The staircase[16] was empty. They were the same familiar, green-carpeted steps I had seen a million times before. With newfound courage, I skipped down to the landing, made a 90-degree turn, and continued to the bottom. Everything looked exactly the same as usual.
Without even switching on any lights, I turned right and walked through the living room with all its shadows and bulky furniture, through the dining room with its oval table surrounded by empty high-backed chairs, across the cold linoleum of our big kitchen in my bare feet, and back into the front hallway, which was furnished only with a little three-legged table and a tall free-standing antique coat rack nobody ever used.[17] Everything was dark but friendly and familiar.
This was my home. All of it was mine. And any intruder had better watch out for me. I had come of age[18].
That house—with its generously proportioned rooms, its superfluous glass-front cabinets, its rows of long bookshelves filled with complete sets of venerable authors like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain as well as the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Harvard Classics, its cozy window seats, and its neighborly front porch—is still standing on the corner.[19] But it has been converted to a rooming house for college students.[20]
I used to see one boy silhouetted against the drawn blind, studying into the wee hours in my former bedroom on the top floor, and I wondered if he was ever troubled by weird sounds while reading something like The Cask of Amontillado or The Fall of the House of Usher.[21] I could have told him they were only the sounds of an old house growing older. The heavy beams[22] could be forgiven for creaking under the weight they were supporting so faithfully. The squeaks and squeals, as I had long since realized, were only the protests of tenacious old iron nails being tugged by weathering lumber.[23]
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