The Switch House: A Short Novel

by Tim Meyer

  With that, the shadow abated. She heard footsteps as the woman walked down the stoop. Outside noise became distant as she shuffled across the yard, opened her car door, closed it, started the Oldsmobile, and drove off.

  I think you understand my meaning, the old woman had said, and those words calloused Angela's arms and legs in gooseflesh.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, the police arrived. Two officers, younger than she, took her statement. She told them where the woman lived and about the show. They said they were familiar with Switch!; their wives were big fans of previous seasons and they had watched this season's premiere. They told her they'd be real heroes if they Snapchatted a picture to their significant others. She reluctantly obliged, hoping the gracious act would motivate them to take her matter more seriously than they had initially appeared to.

  When asked, “Why do you feel threatened, Mrs. Shepard?” Angela simply shrugged and said, “I don't know. That's just how I feel.”

  She neglected to mention how she felt hexed.

  * * *

  Night fell on Trenton Road and shadows sauntered across the Shepard's bedroom. There was no sex that night. Terry was exhausted from cranking a wrench all day and fell asleep about ten seconds after his cheek landed on the pillow. Angela stirred awake, thinking, revisiting the woman's words, everything she had said. We need to talk. What did she want to talk about? The curse she laid upon their house? God, as if she wasn't dealing with enough problems, now Angela had to deal with a witch and her unjustified vendetta against her and her husband. We need to talk.

  In your dreams, she thought, and then wondered if dreams were safe from witches and dark magic. Could dreams be a place of refuge? A safe haven? A reprieve from evil? Angela didn't think so. Thinking back to her “hallucinations”, which were much like dreams, she thought the witch could get to her from any state of mind—asleep, awake, sober, or intoxicated. The woman's touch knew no boundaries.

  Angela threw off her covers and headed downstairs for a glass of water. For the next half hour, she drank fluids and stared out the back window, across the muddy expanse that made up the backyard. She wondered when Terry would level the dirt and plant seed. She was tired of seeing their once Irish-green lawn dead and impoverished. Even though she hadn't stepped foot out there since [we do not speak his name] was alive, the plot was still an eyesore and, in all likelihood, degraded the selling value of the property. Maybe that was what held them back. Not the tragedy, but the unruly condition of the sizable backyard. She thought she'd make the chore a priority this weekend, to motivate Terry and get it done. If they could afford to pay someone, she would have taken care of it the second the cops were finished rooting around back there, concluding their lengthy investigation. She was sure Terry would start it now, especially if she asked in a certain, flirty way; after all, he was in love with her again.

  Angela made her way past the table with the flowers, up the stairs, and toward the bedroom. From the end of the hall, she spotted a blue light glowing underneath the door. She hadn't remembered falling asleep with the television on. It was rare Terry awoke in the middle of the night—he slept like a drunken bear, as well as often waking like one—and she couldn't recall a time in their twelve years of marriage when he had woken up and turned on the tube.

  Strange, she thought; although, considering what she'd witnessed over the past week, a television turning itself on could hardly be considered peculiar.

  She approached the bedroom door and gripped the brass knob. Her hand immediately bounced off the hardware as if some magical spell were placed to repel her touch. All at once, a rush of pain filled her palm, and she looked down to see several layers of her skin had melted away like excessively microwaved cheese. The burning sensation crawled throughout her entire hand and climbed up her arm. Shaking her palm wildly, she screamed out as the white-hot pain cranked up the intensity.

  “Fuck! Goddammit, fuck!”

  She blew on her disfigured palm, but the wind did little to temper the burn.

  “Terry?” she shouted at the door.

  The house responded, pushing open the bedroom door. She recoiled, shrinking back into the shadows of the hall. Blue light escaped the room and spilled across the carpet. Quick pulses of white flickered from inside the bedroom like lightning streaking behind clusters of midnight-gray clouds. An awful burning stench carried its way from the room to her nose. The malodor was enough to trigger her gag reflex. She almost lost her dinner on her way back to the door.

