/yesod

Tag: bedroom

  • “She won’t rest.”

    My daughter is almost nine but we still use a monitor so that we can hear her if she wakes up in the middle of the night.

    My wife has gone to bed and I am up late, doing some work I brought home from the office.

    The monitor crackles and my daughter calls for me.

    When I head upstairs, she is already out of bed, standing there in the semi-dark.

    “What are you doing? Are you okay?”

    She looks at me, eyes clear but confused. “She had to… she wasn’t…”

    I try to lead her back to bed but she stays there, looking around the room.

    “A lady was… she had to get up, her daughter… She won’t rest. She won’t rest.”

    I help her back into bed, make sure she’s settled, and head back downstairs.

  • alarm

    Last night at 3AM the alarm clock on my wife’s nightstand went off, without any cause or reason.

    My wife never uses the clock for anything other than to tell time. It’s been sitting there for years. No one had been in our room, no one had any reason to fiddle with it or set an alarm… but it went off in the middle of the night.

    All by itself.

  • not a cat, not a dog

    This evening as I was taking my daughter upstairs to bed, she froze outside her open bedroom door.

    “What’s wrong?”

    Staring into her room, she said “I just saw a cat or a dog or something on my bed. It looked up at me and then slid under the covers.”

    I turned the lights on and we went in. Of course there was nothing there.

  • morse

    We awake to a burst of static from the baby monitor. This is not uncommon. It seems like almost anything can set it off, if we don’t put the damn thing in just the right spot.

    I reach over and shift the monitor on the nightstand, hoping to move it out of whatever signal is causing the disruption. The noise subsides and I lay back.

    The room is dark. I run through the usual late-night fears and paranoia in my head: Home invasion, ghosts, something worse than either of those…

    It occurs to me that the static had structure, a vaguely familiar rhythm.

    Not musical. Not a heartbeat. I can’t quite place it.

    I’m just about asleep when it screeches again.

    That rhythm. I recognize it now.

    Three short bursts. Three long bursts. Three short bursts.

    I grab the monitor and head downstairs. I won’t be sleeping anymore tonight.

     

  • a fall

    When I get home after work, my youngest daughter meets me at the door. I’m late and phoned ahead to say they should start dinner without me.

    A plate of half-eaten food waits at my wife’s place at the same able. But she is nowhere to be seen.

    “Mama went upstairs,” our daughter tells me.

    After a few minutes, my wife comes downstairs. She takes me aside.

    “Just before you came home, there was this huge crash from upstairs. But it wasn’t like the knocking from before. It was like someone just dumped an armful of books onto the floor right overhead. And it was fucking loud. ”

    She is rattled, just a bit. I wait for her to go on.

    “I went up and Vincent” — that’s one of our cats — “Was sitting on our bed, frozen. His eyes were fucking huge.”

    She couldn’t find anything out of place in our room, nothing to explain the noise.

    I go up to check and, yeah, there’s nothing.

    Later, she notices that a framed photo on a high shelf behind our bed is laying flat on its face.

    It’s a photo of the two of us.

  • hard knocks

    My daughter an I are in my office when my wife calls from the TV room. I hear her but it doesn’t register until she calls again, a rising note of alarm in her voice.

    “What’s wrong?”

    She is pale, intense. I can’t tell if she’s angry or something else.

    “I just heard…”

    She stops, starts again.

    “Someone just knocked on the ceiling in the family room.”

    She looks at me, eyes wide. “It was like this: Bang bang bang… Bang bang… Bang bang bang. It was someone knocking on the floor of our room. Fucking loud.”

    I head upstairs. One of the cats is sitting on our bed. He starts when I come into the room, but he doesn’t move.

    There’s a little alcove off of our bedroom, directly above the TV room on the ground floor. My wife has an antique desk and vanity in the alcove. There are photos and mementos on the window sill. A large green crystal hangs from the archway leading into the alcove.

    Even still, I have never liked that part of the room. It unsettles me, open like that. When I come to bed each night, I have to resist giving any of my imagination to the mental image of who or what might be standing there waiting in the dark.

    While the cat watches, I look around. There’s nothing on the floor, nothing fell.

    Nothing to explain the insistent, deliberate knocking my wife heard.

  • a sad girl

    …lying in bed this morning, I woke to the sound of the bedroom door opening.

    I hear my wife slowly close the door behind her. I hear her footsteps on the floorboards, approaching my side of the bed.

