A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home

by Jason Arnopp

  Dear friend,

  This is no chain letter, hoax or prank.

  It is a sincere warning about your home and the entity which dwells within.

  Your home has been haunted for quite some time.

  I am sorry that I could not personally deliver this document. I did not even post it myself. The postmark on the envelope will not help you, should you ever attempt to locate me. When this letter is complete, I shall entrust a friend in another country with repackaging and sending it on my behalf. This letter also may or may not have been translated from its original language.

  You do not know me. You must never know me.

  Neither do I know you, beyond your name, address and appearance. I have seen you in person but you have not seen me.

  Think back to the day that you moved into your home. I contrived to pass by as you stood outside. I saw your face, but you did not so much as glance my way. I did not stop moving: I simply committed your face to memory and departed before you became aware of my presence.

  Why did I want to see you?

  I suppose my conscience drove me to it. Just as it compels me to finally write this letter.

  I wanted to see exactly who I was passing the entity on to.

  Chances are, you already know this thing only too well. I may be preaching to the converted, in which case I hope you will at least draw comfort from the fact that my partner (who I shall refer to as Tom, although he may or may not be male) and I once knew your misery.

  The entity exists within your home. You may not be aware of this yet and I suppose you may not thank me for informing you. But please trust me: it is present.

  You see, Tom and I lived at your address in the years prior to your arrival.

  I feel for you, my friend, because I am partly responsible for your situation. You are stuck with this apparition. I am afraid I cannot tell you how to free yourself. I can only pass on certain warnings and ideas for coping, to keep matters somewhat under control.

  Tom and I were happy enough when we moved in. The location was fine for our purposes. I will not disclose our professions, but we worked in very different sectors. Everything seemed to be going our way. We had been together for seven years. We had each other. We had our health.

  You only tend to appreciate such things when they are gone.

  I was pleased with most aspects of our new home. The kitchen sink could be difficult at times, as you may also have discovered, but what really bothered me was sleep. I had always been a sound sleeper: I never even had cause to think about it. So after a year of residence there, I was surprised when my nocturnal patterns took a turn for the worse.

  I would wake in fits and starts throughout the night. I was no longer getting the deep sleep, the ‘REM sleep’.

  In the dead of night I would stir, blink and wonder why I was suddenly conscious. Sometimes Tom would already be awake and we’d peer at each other, bleary and confused.

  Often as I was drifting off to sleep, I would snap awake, my whole body jolting. Other times I would feel paralysed while asleep and had to struggle to wake myself back up. I was drowning, breathless, lost in the pitch-black fathoms of the night.

  Since Tom shared my symptoms, I was reassured. Selfish I know, but truthful.

  We tried turning the mattress over. We tried new pillows. A new duvet. Nothing changed the apparent fact that we had lost the ability to sleep well.

  I am sure much of this will sound familiar to you. If not, then believe me it will.

  Two years after moving in, Tom and I were far more fatigued than we should have been, even given how hard we worked. Some mornings we would feel as though we had not slept at all, suffering headaches and barely able to peel open our eyes.

  Tom would always call it “the unfair hangover”, since we drank moderately. Or at least, we did when this all began. Later on, I would often drink heavily just to help myself through the night.

  I am already surprising myself by giving you more detailed information than I had intended.

  When I began this letter, I wanted to outline your situation briefly and bluntly. I wanted to offer you some useful advice and get out of here. Yet writing this document is a potent source of catharsis for me. Maybe I will give you a full account of our experience. I have time on my hands and here, in my part of the world, the day is young.

  So. Those unfair hangovers became a daily occurrence. We learned to keep painkillers on bedside tables. When we awoke feeling like death, knowing we’d have to deal with the latest heavy schedules at work, strong coffee became our saviour. If I could, I would have eaten those beans raw.

  My lack of sleep lent everything an unreal tinge and a sluggish inertia.

  I seized upon a self-diagnosis of carbon monoxide poisoning, but subsequent, hastily-arranged professional tests led to nothing. I installed a carbon monoxide detector by the fridge, which continued to produce negative results.

  Cracks began to show. Tom and I both made silly mistakes at work. In my line of work in particular, this was unacceptable. It would cause major problems and put other people’s lives at risk.

  One night before bed, I found myself staring into the bathroom mirror, surrounded by darkness. Virtually in a state of fugue, I barely realised what I was doing.

  I peered into my own reflected eyes, vaguely wondering when Tom and I might grab a decent night’s sleep like everyone else in the world.

  In a flash, those mirrored eyes transformed. They became blank with a grim-blue tinge, staring right back at me.

  I recoiled, afraid to meet that unearthly gaze again. Gripping the sink, I struggled to calm my breathing.

  When I finally dared to look back into the glass, my eyes had returned to normal. I blinked. And when those reflected eyes followed suit, I sagged with relief.

  It struck me just how dog-tired I was. I was seeing things which were plainly not there.

  As I lay beside Tom, I silently debated telling him about the mirror. I chose not to.

