by Ed
By the time Al came home, dinner was nearly done and nothing had happened. Carmen gave him a kiss when he came in and headed for the shower.
She felt guilty, just as guilty as if she'd been unfaithful to him. She felt she needed to tell him about what had happened, but how? What could she say? What would he say? Maybe he'd think she was crazy— like Stephen—and get angry and not want to get near her.
He might even leave her. After all, if he thought it was just her imagination, if he thought she was imagining such things— things like that—maybe he would think there was something wrong between them.
She decided she wouldn't tell him; at least, she would resist the urge to tell him as long as possible.
Dinner was quiet. There was little talk, just a lot of dinner noises: forks clanking against plates, chewing, drinking.
When it was over, Carmen and Laura washed the dishes, whispering to one another about whether Carmen should tell Al or not, about what they were going to do. Laura suggested she tell him, because it was only inevitable that something would happen to him, too. What then? She insisted that he should know.
As much as Carmen didn't want to admit it, she thought Laura was right.
After dinner, Al settled in his chair with a beer to watch television. When the dishes were done, Carmen went to him, hunkered down beside the chair and put a hand on his arm.
"Can we talk?" she asked quietly.
"Sure," he said, nodding.
"Urn...in the bedroom?"
He frowned slightly. "You okay?"
"Well...let's talk first, all right?"
They went into the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and Carmen told him, in a nervous and halting voice, everything that had happened that day.
The expression on his face changed again and again as she spoke. It went from comical disbelief to serious consideration to anger and then to blank shock.
"You're serious, aren't you," he whispered after a while.
"Yes I'm serious. You think I would joke about something like this?"
"I...I don't know, I'm wondering...well, how long has this been going on?"
"It just happened today. Why? I mean, why would you ask a question like that?"
"Well, I just wondered if...I mean, I just thought that maybe..."
Suddenly, Al burst into tears and buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking with his sobs.
Carmen was shocked. She just stared at him for a moment, then leaned forward, put an arm around his shoulders and held him close.
"Al, what's wrong? What's the matter?"
Through his tears and sobs he said, "I-I was afraid to tell you that...th-things have been happening to me, too."
She clutched his shoulders. "What things?"
"Oh, j-just...music and voices and...just things! I've been telling myself it's nothing. I didn't want to think that...that... One night after I'd taken all the light bulbs out of their sockets downstairs, Michael woke me up and said his light was on even though there was no bulb in the socket and...well, I went downstairs and it was...glowing, Carmen, the light was on, but there was no bulb! There was nothing except...except light coming from that thing!"
"Why didn't you tell me, honey?"
"Because I didn't want to tell myself that I saw it. But there was...more. Music, coming from downstairs. Voices. Like a party. Late at night. And the bed...vibrating."
"You told me that was because of the refrigerator upstairs."
"I was lying. I just didn't want you to know. I knew better. It was vibrating. It wasn't from upstairs. There is, um...yes, there is something wrong. There's something wrong with this house, there's something in this house."
She waited a long moment, then leaned close to him, her arm around his shoulders, and whispered into his ear, "Stephen tried to tell us that and now...he's in a mental hospital."
Al shook his head. "No, no, I think it was more than that with Stephen. I really think there was something wrong with him. He changed. He became...hostile. It was something more than this, I really think that."
"Okay, maybe. But he was trying to tell us about the house."
He sucked his lips between his teeth and said through more tears, "You don't think I know that? You don't think that's killing me?"
She nodded. "We both know it now. So what're we gonna do?"
"We can't afford to move, that's for sure. Not right now, anyway."
"Okay, so what're we gonna do?"
He shook his head, tears glistening on his cheeks. "I don't know, sweetheart. I just don't know."
22
A Prison Without Bars
As that winter passed, slowly and torturously, the events in the Snedeker household escalated and tensions increased. The mood inside the house seemed to grow darker along with the weather outside; it grew increasingly worse as the clouds darkened and it began to rain, worse still as snow began to fall and turn to thick, icy mud beside the roads.
Everyone in the family moved through the house expecting something horrible to happen; more often than not, they weren't disappointed. Things moved of their own volition. Everyone, at one time or another, heard voices. They saw shadows that weren't there. They spotted things rushing by them from the corners of their eyes. Small sections of the house were inexplicably colder than others.
Stephanie had moved back into her room with Laura, and Peter had moved back into his room as well. So Michael was left alone in his room downstairs.
Very late one night, he came running up the stairs screaming for his parents. They awoke instantly and rushed into the hall, where they found him running toward them, arms spread and eyes round.
"Mom! Mom, he came back!" Michael shouted, throwing his arms around Carmen's waist.
"Sh-sh-sh, Michael, who came back?" she asked, holding him.
"That guy, that guy Stephen and me saw! He came to me tonight!"
"Oh, it was just a dream, sweetheart, that's all, just a dream."
Michael backed away from her, shaking his head, and insisted, "No, no, it wasn't just a dream, it was more, I mean, I was still in bed, but I was awake! And I couldn't move, I was paralyzed!"
