Though it’s harder to do when preoccupied by the demands of driving, I find myself entering a sort of “temporal empathy” whenever I pass a particularly striking or otherwise interesting old house, observing and sometimes even stepping into the lives of people who might once have lived in them. Perhaps a quaint farmhouse with a well-worn path to the woodshed, and a barn where a girl might’ve found her overalls taken to the floor and been thoroughly spanked in full view of the cows she was indifferently milking. Maybe an otherwise innocuous cottage in the woods, where an adult child lived with her parents, still subject to their discipline and other limitations of an enforced childhood. Then there are the rare houses which sit as if waiting, ominously, shedding time like falling rain. Until the day when the floorboards on the porch suddenly fall away, dropping an unsuspecting young salesgirl into a dungeon, like Alice down a *different* sort of rabbit hole, where she’s stripped, bound, and driven to near insanity by undreamt-of carnal sensations inflicted by an unseen but irresistible presence.

I used to pass through a picturesque town in South Carolina, which was filled with both stately and relatively modest Victorian-style homes on oak-shaded lanes; every one a story in itself. Sadly, the place has since been eviscerated by an Interstate, but the memories of the houses I saw – and what might gone on inside over the decades – remain.