  “Terry...” she said, approaching the bedroom slowly, as if the floorboards might give out beneath her. “Terry, talk to me.”

  Her husband didn't respond. The night kept quiet save for the distant chirp of chatty crickets. As she got closer to the doorway, she heard a noise sounding a lot like displaced air, whispers of an invisible something moving across the room. Her brain immediately likened the sound to a baseball bat swinging through a fastball, the sound of lumber making contact with nothing but the still atmosphere. The noise grew louder as she crept closer.

  “Terry?” she asked the blazing blue light again, this time in a voice barely above a whisper. She touched the door with her fingertips and forced it inward, being careful not to linger; her ruined palm reminded her to be quick.

  The door gave way to a confusing scene. The room was hardly the same one she'd left to go fetch a glass of water. It was drenched in neon blue light and nothing else. Her bed, her dresser, the nightstand, and the small forty-inch television were all gone, replaced by a soft, tumbling mist that filled the room. Dreamily, Angela drifted into the room, letting the coils of fog roll over her. The roiling clouds curled and twisted around her body like an anaconda.

  Then, as if coming from another room in the house, someone screamed. Angela's heart momentarily stopped, her breath catching in her throat. She tried calling out for her husband but she was voiceless. The realization that this was not a dream stole her words away. Terry cried out again, this one louder than the last. Angela felt tears trickling down her cheeks. Her veins were rivers of ice. Bumps broke out across her flesh as a haunting tickle danced on her nape. She turned to the door but it was shut now, the handle glowing molten red, the button in the center pushed to indicate someone had locked her in.

  Someone. Something.

  Some unseen thing.

  Whatever the presence was, it waited in there with her. And it didn't want her to leave.

  From somewhere off in the distance, Terry screamed again. The inarticulate call for help seemed several houses away.

  How was this possible? She'd gone downstairs fifteen minutes ago. How could this happen so quickly?

  She was hallucinating again. There was no other explanation for the cobalt scenery, at least nothing logical. She needed to ride this waking nightmare out until Terry came to her rescue and towed her out, lugged her back to reality.

  But that scream.

  His scream.

  It sounded so real.

  And so far away.

  She had no choice. Moving into the mist, drifting along with the tumbling waves of fog, she concentrated on the invisible course she had set, toward the bed. The bathroom door was next to it, and she figured, if she could reach the threshold safely, she could crawl out the window, onto the roof, and figure out what to do next once she got there.

  Deeper into the cerulean mist, she traveled. A few steps in, she glanced back over her shoulder and saw the door was gone, enveloped in tufts of foggy barricades. A part of her, the rational half, the part which hadn't lost itself in her own delusions, realized this couldn't be real. That this wasn't a hallucination; it was a living nightmare. That she was currently in bed, her overactive imagination dealing her a doozy of a dream. She convinced herself she'd fallen asleep and soon she'd wake to her little slice of American Pie, next to her loving husband who'd shower her with hugs and kisses and morning cuddles. But then she peered down at the fleshy ruin that was her palm and her mind suddenly went to dark places
, allowing the other part of her—the sinister half—to speculate. This part of her persuaded her to believe she lived in a bewitched house, that this was a product of the woman who had lived here for two months, hexing the place, spreading her witchcraft throughout every room, casting spells on every material thing she owned. She directed her attention back to the blanket of blue fog before her, the direction of the path to the bathroom, and raced toward the threshold.

  What should have been a three-second march turned into a thirty-second hike, and she was no closer to the bathroom than she had been half a minute ago. There were no doors ahead—just an endless stretch of turbulent brume.

  Impossible.

  But was it? Was it any more impossible than peering through a hole in her bathroom wall and witnessing a tiny pirate ship suffer destruction under the beastly force of an enormous Kraken? Or being the only person on the planet tuning into Let's Switch Houses! that saw the old woman conducting some sort of sinister séance in her living room? What about the dream she'd experienced? The one where her house sat in the middle of a place known only to her as The Everywhere, though, she had no clue how or why she knew it was called that. That was when dreams were just dreams and they were allowed to be nonsense. Now she had different opinions on dreams and how they should behave.