Carmen and Al exchanged a long look and Al gave her a slight, but helpless, shrug.
"Would you like to sleep somewhere else tonight, honey?" Carmen asked Michael.
After a moment, he nodded. "Can I sleep on the couch?" he asked quietly.
"Sure you can. I'll get blankets and pillows from the hall closet." She turned to Al and whispered, "You go on back to bed, I'll be there in a minute."
Once she'd set up a bed for Michael in the living room, Carmen tucked him in and gave him a kiss.
"Mom? If he comes again...can I call you?" "Sure you can, sweetheart. You just call and I'll be here."
Back in bed, Al stared up into the darkness as he whispered, "This is gonna keep up...and get worse, isn't it?"
"I don't know," she whispered back.
"What're we gonna do if it does?"
"I don't know."
He reached over and took her hand in his. It took them quite a while to get back to sleep.
After that night, Michael began sleeping on the living-room sofa regularly. Unlike Stephen, he heard no protests from his parents and no one in the house complained; in fact, they were very cooperative. One morning, while he was getting ready for school, Carmen offered to bring a few things up from his room and put them in the hall closet so he wouldn't have to go downstairs. He accepted her offer eagerly and told her what to get for him.
She waited until early that afternoon to go downstairs. Somehow, she just kept remembering there were other things to do around the house. It took a few hours for her to admit to herself that she just didn't want to go downstairs. She knew what was down there...funeral things...burial things...death things...things she didn't want to be near.
Besides that, many of the frightening events that had happened in the house had happened down there, things that Stephen had tried to tell them about, thin
gs they had ignored.
But she had promised. And someone had to go downstairs.
Finally, she did. She told herself she didn't have to go any farther than Michael's room, that all the really bad stuff was deeper in the basement and that she really didn't have anything to worry about.
But when she went downstairs, something happened to her for the first time; it was something that would happen to her again and again throughout the coming months.
When it happened, she was taking socks and underwear from the floor to be washed, clothes from the backs of chairs and from the closet for Michael to wear to school, and clean socks and underwear from dresser drawers.
Suddenly, she froze. There was a feeling in the air, as if it were shifting, being stirred up...as if something were cutting through it rapidly, approaching fast.
Standing before Michael's dresser with socks and underwear in her hands, Carmen gasped as something enveloped her, something like a very dark shadow as thick as pudding; it engulfed her, swallowed her, embraced her entire body and held her in paralyzed terror for what seemed an eternity.
And then it was gone, and Carmen collapsed to the floor, curled into a fetal position and gasping for breath. When she had finally collected herself, she looked at the clock.
It had only been seconds...not an eternity.
She got up, gathered Michael's things quickly and hurried upstairs, still a little stooped and gasping.
"Aunt Carmen, what's the matter?" Laura asked, rushing toward her in the hall.
In an instant, Carmen decided not to tell her. She straightened up, smiled a little and said, "Oh, I guess it's just those stairs. I haven't used them enough, I suppose, 'cause they wear me out."
"Oh. Jeez, you scared me."
"No, nothing...nothing."
As she caught her breath, she put Michael's things in the hall closet, relieved that Laura had not caught her in the lie.
Over the next few days, Stephanie cried out twice in the night because she said the "shadow-blob" had moved through her room again. Laura had been asleep at the time and had not seen it but, after the second time, Stephanie said she did not want to sleep in her room anymore.
Carmen didn't know what to do with her. She asked Laura if she'd mind sharing a bed with Stephanie to make her feel better, and Laura said that would be fine.
Al became more and more uncomfortable with going to work and leaving them alone, but he had no choice. He'd been feeling very weak and helpless lately. He was used to having at least some control over the events that surrounded his family. When Stephen became so ill, that confidence began to chip away. And now...this. He felt that everything around him—his entire household—was out of his hands. Something he couldn't see and did not understand had taken control.
Their home had become a sort of prison. They didn't have enough money to move at the moment. They couldn't just pick up everything and go get another place. They would be there for a while...with whatever was there with them.
The weeks passed and turned into months: long, slow months that stretched out beneath heavy clouds black as soot. The winter grew colder, more bitter.
The children cried out at night.
Voice spoke to all of them at times—from nowhere—at all hours of the day and night.
Sometimes the smell of rotting meat, at other times the smell of human feces, assaulted them in one part of the house or another, a smell so thick and eye-watering that they were certain that, should they look down at their feet, they would find themselves standing in a pile of rotten, decaying filth. But there was never anything on the floor around them and the smell only lasted an instant, a sickening stench wafting by in a breath, there and gone, almost tauntingly.
But there were, at times, flies. Real flies that were really there—or at least seemed to be—but never for very long.
One cold winter evening, a fuse blew and Al went downstairs into the basement to fix it. He had long since replaced the lightbulbs in all the sockets and, when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned on a light.
When he flicked the switch, the opaque glass globe covering the fixture remained black, giving out mere speckles of the light from the bulb. As Al frowned up at the light, the blackness that seemed to be smeared over the glass moved...squirmed...
As he listened in the silence, he could hear a faint hum coming from the blackness, a thing buzzing.
