I was at work the first time Elisha saw one of the dream characters in the house. I didn’t know that she had called because I never keep my phone on me when we’re broadcasting. If it started vibrating or ringing while we were live, they would have my ass. When we finished up, I got back in my truck and saw 8 missed calls between 6:00 and 8:00am. My heart started hammering as I called her back, and I slammed the truck into gear, peeling out of the lot.
She answered on the fourth ring, still sobbing.
“Babe?” I began, “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, but it faltered at the end.
She struggled to catch her breath, and managed to croak out, “Baby’s fine, I saw-” before choking on the words. I blew through several stop signs, praying to God that no one got in my way and doing my best to comfort Elisha. Finally her breathing steadied and she was able to tell me what was going on.
“It was Todd. And Suzie and Will too, but they didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Wait, Elisha, are you talking about a dream?” I replied, feeling a little sour that she may have worried me for nothing. Suzie and Will are the old black lady and little troublemaker I mentioned before. Todd was another story. Elisha hated the dreams he showed his face in. He was mean, sadistic even, and he loved to torment Will in particular.
“This wasn’t a dream, Daniel,” she snapped. She rarely used my full name, and it sobered me immediately. “I saw them. I saw them in the house.”
My mind began racing. The first conclusion I could reach was that my wife was hallucinating. It’s not uncommon for things like this to happen to pregnant women, right? In retrospect I was being pretty chauvinistic, but I was tired and I had already violated enough traffic laws to cost a fortune or even my license if a cop had seen me. I wasn’t in the mood for nonsense.
But I was a good husband. I took a deep breath and let go of my frustration. It didn’t matter what was going on, my wife was terrified, and it was my job to make sure she was okay.
“Sweetie,” I said softly, “Where are you right now?”
“I’m in the bedroom. I locked the door after Todd started knocking. I…” she stopped to whimper a bit before continuing. “I thought he was going to hurt me and the baby!” Just like that, she was hysterical again.
Then I heard it myself. Three distinct raps on the wooden door of the bedroom. Elisha screamed my name and I could hear the phone switch over to speaker. The white noise of the room got a bit louder, and my wife’s crying became part of the wider spectrum of sound. The knocks sounded on the door, louder this time, and the hair on my arms stood on end. I whipped around the last corner onto our street and slammed on the breaks in front of the house. With the phone pressed to my ear, I sprinted the ten feet or so to the front door.
“Elisha, baby, I’m outside, I’m almost there!” I said as I turned the handle of the front door. It was locked, just like I left it. I kept talking as I fumbled with the keys, “I’m coming, I promise! I promise it’ll be okay!” I pushed the door open, and as the morning light fell across the dark living room, the pounding coming from my phone subsided. Only my wife’s cries remained.
It took me the better part of an hour to convince her to open the bedroom door and let me in. I finally had to send her a picture from my phone camera to prove it was really me before she undid the lock. I didn’t touch the door, I let her open it herself for fear of startling her. As soon as she saw my face, she threw open the door and rushed into my arms. I went through the process of talking her down again, and eventually she told me the whole story.
After I had left for work that morning around 4:00am, she went back to sleep. She had been sleeping later than usual since she got into the second trimester, but that day she woke with a start around 6:00. She couldn’t get back to sleep, so she decided to make some coffee and check the news. She had gotten the coffee maker started when she heard a sound behind her and turned to find Suzie in the rocking chair. It was her favorite spot in Elisha’s dreams, but she wasn’t dreaming anymore. Suzie smiled at her and said good morning, stitching something in her hands all the while. Elisha dropped the mug she was holding, which shattered on the tile floor.
That’s when Will appeared from the hallway. He murmured something about noise before settling on the couch. Suzie mussed his hair and told him to go back to sleep.
“Elisha isn’t ready to see us yet,” Suzie said. “We don’t want to scare her, honey.”
“We don’t?” said a deep voice from the opposite corner, to Elisha’s left. That corner houses our small dining table, and it doesn’t get much natural light. Elisha jumped when she heard the voice and backed up to the refrigerator as Todd strolled out of the shadows. He was a tall man, and thin as a reed. His face was sunken and his bones showed sharply under his skin. His eyes were always wide and he tended to keep his mouth open and slightly slack.
“I have every intention of scaring her,” he snarled. He took one step toward Elisha before she bolted
Elisha ran and locked herself in the bedroom, which is when she tried to call me. For two hours Todd stalked outside the door, knocking every once in a while, but never speaking. The attack became more aggressive when I called her back, but as soon as the front door opened, it stopped. I found the full coffee pot on the counter and the shattered mug on the floor. Everything in the house seemed to assure me that Elisha was telling the truth.
But how could that be? What was going on in my house? The weeks that followed were horrible and pushed us and our marriage to the boiling point.
Submitted September 30, 2015 at 07:16AM by MyTchotchkes http://ift.tt/1KQMKT6 nosleep
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