Job (Addled Essence)

The house on the hill is haunted. It was haunted then, and it is haunted still. I walked its halls and I saw its shadows, and I ran away. As I look back at its blackened windows, I feel myself running even now, with its shadows close behind me. I turn my back on the hill I climbed so long ago and walk slowly away. I feel the windows watching me as I turn the corner out of their sight, but not beyond their silent call, “Come back! Come back!” If only I could.
It started with the jolly policeman laughing at a little boy’s fears. My friends and I watched as he entered the huge front door, and we listened as the silence ran into years. He did not return.
We would have left, but we loved him for the high fly balls and the kittens rescued from trees too high to climb. We slowly pushed aside the door and cowered in. He was sleeping at the window desk. Laughing, we shook him hard, but his face was stuck solid to the top. We ran, leaving our friend alone and dead.
No one remembered him. Not one person in town knew him. No such smiling policeman had ever walked our block, only an angry, sullen man we’d never seen before.
And so we made a pact to face the house. We couldn’t bring him back, but we were determined to discover whatever it was that had melted him into the furnishings of that malevolent place and punish it for taking away someone who had given us so much. How we were going to do this was not really clear, but boyhood bravado sufficed. We were sure we would somehow prevail. At the door my friends were not so brave. They watched as I went in alone.
I walked into the silence, sick and feeling doomed, with only pride pushing me on. The sun shone through the windows bright and still. The huge room inside the house was peaceful and beautiful with dust motes dancing in the rays of light and trees smiling their autumn leaves through huge windows. The silence was complete. I couldn’t even hear my own footsteps as I climbed the stairs.
I crept into the room to the left at the top with its dusty furniture and the faces of my friends peering up at the window, unable it seemed to see me or to hear me when I called. They looked small and afraid.
I opened the dresser drawer, and a baby’s face peered up at me and slowly smiled. I leaped back slamming the drawer back in. I looked around. No one! No sound. Had I seen it? I couldn’t open that drawer again. As fear squeezed me, feeling small and helpless, trembling, I furtively opened the next drawer, somehow knowing the baby would be there too. It was!
I ran to the door and jerked it open. I almost walked into the closet where a toddler stood smiling up at me. Shaking so hard I could barely grasp the closet door, I pushed it shut and leaned against it. Tears and sweat were running together on my face as terror caused my muscles to jump nowhere, everything that was me to drain into the floor.
I staggered to the window and tore it open. I would have jumped to my friends below, but hanging from the window by his fingers and smiling up at me was a little boy. I pushed his fingers from the sill and his startled face faded into thin air.
A middle-aged woman tried to stop me as I ran from the room. She seemed mildly surprised at my terror. I began to sing as she reached for me. I called upon all the strength of my childhood loneliness when I sang softly alone in my room as the shadows closed in, “What a friend I have in Jesus….” Startled, and a little hurt it seemed, she stepped back. I turned and practically fell down the stairs getting away from her. I flew out the front door and past my friends who didn’t even look at me. They just stared at the house as I hurtled by.
I wonder what they saw. I wonder if they followed me into the house. I wonder what they found. I wonder where they’ve gone.
No one remembers them. My companions now are cold, and they hurt me when they can. My friends would never have allowed that, nor would I have let anything bad happen to them. But they are gone, so gone they’ve never been.

Footnote: In the story above I have attempted to rewrite (with an obvious existential twist) what I believe to be the origin of the Job story. In my opinion, the original story tried to portray the trustworthiness of a good God given the actual situations with which many of us must deal. It appears to approach the problem without a malevolent Satan and without a loving God. This is good mythology, and it is realistic. Satan is a simple solution with sharp edges, but it is actually no solution at all, and love is a selfish emotion which, though it may be an accurate portrayal of our feelings toward God, is insulting when we accuse God of loving (needing) us.
The happy ending to the Biblical Job story turns a very perceptive insight into little more than a fairy tale when, in fact, I believe it was originally an attempt to describe our struggle not so much with faith as with trust.