This is a story about my cousin. This happened to him a couple years ago and I wanted to retell it for you. I was driving the car that found him at the end. His name is Anders.
Orpha was his grandmother, and she had died at midnight. Anders was the closest relative, geographically if not emotionally, which meant that he had to come early to watch the house. The cousins would arrive in a week, on Friday, the night before the funeral. His parents had died years before and his sister lived in Maine. The aunts lived in Tennessee. The rest of the family might stay a night after the funeral, which he’d welcome. The house was old, built in the early twenties. Brick and plaster and lathe, walls hard as rock. Still, it creaked, and it was dark. No matter how many lights Anders turned on at night, the house seemed dark, like blackness was being pulled in through the windows. Shutting the blinds didn’t help. When he closed the blinds he felt a kind of vertigo, as if there were nothing outside. When he left them open he was convinced he would look through to see something staring back at him. He left them closed most of the time and spent his days outside doing needless work on the lawn.
On his first night in the house he heard taps on the window of his room. He slept in the bedroom upstairs, right next to his grandmother’s room. It came three times, a breath between each, and he sat upright immediately. The taps were loud, and at first he tried to tell himself that it was a woodpecker who’d gotten confused, but he’d never known a woodpecker to tap slowly. It’s more like a fingernail, Anders thought. He didn’t know why a fingernail tapping on glass came to mind, but it fit immediately. The sound of children at the aquarium, Mom getting his attention from inside the house, himself trying to scare off a fly from the other side of the window. An old finger, wrinkled, bony, delineated by blue veins, tapping on the glass, imploring him to open up.
He stared at the blinds covering the window. The lights were on in his room and he could see no silhouette from the other side. His fingers tightened on the sheets and his legs drew up toward his chest. If he opened the window, Grandma Orpha would be there looking at him, and her eyes would be missing. Eyeless dead death monster woman. He pulled the sheets over his head for a moment and tried to close his eyes. Anders considered the image of a grown man cowering under the sheets and pulled them down. He reached over and grabbed the cord on the blinds, ripping them up. There was nothing. The moon hid behind clouds and he saw nothing but his own face.
The taps came again the next night, and the next. He ignored them. Once was enough. If errant birds wanted to crack against his window at night it was their business. He wouldn’t open every blind in the house for the sake of seeing dry clinging hair and dirt in the nostrils nothing at all.
On the third night there was nothing to watch on the old television in the living room, but it was on. The lamp on the endtable was on, as was the overhead light and the yellowish spotlight in the corner that shone over a painting. A fan in the corner was running. The volume on the television was uncomfortably loud and one of the broadcasters on the local news network was talking about a burglary. Oh, maybe that’s what that tapping was. Just a burglar. The tap came again, but Anders did not turn to see where from. He already knew. It came from whatever room he was in.
At two in the morning on the fifth night there was a new sound. Anders was in the kitchen drinking a glass of milk when he heard it and the glass slipped through his hand and broke on the floor. That sound was a barn owl, a scratching, scraping, rasping scream. It seemed to go on and on. Finally the call stopped, but for half an hour afterward he stood still next to the refrigerator with his eyes closed and milk seeping into his socks. Finally he pulled them off with his toes and walked upstairs, head down until he reached his bed. He cut himself twice on the broken glass but did nothing about it save wrap his blanket around his feet until the morning.
The seventh night, near midnight, he was in his room when he heard the taps again, three in a row, taptaptap. They had been slow the first time, a second between each. They had grown faster each night and now they were almost simultaneous, more like several severed fingers drumming on the glass rather than one. Immediately afterward, the owl screeched again. Anders kept his eyes down as he shuffled from the door to his bed, but from the corner of his eye he noticed that one of the sliding doors on the closet was open, the one nearest the wall. Far from the door to the hallway. He shut his eyes and shuffled to the closet. As soon as he touched the edge to push it closed he heard a papery voice from inside. “Please close it. I don’t like the light.”
His cousins found him shaking in his car the next morning. The car was smashed against a yew tree a mile from Orpha’s house. There was blood dried all over Anders’s face but no smears or any evidence that he had tried to wipe it away. His eyes were crusted shut, and when the paramedics pulled one open to shine a light into his pupils he screamed. They brought him to a hospital and after he was sedated they asked how he had crashed. “I couldn’t stand to keep my eyes open any more. It was just so dark. Dark all over, in and out.”
Submitted September 11, 2015 at 03:12AM by AnOldHermit http://ift.tt/1ihklP5 nosleep
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