When I was 11 my family picked up stakes from a small town on the North Shore of Massachusetts to the Seacoast of New Hampshire. The first couple of days at my new school I was the typical new kid until one day I finally got to talking to one of my classmates, Mike. We bonded over the sort of boring BS that 11 year old boys do: Nintendo, baseball, and riding bikes. Pretty soon he introduced me to another friend of his, Scott, and the three of us started hanging out together on the regular.
A few months after we'd been living in the new town, Mike asked me if I wanted to spend the night at his house. Scott would be there, too. I did, and so we got to it. Mike and his mother lived with his grandparents, her parents, in a big-ass colonial-style farmhouse on the edge of an acre of what was probably farmland at one time but hadn't produced anything since the 1800's. The house was a bit run down but the sheer size of it was fascinating as hell to me. For about a year I wondered where his dad was and why he acted so cagey when I asked about him. Scott eventually explained on the down low to me that Mike and his mom had moved up here with her parents to get away from his violent, abusive father in New York and not to bring it up again because it was pretty upsetting for the two of them.
His mother was nice and so were his grandparents. They were a solid middle class group that did their best to spoil Mike and pretty much anyone he hung around with. So Mike's house became the center of our socializing since it often involved pizza and/or ice cream and nobody complained about how much time we spent playing video games. There was a strange rule at Mike's house, though. It wasn't anything bad, it just didn't make any sense and wouldn't make any sense until about 7th grade when things started getting weird at Mike's house.
No one was allowed on the second floor. There were three floors. The first floor had all the common areas you're familiar with. Kitchen, dining room, a TV room, etc. The third floor had bedrooms. The second floor had nothing. There were rooms along a hallway but the doors were all closed and locked and no one spent any time on that floor. When I asked why, Mike dodged the question and Scott shot me a look that said, "don't ask." I can't say that I wasn't curious. Who wouldn't be? But it didn't bother me much. Scott would later fill me in when we were hanging out together without Mike.
"The second floor is haunted," Scott told me.
Internally, I freaked out. I was a little kid and naive and loved ghost stories. My mom used to tell me a story about living in a house with my dad before I was born that had a ghost in it that seemed to love to fuck with our dog. I pressed for details.
"You know how the doors are all closed? Mike says there's a ghost in each room and they can't leave with the doors closed."
"Have you ever seen one?"
"No. You don't really see them at Mike's house. They can be a little noisy, though." He replied.
I heard nothing on the night of that first sleepover, though, and would not for a couple of years. But before that, we'd gotten to daring each other to walk down the second floor hall. By this point, I'd come to believe that Scott was full of shit. Mike had made it clear that we weren't supposed to be on the second floor but I'd never heard his mom or his grandparents mention it and even though I didn't understand why we couldn't be on the second floor, I figured Scott and Mike were just screwing with me. They had each taken a turn cautiously creeping down the hallway toward the end but would reach the same spot and come skipping back in a hurry with a scared expression on their face, both asking each other if they'd heard the voice. Now it was my turn and I was firmly convinced that this was just two old friends messing with me so in a hurry to show them up, I ran down the hall and was stopped at the same door that Mike and Scott had reached when a booming voice came from the end of the hall where those two stood.
"Hey! You're not supposed to be down there!"
It was his grandfather who wouldn't leave his spot at the end of the hall but demanded that I "get back here right now!"
I did but not before I heard, from behind the door to my left, "Hey kid..."
Every hair stood on end and I ran back to the others. My face felt hot and my mouth went dry. I was not expecting that and I later said nothing about it. Over pizza his grandfather apologized for yelling at me and explained in the vaguest of terms that the second floor just isn't safe. A year later, his grandfather would be dead.
His grandfather wasn't exactly an old man. We were thirteen at this point and he was probably in his mid-50's. He seemed old to us at the time but in the grand scheme of things, dead in your 50's constitutes a tragedy. The vibe around Mike's house immediately took a nosedive and being there wasn't much fun anymore. No one spoke much. Mike was still Mike but depression was falling over him. You could see it on his face. The thing that froze Scott and I to the core were the known details about his grandfather's death. We were never told a cause but one day on the way to his room, Mike stopped us on the second floor and pointed to the end of the hall. His grandfather had been found there, lying on his stomach. The door on the right at the end of the hall was wide open and his grandfather's body was discovered half in and half out of the room. His body was positioned in such a way that it looked like he was crawling out of the room. Not long after that, while spending the night sleeping on Mike's floor in a sleeping bag, I was awoken by a thump on the floor from the room below me. The room where his grandfather was alleged to have died. It was followed by another that hit so hard that it seemed to shake the entire house and lift me off the floor. Mike's floor was bare floorboards, no carpet. From below me, I heard his grandfather's voice and I stood up, suddenly feeling the need to pee like never before.
"Michael. Are you up there? Michael, wake up." It said through the floorboards.
Mike was sound asleep and it went very quiet again. There was another huge thump on the floor and this time Mike woke up. He finds me standing there in the middle of his room holding my sleeping bag tightly against me, my face white.
