/yesod

Category: ghosts

  • the short

    We’re in the back bedroom, my wife and I. Fucking.

    It’s hard sometimes to find the time, the moment. Children, work, day-to-day life — these things conspire and distract and exhaust.

    But we find the time, when we can. We find the moments, synchronized, together. And it is good. Perhaps it is too brief, too short. But we know each other so well now.

    Like tonight. Together in the bed in the back bedroom — my absent son’s bedroom converted to a guest room for the time being.

    The room sits in the relationship corner of our home, according to my understanding of feng shui. So, I suppose, it’s good that we don’t leave it empty. It’s good we fill it, from time to time, with each other.

    As we fuck, the window rattles — the expected ice storm has arrived.

    Reaching the end, of our short time — doing my best to hold out as long as I can, to stretch the moment and the movement as long as possible — I look up at my wife’s beautiful face shrouded in shadow. A moment later there is a flash of light and she laughs, suddenly visible.

    The bedside lamp has turned on by itself.

    It flickers, then goes dark.

    This happens, more or less, five or six times before we’re finished.

    It almost seems to be an accompaniment to my wife’s final burst of lovemaking, a response to her rising and falling.

    After she heads to the shower, I inspect the lamp. I try to find a reason for the erratic interruption. Nothing I do will replicate the odd flashing.

    I unplug it, just in case there is a short.

    For the rest of the evening, even now, I’m fighting the feeling that someone is just behind me — quiet, waiting.

    Outside, the ice storm seems to have passed. It is cold. My hair is on end. I do not know if I will sleep tonight.

  • little girls

    Reported by my wife:

    A few days ago she and our daughter were in the back stairwell, getting ready to go for a walk. Once she got our daughter into her shoes, my wife sat down to put her own on. While she was doing this, our daughter went down the three steps to the back door.

    My wife could hear her down there.

    “Who are you talking to, honey?”

    “I’m talking to the little girl,” came the reply.

    “What little girl?”

    “The one right here.”

    A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, my wife asked “What does the little girl look like?”

    “She looks like a sheet.”

  • ragged

    Sitting on the toilet in the back bathroom, I hear a sound at the door — as through someone pressed against it from the outside, maybe one of the cats?

    But the door has nearly an inch gap at the bottom. I can see nothing outside.

    A few minutes later I am jolted into a panic by the sight of something coming quickly towards me — it is as if it passed through the door.

    It is white and ragged, trailing fluttering strips of cloth. I have an impression of gray hair, a wrinkled face . . . an old woman who vanishes just before she reaches me.

    I am startled. I am scared. My hair is standing on end. The akin on my arms feels prickled and tight, almost sunburnt.

    This was not a vague impression or an easily explained corner-of-the-eye episode. I saw something.

  • whisper

    As I come into the front room of our house, I hear man’s voice whisper something — a single phrase, very distinct but unintelligible.

    Cleaning up in the back bathroom, I hear voices pitched in an argument — just a few lines back and forth — again, distinctly audible but no words can be made out.

  • footsteps again, of course

    Standing in the kitchen, I hear the sound of someone coming down the back stairs — slow, cautious . . . almost stealthy.

    But when I go to check, of course, no one is there.

    It takes a few minutes for the hair on my arms to lay back down again. My skin is electric, almost burning.

  • gentleman caller

    …and while my daughter plays in the tub, there’s a sudden wave of men’s cologne — acrid and sour — that passes over me. My throat closes, I am overcome with a coughing fit.

    Inexplicable. My wife does not wear perfume. I do not wear cologne.

    It lingers for a number of minutes there in the bathroom before slowly dissipating.

  • early morning

    Woken by my daughter early this morning, unable to get back to sleep so I head downstairs to sit in the predawn dark, looking up from my book from time to time as little beads of shadow stream across the floor like dark mercury.

    An hour or so later, I hear footfalls overhead.

    They move through the laundry room to the back stairs. But they do not descend.

    Later that morning, I ask my wife if she got up earlier. She did not.

  • laundry room

    20130728-171418.jpgAs I came into the laundry room this morning, a shadow moved in the dim light from right to left — coming from the hallway and passing through the closed and locked door at the top of the back stairs.

    The shadow was large, as wide as a refrigerator though not as tall. It has a solid mass to it, depth even.

    I did not at any point feel afraid.

    This is just another episode in a growing list of sightings here in The Last House — shadows mostly, sometimes dark and sometimes pale, moving up and down those back stairs.

  • doing the dishes

    …and as I turn to put a glass in the cupboard I startle and flinch backwards from the dark figure standing right at my left shoulder.

    Vague impressions . . . someone looking into my face . . . a male presence about my height but larger, heavy-set almost . . . broad head, the bare suggestion of something there . . . a hat, perhaps?

    And then it is gone.

  • footsteps and flashes

    After dinner, my wife runs to the store. My daughter and I play in my office.

    The whole time, my skin is crawling. I have a sense that someone — or multiple someones — is passing through my office, moving past us unseen.

    The sensation is uncanny, disquieting. My daughter seems not to notice.

    When my wife returns, I make no mention of it.

    As we’re getting our daughter ready for bath time, my wife heads upstairs for a towel.

    She comes back into the room a minute later, unsettled. “I just saw a light move across the stairs.”

    It was a white light, smallish. She saw it briefly. But she saw it.

    We nod, matter of fact. Just another thing to add to the growing list of things we’ve noticed in the new house.

    Later that night…

    I’m finishing up a few things in my office, getting ready to head up to bed. I hear footsteps on the back stairs. They stop for a moment, then continue down.

    I go out to look, assuming my wife came down to get some water.

    She isn’t there.

    I go back in my office. A few moments later, the footsteps again. This time on the front stairs.

    I open both doors of my office, looking to the front and back of the house.

    No one.

    It’s worth noting that there is no odd feeling, no crawling skin or discomfort or fear.

    No sense that anything is wrong.