Hardly a day has gone by since this happened to me, back in the year 2000, that I haven't felt the experience creep its way back into my thoughts to be relived anew. I bring that upon myself in large part, as I have since developed a mildly obsessive fascination with the macabre and the supernatural, the likes of which I never had prior to the incident. I am offering this account as catharsis. It is my hope that by sharing this story I will gain power over it and be able to move past it once and for all. Your comments to that end are most welcome.
I was 26 years old when this happened, a veteran of the Army and a college-educated professional. I was working at an ad agency in New York when I got a phone call from my stepmother telling me both my father and grandmother were in very poor health, that she needed my help, and that if I wanted to see either of them again I had better come home soon. I had just had my heart broken by an unrequited love—a colleague at work, no less—and was already in such a pit of despair that when I heard the news about my family I made the rash decision to quit my job and move temporarily back to Texas to help my stepmother. At least that's what I told myself. It's not easy picking up and moving to New York. It was even harder back then. I honestly didn't know when or if I would ever go back.
I returned home to discover that my dad's health wasn't nearly as dire as my stepmother had led me to believe, which made me feel manipulated and annoyed, but I hadn't been home long before my grandmother died. She had been partially responsible for raising me after my mother died and she meant the world to me. She had been careening slowly toward dementia since I'd been in high school, and by this time her moments of lucidity were spare. For a few days before she died, she rallied a bit and I was able to say my hellos and goodbyes, but one day in particular I could tell she was distracted and anxious, and I noticed her eyes darting in alarm and refocusing over my shoulder as if someone had silently crept up behind me. I asked her what she saw but she never told me.
The upside of being back home was getting to spend time with my from college, Kent. Kent lived several miles outside of town in a trailer behind his parents' house on their pasture land. It was a nice trailer—the kind I guess you'd more accurately call a mobile home—and a lot like a generic suburban Midwestern apartment on the inside. Spending time with Kent was the perfect antidote to the stress of my family situation and my withdrawals from life in New York. We'd listen to music and watch movies and talk until late into the night, and before long I was sleeping over more often than not. He had an extra bedroom, but I always ended up on the sofa. There was something I didn't love about that end of the trailer. I even got a little uneasy sometimes using the restroom, which was down the little hallway next to the spare bedroom.
One winter night while I was asleep on the sofa, I awoke to a rush of frigid air as the thick quilt and blankets covering me were suddenly yanked off. Never before or since—and this includes childhood nightmares and desert warfare as an adult—have I ever felt such complete and abject terror. I had seen plenty of horror films and one of my pet criticisms of the genre had always been what I considered the cheesiness of the full-throated terror scream. Always when I had been my most frightened in the past it had manifested itself as paralysis. That's what people really do when they're terrified, I believed. They don't open their mouths and bleat like goats.
Yet that's exactly what I did. When those covers flew off me I knew the second my eyes popped open that there were two diabolical presences in the room with me. I saw nothing of the sort but I knew they were there all the same. I even knew somehow that one was even bigger and more diabolical than the other. In the process of jumping up from the sofa and clambering over the back of it, I managed to kick the coffee table, which had a marble top and weighed at least 75 pounds, completely upside down. I don't know when I started the cinematic horror-screaming, but that's what I was still doing when Kent burst out of the master bedroom off the kitchen, brandishing a baseball bat, and found me cowering in corner next to the refrigerator, squatting on the floor with my hands over my face. Once I came to my senses, we examined the living room to find the covers on the floor next to the end of the sofa where they could not have been if they had simply slid off me in my sleep. We righted the coffee table, whose legs were sticking in the air, and then he immediately drew his attention to my shin where I had struck it, right in front where the bone is closest to the skin. I hadn't noticed it hurting but I had been coursing with adrenaline. When I saw the look on Kent's face I expected the worst, but the skin was barely even broken. I never got so much as a bruise.
When Kent returned home from work the next day he said we needed to talk, and I was expecting a highly awkward conversation that culminated in asking me to get my shit and clear out of his house for awhile. To my relief and surprise, he instead told me a few things he specifically hadn't wanted to tell me before. It seemed Kent had had an uncle who'd been unnaturally fond of him. His mother, sensing the unnatural fondness, had intentionally kept the uncle away from Kent. This prompted the uncle and his cowering mouse of a wife to adopt a young boy, upon whom the uncle had inflicted unspeakable torment and who had been consequently removed from the home, only to die while back in the state's custody. The uncle had died when Kent was in his young teens, and he told me that on the night of the funeral he had awoken suddenly to find his uncle standing next to his bed, leaning over him and leering directly into his face.
"I think it was my uncle who yanked the covers off you last night," he told me. "And if there was a lesser entity with him, it had to be my cousin. It's only natural that my uncle would still have him enthralled in the afterlife. He used to tie the poor kid to a chair and put him in the root cellar for days on end because he stuttered. My uncle was a mean, mean man, and apparently I'm the only thing that ever made him happy. My poor cousin suffered every day at his hand for not being me."
