Eventually we called it a night. I must have shown at least some restraint that evening or I would have no story to tell. It is possible Hayes and Steve took a more direct route to unconsciousness. We all slept downstairs. Steve’s room was at the front of the house; Hayes appropriated the vacant bedroom towards the back of the house. I laid down on a couch in the living room against the dividing wall. My head was towards the front door, my feet pointed down the hallway to the kitchen and the Dungeon. The couch was low and narrow; with my head on a pillow, I could see over the edge to the floor. The doors to the two bedrooms were left open. I know this because I checked, curious to see if Rollo had been shut out of Steve’s bedroom. Judging by the indulgent affection Steve demonstrated for his dog, I imagined it likely that Rollo slept most nights on his master’s bed. So I had thought it odd he lay down in front of the couch instead. Rollo did not attempt to share the couch with me. Neither did he sprawl on his side where I might reach out to scratch his head. Instead, he squatted Sphinx-like, facing towards the back of the house. After a time, he lowered his head on his paws but did not otherwise change position. He looked every bit the sentinel.
Just as I began to drift off, I heard the agitated murmur of a canine growl. Rollo’s head remained flat, but his ears were perked forward. I looked down the hall toward the lighted kitchen but saw nothing. Rollo was silent for another minute. I closed my eyes. Rollo growled again, slightly louder. I looked and again saw nothing, but even as I stared in the same direction, still oblivious to the offence, Rollo growled again, louder.
I’m not too ashamed to say that I was becoming anxious. Perhaps just to hear my own voice, to hear any human voice. I mumbled, ‘S’allright, Rollo. There, there.’
Silence again prevailed for another minute. Then Rollo growled again, a full-throated rumble; still I saw nothing. Rollo raised his head. He huffed twice, whistling through his teeth. I had no doubt he saw something I could not. Cold air met sweat on my temple. With the instinct of childhood I pulled my blanket over my ears and drew my feet up from the end of the couch. And in this position I watched Rollo, growling his warning, as he slowly, deliberately turned his head, watching some invisible presence as it crossed from the hall to the stairs. The interpretation of the action was unmistakable. I was as amazed as I was afraid. Rollo ticked his head sideways—one imagines the presence continued up to the second floor. The growling diminished, and then ceased. Rollo again lowered his head to his paws.
Rollo’s agitation may have ebbed, but mine did not. Rationally, I knew very little had happened. An unhappy dog had moved its head; nothing else had I witnessed. Yet a palpable feeling of intrusion had passed through the room as the event occurred. Some might point out I was reacting to a suggestion imparted earlier in the day. The criticism is reasonable. I can argue only that this was one situation where removed impartiality fails—I am unfamiliar with any commonly accepted graduated measure of ‘eerie’.
How long I lay there curled, tucked, and psychically shaken, I can’t say, but the astute reader will have already anticipated my impending crisis. Did I not mention we were drinking copiously? I needed to relieve myself. And, as I have mentioned, the single bathroom in the house was upstairs. I considered urinating outside, but thought it likely that the opening of the front door (and the screen door beyond) would wake someone. There was less likelihood of that if I went out the back of the house, but it would require walking past the Dungeon, which I had been led to believe was the source of the disturbance, even if my own experience supposed the offender to have moved from the area. If I had been discovered utilising either exit, I would have been embarrassed. It would have been hardly unusual for a drunken young man to avail himself of nature, but it clearly made no sense to do so in that situation, as it required more effort than the expected course. Neither would I be able to explain myself: even if I was believed, fear is not easily empathised. I myself thought my disinclination to go upstairs was unnecessarily cautious. There was nothing for it but to use the proper facilities.
I let my blanket fall away and shivered as the March evening air met my damp neck and scalp. When I rose from the couch, Rollo stood up. He looked at me expectantly—and possibly disappointedly, too, sensing that I failed to see what he saw, just as his master did. As I started towards the stairs, he crossed in front of me much as a seeing-eye dog might check his master when he approached an intersection. I bent and patted Rollo. He moved aside. I was encouraged by his lack of effort, thinking that though he may not much like the supposed spectral presence, neither was he overly concerned about it.
