“What were those things at my window last night?”
Gramma stopped
, suddenly choking on the “food” she had been
shoveling into her mouth
.
“Gramma, do you need me to get you something to drink?” I asked, getting up.
“
No, no, dear,” she managed through several sharp coughs. Then she turned to Lori, staring at her with a worried expression, “
What do you mean?” she asked even though it was obvious she knew exactly what Lori meant.
“They had glowing red eyes…and their faces looked…I don’t know, like—”
My mind flashed back to
the
night
before
, to what I saw. The red eyes.
The bat-like form.
“It was like a bat, a giant bat,” I finished Lori’s sentence.
Lori shivered in what looked like a mixture of disgust and dread.
So it wasn’t just a dream, a figment of my imagination. Lori had seen those creatures as well, and something about this made Gramma uncomfortable.
She knew something.
“Gramma what are they? I saw them too,” I said. “And I think they wanted me to
...
.” I thought back to the voice I had heard in my sleep.
“Amanda…
Let us out
.”
“
They called to me too,” Lori said.
“That pipe in my room, they were talking through that…and it was glowing red.”
Gramma stood, taking her plate to
the
kitchen and dropping it so hard in the sink that I thought for sure it would shatter.
Was she crying? I couldn’t tell for sure. She had her back turned to us, but I could clearly see her shoulders moving up and down, as well as hear her sniffles.
“Gramma, are you all right?” I asked. I st
ood up and walked over to her. When I put a hand on her shoulder, she swiped her hand around and nearly took my head
off. I ducked just in time. “Gramma? What’s going on?”
She rushed away from me, never uttering a word, ran through the dining room, into the family room, and into the bedroom just past the wood-burning stove and slammed the door.
“What’s wrong with Gramma?” Lori asked.
“I don’t know. We should leave her alone. Where’s Mom?”
I didn’t realize at the time that the answer to that question would be
just as
frightening
as
that creature at the window.
Chapter 3
We couldn’t find Mom, so we went up to our respective rooms where we stayed
until
lunch
.
I
tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. The funny thing was I
might have been
more upset about Gramma’s behavior
than anything else
.
I did
a set of morning
sit-ups, push-ups, and jumping jacks, trying to g
et out all of my pent-up energy, but I kept thinking about Gramma
and Mom
.
Mom was obviously still upset about Dad’
s death, and maybe she was out somewhere
taking a walk
. I looked out the north window, down to the driveway. Her car was still here. She could be out for a wa
lk, I supposed.
“Maybe she just needed out of the house,” I
told
myself. My breath co
ndensed on
the wavy glass as I spoke. What seemed strange to me was just how long the condensed water vapor stayed on the glass. It was July and warm outside. It should have evaporated immediately.
I breathed on the glass again, this time in a long, concentrated breath.
Ice crystals appeared immediately as if I were breathing on a window in January.
My breath quickly turne
d to frost before melting away.
Could it maybe have something to do with the c
reatures from the night before?
I did the same experiment on the east window above the bed. The same thing happened. The breath condensed, froze, and then melted.
I then looked down to where the group of them had been standing last night. The grass was dead and black, almost as if it had burned.
This place was just too strange…and scary.
Seeing these creatures and the man in the hall…
I could feel the sweat begin to creep across my brow, my heart beat in my throat, butterflies
fluttered in my stomach.
Something just wasn’t right here.
And I needed to get to the bottom of it before it was too late.
“Hey, Lori, it’s time for lunch. You hungry?”
I said, knocking on her door.
All I could hear through the door were sobs. “Lori?” I knocked again, but there was still no response
,
so I opened the door.
Lori was sitting on her bed, which was to the left. She had her legs crossed and her face in her hands.
“Lori, what’s wrong?” Just seeing her li
ke that made me want to cry too, but I had to be strong
, at least in front of Lori
. Even though she didn’t answer, I knew exactly what was wrong, what had been wrong for the past few months. Daddy was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. That fact trumped all others. No, check that. That fact
caused
all the other problems. Living with Gramma was not going to be easy. She was insane, from what I’d seen, this town was ridiculous,
those creatures from last night,
and Mom seemed to be off on her own somewhere, dealing with her grief through abandonment.
It was a lot to take in.
I sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder. “Lori, I know, I’m.…” What were the words I was looking for?
“I understand how you feel.”
She looked up from her hands and whispered something I didn’t quite catch. “What was that?” I asked.
“I saw Daddy.”
“You saw Dad?” I thought back to the image I had seen, the man who walked through that strange door.
That strange man in
old fashioned clothing
…he
did
look like
kind of like
Dad
, now that I thought about it
. I know he did! “When? When did you see him?”
“Just now…in my dream. I fell asleep, and he spoke to me. He told me
that they were all trapped in the door
.”