"Also, I think I've known for awhile that something isn't right in here. There have been times when my mom has dropped by and accused me of having B.O. when I opened the door for her."
Anyone who knows Kent knows he is not trying to have B.O. under any circumstance.
"My uncle's funk was legendary," he told me. "I've never smelled it, but both my mom and my aunt have met me at the front door and told me how ripe I am. I always make them step away from the door and smell me again. I can't believe I've never put two and two together before now."
I told him I'd never smelled anything amiss either, by the front door or elsewhere.
"I wonder if only women can smell it," he said.
It wasn't long before I grew certain of wanting to return to New York, and this time I told Kent I wanted him to come with me. He didn't need much convincing. We planned to be joined in this venture by another friend of mine, a girl named Jeri whom I had known since grade school. I had been talking to her regularly on the phone but, as she lived several hours away, I had not yet seen her face to face. She had already expressed an interest in moving to New York as well, and Kent wanted to meet her prior to jumping into a living situation with her. I knew they'd get along fine.
The day Jeri showed for a weekend stay, I met her at the front door of the trailer and gave her a big hug.
"Dude," she broke away, "You smell like a goat's butt. When's the last time you took a shower?"
"I beg your motherfucking pardon, madam. I do not—"
Oh my god. It had just happened again.
Kent and Jeri hit if off like I knew they would, and plans for the move proceeded apace. I was glad to have Jeri involved, as I knew her organization and haggling skills would serve us well in finding a space to live in in New York. We found a sweet loft in Brooklyn for the three of us and our moving date was fast approaching. We decided to use Kent's trailer as the rendezvous point, so I went to Jeri's to help her pack and move her things into a giant U-Haul truck, which the two of us then drove back to Kent's to fill the rest of the way with his belongings and mine. The plan was for the three of us to sleep there after packing the truck, and leave for New York first thing in the morning.
The next day I awoke bright and early, put on coffee, and began seeing to last minute travel details. I noticed Jeri was still fast asleep on the sofa (I had slept in the spare bedroom without incident) and although it wasn't like me to be up before her, I decided she must be exhausted from all the labor and let her sleep in until the lure of the coffee became irresistible. Kent soon emerged from his room, and I was again surprised that our talking and moving around hadn't awoken Jeri, still sacked out in the living room.
That's when I noticed the bundle of covers on the sofa hadn't stirred in the slightest. And now that I was fully alert from coffee, I realized there was no way that wad of blankets was Jeri or anyone else. Had she slipped into the restroom while we weren't looking? No. She was nowhere to be found. Her car was still outside, though. Had she gone for an early-morning walk? That wasn't like Jeri at all.
I finally found her behind the loveseat, buried in a pile of afghans Kent's grandmother had crocheted. I could tell by the waxy, gray pallor of her face that she was dead, and I could tell by the expression frozen on her face that she had died in terror. While I was trying to muster the words to tell Kent, however, I saw her eyelids flutter. When they opened, and her eyes met mine, I saw fury in them. And I could see she was deathly ill.
"What was that shit you pulled last night? Explain yourself! What were you trying to do to me?"
I was dumbfounded. I told her I had slept the whole night through and the first time I had come out of the bedroom was this morning when I woke up.
"Bullshit," she spat back at me. "You were out here fucking with me all night! I was so exhausted and you wouldn't let me get a wink of sleep! I would just get my eyes closed and you'd pop out of the bedroom again and call my name and wake me up. Over and over, all night long."
"Jeri, I would never do such a thing! Why would I do that?"
"Well if that wasn't you, who the hell was it? I know it wasn't Kent, because it was coming from the hallway outside your room and I would have heard Kent walking across the room from the other side of the house. Plus it sounded just like you. I know your voice after all."
"What the hell did it say?" I asked. "It just kept calling your name and waking you up?"
"No," she said, "It kept telling me to come here. I thought it was you so I kept asking you why and where and what the hell you wanted. And you never answered me, you just disappeared back into the hallway and waited for me to go to sleep again, and as the night went on you got meaner and nastier until I thought I was losing my mind!"
I ran out of ways to try to convince her that it hadn't been me. During the drive Kent and I told her the whole story of his family and the paranormal events we'd experienced in the trailer. We made it to New York, the three of us, behind schedule but excited about our life as roommates in our funky new Brooklyn loft.
But I never fully regained Jeri's trust, and things were never the same between us again. Before too long, the stress of living in close quarters with me took its toll on her and she opted to return to her abusive relationship in Texas. The stress took its toll on Kent as well, and not long after he got a phone call informing him his mother had died, he, too, disappeared in the middle of the night. Only he was really gone.
Submitted November 15, 2017 at 12:57PM by vodajcek http://ift.tt/2zXQsQs nosleep
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