Irrational

Sometimes, when you imagine you see something out of the corner of your eye, you may not be imagining at all.

People will argue with you to their last breath about what separates us humans from animals. Language, philosophy, litter. Really, though, what it comes down to is intelligence, and it comes with a price. The difference between you and a dog is that if the dog sees a treat, it will go for it without question. A treat is a treat. It likes treats, and there’s one right there. Great. On the other hand, when you see a treat, you think about it first. Is it safe? Who does it belong to? What are the consequences? It’s this ability to think about the results of our actions before actually performing said actions that is our greatest strength, and also the cross we bear. That makes us better than the mindless animals from which we evolved, right? We are superior in intellect, and what else is there?
Let’s go back to the dog. He is wandering around the woods, and a bear suddenly charges him. He outruns the bear. The danger is averted. The dog felt fear, but the need for fight or flight has passed, and things return to normal. He may even return to exploring the woods until he runs into another bear. Fear was a tactic for survival, and once the danger passes, the fear goes away. It’s a logical process.

As humans, you and I work differently. If you were jumped by a grizzly and you managed to outrun it, the fear doesn’t go away. Sure, the bear isn’t chasing you, but he’s out there somewhere. There’s a good chance you won’t run into the bear again, but that one moment of rational fear has left an imprint. This stain on your memory will pervade your consciousness even when it doesn’t make sense. You imagine that the bear will emerge from the bushes at any moment, because as an intelligent human, you think too much.

Here’s another example: you’re moving into a new house, and the children and mother who lived there before you were killed by an alcoholic father. Sure, that’s horrible, but that shouldn’t change a thing about the house. It’s been cleaned out of every trace that might have been left behind. But that doesn’t matter to you, because you’re a human like me, and things like that creep you out.

That last scenario wasn’t hypothetical, by the way; it happened to me. A few months ago, a man was driven mad by drink and a bad marriage and the loss of his job. He got home one night and killed everyone in the house, including himself.

Knowing that fact shouldn’t have been a problem. It really shouldn’t. Had I not known that, the house would have been perfectly innocuous, because it is innocuous. It’s just some wood and pipes and drywall with furniture in it. I could have lived there quite comfortably and happily, if I were ignorant like a dog. Intelligence bred a thousand potential dangers that couldn’t possibly exist. Every noise in the house--the pipes moaning, the floor creaking, a window ratting--unsettled me, even though every house I’ve ever lived in made similar sounds and I was unfazed.
That’s what I’ve been getting at. Irrational fear, the reason that ghost stories will keep you  up at night and that you were afraid to walk on the floor of your bedroom because the monster would reach out from under your bed and get you. There’s no imminent peril, nothing to fight or flee from. The mind takes evidence from the environment and creates things to fear.
The whole house gave me the creeps. It didn’t help that I was living all alone for the first time in my life. If I were still with my roommate and best friend, we could have laughed off these eerie things that keep happening to me. Just the other night, I was getting ready to take a shower, and I thought I saw something in the bathroom mirror. This put me on edge. You know the feeling. No matter how many times you tell yourself it wasn’t real, you can’t bring yourself to even glance at that mirror again... you know, just in case. You move a little faster so you can put it out of sight. It’s stupid, but you know what I mean. You know exactly what I mean.
Everything went smoothly after that and I had nearly put my tension to rest. I had just begun to wash my face with a fistful of soap when the radio that was playing in the background began to squeal. It was changing stations, whining and hissing static in between. I opened my eyes reflexively, immediately flooding them with soap. I yelped, and thrust my face beneath the shower head, trying to flush out the burning sensation. I finally soothed my stinging eyes and leaped from  the shower to find out what was going on. I found that the radio had settled down. I began creating explanations. The station was experiencing technical difficulties. It was part of the song. There had been some disturbance in the signal. The walls here were pretty thick--it was entirely possible.

I unplugged the device anyway.

I shut off the water and began to towel off, and noticed that I still had shampoo in my hair. I groaned, but I was too afraid to go back into the shower. Something about that house kept me feeling antsy like that.