  A few nights later, I heard him yell something in the bathroom. Dashing through, I found my partner with his hands over his face and his back to the mirror. This strong, reined-in guy was actually crying, which disturbed me. Exhaustion had rendered us overwrought and forced our emotions to the surface.

  Coaxing his hands away from his face, I gently encouraged him to open his wet eyes, but he would not.

  “They changed,” he said, gently sobbing as we embraced. “My eyes.”

  I hated the thought of him feeling alone. “Mine did too. They became... blank, right?”

  Beneath Tom’s shaken astonishment, lay a thick seam of relief.

  “We’re just tired,” I said. “That’s all it is.”

  We practically collapsed onto the mattress and drifted off into sweet, precious sleep. Sadly, Tom and I now did little else on that bed.

  The next thing I knew, maybe two hours later, there came a gurgling, choking sound.

  A bizarre, grating rasp.

  I jerked awake with a start. As usual, I didn’t know why.

  Threads of moonlight illuminated great strips of the room. Everything was so very silent, as though we were in a vacuum.

  There was a strange, heavy feeling in the air.

  Wondering why I felt so apprehensive, I studied the room cautiously.

  Then I saw it.

  The small, dark figure.

  Little more than a silhouette.

  The silhouette of what resembled a small child, perched on the foot of the bed with its back to me.

  My whole body seized up, the bed sheets bunched tightly in my hands.

  As if sensing my gaze upon it, the figure drop
ped smoothly, soundlessly towards the floor, out of sight.

  I stared down the bed’s length at the spot where the figure had been.

  Had it really been there, or was it a shadow, a trick of the light? Was I dreaming?

  I wondered what the hell to do.

  Mindful not to wake Tom, I shrugged the covers aside gently and grabbed a torch from under the bedside table. Being the careful type I always kept one there, wherever I was in the world.

  As my bare feet touched the floor (which was carpeted in those days – you or an agent may since have had this removed), I shivered, expecting something to grab me. When nothing did, I rose to my feet.

  I crept around to the foot of the bed and examined the area where I’d seen that figure. Even shone the torch on it. I surveyed the floor and everywhere else I could think of.

  I found nothing. I had no idea of what I was even looking for. But in the pit of my stomach, the disturbance was unquestionable.

  Had I witnessed the supernatural?

  No. That ‘thing’ at the end of the bed had been an illusion, made all the more tangible by my feeble state of mind. No sense in adding to my problems.

  Over some much-needed coffee, a friend suggested that Tom or I might be snoring. We hadn’t considered this possibility as neither of us had ever experienced the issue. Like Tom, I kept myself trim enough and it seemed to me that excess body weight was a primary cause of snoring.

  Research, however, quickly brought me the facts: snoring could be borne of several factors, including smoking (which neither of us did), sleeping position and allergy.

  I decided to run a test. My God, how I wanted snoring to be the answer. This nightly problem threatened to wreck our livelihoods and relationship. Tom and I were become short-tempered. Our usual saintly patience for each other’s defects was running low. One evening, what would normally have been a good-natured debate over the washing-up became a screaming row. Tom even smashed a plate on the cooker.

  Devouring more research, I was concerned to read about Sleep Apnoea, a disorder involving abnormal pauses of breath. It could even prove fatal. I remembered that choking, gurgling sound, which had stopped abruptly as I woke. It seemed to fit the bill, which made me wonder if I did have this illness. Perhaps I really was snoring all night, waking both myself and Tom up on a regular basis.

  I decided to record us both asleep, for the duration of the night. This would surely find us some answers.

  Having prepared the recording device, I tried to sleep. My memories dredged up that shadow-child on the foot of the bed. With a shudder, I tried to forget him. Medical science could, and would, explain all this. It had to.

  Morning sun bled into the room. Having had a typically splintered and fruitless slumber, I dragged myself out of bed, deciding to let Tom sleep in. He really needed the rest, such as it would be.

  The device presented me with a crude graph of the night’s readings. A thin line, jagged as a mountain range, denoted regular spikes of noise throughout.

  I surveyed the recording, winding my way through and playing the audio at random intervals.

  Silence...

  Silence...

  More silence...

  And then, about an hour in: those hideous, all-too-familiar sounds of gurgling and choking. There was an increasing urgency to them.

  My God, was that really me?

  I very much wanted the answer to be “Yes”.

  “Yes” would have been infinitely easier.

  But it sounded nothing like me. It sounded nothing like Tom.

  It had an altogether different tone. A higher pitch.

  It sounded, for all the world, like a child.

  Those night-graphs all looked the same. Regular spikes, peaking roughly every half an hour. Sounds of gurgling and choking iced my blood. I couldn’t play these recordings to Tom: he was already going crazy trying to maintain his focus on work and I refused to compound that stress.

  The more I played the recordings through headphones, the more I noticed a trend. Each outburst of breathless noise eased off after around two minutes, becoming calmer... only to return with a vengeance half an hour later.

  I had no idea what this meant, but I was soon to find out.

