The ongoing creep factor

As the summer came and went, and I began preparing to start my freshman year of college, that terrifying incident of the previous summer still weighed heavy on my mind.

A vast green wall separated the house from my view, but as the leaves began to turn and fall, it reappeared once again. Once in a while I saw Pete working outside, cutting grass, blowing leaves and doing other yard work. The way our house was situated and the distance it was to theirs made it so that you would have to actively look to see someone outside of their house or ours. From then on, I really had no interaction with them at all, though there were times when I’d be out at the edge of my yard and I’d look over that way. Lilly ended up being quite reclusive, and I never saw her outside at all, even when their kids were out playing. By that point Pete and Lilly had become monsters in my mind, and I devoted a fair amount of leisure time to making artwork that reflected those feelings. I also had a creative writing class in school where I wrote stories about them being a family of vampires that moved in next door to me. Actually it was more than one story that I wrote. One of them (written after I graduated college) had the final battle between me and the monster couple taking place at Bloomfield Manor, where I sought refuge. I never wrote any stories where there was a car chase across the Key Bridge with them pursuing me, though. That would have made for an interesting plot line. Especially since the Key Bridge incident happened when I was in college. But in some of the tales they did chase me in their souped up, Mad Max-like minivan. Which they didn’t actually have. Well, OK, they had a minivan but it looked nothing like some prop vehicle from that classic dystopian film. These people essentially became much larger than life movie villains that lurked at the edge of my daily life, always waiting to cause mayhem. Since I really knew nothing about them I ended up filling in those blanks in all sorts of creative ways. Bram Stoker dreamed up Dracula, loosely based on a real life historical figure, Vlad the Impaler. Mary Shelly wrote of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, also loosely based on some of the scientific and medical research that was going on at the time. And I created this ghoulish couple who lurked in an ordinary house, in a quiet suburb, driving an ordinary vehicle, who were anything but ordinary. Again, also very loosely based on reality. You could say that I had demonized them. Pete, the bloodthirsty monster, aided by his creepy wife Lilly, preyed upon anyone foolish enough to trespass upon their sinister suburban lair.

They were always in the back of my mind, somewhere in the darkness, no matter where I was or what I did. Once I got out of college, having spent a couple of years trying to figure out what sort of career I wanted, I finally got a good job offer. In order to accept it, I would have to move. And move far away, out to the Los Angeles area. So I headed west in my late 20’s, and began a new life and job. While I was out there, I thought less of the creepy couple as naturally I did not have to look at their house every day. There was nothing there in my new homeland to remind me of them. I did come home to visit a couple of times a year, though I was only there for about a week or so at a time. Which was not long enough to think much about the past. Eventually, my fortunes changed and I ended up moving back home. Which of course meant looking out my old bedroom window at the house when the leaves were off the trees….

Nothing much happened for the first couple of years, other than that my father passed away. It was just me and my mom after that. But then, one year something did happen, something that brought this nightmare from my past flying back up into my face.