A few more days passed, and nothing happened. I was constantly on edge, even during the daytime when everything seems less spooky. I tried to spend a lot of time out of the house. I found any excuse; Oh no, I seem to have eaten all my bread in one sitting. Time to go the grocery store. How unfortunate, my stock of pencils seem to be running low. Off to the office supply store. After a while, I dropped the pretenses and simply walked around the city. I dreaded the moment when I would have to return, but what choice did I have? I could try crashing at a friend’s house, but what would I tell them? My radio was on the fritz, so I had to leave the house? What was I, nine years old?
I rejuvenated my resolve with that thought. Shame is a great motivator; just ask the dog you just caught stealing treats. I marched back to my house and determinedly ignored anything unusual. It worked for a night or two. Despite this, I always felt that there were things crouching just out of sight.

I was watching TV and I had to take a piss, so I went to the bathroom. I was far enough away from the living room that I couldn’t hear the TV anymore. Not even the AC was rumbling. I prepared to do my business, but then the shower curtain rustled. Already being a little freaked out, I took a step back and stared at it. It simply hung there, now unmoving. I imagined the little girl from The Grudge standing on the other side, just waiting for me to begin peeing. She would get me while I was most vulnerable. I exited the bathroom promptly. I grabbed an empty soda bottle from the coffee table and peed into it instead, and dreaded the moment when I had to go “#2.”

There was something about the master bedroom, too, that I couldn’t simply block out. It felt as though the room was... angry. Like there had been awful fights and furious beings in the room before. I don’t know what gave me the idea, and there’s no possible way I could explain it to you. I fought my way to sleep a few nights, but the more time I spent in that room, the more real the negative emotions felt. I could practically hear two people arguing, shouting at each other. The rage was so tangible that I found myself spiting everything.

Not just while in bed, but during the day, too. If someone got in my way while I was driving, I shouted and flipped them the bird. That’s not like me at all. I’m a pushover--you read the part about the shower. People started separating themselves from me at work, and even my friends noticed something different about me. I just kept telling them that it was the stress of living on my own, and I was alright, really. But they kept giving me this look, and I didn’t like it. It was like they thought I was an injured dog that needed to be put down. I hated it.

When I got home and crawled into bed, I noticed something for the first time. I was a little too tall for the thing; when I laid down  flat, the heels of my feet hung over the edge. It’s not like I was a giant, and my feet were dangling over the edge. They were just far enough off the mattress to get the occasional draft, or to imagine that there was a pale, ghostly little girl, staring up at my toes, just waiting to grab them with her cold, scabby hands.

