When Someone Left the Window Open

It all began when someone left the window open. It was the white house on the top of the hill on the third floor bedroom. Where else could it have been? Papa kept things in there back when the house was still occupied and everything was relatively normal, or at least seemed so. It started out with only a few small words on a crumpled piece of paper. Just writing. But isn’t it something what words can do? How words can creep like subtle ghosts in the night and make a home in your head only to twist and torment and haunt you so. He wrote them down after Mother slammed the door in his face and then left the place hollow. She was the first to go. Even now I’m pretty sure there are still broken remains of the vase she threw when they were fighting. We never did keep a clean house. He wrote more and more and kept it all in his bedroom stuffed into the drawers of his desk where no one could see it. He came home late from work one evening. Then the next and the next and the next that followed that, and we found out later that he hid butchers knives under the bed where no one would find them. And then when he lost his job he’d already lost us, ‘cause we had learned how to manage just fine on our own. We had to. So Papa called it quits and left a note on his desk before he left, where he knew I would find it. I hadn’t gone into the room before. We weren’t allowed. For a good reason, too.

 

But I went in anyway the day after Papa left. And the floor creaked as I entered. The light bulbs needed replacing so the room was dingy and the whole feel of it was cold and very, very still. Like our father as he lay decomposing at the bottom of the ocean. But there was something else there as well, something in the room, for all of his words had been left behind, scribbled down in such a hurry that most of it wasn’t that legible. And they had a presence. It sent metal shivers all down my body. Made the hair on my arms stand straight up and for a second, though I thought maybe I’d imagined it, I heard something growl. I sure ran out of there fast. Only Suzie wandered in after, to see what all the fuss was about and she was running too fast and then tripped over a butcher’s knife that had slid out from under the bed. It was already stained before she came along and I stained it myself, years later.

 

No longer a child I had come back to the old house that night to say goodbye to the place that would always give me nightmares and cause me to be afraid of everything no matter how old I was, or how many sessions of therapy I’d been through. The thing in the bedroom must have kept quiet all that time ‘cause the house had become a sort of hangout for junky teenagers who didn’t know what else to do with themselves. The walls in various rooms were spray painted and cigarettes and glass from beer bottles lay scattered on the floor. Still the third floor bedroom was exactly the same as I’d left it. As if no one had touched it since. When I finally got up the courage to go in there after massive contemplation and a serious panic attack, it came alive on me all over again, only about a thousand times worse than before because there were thick and swirling shadows moving on the walls and the whole room was groaning like an unpleasant old man who was slowly, and finally dying. I knew I shouldn’t have gone in there. I knew I should have left it alone because some things are better off not revisiting, or being known about at all. There are parts of the universe, parts of the mind so terrifying they’re blocked off for a reason and once we begin to poke and pry at them they’ll do nothing but destroy us. As a matter of fact you’re better off not reading this. If someone is reading this right now. You’re better off not knowing. But the room had been opened up again after years of festering away on its own, the thing inside it growing like some demonic weed. Something very hungry. And very dark.

 

The knife was still there on the floor from years ago. I grabbed it as a pathetic attempt to defend myself from this thing I could not see. I stood there quaking in the room that seemed to loom over me, laughing at how small I was. Not knowing when the thing would strike and then all at once, it lunged. Started ripping away at me. Tearing at skin and uncoiling layers of who I was to make way for something at the very core which I didn't know even existed. But I felt it stir inside me. And I did not like it. I opened the window and jumped and then that was it for me. I had been planning to do it some time soon, so why not now? I’ve never been so goddamn stupid in all of fucked-up my life. As I write these words I am no longer me, but a part of the darkness that lingers, still growing. It does not matter whether you kill yourself or not, ‘cause that’s not escaping. Wherever you go you take yourself with you. Only I didn’t know that then. I am trapped in it now, along with the rest of my family, only they’re much deeper in it than I am. They’re not even anything that would be considered the least bit conscious or even alive. Just pure dark. Maybe that’s what happens to all of us. No matter how hard we try to be good people, no matter what sort of a life we live we all just end up here. Swallowed by this cold, black, unfeeling and terrible thing. Maybe when we’re alive we are a part of it already. Words have a magical power, you see, for it was he who summoned it here in the first place. He called upon devils and unnatural things. A monster of which the world has never seen before, never even began to imagine, lives here in this old piece of history I wish I’d never lived in, and would give up my soul to forget. It hurts. It’s been trying to swallow me, or rather the tiny piece that is left of me. It’s not even human anymore. And now that I’ve left the window open oh why, oh God!ohno oh dear please. PleasepleasepleasePLEASE HELP US HELP MEfejiow[weopa[wewpfjkgdroprdgdXXXXXXXXXxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx STOP. I’m such a fool, a hopeless fool. Because now that I’ve left the window open who knows where it will go? It will just keep growing and devour everyone and everything else.