The wooden stairs creaked, of course. I was somewhat surprised to see one of the upstairs bedroom doors ajar. I would have expected anyone inhabiting a shared house to shut his door before leaving his room for a week. I took care not to stare too hard into the dark.
Jarringly bright fluorescent light sputtered to life from a naked tube mounted on one wall of the bathroom. I shut the door firmly. The commode was situated in the far corner next to a full-size tub (with opaque shower curtain drawn completely closed, of course, to conceal anything that might want to lie in wait). I can only blame the disagreeable light for making it seem terribly far away somehow. I had to cross in front of a mirror over the sink on the way. The drawn, red-eyed face I saw in it looked unnaturally wan, but it was at least familiar. As might be expected, my subsequent relief was profound. The affair completed, I washed up, opened the door, and turned off the light.
I noticed some slight movement. I did not see what moved, but I felt sure that the open bedroom door was now more open. Again, an explanation was readily available: the opening of one door occasioned a change in the air pressure that caused the other to swing. But it seemed as though I saw less dark than when I stepped into the hall—as though a shadow blocking part of the white door had disappeared into the room.
I hurried downstairs and thought no more of it. The End.
No, of course not. As disinclined as I had been to go upstairs in the first place, to the point of weighing unreasonable alternatives, I now felt driven to close the mystery. Perhaps my body, greedy for sleep, spurred my curiosity so that I might assuage my fear and thereby enable peaceful shutdown.
I considered and rejected two possibilities: one, that I had been misinformed about the departure of all the other housemates—this seemed preposterous, that Steve would either be wrong in his tally or that he would lie about it, and that someone had remained upstairs and unannounced; and two, that he or Hayes had changed bedrooms in the middle of the night—also unlikely, as I should have heard someone ascend the squeaky stairs, and likewise I doubted either of my inebriated companions could rush into an unfamiliar and darkened room stealthily.
I pushed the door open wide and felt along the wall for the switch. The light revealed the room vacant as reported. But I saw a section of blanket drooping from the empty single bed flutter near the floor. The furnace had kicked on with a hearty ‘harrumph’ when I was in the bathroom, but I did not think air escaping from a vent near the baseboard on the far side of the room could cause the movement. Here was another opportunity to defer, but I did instead what anyone denying his instincts would and pressed my stomach to the floor. I had seen the blanket move towards the top of the bed; I approached from the foot. I remember that I did not hesitate. I cannot say why I did not. I lifted the blanket and looked under the bed.
Because the blanket fell near to floor, little light ventured underneath, and the clutter of clothes, magazines, and unidentified paraphernalia was fuzzy with shadow. I was about to leave, very nearly disappointed for some ungodly reason, when I saw quite clearly towards the top of the bed the coiled figure of a boy. He stared at me from beneath a tangle of dark hair. I believe I read fear in his expression. I can only imagine what he saw in mine. My every nerve buzzed. I was more than simply afraid, though I was that (intensely); there was feeling outside of me that pervaded the room, the feeling of unworldly wrong. This feeling seemed not self-generated,
but absorbed, as though I was being told to flee by voices of my ancestors, and they used my very blood as the receptor for the message. But before I could collect myself and take action, a strange thing happened: I saw that I was mistaken. I had somehow assembled the figure of the boy and the face from various objects: a bong, a sweatshirt, a pillowcase sliding between the bed and wall—part of the ‘face’ was defined by the leather strap and metal clamps of an adjustable roller skate! In the gloom, my mind had assembled a picture more quickly than my depth perception had adjusted. I chuckled with self-reproach. I looked away and blinked my eyes, and then looked back again, curious to see if I could reconstruct the scene now that I had ‘unseen’ it.