I slept on the couch. With the lights on. It was pathetic.
Two days later, it was a Saturday, the night that my friends and I typically explored the city, visiting bars, picking up chicks. What twenty-three-year-old men are supposed to do on the weekends. It was the perfect reason to get out of the creepy-a*s house. I called up Rich, my roommate from college. The phone rang a few times, but the call was rejected. He didn’t miss the call--he deliberately denied it. I tried Kenneth, another friend who frequently joined us on these late-night adventures, but he ignored me as well. I realized that the moment had come; this poor dog had been put out of its misery. I didn’t need those b******s, anyway.
I spent my weekend cooped up in that damn house. My only companions were my computer and the silence. I stared at that glowing screen into the wee hours of the morning, by which time all other light sources had been eliminated. I was just dicking around on the Internet when there was a sound behind me. It sounded like several footsteps on the tile. I wheeled around, standing up out of the chair as I did so. I tried to adjust to the darkness, but the light from the computer had temporarily blinded me. I kept expecting that it would take advantage of my moment of weakness and strike at me. I imagined a thousand different horrible creatures lunge at me from the murky darkness that pressed around me, but my eyes adjusted slowly, and everything was as it should be. Or, at least, the same as it was before.
I had long since learned to stop listening to music--my radio lay smashed in pieces on my driveway--and silence buzzed in my ears as I gazed into the darkness, the faint gleam from the computer screen casting discolored shadows across the room. The irrational fear had already been present in me, but it flared in the wake of the mysterious noise. “Hello?” I whispered. I was stupid and foolish, but it was reassuring that nobody answered. I stayed perfectly still for a few minutes, with only my eyes darting from shadow to shadow. The sound could have been my imagination. I don’t even have any stone floors. I crept into my bedroom, careful to remain quiet. I intentionally avoided looking at a mirror hanging from the wall as I passed it. I kicked one of my shoes, which I had left lying around, and I jumped, looking around frantically.
What the hell was I thinking? That I was going to wake “them” up? I’ll never know. I lay flat on my bed, keeping the whole room in plain sight. My legs were pulled up to prevent leaving my feet exposed. I heard the same sounds coming from outside my room; noises that houses don’t usually make. It wasn’t footsteps. There was a thumping. A constant, rhythmic sound. It was soft, slow, edging into the peripherals of my consciousness. It was like a drumbeat heard at a long distance, but it was different somehow. It was more immediate, more sinister. I tried as hard as I could to ignore it. If I could just fall asleep, morning would come more quickly and then it would be light out and this whole thing could end. But of course, it wasn’t that easy.
For painful, endless hours, I lay awake, watching the dark corners of the room, forcing them by sheer willpower alone not to spawn the horrors I knew they could. After a long time, I gave up on trying to sleep at all. Closing my eyes for more than a few moments at a time seemed to make the noise louder. That’s right, the noise never stopped. The more I focused on it, the faster it got.
The next few nights were the same, agonizing routine. The demons in the room--the furious, invisible demons--seemed to take delight in letting me relax for just a moment before tugging another shadow into motion in the corner of my eye. I cried on the fourth night. I just started sobbing. I wanted so badly to sleep, but I was far too afraid. I think I was hallucinating from lack of sleep, because I heard scratching on the floor near the foot of my bed. I was so scared, I was shaking, but I dared myself to peek over the edge of the mattress.
There was a kitten, sort of. It was like I was watching a kitten in an old movie, except it was right there on the floor, like I could touch it. It walked across a blanket, and one of its claws got caught on it. The didn’t notice it was dragging the blanket around until it brushed up against its back legs, and then it jumped, sending the cloth waving in the air. The kitten’s wide eyes stared up at the blanket as it swooped upon him like a bird of prey. The kitten was caught beneath it, trapped by no one’s fault in particular. It wrestled around inside, trying to escape, but only getting more and more hopelessly tangled. The shape of the kitten became less and less distinguishable, and finally, there was a dull snap. The wriggling wad of blanket grew still. I knew that the kitten’s neck had broken.
The whole setup disappeared; the blanket, the kitten, everything. It simply wasn’t there anymore, and I realized how long I had left myself vulnerable. I swiveled my head around rapidly, making sure that there was nothing sneaking up on me. I yanked the blanket over myself and curled up again, creating a fortress against my own fears. That’s all that was happening. I was scaring myself.
On the fifth night, I finally managed to fall asleep, but that was only because my brain basically shut down. I was very grateful for that. I obviously hadn’t showered for about a week either, so I was really looking like a mess. At work, my boss forced me to take a vacation, to spend more time at home. I tried to tell him that was the exact opposite of what I need, but he didn’t understand. I could have tried to explain, but words can’t describe the feeling of living in that house for as long as I have. You’d have to experience it to really know.
The next two weeks, the ones when I wasn’t allowed to go to work, were hell. I would spontaneously break out crying every few hours because I just wanted so badly to be able to sleep or take a shower or use the bathroom in peace, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I was a damn coward, and the house wouldn’t leave me alone.

I stopped thinking it was my fault. If it was really in my head, I could have forced it out. I was good at that kind of stuff. This was definitely not the kind of thing that you can just make up. I had actually seen detached fingernails scattered around my house. I usually went into a different room, just in case the body it came from was nearby, and when I returned, the remains were gone. I stopped watching TV, because the noise gave whatever was watching me too much cover.

The lights were kept on constantly. Every room, every minute of every day. The blackness was their domain; I quarantined the hall closet and the guest bedroom. There was no lightswitch in the closet and the one in the guest bedroom was all the way across the room. I dared not wander across in the dark to find the switch. I imagined that when the light switched on, I’d be face-to-face with an undead little girl, head crooked because of her broken neck.

I slept on the couch. The master bedroom became too much to handle. I use the term “slept” loosely; I only got an hour or two if I was lucky. Just a small taste of relief, a glimpse into a world without fear. Then when I woke up, it was right back to crying and peeing into a bottle.

