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This post ended up being way longer than I thought it was going to be, but I'm sorry. I tend to write as I talk, in a kind of stream of consciousness, and there were a few moments where I had to step away for a bit because I was starting to panic at the memory again. Again, sorry for the length! -- My mom blames herself for how skittish I am. She believes that her hobbies during her pregnancy put too much adrenaline in my bloodstream -- and because of that she says I was born afraid. I don't think my mom was allowed very much freedom with her entertainment as a kid, since although both her parents owned motorcycles and loved running them on dunes, they were still West Virginians at heart and incredibly conservative. My mother didn't even own a pair of jeans until she joined the army because my grandpa didn't want her to look homeless or like a factory worker. Anyway, like I said earlier, I'm always afraid. I always behave as if I'm being followed, or watched. Always planning my escape route, sizing up people around me trying to gauge their strength and what their natural reactions to situations would be. I'm very paranoid. Thanks to medication and therapy I can keep a level head and reasonable expectations now, but sometimes I still make those plans. This is very important. I've grown up around murder mysteries and horror movies. I know the Bride of Frankenstein movie poster in our basement more than I know my father. I was never shielded from my mom's love of horror, gore, and the paranormal. She also never made an effort to tell me they were all fake. Even though I know better now, the way I handled the below event is, I believe, due to the fact that although nothing I've seen before this was real, I've still seen some poo poo. Now onto what actually happened. When I was about 3 or 4 years old my grandma and her husband moved into a pretty decent townhouse that was built in the 50s. The neighbors were very friendly, and in fact still live there. Nothing of note actually happened in the house back then and it was a pretty chill place to spend most of my day. I'd sit in the basement on their exercise bike with some celery and peanut butter and watch some Speed Racer until my mom got off work. One night after being picked up I was told to go give Bull (grandma's husband; his name was Bill but when I learned to talk the letter I was hard) a hug. It was a little strange because I usually wasn't told to do that. Things felt “off” around him in a way that I still can't describe. I gave him a hug anyway because I was more afraid of causing a scene than I was of feeling weird, and we headed home. This is a bit of a tangent but I think it's a good example of how react to everything as if it's happened before. That night while I was asleep I had a dream that Bull took me to an aquarium. It had a lot of buildings underneath the tanks so that they were full domes surrounded by fish as you ate, or shopped or whatever. A really pretty place. While we were in one of those buildings the walls started to leak and crack. We were surrounded by sharks that I was pretty sure hadn't been in the tank around us before. The cracks started to spread, and chunks of thick glass began to fall onto the floor allowing water to flood in. The stairs to the outside were still clear, so he pushed me as hard as he could towards them. I didn't want to leave because there was obviously something going wrong and I wanted to try to help. “Go wait outside! I'll be up in a minute!” So I ran outside. That was the last time I ever saw Bull alive. Time passed in the dream as it usually does – quickly and slowly at the same time. I wandered around the park for what felt like hour yelling his name and looking everywhere I could think of for him. I screamed myself hoarse in my desperation. He said he'd catch up, so maybe I just wasn't in the place he wanted to meet up. When I woke up my mom was standing in my bedroom doorway. As I sat up and felt around for my glasses, she calmly told me, “Bull's dead.” I stood up and hugged my mom as tightly as I could but I can't say that I had any reaction. I was sad, of course, since he was one of my favorite people in the world. But I had no physical reaction. I never cried. At his funeral I refused to see him and sat on a bench outside the room listening to the eulogy instead. No one directly told me how he died, so I only learned later while listening to my grandma describe what had happened. Bull liked to sleep in the basement at night because he would set an alarm for 5am to start chores and breakfast, and he wanted to let my grandma sleep without disturbing her. Some time during the night his lungs began to fill with fluid. He drowned, alone on the couch. My grandma found him in the morning when she woke and heard his alarm still going off. By then his lips were blue and he was already gone. Like I said that story was a tangent, but I can't ever talk about him or living here without telling people about Bull. Was that dream a coincidence, or did he really save me from something that night? Now for the real reason I started writing this. After Bull died my grandma waited out the rest of her time at the factory where she worked in order to get a slightly better retirement deal, then she packed up and moved back home to West Virginia. She didn't want or need to sell the house, so she let my mom and I move in for half the cost of actually renting. We lived in the house for at least 5 years with nothing of note really happening. I think a lot