I needn’t have worried. I saw the face again—I saw the face and it was a face, unquestionably, and it pressed closer to the foot of the bed. Its expression had changed as well: there was cruel challenge in the boy’s eyes. The fear there had mouldered and spoiled, and defiance emerged from the dregs. His expression bespoke a horrid invitation to stay and ‘see him away’ again—and see what might come from that.
I did not. I gave in to my better judgment at last. I scrambled backwards and leapt to my feet on the landing. I glanced at the bed but saw no movement. I turned off the light and somehow retained the presence of mind to shut the door quietly, if no less firmly than I possibly could. There was, of course, no logic to hoping the closed door could protect me—yet hadn’t I seen it move before? If there are rules, I do not know them. But I was damn sure the door would not open on its own.
I went back downstairs. Rollo was still in front of the couch. He watched me cross the room with no more than mild concern—though watching that same turn of his head only strengthened my first appraisal of the motion. With the same useless logic of protection I applied to the door, I hid under my blanket on the couch. I am surprised my flopping about didn’t wake one of the others. Perhaps it did. I fell asleep quickly afterwards. That may seem unthinkable, but I was more drained now than ever. Another benefit of youth: being able to sleep no matter the circumstances given the right degree of exhaustion (a feat I cannot manage now). I even tried to stay awake. I watched the top of the stairs. I knew I was staring too long at the railing and that that was what caused me to see the straight line waver, as though something toyed at moving out from behind it. I knew that the flutter of my drooping eyelids made me see the shadows shift on the wall. I waited for Rollo to growl again but he did not. I remember thinking, He was hiding in the pantry, and then he went to hide under his bed. I don’t know the source of the unnatural surety I had of either the original function of the Dungeon or of the boy’s actions. I did not manage another coherent thought that night.
By the time I awoke in the morning Rollo had gone to his master’s bed. When I went up to use the bathroom I saw that the bedroom door was once again open.
On our return trip several days later, we pushed through to Columbus without stopping; I did not return to that house.
You may wonder that I did not relate the night’s events to the others. I confess I did not see the point. Steve had lived in the house for a time already, and I thought that if he had not witnessed the phenomena himself by then, alarming him served no purpose. Whoever slept in that bed was clearly not ‘sensitive’; it seemed best to leave the occupant ‘in the dark’. I expect Hayes might have raised every alternative explanation that I have already detailed. Finally, my own doubts fostered silence. No matter how sure I was of everything that happened, part of me didn’t want to believe, and I found myself reaffirming my excuses. If it weren’t for that face, my conviction may have wavered. It did not; it does not. I have wondered since if ghosts are able to avail themselves of those optical illusions wherein they seem to appear. This may seem an odd argument—to hold up the alternative explanation in support of the phenomena—but if we speak of phantoms as beings of psychic energy peeking out from the hidden angles in the shadows, it makes sense to me that they might be spied most often through the faults in our perception. The sceptic will quibble that I wilfully ignored opposing evidence. You’ll forgive me if I felt no sense of moral obligation that evening to persevere and attempt to ‘unsee’ that face. I do not feel my fear was ungrounded. I have never doubted that I was right to disengage when I did, and I have learned since that my conviction was correct.
At the time, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. None of my contemporaries had a home modem. Students wanting to use the internet went to a console at one of the university libraries. Only a few of my friends had begun to use email (I had not). The point being, I did not have the opportunity for casually browsing a gargantuan repository of useful and useless minutiae. There was no way to further research my encounter that did not include greater effort than I was willing to put forth. I have mentioned already that my lax attitude and devotion to other interests also allowed the matter to drift from my focus so that the mystery of that house faded quickly to the distance.
Recently, while sorting through some old boxes (and wondering how there were always more old boxes in my small house), I came across a cassette tape recorded by my friends (presumably in the Dungeon) and released on their cottage record label. I recognised immediately the address on North Congress scrawled on the paper tray card as being that of the house in which I spent one frightening evening. Having now both the address and the means to research the house at hand, I searched the internet for whatever answers it might provide.