    I cannot move, cannot open my eyes.

    I feel a fingertip on my arm, just inside the hinge of my elbow.

    The footsteps move away. I struggle to rise, to grasp the her arm but my hand feels strange, tingling in the air where I reach for her, a moment’s resistance . . . then the woman pulls away and walks into a little alcove on the other side of the room.

    The woman is gone. It was not my wife. It was someone else, someone younger — her hair was longer, darker — and she had long scratches or cuts down her arms. And she was sad.

    I cannot confidently say whether or not this was a dream.

  • echo | the recursive old woman

    Another entry from one of my old journals, this time from 1996.

    It begins simply enough…

    I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms.

    You can read the rest here.

  • again

    The voices again tonight.

    No music this time, no men.

    One or two women, I can’t quite be sure. Possibly a child.

    I told my wife about the voices a few days ago. She could tell tonight that I was hearing them again. And, of course, she cannot.

    We keep a fan going at night, even in cold weather. White noise.

    She suggested I turn it off, just to see if that helped.

    She might be right. I honestly can’t say for sure.

    Maybe it’s a trick of the sound in the room, the combination of the fan and the hiss of the baby monitor.

    With the fan off, we sat there in the dark and waited.

    There. Not as loud, not as much. But there.

    And again.

    “I don’t hear anything,” she told me.

    I apologized, turned the fan back on so she could sleep and came downstairs to wait it out.

    Down here it’s the usual creaks and hums of the house by night. The fridge ticks over from time to time. The radiators gurgle. The cats snore, dozing. The baby monitor sounds a bit like running water.

    And, sometimes, I think I catch a brief murmur underneath it all. Somewhere.

    I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s all just paradoelia.

    But . . . I have a vague memory of something similar when I was a child. This would have been when I was maybe six or seven years old.

    I remember my two older brothers got to stay up later than me, I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair they got to watch Hawaii 5.0 and I didn’t.

    I remember lying there in bed, listening to the pulse of drums and what sounded like singing or chanting –faint and very far away.

    I got up to complain that the TV was too loud.

    My mother told me that the set was off. It was later than i realized, my brothers had gone to bed, She asked me what I heard. When I told her, she gave my father an odd look.

    I would get to know that gesture very well in the coming years — the sidelong glance, lips compressed, a knot of worry in between her eyes.

  • raised voices

    Two or three times now, I have found myself unable to sleep because of the voices.

    It sounds for all the world like two men having an argument somewhere in the house. Sometimes there are women’s voices mixed in. Sometimes there are children.

    I can almost just make out what they’re saying. Almost.

    Sometimes there’s music as well, faintly.

    But I only hear it in our bedroom, only at night.

    It’s… disconcerting. Maddening.

    Irritating.

    Impossible to sleep.

  • home invasion

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated January 6th, 1997]

    I stand in the front window and watch as the car makes its second pass, making myself as visible as possible to the men inside . . . letting them know that there are people home and they’ll have to find someone else to rob.

    On their fourth pass, I make eye contact with the driver and I know then that this is no normal robbery. They want me to see them.

    We stand there, watching the pass and I realize that we’re being diverted.

    Misdirection.

    Someone is already in the house, I know. Someone came in the back — the car had been empty? The car had been full on the first pass, but the last few times, I could see that the men inside were not so cramped; one of them was gone.

    They were already in the house.

    Through the house I go, searching.

    Passing by my room I see that the french doors have been kicked in.

    Someone is in the house.

    In a back room, my teenage daughter’s room, I find them. He is sitting at the piano, holding a gun in her face. She sits on the bed, crying.

    With a broken crystal candlestick, I stab him in the back — just to the left of the spine — before he can turn.

    Push the splintered end deep into him, glancing off the shoulderblade, scraping against the bone.

    He breathes once, heavy, and then dies.

    When the car passes by the window again, I am there — his head in my fist, raising it high, my fingers in his hair.

    I see the eyes widen as they see his glazed, empty gaze.

    I meet the eyes of one in the car as it speeds off — that is the one, I know, who will return for revenge.

    The car drives off into the night and I drop the head, realizing that — for the first time — it is snowing in the Midlands.

    [2013 Addendum: This is a odd one to look at now. In 1997, I did not have a daughter. Now I have two. And, for what it’s worth, my bedroom (four houses and sixteen years later) has French doors. That’s not going to help me get to sleep any easier.)