Obvious as the nature of such a place might seem to discerning readers such as yourselves—and already I can perceive it forming, with reluctance or anticipation as the case may be, in a number of your minds—it is perhaps best to err on the side of caution here and remark that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House was in fact a house: one of those newer structures of perhaps six thousand square feet and three stories (if one counted the basement) that seemed to be cropping up in little clumps during those years on the western edge of the county which lay closest to the city (some fifteen miles distant) and thus proved attractive to upwardly mobile professionals and people of like financial resources who desired vaguely pastoral and ostensibly safe, albeit largely sterile and uniform, communities and neighbors.

The particular domicile in question stood in candid relief—a little more to itself than the others, perhaps forty yards from the road—and probably appearing altogether unremarkable if one glimpsed it in daylight, which none of us ever had. However, though the outside of the house was conventional enough for new homes built during that first half-decade of the 1990s, the interior was highly irregular, even downright bizarre. It was said that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s wife or mistress or housemate—the enigma of her status was consistent with everything else about the place—had been given free rein to design the interior to her fancy. For one conversant in the art of home decoration it quickly would become apparent this mysterious woman had possessed a fine eye for space and color but, for one reason or another, either had lost hold of her gifts so that they had run amok or purposefully set them loose as a dogfighter releases his pit bull when the last bet is made and the final bit of money changes hands. Indeed, it appeared almost as if the limitless freedom Willy’s Mann’s Uncle had imparted to his beloved architectural muse had driven her decisions to the maximum of hyperbole in nearly every regard. There were rooms possessed of odd shapes, painted in overpowering colors; sliding doors and hollow panels which often as not led nowhere in particular; ceilings of erratic height which seemed meant either to crowd the occupant or make them feel tiny to the point of insignificance; and long thick rugs dyed in blunt primary colors which matched neither the walls nor the trim of the room or hallway at hand.

As a result of these features the whole physics of the place seemed askew or even reversed and, as if this eclecticism wanted yet another variable, it was rumored that upon the completion of the home the mysterious woman had taken up residence on the side of the structure she had designed especially for her own habitation only to make the tardy revelation that it faced north and, what’s more, stood almost next to a thick stand of full grown bushy cedars and stately Virginia pines, so that it remained perpetually darker and colder than the rest of the domicile. Her solution, it was recounted, rather than having the trees cut or moving her effects into the opposite end of the house and forsaking her most favored colors, secret panels, and oddly shaped rooms, was to quit the place entirely—and apparently forever—leaving Willy Mann’s Uncle with a freakish alien home that afforded him neither joy nor comfort and, indeed, became a place he was reputed to visit but rarely, though apparently he had made no attempt to sell it.

Here it should be pointed out that of Willy Mann’s Uncle no one knew a thing either—not even his name. He was as mysterious as that departed female we referred to, not without a certain measure of awe and reverence, as Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman. Though we frequented his house weekend after alcohol-soaked weekend, no one of our acquaintance had ever laid eyes on him. Willy Mann himself we did know as a peripheral athlete, partier, and classmate—fast to laugh and even faster to take up whatever mischief might offer itself to his twinkling eyes and ready smile. Purposefully vague in his answers and apparently viewing the ritual of these parties as a delightful whimsical game, he was of little assistance to those few who bothered asking him about the man whose house they regularly occupied and occasionally trashed. Indeed, Willy Mann lived at that time what must have been a fascinating existence, at once poor and extravagant: electing to act out a meager sort of social role himself, yet flinging open the doors of his uncle’s abandoned house to any and all comers.

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