So I decided to go. I realized that the more time I spent thinking about it, the closer I'd get to talking myself out of it. And that couldn’t happen. Somehow this felt important. Important that I figure it out.
I drove over to the neighborhood and parked on the street opposite the house, in the exact same spot I had as last time. It didn’t take long for the unease to set in, and I tried not to look over at it, even though the burnt wood was always there, creeping into the corner of my vision. Thankfully the street wasn’t as empty as last time. There were a few cars parked in some driveways and even a couple of kids kicking a ball around on one of the lawns.
It took a while for me to settle my nerves, to make a firm commitment to stay there and wait. I'd gotten there an hour early. I suppose it was a way of giving myself an out, a chance to bail at the very last moment.
A few minutes later, I got a call from my sister, asking if I’d be able to drive her somewhere later that week. I agree, and almost in passing mention that I’m about to meet up with dad, as if that could possibly be something that she’d go on and ignore. As far as I was concerned, she didn't talk to him either.
The moment I tell her this, the line goes silent, and I begin to think that she’s hung up on me. But then I look at the screen and the call’s still going.
“Hello?” I ask. “Sarah you there?”
“What do you mean dad’s coming to meet you?” she asked.
I sighed. “Look. It’s a long story. I called him up yesterday and we decided to meet up. He said he’s living close by and that he’ll make the drive over-“
“Close by?” she interrupted, sounding confused. “What are you talking about? Dad moved to Australia. He’s been there for years.”
Now I was the one rendered silent.
“What? How do you know that?” I asked.
She goes on to tell me how she started talking to him again a few years back, a way to reconcile things after the "incident."
I really didn't like the way she'd said it.
“What?" I shook my head. "What incident?"
She goes into another bout of silence, and then after a while says “The house. The fire. You really don’t remember?”
I told her no, I don’t and all of a sudden I start to feel really dizzy. I check the time and it’s twenty minutes before my “dad” is supposed to show up and I feel a pit growing in my stomach. I start to look around and I end up focusing in on the two kids playing in the yard. At first I wasn’t sure why it was so unsettling, but after a while I realized that it was in their movements. Too emotionless, too mechanical. Almost like they were trying to pretend to be natural. They were literally just standing in place, kicking the ball in a straight line back-and-forth, no talking, no laughing, just blank stares.
I suppose the sight of them had put me into a trance or something because when I looked back at the clock, it was 3:01 PM. I checked my phone. The line had been cut and it looked like Sarah had tried calling me back a few times afterwards.
My heart began to beat really fast, and I looked around but there was nobody else that had arrived. I took this as a blessing and started my car and prepared to get the fuck out of dodge when I caught movement coming from the corner of my eye.
Somebody had opened up the front door of the house from the inside. For a moment I sat stunned. I didn’t want to look. I knew that I shouldn’t. But of course I couldn’t stop myself.
Standing in the darkness of the doorway was something tall, something pale and naked. It had skinny limbs and a box-like torso, but its head was too high up to see, blocked out by the doorframe. It stood there for a long time while I tried to find it in me to move. You need to leave, I kept repeating in my head. You need to get the fuck away. Yet I couldn’t. I was basically paralyzed in place.
Eventually the person, or whatever it was, moved. It hunched its head while its shoulders stayed in place and the moment that I saw its hanging, grinning jaw, the mouth filled with long, black teeth, I snapped out of it and put my car into drive and sped away.
After getting home later that day, I considered my options. Of course I could just do nothing, forget it all. Never go back to that house, or hell, even that town, never bring it up to anybody, just cut all ties with the situation as a whole.
But somehow that felt like the wrong move. Just a subtle inkling that if I were to try and ignore it, things would become even worse, that something would go out of its way to pursue me.
I needed to deal with it. But in order to do that, I first needed to understand what the hell this was. I’ve always had this suspicion that there were certain things that my mind had been repressing all these years, and that call with my sister had all but confirmed it.
It made sense. The lapses in memory, the estranged relationship with my dad. I’d never bothered thinking about it before because life had served as a good enough distraction. And maybe that’s exactly what I’d wanted, what I’d been hoping for.
But now it was obvious that the past wasn’t willing to let me go.
I called my sister again and asked for dad’s number. His real number.
As soon as he picked up the phone, I noticed the differences in his voice compared to whoever the hell I’d been talking to earlier. But the fucked up part was that they still sounded somewhat similar, as if the fake had made a concerted effort to study and emulate not only my dad’s voice but his way of speaking.
And he’d almost nailed it. If I hadn't been able to compare it to the real thing within a short amount of time, it probably wouldn't have even registered.
