Have you ever noticed that some evenings, usually between five and eight o’clock, the light from the setting sun will cast a strange and eerie glow on the world, bathing everything in an odd shade of purple, or orange, or red? The blooms on the trees and flowers all seem brighter, crisper somehow, and the clouds are painted hues of amber and gold. In modern terms, it’s as if someone has applied an Instagram filter to reality, just for those few moments. When the sun finally sets, the effect is gone.
This evening was like that. I looked out the window and was shocked to see the gravel road outside my home in the country bathed in a deep orange. The sky looked like a watercolor painting, casting that eerie glow over everything I could see. Strangely, it felt like the crispness of the colors clarified my mind as well. I was recently single and had been feeling anxious and nervous for the last few weeks; this new feeling of wholeness was a welcome respite. I knew this phenomenon wouldn’t last long, so I decided to go for a walk.
I put on my Nikes and set out into the evening air. By the time the road curved about an eighth of a mile from my home, I noticed that the richness of color all around me stood in stark contrast to the silence of my surroundings. The sounds of cicadas, frogs, chirping birds, and other forms of animal life, which are typically omnipresent during the evenings out here, were strangely absent.
Ahead, I noticed a small home, tucked back into the large pines on the right side of the road, where no home had previously stood. It was not a new build, that was for sure, and as my ears strained to pick up any hint of the wildlife around me, I thought I heard someone screaming. As I got closer, I knew my ears had not deceived me. Someone was screaming in pain, and it was coming from the house.
Without a second thought, I ran towards the house. I banged on the front door with both fists, trying to get the attention of anyone inside, but no one answered. In desperation, the screams still jarring the stillness of the air, I ran to the brightly lit window to my right and looked inside.
To my surprise, it was a hospital room. I don’t mean a room inside a house with white curtains and machines, I mean an actual hospital room, complete with tiled floors, equipment, and a window on the back wall that revealed a clear blue sky, clearly impossible considering woods bordered the back of the house. Inside, a woman on a bed had her legs hiked up, pushing with all of her might as her husband, several nurses, and a doctor urged her on. She was having a baby. After a final push, a red baby boy burst forth into the doctor’s arms. When it was the woman’s turn to hold him, she cradled the boy in her arms, tears in her eyes, and then leaned over to the man. One of the nurses pulled a cellphone from her pocket as the man took off the hair cap and surgical mask he was wearing and smiled for the picture.
In shock, I realized why the people had seemed so familiar at first: the man was my father. Upon closer inspection, the woman was my mother, albeit 38 years younger, thinner, and with a different hair style. Being an only child, the baby boy could only be one person: me.
I stumbled back from the window, suddenly terrified. What the hell is happening to me, I thought? Not knowing what else to do, I jogged back towards the road and sprinted towards my house. When I rounded the corner again, I stopped in my tracks. My house was no longer there; in its place was a dry patch of earth, filled with weeds and the occasional pine careening towards the heavens. The road before me seemed to go on forever, still bathed in the strange orange light. After a moment, I sat down in the gravel, confused, breathing deeply in and out to slow my heartbeat. It was a nervous breakdown, I knew it. What else could explain what I had seen?
After a few minutes, when I was feeling a bit better, I got back up, dusted myself off, and started walking back towards the house that contained the room at the hospital in Texas were I was born. The window I had looked inside was now dark and empty, the house silent. Whatever had been there, or whatever I thought had been there, was gone.
I started walking, carefully and cautiously, a slow march of trepidation and bewilderment. The road before me, like the stretch where my house should have been, seemed to go on forever into the distance, twisting and turning as it went.
It wasn’t long before I encountered a second house, this one a bit larger than the first.
This time, when I looked inside the window, I saw the playground at Elias Shaw Elementary. It’s a striking feeling looking inside a structure and being met with a sprawling, separate reality, especially one that is outdoors. If I pressed myself close enough to the glass, I found the countryside faded away and I felt as if I was actually standing there at the school in North Carolina I attended so long ago.
I watched as a younger me, probably 6 or 7 years old, and a few other children spun precariously on the merry-go-round while a few others pushed. Then, I watched as I slowly climbed the ladder to the tallest slide on the playground, following a young girl in a yellow dress, her name escaping me. Timidly, she sat at the top of the slide, refusing to go down. When she turned to climb back down the latter, I barred her path, refusing to move.
“You’re going down!” I could hear myself say over her objections. Then, suddenly, she toppled over the edge of the slide, falling what looked like 8 or 10 feet and landing awkwardly on her arm. She screamed. I sat atop the slide in triumph, smiling.