The blackness was made up of flies—hundreds, maybe even thousands of flies crawling over the globe and twitching in a pool around it on the ceiling, their wings humming as they crawled over one another in black, writhing heaps.
Al stared at them for a long moment, his jaw slack, eyes opening slowly from a squint to wide, gaping amazement, frozen in place, his finger still on the light switch.
His voice a mere breath, he whispered slowly, "Where...in the hell...did you come fr—"
All at once, the flies became airborne and flew in a swarm toward Al's face.
Al threw his arms up protectively and let out a strangled cry of horror through clenched teeth, closing his eyes tightly, so surprised that he was unable to turn and run back up the stairs. He expected to feel them over him, feel the small vibration of their wings, the tickling-twitching of their movements, but...
He felt nothing.
Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his arms and opened his eyes.
The flies were gone. They were nowhere in sight. He couldn't see them, and he couldn't hear them.
There was a noise then, deep and throaty, sounding at first like a groan, then becoming a low, evil chuckle. It came from nowhere...but from everywhere around him.
Al took a long, deep breath, set his jaw, crossed himself and— although it took some silent, internal fighting—he ignored what he'd thought he'd heard, opened the French doors and went into the next room, flipping on lights on his way to the fuse box. But he stopped a moment to take a careful look at the light overhead.
There were no flies this time.
He wound his way through the basement to the fuse box, opened it up and reached into his pocket for the fuse he'd brought from the kitchen drawer.
That was when the smell hit him.
First, it smelled like roses, a strong, sweet, flowery odor. Al froze, looked around slowly and allowed himself a slight smile. It was a good sign, the smell of roses; it was a sign of blessing, a sign of peace and safety...a sign from the Virgin Mary herself.
Al's nerves calmed, the tensed muscles in his body relaxed slowly. The scent of roses had made him feel much better. In fact, he could still smell it as he replaced the fuse.
And then, quite suddenly, the smell changed. For the worse.
Al recoiled as the air filled with the odor of spoiled meat. He slapped a hand over his nose and mouth as he leaned over to retch dryly. Coughing as he stood, he slammed the fuse box shut, turned and hurried back through the basement.
The odor was everywhere.
As he moved through it, the smell changed. It went from rotten meat to the smell of a vast open sewer—the smell of massive, uncontained shit. The odor filled his nostrils and clung there, clogged them like thick grease.
Al hurried through the basement, his hand over his face, but in the middle of the room that used to be Stephen's, he weakened and dropped to his knees,-the thick, cloying smell was overpowering and literally pushed him to the floor, shedding tears and gagging.
He walked on his knees for several feet, trying to get to the stairs, but in a moment the smell was gone.
Still on his knees, Al froze. He removed his hand from his face slowly, lifted his head, looked around, sniffed the air.
It was gone.
Moving quickly, he stood, hurried to the stairs and, in a rush, left the basement.
The winter gradually began to recede. The snow began to melt and occasionally, patches of blue sky appeared between the dark clouds.
Al began to drink even more than usual. As the frightening events that took place in the house steadily grew
worse, he felt weaker and more out of control, more helpless against...whatever it was that had decided to target them.
Carmen, on the other hand, held fast to her faith. She prayed more, she always kept her rosary with her, she wore a crucifix around her neck at all times. She refused to let the fact that Father Wheatley's blessing of the house apparently did no good whatsoever to sway her faith; she told herself that didn't matter and just kept praying, kept asking God to be with her family, to watch over her house and her family, to protect them from whatever evil, supernatural force was plaguing them.
Sometimes they had conversations late at night in bed.
"You're drinking a lot," Carmen whispered one night as the two of them cuddled together.
"Whatta you expect?" Al whispered back.
"Well, is it necessary?"
"Whatta you think? I mean, maybe that doesn't excuse it, but good Lord, I've been... I've been—"
"Okay. Yeah, I know, honey, things have been, uh..."
"Things have been fuckin' scary, is what they've been."
"But remember, we still have God on our side."
"So, where is He?"
"He's here, sweetheart. If He wasn't, maybe we would have been hurt. Maybe we wouldn't be here." Al pulled away from her and said, "Yeah, I know, but..."
It was on a summer evening that Laura went out on a date with a pleasant, tall, muscular young man who arrived to pick her up while Carmen was preparing dinner. Al invited him in and they chatted for a few minutes until Laura was ready to go.
Michael had gone down the street to a friend's house for the night, and Stephanie and Peter were quietly occupying themselves on the living-room floor—none of the children spent time alone in their rooms anymore.
They ate dinner in silence, as they had been doing every night for some time, and they ate it in the living room before the television. In spite of the silence, though, the tension was not as thick as it had been lately. There was more of a feeling of calm in the house, as if things might be all right...at least, for the time being.
After dinner, they watched some more television, Al had a few more beers, Carmen sipped a cup of tea, and eventually everyone started heading for bed. The children were reluctant and Carmen kept waiting for them to ask if they could sleep with her and Al; she decided that if they did, she and Al couldn't very well say no because now they knew the kids had good reason to be afraid.
