Inside the house, people are starting to panic. The sky outside is dark and green, the wind bending the trees to almost impossible angles. We can hear the sirens and, in a house this old, there is no safe place . . . every room has windows, the elderly frame flexes and creaks in the wind just like the trees outside.
Women huddle with their children, people cover in corners and try to stay out of the way as pictures fall from walls, little knickknacks shatter to the floor.
I can feel a pressure in the house, a suction that ebbs and flows as the storm overhead rages on. I move from room to room, peeking out of windows as I pass, making sure they stay open so that the suction won’t blow them out completely.
Through one window, I watch as a massive trees outside comes down. The entire house shudders under the weight of it. People are screaming now.
I look up to the mass of gray swirling in the sky, like ink in milk . . . funnel clouds dance around each other, like strands of barbed wire twisted together. I count five of them, shouting out to the people to take cover. The funnels move in.
I head into another room and suddenly the house is vibrating, a low hum that slowly builds to unbelievable intensity. I can feel it in my eardrums, in my molars, in my gut.
People are praying, people are crying.
Looking back on it now, I am surprised I did not think of the gods.
The ceiling of the room I am in begins to peel away, I move quickly to the other side of the house . . . Just in time to see something so odd, my eyes have trouble making sense of it at first.
It is a rubble in the suddenly still air of the room, a wavering column of distortion that runs from floor to ceiling, as wide as a refrigerator and spinning. It moves across and through the opposite wall without leaving a trace of its passing.
Then all is quiet once more — save for the sobs and cries from the other rooms.
Later…
The specific circumstances of it escape me now, but at some point I am helping out with a local theatre company in town. One of the actors has an old van that we need to pick up to haul props. I volunteer to go over to their house and collect it.
They live in a seedy part of town, their house is a hoarder’s nightmare. Out back in the tall weed a is a rusty van, engine idling.
I go to see if they’re inside, ready to go . . . only to find that while they are inside, they’ve already gone.
Her face is bloated, her lank gray hair matted to her skull with sweat and vomit. There’s no way of telling how long she’s been this way.
Repulsed, I back away.
And later still…
“I need to talk to you,” my son tells me. I nod and suggest we go out back where it is quieter and the people at the party won’t bother us.
Why we are having the cast party in the dead woman’s house, I don’t know. It didn’t seem odd at the time, but I have a vague recollection of being worried that she might be discovered back there and somehow spoil things for everyone.
On the rickety back porch, I see the van in the weeds — the engine has long since run out of gas — and I suddenly remember that I never called the police.
My son is already down the steps, trying the side door of the van. I call to him to leave it be but he is curious. Something dark and vile has pooled at one corner in the grass below, running from the door frame like a faucet accidentally left on.
He opens the door and I hear his disgust. He starts to move the body, to try and get her out but she’s become a liquid, gelatinous mess. I tell him to leave things as they are, otherwise the police might suspect him of trying to cover something up.
He runs inside to call 911.
Standing there in the dead grass, I turn my head to look down the broad alley at the back of the house. A few yards down there is a splintered wooden fence, leaning to one side. A large dead tree bends low over it, the skeletal boughs hanging over the alley.
Caught in the boughs is the body of a small child.
And just before I wake…
My wife and I are walking through the house, we cannot believe that we are so lucky to have a place of our own at last. In the attic room we find an old leather sofa that the previous owners have left behind. I flop down on it in exhaustion. Under my hand, the dull surface gleams as I wipe the dust away.
My wife stands at the gable window and looks out onto the street below. She turns and raises her blouse over her head, tosses it aside. Her jeans and panties follow. By the time she gets to me, I am ready for her.
She straddles me and we begin to move, the old sofa creaking under us.
Somewhere down below in the house, we hear a door slam. A woman calls out, we hear the voices of children, little feet running up the stairs…
In the upstairs bathroom, I stand and wait for my youngest daughter to finish.
…and as I walk back into my office, I see — or I think I see — a man standing to one side and looking through my filing cabinet.