  She longed for the days when dreams were just dreams and not horrible realities.

  Ignoring her thoughts and the hopelessness they tacked on her shoulders, she surged ahead, pushing her way through the mist. The acrid stench that had made her want to revisit her dinner grew bolder. The sound of air whooshing past her ear became distinct, louder. Almost inside her ear. Like a ball pitched at her head, missing by mere inches.

  A shadow materialized in the mist. A figure. A man or a woman, she couldn't tell which. Whoever (whatever) it was acted as if they were dancing, frolicking in the blue haze overlaying the bedroom.

  If this is still my bedroom, she thought irrationally. She couldn't shake the feeling that her body and mind were somewhere else now, lost in a place between places.

  (The Everywhere)

  (Ma-me)

  The figure bumped into her, knocking her back a few feet. Upon closer inspection, she realized the phantom-like being was a man, and he was naked, his body taking on the same hue as the rest of the room, that cobalt glow. His back faced her and his arms were moving as if entwined in some Egyptian boogie, mimicking the flow of octopus tentacles waving through the depths of the ocean. His limbs moved awkwardly as if he were double or triple-jointed. The unsettling fluidity of his movements made her instantly nauseous, and she felt stomach bile burn her throat upon its ascent.

  Then, the figure turned and faced her.

  Her heart hammered, slamming against her chest cage.

  Both of the figure's eyes and mouth were sewn shut, black wire laced up over them, the healing wounds oozing with infection. The man whimpered, or maybe laughed—Angela couldn't tell which—and then disappeared as rolls of fog draped over him. She watched his shadow dance into nothingness.

  Angela shrieked, but her voice received no echo, no play anywhere except the few feet in front of her mouth. The dense mist smothered her sound, absorbing the echo of her shrill outburst.

  Another figure appeared; this one female. She was also naked, walking slowly as if she'd died and reanimated. Exiting the mist, the unclothed woman entered a small clearing about three feet from Angela. Her mouth and eyes were also wired shut. Dribbles of blood ran from the incisions, leaking down her cheeks and the sides of her face. She stumbled past Angela, paying no attention to anything except whatever she was striding toward. Angela kept completely still and clapped her hand over her mouth, careful not to utter a single noise.

  Where am I? she thought as thick loops of fog swallowed up the woman's shadow. What is this place? It certainly wasn't home and certainly wasn't Red River, New Jersey. Once, when she was about nine, she'd gotten lost, turned around, in the woods near her parents' home. Every path looked the same, every tree. It had taken her hours to wander her way out. The dread of becoming lost, coupled with the plausible possibility she'd never be found, was a unique experience, one she thought she'd never feel again. But now, in the place that wasn't her bedroom and likely wasn't anywhere, that odd sense of being misplaced nestled against her bones once again.

  She continued on, mindful of the shadows forming at the edge of obscurity. A few more naked shufflers scurried past, some more grotesque than others. Some of the walking corpses wore zippers on their flesh, the kind found on puffy snow jackets. One gentleman cruised by, opening the zipper across his stomach as he passed Angela, letting everything inside tumble out onto the floor. To Angela, the spilled contents looked like a heap of uncooked meats mixed with a few jars of chunky tomato sauce. She avoided contact by simply dodging past, preventing her curious eyes from wandering. The man didn't follow her but his head spun in her direction as she skipped by. She felt his eyes—not that he had any—on the back of her neck until she had made it far enough into the mist to where she felt safe.