"What's the problem?" He asks.
"I heard a voice."
"Was it grampa?"
I nod.
"Yeah. Sorry. I probably should have said something." And then he casually went back to sleep.
After some time, I finally felt tired again and lay back down. With my head on the floor I could hear him again.
"The door is locked," The voice said, "I need you to open the door."
After that I gave up on sleep.
Scott began to put some distance between himself and Mike. Mike's behavior was changing in a bad way but I couldn't see myself not hanging out with him. He was in a bad mood most of the time. His grandmother seemed to have confined herself to her bedroom since her husband's death and his mother spent most of her time watching television and not doing much of anything else. Sometimes he didn't come to school. We'd get together and he'd act like it didn't matter if we hung out or not and sometimes he'd be outright abusive. We were in his kitchen looking for something to eat. The house had become a bit of a mess lately and it smelled. Bad. It smelled in a way that I didn't expect. The house had fallen into a state of disarray but it was far from squalid. No matter where you went, however, it smelled like rot; rotten eggs, wood rot, urine. Mike shuffled stuff around in the refrigerator and when he couldn't find anything, he became angry and slammed the door and told me to get out. Leave.
I turned to go but before I did I left him with some angry parting words, "You've become a real asshole. I'm sorry your grandfather died but you don't need to take it out on me. In case you hadn't noticed, Scott hasn't been around much. I seem to spend more time with him these days without you than I do over here. This all sucks but you need to do something to get over it."
"Come here," He said, and led me to the stairs.
We walked up one flight to second floor and he pointed down the hall. The stench was unbelievable here and completely unidentifiable beyond a general description of "bad" but most notably and most shocking was the revelation that every door down the hallway had been opened at some point. The floor was as quiet as usual but the silence was somehow heavier this time now seeing all the doors open for the first time. I couldn't make out what was in any of them from where I was standing but Mike urged me to go look.
"You need to see what's in those rooms."
I refused. I wanted to go home. He grabbed my arm and started to walk me down the hall but before he could take more than a couple of steps, I yanked my arm free and told him no. He made another move to physically force me but this time I moved to hit him which translated to me either hitting him or pushing his face away. This time he lunged at me and we went down to the floor struggling awkwardly, me trying to get away, him trying to do, I don't know, something. We were suddenly broken up by his grandmother, whom I hadn't seen in quite some time. I took a moment to collect myself and then looked at her standing between us. Her hair was matted and greasy and it looked as though she'd been wearing the same outfit for a month. Her face had sunk a bit and she'd lost quite a bit of weight and though facing me, she didn't so much look at me as she looked past me.
"You need to go look in those rooms," She told me in a voice just above a whisper.
Having had enough, I turned and bound down the stairs four at a time before running out the front door and pedaling away on my bike as quickly as I could.
Months went by and Mike's school attendance got worse until he stopped coming, altogether. Scott had been cool and disconnected from the situation. He never went into details but two weeks after Mike's grandfather died Mike had done something to Scott that freaked him out so badly that he couldn't bear the thought of being around him. This effectively ended their friendship. I began to explain to Scott what had happened to me but he stopped me and told me that he didn't want to hear it. However, with Mike being gone from school for so long the two of us found an unexplainable sympathy for him and eventually got up the motivation to ride by his house and see what was up. Three days in a row we went and three days in a row no one answered the door in spite of his grandmother's and mother's cars both being in the driveway. Scott gave up. He came to conclusion that no one lived in the house anymore and stayed home the next time I went by to check on Mike. The following week, Mike's grandmother answered the door. She looked different. She was clean and looked me in the eye when she spoke to me but her complexion was as pale as the last time I saw her and her face had the same drawn look to it. She wore too much makeup for a woman that hardly wore any for as long as I knew her. She opened the door a crack, just enough to press her face to the opening and smiled. I asked where Mike was.
"That's so nice of you to check up on him," She said, "But Michael hasn't been feeling well for a while."
"What's wrong with him? Is he ok? He hasn't been to school in a couple of weeks."
"Yes. He's sick."
That didn't really answer my question. I pressed her for more and did my best to look past her into the house which she thwarted by moving her body with the direction of my gaze.
"I'm sure he'll be back," She said and then closed the door on me.
Another couple of weeks went by and Mike still hadn't come back to school. My teacher took me aside to explain to me that he had been withdrawn from school. I tried to talk Scott in going back over to his house after explaining what had happened with his grandmother but he couldn't be bothered. He was done with Mike and his weird family. So I rode over alone. When I got there I found the house and property cleaned up. Someone had cut the grass which had previously grown over. The doors were locked but all of the drapes had been taken down. I looked inside and found that every room had been cleared out. The cars were gone, too. Mike had left town and taken every trace of him with him.
Every now and then it occurs to me to look him up but nothing ever changes. No Facebook, no LinkedIn, not even a Myspace. The last time I saw Mike was effectively his last day on Earth as far as I could tell.
Submitted June 03, 2016 at 01:07AM by ThatWerewolfTho http://ift.tt/1UxNyDh nosleep
No comments:
Post a Comment