I quickly turned away from the window, not wanting to see the odd angle of her arm as the teachers scrambled to get her inside the building. I remembered the event, and the aftermath. She had a broken arm and had to wear a pink cast for quite a long while after. My parents had been notified and I had gotten a stern lecture from my father that night about how to treat little girls along with losing my television rights for a week. It was an accident, after all, and kids don’t know any better.
I looked back towards the first house only to find it had disappeared like mine had. There was only one thing to do – move forwards. At this point, about an hour had passed, but the sun still hung petrified in the sky, casting its eerie spell on the landscape around me.
The next house, now a three-bedroom home with a garage in front and a white picket fence, held a scene a bit more macabre than the previous one. When I was 9 or so, I had taken a thick plastic bag and a bunch of rubber bands and placed them around our cat’s head, watching with glee as it ran and flailed into the night. I remembered my feeling that night as I watched: not pride at my accomplishment, but something more like contentment.
The next house, larger still, showed me the time I stole my friend’s new bike he had gotten for Christmas, probably 12 or so at the time, and pushed it into the pond beside my house. I had wanted a new bike for Christmas, but my parents couldn’t afford it, so why should he have one?
And so it went, on and on. I walked and walked, each house I encountered showing me another moment in my life, every one filled with more anger, rage, and resentment than the one before. I saw the time I berated a clearly autistic boy in high school and the time I beat a kid in my class up for looking at me wrong. I saw the night I took that sorority girl back to my dorm room when she was a bit too drunk. I even saw the night when, fresh out of college, I ran a woman and her young daughter off the road and into a telephone pole in a fit of road rage. I had done many terrible things in my life – some of them I had even been to jail for – and each played out one after the other like some sick highlight reel.
Each house was larger and more secure than the next, eventually forcing me to climb over gates, pry shutters open, or creep around to the back yard to find windows I could look through. The Beware of Dog signs and obvious security cameras didn’t deter me in the least. The scenes went on and on forever under the light of that strange fading sun.
Finally, I made it to a house that was much bigger than the rest. A large brick and stone mansion, it looked horrifically out of place against the backdrop of the fields and meadows of the countryside. The hedges in front were the sharpest shade of green I had ever seen and the gray stone pillars with their hints of shiny ore seemed to refract the orange light like prisms.
I climbed the large iron gate and strolled past the empty guard station at the front of the long driveway that led to the home while the security cameras perched just under the roof line sat silent.
Standing in in the circle drive, I looked around to find an open window. Part of me knew what I was going to see in the depths of this monstrosity - and that part of me smiled. I smiled again when I saw the front door, which was almost completely glass. Stepping up, I had an amazing view to the scene within.
There was blood – everywhere.
Melissa’s body lay on her kitchen floor, twisted and broken. There were streaks of red on the cabinets, the refrigerator, and even on the ceiling. I was nowhere to be seen. Instead, I saw several men in uniforms and one or two in white suits milling about the apartment
The police.
When one of them looked in my direction, I instinctually backed away from the window. Foolish, I know; obviously they couldn’t see me, but it was unnerving all the same. I also didn’t have anything to worry about, as I had been very meticulous in cleaning up after myself. Mellissa and I had only been dating for a week or so and we hadn’t told anyone yet, so there would be no reason I would even be a considered as a suspect.
Looking back inside, I noticed the people in the white suits seemed to be collecting samples. One man held his tweezers up to the light above the bar in the kitchen and although I couldn’t quite make it out, I could guess what it was: a hair. Not mine, surely; I had been too careful. Outside the apartment door, two detectives were talking to another female in front of the open door across the hall. Her arms were crossed and her face tear-streaked, her running mascara creating the illusion of a sad clown’s face. After a while, the body was photographed and removed, and the apartment was dark and quiet again.
When I made it back to the road, I was relieved to see the sun finally begin to creep below the horizon, the orange light finally fading into the muted tones of dusk. I rounded the next corner and was escatic to see my house in the distance, right where it should have been, the birds and cicadas performing their chirping soliloquys once more. Somehow, I had come full circle.
Now, as I sit and write this, a creeping dread has risen inside me. Whose hair did the man in the white suit collect? Was it mine? And what did the woman across the hall see?
Most importantly, what the hell just happened? I must be going crazy, right? I wouldn’t believe it myself if someone told me this story. Why would I be shown this, if not for some purpose?
I was going to end this a bit differently, but now that I can hear the faint sounds of sirens in the distance, I’ve become a bit paranoid. Maybe I'm imagining them - I surely can’t trust my eyes and ears after what just happened.
Whether they’re real or not, one question won't stop repeating in my mind: Are they coming for me?
Submitted July 21, 2016 at 11:10PM by Creeping_dread http://ift.tt/2acFsS3 nosleep
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