/yesod

Tag: stairs

  • forearms

    Napping this afternoon on the couch, I dream…

    …we’re sitting at the dining room table, my wife and I.

    I hear someone call “Tom” from the back hallway. I turn to see something there, down at the bottom of the steps — small and pale, almost like a child.

    “Don’t look!” my wife says just as it rushes up towards me…

    …awaken with a gasp, lying on the couch with my arms across on my chest.

    I cannot open my eyes. I cannot breathe. I cannot move.

    Something is holding it’s hands on my forearms, pressing me down.

    My breath hisses out between my bared teeth. Little gasps push out of me. I can hear myself whimpering as I struggle to rise, to open my eyes, to speak the name of my God.

    Panic. I can feel my body shaking with the effort to move, those hands holding me down . . . something over me, drawing the breath out of me in long, hissing strands.

    Finally I manage one word: “Ssssssssasssssstop.”

    Immediately, the pressure on my arms lightens and I sit up and open my eyes.

    Alone in the room.

    Even now, writing this, my shoulders and forearms ache as though I’d been carrying a great weight.

    And I can still hear that hissing whimper in my ears. It sounds a little bit like laughter.

  • 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.”

  • the floating eye

    …and I have no breath to scream as my daughter falls twenty feet to the hard concrete floor, a gasp pressing out of my as I run to pick up her tiny, limp body.

    “Oh god, her eyes…”

    I turn away hiding her face from my wife so she cannot see how our daughter’s right eye has become detached and is floating freely between one socket and then other as she tilts her head, a dreamy smile on her face.

    It is horrible to see. It is my fault.

    So horrible that, later that day, I decline to tell my wife the particulars of my dream. I want to spare her the horrors of that image, the drifting float of our child’s eye.

  • 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.

  • the shadow on the stairs

    Dozing on the couch while the baby has her bath, I dream…

    …and at the turn of the stairs I look up to see a shadow slowly slide down the wall and onto the floor, like a black puddle of oil.

    From this pool, a figure slowly rises — an almost cartoonlike shape of a man, pale eyes like saucers peering out at me.

    It drifts slowly down the stairs, halfway emerging from the shadow on the floor . . . drifting towards me.

    I run down the stairs and through the darkened living room, falling on the floor — my arms and legs suddenly heavy — immobilized.

    I watch, helpless, as the shadow drifts down the stairs.

    And I struggle to free myself when…