Forgotten House (Part Five)

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

Audio Recording

It was a week after I had ventured inside that house, almost a week since the incident in the police station. The police hadn’t contacted me about that, which struck me as odd, until I convinced myself not to care so much. It wasn’t my fault, I had no idea what had caused that, who had done that. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking, wondering, what had happened. Who had been responsible. I had heard nothing in that station when I sat alone and waiting in that cold room. There was no noise. I had only caught a glimpse of someone dodging behind some shelves.

No, I wouldn’t wonder about that. The police would work it out. Perhaps they already had done so. Regardless, that was their territory, not mine. I had my own problems to worry about. Most of it had to do with work, though.

It was early evening, the sun beginning to reach the far horizon, as I walked around my front yard. There wasn’t much to see from where I tread, as a thin barrier of pine trees blocked the view to the nearby two-lane road. I could hear the occasional vehicle drive past, though, which was sometimes a comforting sound; knowing that I wasn’t completely out in the middle of nowhere, should some emergency suddenly arise.

Then my eyes fell upon it, the house I had dared to step inside a week ago. I could see the thin, metal sheets that served as a roof for that decrepit house, and the top of the red walls. Trees shrouded the rest from my vision, however. By this point, that house was a bruise on the landscape, as far as I was concerned. Yet even as I came to a stop, and stared at the rusted tin sheets, I found myself wanting to walk back through its door, and wander those hallways. Maybe there was some clue I missed, something to explain what waited in the basement and below.

That wouldn’t happened tonight, though. I turned and walked back to my own house, in through the front door. I had left the living room light on before my foray into the front yard.

In that span of a week, I had taken to recording as much as I could of my dreams. I kept a cheap composition book on an endtable near my bed. Earlier that morning, before work, I had moved the composition book to the living room, so I could look through it this evening. I sat down in a chair, and picked up the book.

I opened the book to the first page. In my neatest handwriting, I had written a brief note in blue ink detailing what I’d be writing on the following pages: “So I have been having some bizarre dreams of late. Not that this is anything new or strange in and of itself, but the matter of my dreams has become increasingly peculiar since I visited the house just down the hill from where I live. That old and abandoned house.”

Already I had notes on the first six pages of the composition book. To my mind, it was interesting to track the changes in my handwritng during the night, in the dark, when I couldn’t see the page, and was only moving the pen across the page forming what my mostly-asleep mind assumed were letters arranged in words, arranged in broken sentence fragments. A good percentage of my notes where thusly illegible, though I had attempted to puzzle through the markings. I tried to read through the first dream in the book.

“i and group of freinds trapped at combination military compund/school. i tried to lead escape. eventually we were caught and i forced a guard to shoot me point blank. i could apparently take andsurvive all that pain and i did that to prove my point. last i remember was telling guard to shoot me point blnak first through my hands then through my skull.

elsewhere in dream i was having a nervous breakdwndown because i wanted to show XXXXXXX just how much i loved her. XXXXXXX and i finally made love.”

As I read through that, I noticed two things, the first and most obvious being the errors in spelling and grammar. I excused those, given the time of night I’d written the notes.

The other thing I noticed was that I could remember parts of the dream quite vividly, especially the sensation of pain. I remembered, from the dream, standing with my friends as we were attempting to escape, in the night, alarm klaxons blaring, red beacons flooding the valley with their harsh light. I remembered watching the guards, heavily armed and armored, rushing us, and acknowledging that we were vastly outnumbered. I reached out a hand, motioning the guards to stop, but they kept running towards us, guns focused on us.

“SHOOT ME!” I shouted, my throat already raw and sore. A few guards approached, and stopped. “I know you want me dead. Shoot me, kill me, like I know you want to. Let them go,” I motioned towards my friends behind me. “Kill me, and let them go.”

I remembered the pain of the bullets tearing through my palm, some through my arm. Bullets then cut through my skull, searing pain throughout my body. I fell over, still conscious. The gunshots stopped, and I heard the guards yelling for my friends to leave, quickly, before another decision was made. I remained there on the ground, eyes closed, as my friends ran away, and the guards retreated.

That’s all I remembered from the dream. I noticed the last paragraph, but ignored it. She was gone, she had moved on, leaving me alone. That was months in the past, by now, and no longer a concern.

I turned the page.

“he stands before me, near the bed, that abomination of a man. not flluy humna, not this thing. I see eys, not the eyes of a man, but of some foul creature. why doesn’t he move? why can’t i move? I feel a hand upon my chest, a massive weight hodling me in place. he doesn’t move he just watches me. sees me. doesn’t look away.”

I closed the book. Those weren’t notes from a dream. I had written that two nights ago, apparently, upon waking up. I thought back to the other night, when I was convinced something was chasing me through the darkness in my house, but shook away all thoughts that there was something really there. Foolish thoughts. Impossible thoughts. Unlikely.

I needed something for dinner.

(continued in Part Six)