It was two years before I heard from the Devil again.
Two years of peace in that house. I was 17 then. Tall and thin and socially awkward. My parents were happy; settled firmly into their newer rustic life and I guess I was happy too. Life went on. I went to school and I came home and I'd bought my first car (a red 2002 Chevy Impala) and had a summer job making refrigerator door handles on an assembly line.
My nightmare became just that. A distant nightmare memory. A childish thing to fold up and compartmentalize and put away in the back of my mind. If I thought about it at all in those days it wasn't often. Mostly at night in bed; in the quiet of my mind when I couldn't sleep. I ended up throwing that shirt away.
In the winter of 2005--I remember it was right around Christmas--we found the hole in my closet.
I'd been noticing the smell for awhile. It started small--a whiff of mildew or mothballs when you first threw open the door. By winter break I could smell it from my bed across the room and in the hallway outside. That stink of rancid meat.
"Goddamn it, there's a hole in here." My dad called from inside my closet when he could ignore it no longer and came to investigate.
"There's your culprit. Bet a rat or something got inside the wall and died. Or maybe it's a leaky pipe. Smells like mold in here." I watched my dad struggle to his feet from across the room; crawling backwards on all fours.
"Can you fix it?"
"I'll have to call somebody. Holes too small to see much. Probably gonna have to knock out a section of the wall to get to the pipes or whatever's back there. Bastard."
My father was not one for handy work.
"How am I supposed to sleep?" I whined "It stinks in here."
"Sleep in the other room," said my dad on his way out, "or the couch downstairs."
The other room was the spare bedroom across from my parents. It was always cold in there and I tended to watch a lot of porn on my laptop late into the night and didn't need my mom walking in on me.
So, I lit some scented candles my mom kept in the bathroom and decided to tough it out under the blankets.
That night I heard the voices for the first time.
Sleep came easily in those days. I'd lie in bed with the TV on and my eyes closed and let my mind go; the faint blue light from the screen a comforting warmth on the back of my eyelids in the vast dark chasm of my dreams.
I think what woke me was the quiet.
The TV was off and with it, the familiar light and sound that held back the armies of the night. Lying in bed, the silence forced itself upon me. Hard and oppressive--almost tactile--I breathed it in and held it inside me. A kind of cotton muffled pressure behind my eyes that strained against my skin from the inside.
Silence.
I could feel too, the house around me--the utter reticence of it to breathe; to make a sound that might shatter that heavy unnatural kind of quietude.
And then I heard the voices.
So soft and fast at first to seem almost like nothing. It might have been the wind or my imagination. But no, there were words. If I strained, I could just catch a few snatches amid the hurried dry whisking of voices speaking faster and faster.
Pain
Flame
Yes
Come
Darkness
Run
The scarred wood floors felt cold against my bare feet as I swung them over the edge of the bed. I listened hard. A room in darkness holds many secrets, and I strained to find a figure crouching in the shadows; to hear the muffled creak of an intruders footsteps in the hall outside my door.
Die
Hurry
Hungry
Rising, I stepped slowly forward, feeling the familiar way with my toes; arms out stiffly in the dark. The stink from the closet filled my nose. I gagged and fought down rising bile.
My room smelled like a headache. Freshly turned earth over rot and sick. I covered my nose and mouth with a hand. The closet door stood slightly ajar and I nudged it further open with my foot; pulling back as the smell intensified. Clicking on the closet's overhead light I peered inside.
The hole was back behind the shoe rack. Far right corner; down near the baseboard. A rough hewn hole about the size of my fist that ate all the light around it and pulled the eye into an impenetrable black emptiness.
Crouching down, I kind of crab walked over it the hole, pushing aside hanging clothes and my shoes to reach it. Up close, the hole resembled an ovoid gaping maw. I could feel a slight cool rush of air from it; something from the bowels of the house itself.
And now, with my ear pressed up against the hole, the voices more audible. Still soft though--like other voices from far off. But now I could make out what they were saying.
comeoncomeoncomewe'rehungrycomehere cometouscometothefirehurrywe'reinthedark cometothefirecometothepaincometothedark hurry Jacob I'm waiting
I pulled back from the wall with a yelp and scrabbled out of the closet madly; kicking the door closed and leaning my back against it.
There was something in the wall. And it knew my name.
Submitted January 19, 2016 at 03:08AM by JayGetsHazy http://ift.tt/1SZzuTw nosleep
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