to go even further to satisfy my desire to finally know what was making the house cry.

My mind started playing tricks on me as I walked down the cement steps, imagining all kinds of horrible monsters down there, but still any monster would have been better than the most traumatizing scene of my entire life.

As soon as I reached the bottom of the stairs to hell, my entire body went into immediate shock. At first, I didn't understand what was happening, I just saw my grandfather desperately trying to unchain one of dozens of women chained to the walls, covered in a thick layer of sweat and other bodily fluids.

Dad was unconscious, with a huge wound on his head. My gaze went from one side to another, the whole place smelled of blood, urine, feces, it smelled of rot and, worse... it smelled of milk.

All those women I didn't know, naked, their hair disheveled and their expressions in a crease of permanent despair, they all had these tubes connected to their breasts, making an unbearable sucking noise.

All these tubes went to another machine, and another... I couldn't understand it. Tears ran wildly down my cheeks when I saw Aunt Catarina among those victims. Almost unrecognizable, but with a huge pregnancy belly, like many others. Her knees were deeply scraped, her vagina was bleeding violently and the bright red blood ran onto the stained floor.

Grandpa only saw me there after a very long time. I couldn't read his expression, everything was blurred, there was a strange feeling of emptiness inside my chest, and he wasn't saying anything useful. He dragged me and put me in the car, but the images continued to flash.

When I finally understood that this was the milk I had been drinking all that time,I vomited it all out the window. The last emotion I felt, the last feeling I remember feeling before I entered a near-catatonic state of trauma for the next ten years, was heartbreak. Disgust for everything, for milk, for cows, for farms, for life.

My grandfather suffered threats, the only thing he could have done was kill my father, my mother, and his wife, grandmother Romilda, and take us out of there. He told the police everything. And for a long, long time, I didn't have the courage to read the news about this case.

Every subsequent night of my life, I heard my house cry. True ghosts of memories that would haunt me forever, echoing inside my brain whenever I lay in any bed, anywhere. The incessant and desperate mooing, the screams for help muffled with tape in front of the mouths of those poor women who, even if they had survived, had died in that basement.

Raped to generate milk, and milked like animals for years. Years on end. I even thought that it was all my fault. If my mother hadn't gotten pregnant with me, my father wouldn't have discovered his breast milk fetish. Years of therapy were barely enough to get this idea out of my head, to understand that he would have had this sick idea anyway.

My mother agreed. My grandmother agreed. Everything to recover money, the money they had lost because of Grandpa Fish, in that chance-game. I've never been able to look at anyone the same way again. I was never able to look at myself naked in the mirror again. I have never been able to consume any product with milk or that comes from any animal again. The pain I felt in my stomach whenever I saw someone drinking milk could give me ulcers for days.

Grandpa committed suicide at age 80, and I didn't go to his funeral. I had also died a long time ago.

Today I'm almost the age he was the day he decided to save those women, the day I lost my soul completely.

I close my eyes to sleep, but my brain still cries.