  She walked for ten minutes. More of the shambling dead came and went; each one eager to show her things that brought forth disgust and bouts of nausea, things she couldn't possibly conjure on her own. A man walked by with a hacksaw blade halfway buried in his throat, and he was hellbent on working the fine-toothed metal all the way through, streams of blood pouring from the ragged slice. A woman plucked her own fingernails off with her teeth, laughing hysterically as each one tore free. Two children were dragging a toy behind them, tugging on a piece of rope, only it took a moment for Angela to notice the toy was an adult (possibly a parent) and the long rope was the man's intestines. They skipped happily off into the mist, reciting some nursery rhyme in a language foreign to Angela's ears.

  She tried to close her eyes and blind herself to all these horrible events, but found she had zero control over that part of her face. Some unnamed force had pinned her eyelids open, compelling her to engage in the horrors before her.

  It's a dream, she thought. This is one majorly fucked-up nightmare and soon you'll wake and this bullshit will all be over.

  But the flitting horrors didn't feel like a dream, not entirely. They appeared as real as anything she'd ever experienced.

  She heard her husband scream, again. Closer this time. Real close. As if he were only ten yards away.

  The haze grew thicker, devouring the last remaining shred of clarity. Flashes of lightning, those bright blinding bursts, quickened their pace, narrowing the downtime between appearances. The smell, those nose-wrenching fumes, intensified.

  Through the swirling haze, she made out another figure, a man lacking a single garment. The room's newest victim was stretched, each of his four limbs pulled taut as if about to be quartered.

  The man was her husband.

  “Terry!” she shouted, rushing ahead without caution.

  Her husband tried to respond, but no words made it past his sewn lips. He'd been stripped naked and all of his body hair—including what little remained on the top of his head—had been shaved. She glanced down at his genitals to find them gone, replaced by an open, bleeding cavity that supplied the ground with steady droplets of dark crimson.

  She screamed in horror.

  Terry screamed, too. Although his eyes were glued shut, tears still leaked through, basking his face in a heavily glistening sheen. He tried to move, squirm free, but his wrists and ankles were bound by barbed wire.

  She approached him slowly, her vision blurry from the gush of tears flooding her eyes.

  The closer she got, the tighter the wire twisted around his flesh. The more he screamed. The more the lightning flashed and the more turbulent the room of clouds grew.

  She stopped. Dropped to her knees.

  “Terry?” she asked, throwing her head in her hands. “What is happening to us? What is this place?”

  He shouted, but his sewn mouth trapped the words and only produced nonsense. She didn't understand a single
syllable. She cried some more, and he screamed some more.

  Without warning, the black wire attached to his limbs snapped, pulling Terry apart. Each of his appendages tore free from his body and disappeared somewhere into the surrounding realm, leaving crimson torrents in its wake. Blood exploded from the fresh scarlet pits like a city fire hydrant in the dead heat of summer.

  Wet crimson splashed across her face. Its warmth coated her flesh, and the sickening sensation caused her to vomit and urinate simultaneously. She screamed and screamed, and screamed some more, until—

  * * *

  When she removed her hands from her face, the bright early morning greeted her with open, loving arms. A square of light coming in through the kitchen window nearly blinded her. Birds chirped right outside the window, perhaps while removing pine needles and leaves from the gutter to build their late-season nests. She checked the immediate area for evidence of what she'd witnessed, but there wasn't any—no Terry, no puddles of blood, no blue light, no active fog, nothing of the sort. Her knees felt wobbly as she pushed to her feet. When she walked, the tile floor of the kitchen shifted beneath her. She used the counter to guide herself to the other side of the room, where she lingered in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

  How did I get here?

  The last thing she remembered was wandering aimlessly in the blue fog blanketing her bedroom; now, she found herself in the kitchen, basking in the early morning sunlight. She checked her palm, the one seared by the ultra-hot doorknob. It appeared fine, her hand clean and unmarked, the skin perfect and smooth, zero evidence of her terrible ordeal ever having happened.

  Holy shit, what the hell is happening to me? Angela thought as the room spun in all different directions. She felt ill. Really ill. She forgot about the floor and its shiftiness, and rushed across the kitchen toward the sink. She arrived just in time; remnants of what she had eaten the night before came back up and layered the bottom of the sink.