Soon my fears began to expand from the house. I feared being alone anywhere. Public bathrooms were too creepy. If there was a car parked on the curb, I would sprint past it, not wanting to see what might press its awful face against the windows. People who passed me on the street thought I was homeless and gave me coins or avoided me. Usually the latter.

Finally, I became too desperate for relief to go on any longer. I started searching the Internet for an exorcist. I simply feared that the eyes looking over my shoulder as I browsed would catch on to what I was doing and punish me. They seemed to do that; if I thought too much about ignoring them and defeating them, they would make loud noises or flicker in the reflections on the dark windows.

I made a quick run through a search engine’s results, picking out the website for a church near my house. I called the number from the website and closed the laptop, just in case they were on to me.

The pulsing sound, which had never really stopped, began to increase in tempo, growing infinitesimally louder. It penetrated my mental defenses, and I sat up, frantically looking around the room for the sound. “Stop it!” I shouted. I dropped the phone, and I thought I heard someone asking who was calling on the other end. I didn’d dare pick it up. “Leave me alone!” But it didn’t listen. No, it grew louder and faster still. My ears rang mercilessly. I fled the room, covering my ears. Something tripped me, and with my arms occupied, my fall went unbroken. My breath was forced out of me as I landed on my back on the tile. I gasped and coughed, trying desperately to scramble back onto my feet.

I could hear a thousand winged insects begin to buzz, the angry sound slowly rising. Still wheezing, I half-crawled half-ran to the front door. I tried to yank the door open, but it failed to budge. “No!” I cried hoarsely. I twisted the lock, and pulled again with all my might, but it was no good. The door was stuck. Some evil force in the house was preventing me from escaping. I twisted the lock over and over again, but I gave up quickly. The sound! Why wouldn’t it stop? I beat my head against the wall once, twice, three times, trying to eradicate it from my skull. I shouted my fear and frustration, and fell to the floor as the pain in my forehead swelled. There was a high pitched whistling sound, and Death’s drum kept pounding away all around me. Was it the ghost of the family that died there, haunting its current resident?

I dragged myself to my feet, my breathing fast and shallow. “Please! Please, stop!” I was openly sobbing again. I felt unbearably hopeless. I just wanted to sleep, to feel what I had been getting small doses of in the wee hours of the morning. I wanted peace. Then I knew what I had to do. I kept it in a case beneath my bed.

I staggered down the hall, but the house was twisting and melting around me. Shapes warped, and there was no other noise except the pounding and the ringing, which seemed to emanate from the walls and the floor and reverberate in my brain. When I cried my pleas aloud, begging for the torture to stop, I couldn't even hear my own voice. I reached for the knob of what I thought was the bedroom door, but when I burst inside, I was facing myself in the bathroom mirror. The sight was unbearable; a plague of misshapen shadows gathered around my reflection, caressing my face and tugging at my hair. I flailed my arms around, trying to grab them, to throw them away from me, but there was nothing in the room except me, and the noise. That goddamn noise!

I gripped the walls for support as I forced my way out of the bathroom and towards the end of the hall where the black case was hidden. Reality itself seemed to be dissolving. The outlines of shapes began to waver and I couldn’t find my balance. The door was open, and I collapsed directly to the floor, where I crawled with every last ounce of my strength towards the bed. I felt around with my arm, and undead children scratched at my forearm with dirty, broken nails, bent on keeping me separated from my last hope. My arms were weakened from sleep deprivation, and fighting them off was nearly impossible.
I finally found it, and clicked open the case. THUMP THUMP. THUMP THUMP. My head was ready to explode with the despicable noise, so I cocked the handgun and prepared to oblige it. I touched the tip of the cold, soothing metal to my temple. I tried one with one last, desperate ounce of willpower to banish the noises and the visions from my mind, but I finally came to terms with the fact that they weren’t in my head at all, and never were. Escape was the only option. Escape from everything.

I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. For a second or two, the noise tried desperately to follow me into the next world, to drag me back into its domain. It no longer had any power over me. It sounded desperate. As desperate as I had been just a few moments ago, when I was at its mercy. But without me, it was nothing. It slowed and grew quieter, and it knew I had beaten it. With a few more weak, irregular sounds, it stopped. I had conquered irrational fear, once and for all. I outsmarted it, because I was intelligent. I'd like to see a dog do that.

Author's Note

Have fun staying awake tonight. :)