of my talking around the issue is that I'm still not entirely comfortable with what happened, and I don't think it's over. But I don't know when she'll be back, and every doorbell or knock at the front door sends my heart racing. A few weeks ago I heard a knock at the door. I stopped 2 stairs from the bottom, using the elevation to look out the window on the door. There was a very grungy looking woman covered in black, brown and grey. I know that sounds like a vague description but her appearance was hard to define at all. It looked like she was wearing rags, and honestly could have blended in perfectly at a homeless shelter. She had a very long, slender jaw ending in a square chin, and hollow cheeks. Her hair was so tangled it looked more like a brown and black lump of steel wool. She's wrong this isn't right she needs to go now go go go go go Her face overwhelmed me with with darkness, even though she was very pale. Everything about her was black. I could see the sun shining on the sidewalk and grass behind her, but none of it touched her. Already I didn't want to answer the door but she saw me through the window. She never looked at me but I know she saw me. So I yelled through the door, “Who is it?” I was still standing on the stairs a few feet away from the door, and hadn't made any move towards opening it. Let me in. Her voice didn't sound like it came through the door – in fact it was a very grainy, hoarse whisper – but I heard it very clearly. Let me in. My mom hates answering the door even more than I do, so I knew she was staying out of sight in the kitchen but still trying to listen in on what we were saying. She hadn't seen the woman at all, and I don't think she heard her voice. The sun chose that moment to hide behind a tree across the street, and our living room lost nearly all of it's ambient light. I probably would have laughed at the “oooo spooky timing” if I hadn't already been wondering if this lady outside was going to stab me or poo poo on our porch. I yelled to my mom, “This woman wants me to let her in!” “Who is it?” My mom's voice was faint from across the house, but as I opened my mouth to repeat the question through the door- Gretel... “Gretel,” I yelled back to my mom. Grains... Grains.” But as the last 's' sound left my lips after saying her last name I heard the locks on the front door click. She still didn't look like she'd moved, but without thinking I threw myself onto the door and held it closed. I honestly couldn't tell you if that did any good. I started screaming at her, “Leave! You're not welcome here!” As I've said before, I've seen some poo poo. My first instinct after hearing a door unlock at the sound of a name is to immediately try to stop that door from opening. And she left. Sleep was very hard to come by over the next few days. I couldn't stop shaking, and every time I heard the mail being dropped off my heart started to race again. I didn't want to walk down my stairs into the living room because I was terrified that I would reach the bottom of the stairs and see her through the window again. I don't I can't don't want to talk about it I don't know how much time passed since most of my time was spent trying to talk myself down. It was a homeless woman. She probably wanted to use the phone or the bathroom. She's probably looking in a YMCA mirror laughing at how she looks pretty scary these days. One afternoon I was on my way back upstairs from the kitchen. As I rounded the corner into the living room and toward the stairs there she was. She looked exactly as she did the last time I saw her, except this time she was in my living room. I was home alone. She was standing between me and the door. This is my house. I was very confused. We've lived here for over 20 years and I've never seen or heard of any previous owners. You owe me for living in my house. I don't think I said anything to her at all. I was frozen with fear and even if someone were home it felt like calling for help wouldn't have mattered. This is my house. Her voice was still a hoarse whisper but clear as a bell. For the first time I saw her move, and it was towards me. I didn't want it why I didn't not This is how you're going to pay me. Every morning you will give me a finger. Chew it off, spit it all out, and give it to me. Put it down the drain. And when you run out of fingers you can start with your other organs. As long as I get paid. Before I could even process what she had just said she was gone. I let out a small laugh because a request like that is completely ridiculous. Chew off a finger every morning? What? It hasn't been very long since I saw her, but I haven't seen her again yet. For those concerned I still have all my fingers, though I do have a bad habit of chewing my thumbs til they bleed. I'd been doing so well at kicking that habit, too. Oh, and one more thing that was kinda weird when we moved in. I didn't know this when my grandma was living here, but after we started sorting through things we found dozens of watches all over the house. They all still worked, surprisingly. It looks like Bull had nailed them to the insides of the walls wherever he could fit them in. He had always been a “just in case” kind of guy, but we've never been able to figure out why there were so many watches in and on the walls. I'm starting to wonder if Bull knew something and never told the rest of us.
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May 12, 2015 00:56
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 01:59 |
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