  One night, somewhere around 4am, I found myself in that hazy mental limbo in which one is neither fully asleep nor fully awake.

  Fear uncoiled inside me as I heard the gurgling, the choking. No longer through headphones, but right here in the room.

  Being conscious this time, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t making this sound.

  That taut feeling again: the sense of a storm about to break.

  Becoming more vividly alert with every second, I came to sense a presence, directly above me and all too close.

  Oh my God.

  My entire body rippled with dread.

  I inhaled deeply, but only the thinnest air reached my lungs. I couldn’t breathe properly.

  Raw terror kept my eyes tightly shut.

  Something was in the air right above me.

  Even as I tried to draw oxygen, it was sucked right back out of my mouth.

  I gasped and felt my lungs quiver as the very air was stolen from them.

  Writhing, full of dread, I just wanted this thing away from me. Flinging the bed sheets over my head, I rolled violently to one side, briefly fell through space, then felt my dulled impact with the floor.

  I must have been crying out. Next thing I knew, Tom was down there too, unwrapping me with care. He was full of comforting words, as if I’d had a bad dream.

  I inhaled so greedily that I began to hyperventilate. Now that the storm had passed, the air tasted so fresh, so very vital.

  Although I paid cheery lip service to Tom’s explanation, this was absolutely no dream.

  I am sure you can imagine how I felt after that.

  I had never felt so afraid.

  There followed a foolhardy phase in which I strove to avoid sleep altogether.

  I would load up on coffee and caffeine pills, then sit by the bed, rocking to and fro, watching over Tom in case our spectre returned.

  I lasted two nights before feeling deranged. The quality of my sleep had already been drastically reduced, so to go wilfully without was dangerous.

  The night would amplify the slightest sound. I would over-react to each and every one, jolting and goggling at shadows. Becoming a basket case.

  On both of those nights, that pre-storm tension fogged the air again. It pressed down upon my chest.

  During the second night, glass smashed in the bathroom. Miraculously, this didn’t wake Tom.

  Running through and turning on the light, I was alarmed to see that the mirror had come crashing down. There were big shards of glass in the sink and on the floor.

  Good. I had hated the mirror ever since seeing the eyes in it. Plus, this incident gave me something to do. I killed time using a dustpan and brush to clear up the glass.

  In desperate need of sleep, I decided to surrender. I really had no choice.

  Padding back towards the bed, I froze at the sight of a small shadowy figure which appeared to sit astride Tom’s chest, its face close to his.

  It was unmistakably a child.

  A child made of shadows.

  I opened my mouth but could shake no sound loose.

  The thing on Tom’s chest jerked its head towards me. Those sickly blue eyes were only too familiar, being the ones I had seen in the mirror.

  Against all instinct, I darted towards the bed, not knowing what I was doing. I realised this thing was not on Tom’s chest: instead, it hovered inches above him.

  With a thick, breathy wheezing sound, it seemed to fly apart, fast as scattering crows. Melting away into the black, it was nowhere to be seen.

  Tom woke with a start, confused and breathless.

  He saw me and jumped half out of his skin.

  As I climbed into bed, I flashed him a reassuring smile. God only knew how convincing it was. My heart was pounding so
hard, I was surprised he couldn’t hear it.

  Switching on a small side-lamp, I curled up behind my partner, tightly wrapping my arms around him, as much for my sake as his. Thanks to my raised, insistent pulse, I would inevitably now stay awake until dawn.

  This day was only just getting started. It would be the very worst of my life.

  When Tom woke, he felt nauseous and dizzy. I hadn’t known him to take a sick day off his job in years, so knew he must be feeling bad in order to do so today.

  As I left for work, he was planning to catch up on sleep. I didn’t like the idea of him sleeping while I wasn’t around, but couldn’t justify telling my sick partner not to rest. Besides, it was daytime. Everything was fine in the day.

  At work, I had to fight to concentrate. Not solely due to my lack of sleep, but because the supernatural had entered our lives. This changed everything. I had always sat on the fence, neither denying nor believing the paranormal’s existence. And now I knew it was real. There was some kind of apparition in our home – which is now your home, may God save you – which visited us on a nightly basis, doing whatever the hell it did.

  Stealing our breath?

  I was put me in mind of the old wives’ tale about cats and newborns. Around the 18th Century, cats were believed to steal babies’ breath as they lay in the crib.

  I batted that image away and tried to focus on the job at hand.

  And while I did that, Tom died.

  I found him on the sofa, beneath a blanket.

  Skin the colour of smeared ash. Eyes lifeless, big with fear.

  I dropped my bags, ran to him and administered the kiss of life, frantic. When no response came, I laced my fingers over his chest and pushed down repeatedly, attempting to resuscitate.

  My Tom just stared up at me. Blind.

  I’d seen more than enough dead people to know he wasn’t coming back.

  I closed his eyelids gently, my tears splashing him. After calling for an ambulance and police, I held the cold hand of the man I loved. I tried to say goodbye, but the words came out a mess.