July 14th, 2010
It was last Wednesday night when I got the first call. The caller ID on the landline displayed my family's house, I picked it up only to find static on the other side. It wasn't the kind of static that you would hear on the television, it was ambient, the static of an abandoned line, when there was nothing but silence on the other end.
I figured it was a fluke and went to bed.
It was two days later when I received the next call. Once again I walked over to the phone bearing the ID of my former residence and was mildly unsurprised that there was no one there. I hung up, and then dialed my mother's cell phone to tell her that their phone was acting strangely. It went to voicemail after a dozen rings and I left a short message.
The next day, Saturday, I got two more calls. Silence greeted me. I called my mother's cell again, then my father's, and lastly my sister's; no one picked up.
It was then that I got worried. I put my phone down and stared out the window before my desk, the lush green of the woods in May doing nothing to reassure me. I scribbled a few lines into the notepad I kept for myself, updating the record of what I now referred to internally as the Mysterious Call Log. I was worried I couldn't contact them, they lived a bit of ways out of town but cell service was by no means scarce.
I decided to go to bed and head out for my family's place after breakfast.
I awoke to my landline ringing. My heart grew a little cold as I extracted myself from my bed; I knew exactly where that call was coming from. I trudged by the caller ID without looking at it, making my way to the kitchen. I grabbed a few pop-tarts from my pantry and threw on my coat, doubling back to retrieve my car keys from my room and then heading out.
It was very early out and the air hung about with a chill. Dawn was seeping over the horizon; an edge of the sun was manifesting along the left side of a distant Idaho mountain making it look like a blaze had been set on its far slope. Dew covered my front lawn and my shoes picked up some dirt from a few bare spots in the grass. When I reached my car I didn't bother with trying to wipe them off on the gravel, my mind too was preoccupied with my family to worry anything about myself.
I backed out the driveway and started making my way through town, mindlessly munching on my pop-tart as my mind turned over deciding how worried it should feel. Life has been almost mechanical these few years since I moved out. I lived a silent life devoid of the friends that had left this town around the same time I had left home. I worked for myself doing lettering for logos and local official documents, calligraphy was the only art I enjoyed. It was a way of adding flourish to the mundane, adding a beauty to something that divulged its own separate beauty through words, not letters. Was this what my current predicament was? Was this the flourish to my bland life, a moment of worry and fear to give memory of my life structure? I decided it was and let my thoughts turn to worry. I allowed it to naturally crowd out any other thoughts I had, it was an uncomfortable feeling, I was a creature of comfort and I wanted to deny it, to only scare myself when there was actually proof. But even being mildly scared felt healthy and after all, it was my family.
It's easy to get spooked near McCall, although it has nothing to do with the town itself. The medium sized burg is almost touristy; it's perched at the foot of several picturesque mountains to the east and abutted the Pynette Lake to the north. The population is climbing back up to 3,000, it certainly isn't a rich area, but with the recent influx of visitors our town was on its way to becoming one. So what I mean to say is that it's easy to get spooked of the woods our pleasant town happened to be surround by, and I wasn't alone in this.
A few months after living in what had unwittingly became my self-inflicted seclusion I decide to visit the local bar a ways down the road that kept me up some nights. It was a small place, I lived past what most would consider the edge of town. The patrons there hadn't come during the influx of the late 90s, rather they consisted of weathered, craggy faced men who would've probably worried you had you met them on the street outside. Most of these men were trail guides and, slouched in their stools wearing their rain coats like a second skin, they would tell me about the eldritch creatures that lurked in our countryside. The wolf-like Brayers, thin winged Dragonbats, human-like Jockeys; it seemed as if there was no end to what their socially deprived minds could imagine. Some obviously didn't believe what they told me, others gripped me by the shoulder, staring at me with suddenly haunted eyes as they told me what had actually happened to that one hiker who went missing that one time.
Looking back, I should have paid more attention to what they called the Screecher. At the time, I had slowly gotten morbidly curious as they explained their legends to me, but I never paid them much heed. It was fun and interesting but eventually they seemed to run out of monsters on me, and I never heard much more on the subject after that.
Driving through town has slowly become more of a chore as the years go on; it seems every month there are more cars on the roads and Main street often slows to a ponderous procession. Even though my family technically lived close to me it still takes close to an hour to drive there. The town streets are becoming a congested maze and driving through it always leaves me with a slight headache.
As was expected, close to forty minutes later I pulled up to my old driveway and turned into it. The house was set back moderately from the road with a few decaying automobiles sunken into the landscape, a common setup for this slightly backwater locale I called home. The driveway was dirt and the pine boughs hung low, almost hitting the roof of my car as I trundled underneath. The surrounding landscape was a pallet of dark green and brown, the always seemingly desolate woods not helping my slowly growing sense of dread.
I nearly didn't want to go in, even after the trek to get out there. If something bad had happened to my family I would have preferred to not know, to keep living my mundane but comfortable life with the quiet reassurance that the world outside was ok, and I held no responsibility to it. It was a selfish feeling, and as I walked to the door I forced it down, letting the dread and worry well up in me again. My life needed this, this brief moment of fright and horror. It needed it to be normal, to add a few more colors to my monotone existence.
The door was unlocked and I pushed it open, revealing a house just as still as the woods that surrounded it. The stairs in front of me that led to the second floor were empty, as was the hallway past it. The paranoid part of my brain left the front door open as I took my first few steps deeper into the house. There was an odd smell in the air, it was musty with a hint of something I couldn't identify. It almost smelled like diluted gasoline, the smell you'd find hanging in the air at gas stations except much softer. Thinking it was my family's gas stove I went through the door at the very back of the hallway.