At first I found nothing useful. Knowing the property value did me no good, and I soon discovered I lacked the savvy to identify prior owners; it seemed gaining that information would require the in-person rifling through of official records I had avoided twenty years ago, and though I am perhaps more responsible and motivated now, likewise am I busier and unlikely to find the extra time to follow that avenue. My search was not entirely without results, however. The house was mentioned in a forum on a website detailing various ‘hauntings’ in Ohio. I include the post from ‘bobcatgrrl6’ in its entirety:
One year when I was at OU I lived in a house at — N. Congress. Stuff used to turn on and off on its own and there was one room that never got warm. We used to joke we had a ghost but really we thought the wiring was bad. We were more afraid the house would burn down one night. We told the landlord but of course he didn’t do anything. Then one time a hippie chick friend of mine was hanging at the house. All of a sudden she gets this crazy look. We ask her what’s up and she says, ‘Did you see that?’ She gets up and creeps upstairs like she’s following someone. We all laugh because we figure she’s high, which wouldn’t have been that unusual for her. A couple minutes later we hear her screaming her head off. We all run upstairs and she’s halfway underneath my bed kicking like she’s stuck. We drag her out and she’s still screaming. We’re all freaking out because we don’t know what the hell is going on. My roommate even looks under the bed but there’s nothing there. We have to hold on to her for like ten minutes to get her to calm down. She finally is just about able to start talking to us when she turns her arm around and we can all see these marks on her wrist—teeth marks. No doubt. Someone said, ‘She bit herself!’ but I didn’t think so. The teeth marks looked like they came from little teeth. So she starts to freak again and we have to get her out of there. I took her home but she wouldn’t talk about it.
The next day I go to see her to see if she’s okay. At first I can’t find her but her roommate swears she saw her go in her room and that she hadn’t left. So I go back in to leave her a note. Then I hear something coming from the closet so I opened the door. She’s scrunched down on the floor, hiding under some coats. She has a crazy look in her eyes. I talk real soothingly to her, but when I try to get her to come out she looks like she’s mad and she’s going to attack me. So I went out in the common room and waited. When she finally came out she seemed embarrassed but it was like she wasn’t sure why.
She got weird and didn’t talk much to anyone after that. Next year she dropped out or transferred. I
don’t know anyone who talked to her since then. I know whatever messed her up had something to do with what happened in that house. We all thought it was haunted after that. I moved out of that room and we left it empty. We kept the door closed but it would always open up again even though no one ever saw it happen. We never had any problems as crazy as that one time, but none of us wanted to renew the lease. I’d be curious to know if anyone else had any experiences there.
And so I think it’s time to share. There may be someone more ‘sensitive’ than I who needs to know they are not alone.
I was unable to learn anything more as to the identity of the boy or the cause of the haunting—why he was frightened and against whom (and in what way) he might have rebelled. I think it likely just as well. My experience taught me not to go looking for monsters under the bed. If they choose to crouch there, leave them be—and hope they return the favour.
NOTHING BUT THE WAVES
Mark J. Saxton
WORK, for the majority of people, is a necessity rather than a pleasure. Many, if given the opportunity, would be happy to experience the life of the idle rich.
At least for a time.
When working, it’s fair to say most are happier when they’re busy. Active days tend to pass more quickly than quiet ones. Strange how we mortals so eagerly wish our lives away. Yet few of us enjoy being constantly rushed off our feet. There have to be limitations. Even machines need to be switched off now and again to cool and take a drop of oil. The odd slackening of business and a chance to enjoy a bit of a blow are usually welcomed. In the eyes of most people, it’s inconceivable that an intelligent person of sound mind and professional qualification can possibly prefer to be quiet and idle at work, rather than active.
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