Ghost stories (pt 2) fini

In fact, they grew more solid as I grew more alarmed. The background of my mind was now abuzz with voices, with data, as I desperately searched for a precident and a plan for coping with this phenomenon. Against the buzz, and the greying of my vision, the peaks became black, solid objects, with a mass below them, almost as if they were ears.

Ears sitting atop an jagged and edgy head.

I could hear myself inhaling; I became aware of the weight of the sheets across my chest; dreamtime was slowing to make the final transition into waking time. And the head with ears was growing eyes like lightning bolts.

Finally I opened my eyes.

I was lying in bed. The air seemed cool, and stagnant. I thought I could see my breath. For a moment, but only a moment, because then I dared not breathe. My head was propped lightly by my pillow, and I was turned just slightly towards the window at the side of my room, at the foot of my bed.

The nearly full-moon provided plenty of light for me to see all of my room. And to provide a stark sillhouette of a man-like thing standing near the foot of my bed…at my 11-o-clock.

He was pitch black, except for glowing yellow eyes. And he was all jaggy – he looked similar to the old “electricity guy” who once promoted the local power company and electrical safety. Even his eyes had sharp, jaggy edges.

I knew beyond all certainty, that if we two should touch, I would die.

I heard the Controller again. Verify that you are awake. Look off target and look back again I could barely take the risk, but I realized I needed to verify my escape route. So I carefully turned my head to my right, and looked straight down my hallway, and the axis of the house.

I could see clearly out the bathroom window at the end of the hall on the level below. I heard my head rolling on the pillow, felt the feedback through my neck and chest. Then I turned sharply back toward “Mr. Watt”. He hadn’t moved.

I looked at the mounds my feet made at the foot of my bed. I focused on them, and saw my depth of field blur behind them, including the visitor. Then I lifted my eyes to my dresser some few feet away, just past my window, on the exterior wall.

As the dresser came into focus, my feet mounds blurred, and so did my visitor.

Then I focused on the edge of his leg, with my feet in the foreground, and the dresser immediately behind. They both blurred in the depth of field, while he was sharpely visible.

It has perspective. It has persistance. And, I knew if I touched it, I would die. But I also knew, that it would not touch me.

Jesus make it go away Jesus make it go away Jesus make it go away Jesus

I tried to call for help. Then I realized, I wasn’t breathing.

I slowly dragged in a breath. My lips moved but I made no sound beyond a squeaking sound that a mouse might have missed. I drew another breath. I made a rasping. I drew another breath, I made a tone. There, now, to do it again, only louder.

mom

Mom?

Mom!

MOM!!

I heard movement from my parents room, I glanced down my hallway, then back to Mr. Watt. He still had not moved. And I realized – he’s also casting shadow!

“MOM!”

She called back to me. “Help.” I answered.

I had broken his geas. Maybe it was prayer, maybe it was witnesses. Or maybe it had acomplished whatever it had come for. For any reason, it started to fade. From the blackest opaque to translucent, to shadow, to history.

I waited what seemed like 3 days before I moved. Then I snapped upright in bed, and looked over the left edge. Then the foot. Then the right, which was the hardest, as he had been on my left, and there’s that insane fear that while my back is turned to the right, it will come back over the left and eat me.

So I checked over the left side again, after I looked over the right.

I now sat upright, crosslegged in the middle of my bed.

“Help!” I hollered. I needed someone else to verify things were okay.

My mom came upstairs and sat on my bed. “I had…I don’t know. I don’t know what it was.”

“Did you have a nightmare? Tell me about it…”

“No, it wasn’t a nightmare. I was awake. It was… I don’t know. It was wierd. Can I sleep on your floor?”

A couple of minutes later, I am plopped on my parents floor, wrapped up in my bedspread. I feel stupid. I am a senior in highschool. And I cannot go to sleep, even with a light on in the hall.

What did it mean? Why did I see that? Why did it visit me? It didn’t want to hurt me, though it could have. So there was some other reason, some other message. It wanted me awake? But why?

To protect me.

I scrambled from under my covers, and moved through the house, turning on the lights in every room, and all the patio lights. I double checked all the doors and windows. Then, when I returned, I found that I could sleep. The message was finally delivered.

My parents were not disturbed, it seems, by my story of what I saw. It was on a visit home from college that I learned why. My parents, it seems, had become quite adjusted to bizarre things in the home. My mother often felt that someone was in the house with her, even when she was alone (I remember coming home one evening, and finding the carving knife in the living room. My mom said that she must have just walked in there with it and layed it down. Now I knew, she was hunting for the “intruder”)

My step-dad spoke of seeing things…. things that gave him a shudder to mention, and that he has yet to speak any other detail about.

We came to accept that our new house was haunted somehow, by our own “personal spook”, although I know that the thing I brought back from my dream was not a familiar to our residence.