It was condemned.
It was condemned, but the wreckers couldn’t figure out how to tear the old house down. By this point, in fact, no reputable wrecking company would come near it. Construction workers, as a profession, have never had the reputation of being a particularly superstitious lot. They are, generally, better known for making semi-lewd suggestions to passing women, or for overall sloth, than for reciting spine-tingling tales of fancy. Not so with the would-be wreckers of the old house, who could be founded dotted up and down the seacoast for some several hundred miles. Not that they boasted of their experiences, mind you. Far from it. Those men, men with barrel chests and gruff hands wrought from lifetimes of unforgiving labor, shied away from the subject of the old house like children asked to fess up to some innocent transgression. They diverted. They disavowed. They ignored. But reluctance breeds interest, and either by honeyed coaxing or shear persistence the curious inevitably came away with some salacious tale. And although the testimonials varied widely in detail and scope, the unifying factor in them all, besides the shaken voices of the workmen themselves, was the unalterable impression that the old house was not a building to be trifled with.
Hammers flew from hands before striking walls, they said.
The motor of the wrecking crane stalled on the dune over looking the property and could not be made to restart again until mules hauled it away.
A ballroom’s worth of fixtures---chandeliers, sconces, wall plates and the like---dismantled by one evening, were found to have flown stubbornly back in place the next morning.
And the floor plan, no matter how many times they measured, wrote it down, re-measured and scratched their heads, simply refused to stay the same.
Now, inevitably once enticed to divulge such clearly disturbing accounts the listener would ask the wrecker if he believed the old house haunted. And inevitably, after some silent pause on his part and bated breath on the part of the inquisitor, the worker would reply that he did not think so. That which took place in the old house may well have been beyond the natural working order of the world, but to categorize the events as spectral or phantasmal, the upshot of some mischievous sprite or playful poltergeist, would have been too simple an explanation. No, he would say, not ghosts. It is, he would whisper, something far stranger. Just what he did not know, but he did know that he, for one, would never return to find out.
Thus the old house continued to sit, gray and sun-bleached, shuttered windows and heaving balustrades overlooking the same sea-battered inlet that they had overlooked for the past half-century, the dune encroaching closer and closer upon its tired old walls.
Of course, while the house had remained the same with the passing decades, steeping the surrounding sands in its faded grandeur, the view over which it presided had not. Most obviously different was the recent addition of the Pleasure Pier jutting out into the bay. Built in the space of a single summer it had been the brainchild of one Alistair Roy, a theatrical transplant from Chicago. By his account he had bid farewell to his metropolitan brethren to their great protestations, betrayed that he should deprive their fair city of his talents in favor of some hamlet on the Golden Coast. Ladies wept as he boarded the midday express train, he said, and gentlemen threw untouched bribe money to try and convince him to stay. At least, that was the story he told. By the accounts of others he had vacated the Windy City at night, in the back of a milk wagon, in order to evade unpaid gambling debts, the number of which had grown truly mountainous in size.
Removed from the city of his birth, however, the size of his supposed debts would pale in comparison to the size of his doubtless success. Celebrated actor or not, crook or not, Alistair Roy was a showman through and through, and the Pleasure Pier proved it. Its detractors called it a nuisance, a chaotic maze of color and light atop the water, an unbearable din echoing across the bay, a citadel of licentiousness, depravity, and sin. Its admirers, who outnumbered the detractors a hundred to one, called it wonderful.
A mere ten cents at the gate admitted the pleasure-seeker to a world unlike any yet seen, one that left the gray and dusty dullness of life behind and plunged the lucky lad or lass into the sights, the sounds, and the smells of unparalleled amusement. Rides with names like the Teaser, The Tickler, Shoot-the-Chute, and Loop-the-Loop twisted and twirled, shooting up-and-down and in-and-out with reckless speed that both tantalized and terrified. A scenic railway glided past pastiches portraits of beer-soaked Swiss Alpine life. The double-decker Imperial Carousel let riders join a five-dozen horse regiment of the Tsar’s cavalry in a never-ending circular charge against the Germans. A synchro-mechanical exhibit entitled Genesis filled a two-hundred foot long hall and did God one better by depicting the creation of the world not in six days but in just half an hour, and eight times a day at that. These thrills and more filled and flitted around a procession of edifices adorned with spires, minarets, domes, and towers all painted a brilliant red and white. And everything---absolutely everything---was covered with so many electric lights that by night the Pleasure Pier shown like a beacon for fifteen miles out to sea.
The public clamored for more.
Being a man of solid business sense, if not dubious morals, Alistair Roy enthusiastically bought up all the land adjacent to his magnificent Pleasure Pier with the unsurprising aim of expanding his carnival kingdom for the next season. In the most part these parcels consisted of already vacant lots, or else ramshackle hotels, inns, taverns, restaurants, trinket shops and so on trailing from the Pier gates all the way to the nearby railroad terminus from which the majority of pleasure-seekers disembarked. By and large these such establishments had sprung up with little regard to artistic flair, or structural integrity for that matter, and so were just as easily un-sprung back into empty land. And while the foundations of the Pleasure Pier itself had blossomed initially from the site of a derelict fishing dock down close to the sea, Alistair Roy now turned his enterprising eye to a spot of higher ground, just a little ways up the coast, but blessed with a commanding view of the bay and framed by picturesque dunes. The deed to the property in question proved easy enough to obtain. Following that, however, was the problem of dismantling the old, gray and sun-bleached house that already stood there.
And the old house, as we have heard, was not a building to be trifled with.