We started off by exchanging awkward pleasantries, but I was eager to get to the bottom of things, to find out the truth behind this “incident.” I’m sure I had forced myself to push it away for good reason, but once again, this had become something that needed to be dealt with.
Once I brought it up, my dad went silent. After a while he sighed.
“You really don’t remember?”
I assured him that no, I did not.
After hesitating for a few moments, he went ahead and laid it all out based on what he knew himself and what he had been told by the police after the fact.
It happened when I was fourteen, one year before starting high school. Dad was working late at his office so I’d been home alone at the time. (Sarah was out on a week-long school camping trip or something). Just as he’s getting ready to leave, he gets a phone call. From the police. The house across from ours had burned down and when the firefighters had gone in to rescue anybody trapped inside, they had found me, and can you guess where?
In the basement, completely passed out and minutes away from being fully engulfed in the flames. There was nobody else in the house. Just me.
Of course dad rushed straight to the hospital and when I came around several hours later, both him and the police were grilling me, asking why I’d gone into the house to begin with.
According to him, my responses had been mostly incoherent, but from what little they could decipher, I’d gone in because I needed to "get to the portal in the basement."
As soon as he said this, my blood ran cold. I listened on.
Apparently, the cops were suspicious of me. Suspect number one, even though there was little supporting evidence of my involvement besides the fact that I was the only one in the house. Eventually they dropped it, boiled it down to some freak accident. The young couple that owned the house were never found and when they asked my dad and the other neighbors where they might be, nobody had a clue. In fact, once they thought about it, they realized that none of them had exchanged more than a few words with these people in any given interaction and nobody knew what they did for a living. A few of them had even said that they’d only ever seen them leave their house late at night and return early the next morning.
The next thing he told me was the part that really freaked me the fuck out.
While I was still in the hospital, the firefighter that had first found me approached my dad and said that he knew for a fact that I couldn’t have been the one that burned the place down. My dad asked him how he could be so sure, and this is what the guy told him:
When he'd seen me in the basement, I wasn't actually alone.
I'd been passed out, and that part was true. But standing at the end of the room were other people. Maybe a dozen of them, all clustered together into a tight crowd. But they weren’t right.
They were too tall, too pale. Their faces too long, their grinning mouths too wide. The most upsetting part was that they were all naked and standing perfectly still within the roaring flames. For a moment, Jake thought that they might have been lifelike statues. He hoped that they were.
He called out to them. “Are you alright?”
They didn’t respond or move at all, so he felt safe enough to walk forward and grab me. But the moment he did, he could see all of their expressions change in unison, the smiles suddenly replaced by looks of sheer malice.
“He said it was the first and only time he’d ever seen pure evil in front of him,” my dad explained. “It was in their eyes. A complete lack of soul.”
Jake then lifted me up and started to carry me away as the smoke began to get suffocating. He thought he saw one of them step forward and that’s when he lost his shit and bolted.
“I’m not sure I believe it,” my dad continued. “But… I don’t know what he’d gain from lying. I really don’t.”
He went on to explain how for the next few days following the incident, I had been borderline catatonic. Wouldn’t speak, would barely eat. The only person that Jake had told that story to was my dad, and even throughout the entire ordeal, he kept it to himself. Because who would believe it?
Right before they began to seriously consider seeking out professional help, I snapped out of it. Just like that. No memory of the incident, but strangely enough I had asked to be sent to live with my Uncle all the way over in a different town. I didn’t tell anybody why, but I had seemed dead set on it.
I never talked to my dad after that. But in all fairness, he hadn’t tried reaching out to me either.
I wasn’t sure what to say or think so I told him goodbye and hung up.
Tall. Pale. Long, hanging grins. The people in the basement remember you.
The more I thought about it, the more I could begin to remember it. The voice luring me in. The stinging heat of the fire. The faces. The strange dancing. The chants.
That purple void in the corner.
I shook my head. Fuck this, I thought. Whatever the hell this was, I wasn’t about to be dragged back into it. I called the police and made an anonymous tip. I told them that I had good reason to suspect that there were a group of people running a meth lab in the basement of a burnt down house a few towns over. I told them that I had good reason to believe that they were armed and violent, to send more than a few cars, maybe even the SWAT.
Then I gave them the address.
And that marked the last of my involvement with this mess. I won’t let them drag me back into it. I won’t bite, no matter what they do. I won’t look at the children playing out in the field below my balcony, the children that were never there before. I won’t answer the calls from unknown numbers. I won’t open the fortune cookies that keep coming for me in the mail.
I won’t let them win.
---
Credits
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