“
Trapped in the door?”
“
That door…out there. He said to open it and to let them all out. He said he’s there, Mom’s there, and a whole bunch of other people
!” She grabbed on
to me tightly, shoving her face into my chest. “Dad wouldn’t say that if it wasn’t true, would he?”
What almost slipped out was
Dad’s dead. He isn’t saying much of anything,
but I stopped myself. The normal circumstances of who could say what and under what conditions flew out the window as soon as we moved here. Besides, if I had said that to my already hysterical sister, I don’t know how she would have reacted.
“Come on, Lori. Let’s get some lunch. It was probably just a dream.”
She got up with me, and we walked downstairs to the kitche
n. Did I really believe it was just a dream
? No, of course not. Not with the things that I’
ve seen here so far.
Downstairs, I asked G
ramma about the house, inquiring as if I were genuinely interested in
its
history, rather than in any of the ghost and ghouls that might be lurking
around
the hallways
, the yard, or anything else
.
Didn’t want to get her all worked up again.
“Oh, my dear,
I don’t really know a whole lot,
”
she said as she put together sandwiches for us. Then as we moved into
the dining room
, she said, “You’ll notice
,
the bathroom is in a peculiar location
, and that is because it
isn’t original to the house.
When this house was built, it didn’t have a bathroom.
”
She motioned to the small bathroom directly off of the dining room.
A
confused
look
crawled across Lori’s face. “So no one could go to the bathroom?”
“Sure, they could. They went outside.”
I found this amusing
, and it made me forget for the briefest moment all the fear and anxiety I had been feeling
.
The reason for the bathroom’s “peculiar location”
was something I had suspected ever since seeing that pipe jutting up through the floor in Lori’s be
droom. There is no way that it
was original. Seemed like the house was built the way it was built, and when a bathroom was added in, they had to work with what they had, and they couldn’t put that stink pipe in a wall.
The thought naturally led to that strange door. I wonder why that was there. Who put it there and why?
The likeliest answer was at one time there was a balcony out there.
I was about to ask Gramma about the door and a possible balcony, but Lori
was
still
preoccupied with the idea of
goi
ng to the bathroom outside. “W
hat about mosquitoes? Wouldn’t they bite your butt?”
Gramma laughed. “
Ah, sometimes
, but that was the least of our worries.” She paused for a moment
as
a look came over her, a look that suggested she was heading into frightening territory or reliving an unpleasant memory.
With
lunch
over, Lori and I went
back upstairs.
Gramma had been
relatively normal, which put Lori and I better moods, even though we were both still dwelling on the strangeness of this place.
Instead of going to our own rooms, we both went into Lori’s and sat on her bed. She had some dolls scattered on the floor, some of them were my old Barbies, toys that I missed a lot more
than I would ever admit.
“I hate that pipe,” Lori said. It seemed to come out of the blue.
“Why is that?”
“I can hear them talking through it. The whispers.”
“The whispers? You hear people talking through this pipe?”
She stood up and walked across the room and pressed her ear against the pipe. Terror etched itself on her face, her lips quivered, and tears began welling in her eyes.
“Lori, you can sit back down.”
“They want to hurt us, Amanda! Those monsters want to hurt us!
It’s the only way they can come in!
”
She came back to me and cried in my arms. I wanted to know what it was she heard, but I dared not ask.
Instead, I walked to the pipe and put my ear against it. All I heard initially was the
hissing of air in t
he
pipe, but then, as I concentrated,
the faint hissing became a voice.
“Amanda…Amanda,
let us out
!”
I tried to get away, to pull my ear away from
the pipe, but something was holding me there, some force beyond my control. “Lori,” I whispered—because that’s all of could really do, “Lori, help me.”
Then I heard another
voice
.
“
Amanda…let us out.
”
Mom!
That was Mom’s voice!
From inside the pipe?
“Momma! I hear Momma!”
Lori said. I was facing her and could see t
ears streaming from her puffy eyes, down her red face.
“Lori, help me. I’m stuck!”
I cried
, forgetting about Mom for a second
. My face felt like it was glued to the pipe.
Lori was hysterical, but there was nothing I could do. I was stuck.
“You’re not going anywhere, Amanda!”
a voice
that was no longer Mom’s
said from inside the pipe.
“You’re staying right here
until you let us out
.”
It began with a sensation of pain, but when I realized the pipe was turning to ice, I began to panic. The cold was so unbearable. “Lori, help me get off of this thing,”
I pleaded, but all she did was stand there
.
Lori made it pretty clear that she wasn’t going to help me, so I pulled away, hard. In a way, I felt like that kid who got his tongue stuck to the pole in “A Christmas Story.”
But unlike that, this wasn’t one bit funny
!