The kitchen was a mess. Dirty pans sat along the counter next to the sink and a few glasses half filled with orange juice sat on the opposite side. Had my family been cleaning up after breakfast? I decided it was a good sign, that made sense, it was still morning and my father insisted that everyone rise early on Sunday to get all the weekend chores about the house done. My gaze passed over to the kitchen table and that's when I received my first chilling observation.
In my father's spot there was a plate and glass, with a half-eaten omelet on it. At least, I guessed it was an omelet because there was a thin layer of mold splotched over it. Standing there stunned, I noticed that the chill I felt wasn't entirely in my heart. I turned and noticed for the first time that the refrigerator was only mostly closed and a thin wisp of vapor was leaking out to the tiled floor.
My mind was racing now, what had caused my family to move so quickly that they left everything the way it was? The gas leak theory surfaced in my mind again but I felt that if that truly had been the problem the smell would have been more pungent, and wouldn't they have called me? Wouldn't they have asked to stay with me while the leak got fixed?
I walked over to the refrigerator and absently pushed the door closed. I looked at the papers and newspaper clippings for anything with a recent date, but they failed divulge any clues. The house was still eerily quiet, the smell wafted gently through the air and the floor boards creaked as I went to check the other rooms.
The living room was mostly tidy, a newspaper on the couch, a pair of slippers near the door. Nothing out of place, just like an ordinary day returning from grade school to the empty house. There was a piece of notepad paper taped to the wall near the window; the window itself had its blinds closed except for a gap in the center, the blinds not fully pulled shut. As I got closer I saw that the paper had been divided into columns headed by the days of the week, a few tally marks in each. The tallies only existed in three consecutive days starting with Friday. Two marks on Friday, three on Saturday, and five on Sunday. I recognized it as my father's handwriting, had he been watching something through the window? I took a long look out into the woods for a moment and found nothing worth noting. Had someone been staking out the house? The scenario didn't make much sense but at the time my mind had no trouble conjuring up an idea of the sort.
Disturbed, I turned away from the view and started climbing the stairs in the main hallway. The wood squeaked and groaned slightly as I went up, while definitely safe the house had already existed for several generations; it wouldn't have been long before it would have needed some labored attention again. I passed my old room, which had been turned into storage; there was nothing odd inside. It was only until I reached the spare room to the left that I found it.
I stopped in the doorway, at first wondering what it was that sat on the middle of the rug. Surely those couldn't be bones, could they? However, as I took one step closer, my heart was seized once again by a pronounced horror and my mind fumbled as my eyes confirmed that it was right to be so afraid of this place.
The bones sat in a neat pile on the floor. There was no doubt in my mind that they were human, I could recognize a femur or humorous placed next to a scapula, individual ribs set beside a jawbone. They were bleached, as if they had never touched a drop of blood. I fell to my knees in shock and terror; I knew that this was no trick, something evil had come into my old house and left this for me to find in its wake.
The floorboards from the hall squeaked behind me, something heavy settling its weight on them. I turned slowly in my knelt position, eyes tracking the wall more slowly than my head turned, not wanting to see, to know. Then my eyes crossed over the door frame to meet a different pair.
It looked like my mother, but it wasn't. Her body was bulging and unnatural, bone-like shapes pushing up against the skin of her doubly wide limbs. Her mouth was too agape, and as I stared I felt the hate in its eyes. The smell washed over me, only later did I realize that it must have been what I had smelled when I entered, except now it revealed itself as the aroma of thick pine, the smell of the deep forest. Her clothing was ripped and her elongated fingers stretched like claws toward me. She almost filled the doorway, unnaturally tall, her eyes peering at me from just under the top of the door frame even though her legs were bent, as if to charge into the room.
I didn't think, my mind took just one look at the monster and told my body to escape. I launched myself forward, scrambling from my knees and ducking under the outstretched arms. I tried to push the thing aside as I shot through the gap between it and the frame but its weight was so great that I instead launched myself down the hallway towards the stairs. A horrible screech boomed from the hallway behind me, it almost sounded like a red tailed fox being skinned. I bolted down the stairs, my adrenaline addled mind refusing to let my legs trip, and shot out of the slightly open front door.
I left the door open behind me as I ran to my car, threw the door open and jammed my keys into the ignition. Nothing appeared in the front door as I spun the car around but that didn't stop me from almost hitting a couple trees on the way out. I drove myself into the city and only when stuck in the traffic, surrounded by people, did I finally feel a measure of safety again.
I write this journal entry, my only entry, as a warning to whomever finds it. I hope you'll believe me, that you'll take this to someone with authority. There is no doubt that I've gone insane. I am unable to speak now, I can only write now as I have for most of my life. I hope you can read this, my handwriting isn't nearly what it used to be, and everything I've practiced is lost to me now.
She visits me every day, I can see her through my study's window right now, standing just beyond the edge of the woods; her face is warped by rage. I understand what I'm seeing finally, it's just like they said.
It's wearing her body.
Today is the third day I've seen her, I know it will come for me soon. Tomorrow I'm going to go outside and meet her, it's for the best. I'm scared, but I'm also resigned.
I only hope that it forgives me for whatever I've done wrong.
Submitted August 11, 2015 at 02:14AM by SentiusRising http://ift.tt/1IFBzeV nosleep
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