The house I grew up in sits way out in the country. It was one of those houses that was built by a miser who tried to live beyond his means, but was still frugal about everything. His idea of decorating the cabinets in the kitchen was nailing giant “Z”s across them, making them look like a barn door. Apparently he was a real spook show. He would disappear for months at a time and holed up in this house until he finally passed away. He never was a social person, and it took a while before anybody found him. He never really kept up with house, and as a result there were several structural shortcomings. One corner of the floor in my room had rotted out because there was a leaky pipe that ran water to the spicket on the outside of the house. This pipe had rotted out the foundation of the corner of my room. Nobody could stand on that corner for risk of falling through so we put my bed caddy-corner so we couldn’t accidentally stand there and land in the basement. We had 8 acres of land, but most of it was densely wooded with a small creek-bed that would fill with water in the springtime because of the storms. I used to play out there all the time with my sister or whenever my friends would come over. Later my mother told me she found some “fairie mounds” in the back woods. Fairie mounds are Irish folklore. The lore is that fairies would build these mounds and you could hear music coming from them when it was really quiet. If you listened to them too long you could lose your mind. If you disturbed or accidentally fell into a fairie mound you would go missing for a hundred years. My mother is a teacher and she shared this tale with me as a lesson in respecting your origins and heritage and so on. Before we had lived in the city and I had gotten used to the sounds of sirens and hot-rod assholes peeling out. When I moved into the new house I heard the quiet for the first time. It was very peaceful, but it was difficult to adjust to the lack of noise. It made it really hard to fall asleep. In the early hours of the morning I would lay awake staring at my ceiling letting my gaze distort the ceiling into different shapes and I tried to find faces until I got so bored I’d finally doze off. During these late hours I’d hear noises. I thought it was just the house settling or the wind or something. It was usually very drafty in that house. During the summers it would be hot upstairs on the main floor and cold during the winters, but downstairs it was always cold. So cold I could almost see my breath some nights. We had a dog named Zuzu, after Zuzu’s petals from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That’s my dad’s favorite movie. We trained her to ring a set of bells on a string that we tied to the doorknob anytime she needed to go outside. She was very intelligent. We’d let her out and she’d run outside, do her business, then run back inside. At night she couldn’t sleep in bed with any of us because she was so restless. Always rolling around, bark-grunting, and trying to get comfortable, not to mention she’d lose her damn mind if she saw a squirrel outside, which was likely given that you could see the woods through our bedroom windows. To solve this problem, we bought her a kennel and covered it with a blanket so that it blocked her line of sight to the windows. It also had a nice comfy pillow for pooches inside. It looked incredibly cozy and if I’m being honest, I was a little bit jealous. We always locked her in at nighttime so she could sleep. We always did this. Always. One night I was finding faces in the ceiling and I heard Zuzu’s bells ring. My blood ran cold. I grabbed the mag-lite I had under my bed and slipped into my homer simpson face slippers. I creaked open my door and pointed my light down the hallway. No zuzu. I turned to look up the short stairs of the foyer into the living room. I saw, just barely… neglectfully even, a shadow dart around the corner. I searched the rest of the house, which included a caged Zuzu, but I saw nothing. I saw my breath in the basement. Several years passed and then I was in middle school. Around 5th or 6th grade I went through a phase where I wanted to play with toys from when I was really little. I’d go through home movies and photos and all sorts of family memorabilia and keepsakes like that too. I guess I was just being nostalgic, which is weird for an 11 year old. Nonetheless I remembered this toy I had that was a matchbox van that unfolded into a city for mini-matchbox cars to roll around in. I hadn’t played with it since I was five. I looked all over our house for it, but it was nowhere to be found. I eventually remembered that we had put it in the attic. I had been asking my parents to get it down for weeks and they said, “yeah, I’ll do it later.” I don’t blame them for putting it off. Getting in our attic was kind of a pain in the ass. We had a refrigerator in the garage that was placed just so you had to finagle the fold-down ladder to make sure it was sturdy. This ladder was also rotted and the hinge bolts were loose and shaky, this was probably because in order to avoid hitting the refrigerator we had to pull the ladder about a foot to one side and then push it back for it’s legs to be even on the floor. This put a lot of strain on the hinges. Very unsafe. Anytime we opened the garage door too quickly it bounced open and almost unfolded on the fridge. As rusty as the old springs were, and as much tension as they lost, they had just enough left to spare our refrigerator a good bonk on the noggin. One weekend my father had gone to his dad’s ranch to shoot some guns, we lived in the midwest it was normal to us, and my mother and sister went to the grocery store. I thought it’d be a good idea to get up into the attic and get my damn matchbox city! I pulled the string that pulled down the attic ladder in our garage. It had been so long since we had used it that dust poofed everywhere as it opened. I scaled the creaky ladder. With each step I feared it would crumble beneath me. Looking back I wish that it had. When I reached the top of the ladder I felt around for the string to click the light on. I pulled, the light lit, and I began my juvenile search for my long lost toy. I searched through Christmas decorations, antique silverware, and general garbage for about five minutes before the light started to flicker. I glanced over at the bare bulb and saw it was swinging, making the shadows of our crap sway eerily. I noticed that, off in the distance, one shadow was not swaying. As soon as I understood this was impossible my eyes widened and I drew in a breath to scream. All at once the ladder, the ladder that would be barricaded by the fridge, the ladder that was gravitationally sound resting on the ground, the ladder that had rusty springs that barely held it up to the ceiling, that ladder folded up and slammed closed and the light clicked off. I was frozen. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t tell a difference. I still felt the stationary shadow looking at me. I fumbled around trying to find the string to pull the light back on when the attic started shaking. It felt like an earthquake. I heard screaming. It was loud, screaming. Not my own. It consumed my own screams. It was like hundreds of other people were trapped up there with me. I finally found the string and pulled it with all my might. Click click click. No light. I knew the ladder would be right next to me so I jumped up and down and threw my weight on it, trying to get it to drop down, fridge noggin be damned, but it was like it was nailed shut. I passed out. The blackness consumed me. I woke up later to silence. I thought I had heard silence before when I moved to the country, but there were usually crickets and cicadas to break the silence. This time is was absolute quiet. I was afraid to breathe because I thought it would be too loud. As I held my breath I heard my heartbeat, then the faintest sound of music. I sat there for what felt like a hundred years until I heard the garage door open and I started screaming again, for help this time. Moments later beams of bright light poured in around the ladder. The light pulled me out of the darkness so abruptly, like I was waking from a nightmare. My mother’s head poked up from the ladder. Salvation. My parents scolded me for poking around in the attic without supervision. Of course they didn’t believe my story when I told them what really happened. “You were just a little traumatized”, they said. They had no idea how traumatized I was. From that day forward I never thought about old toys in the attic again. My mother never really thought our house was haunted or anything, but now my sister and I have moved out. I live in another state, and she left for college. Now my mom is left to face the silence for the first time. She called me the other day and she told me that she was sorry she didn’t believe my story. I told her not to go in the attic.
Submitted October 16, 2015 at 03:18AM by boostbander24 http://ift.tt/1RKZwHw nosleep
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