Two Houses: Part Four

I Awoke in the Night. A Noise I Did Hear.

Claudia blinked just in time for Evie’s limp body to hit the carpet with a thud. She felt the reverberation of it travel through the floor, into her bed frame, and rattle the mattress beneath her. 

What?

But then she was moving. Not gracefully, only forward enough that she also hit the floor with a jolt to her knees and elbows. She was entangled in the blankets, the fabric wrapped tightly about her ankles after thrashing fitfully in her sleep. 

“Evie!” Claudia tried to shout but found her voice breaking, coming out in a squeak instead. She always seemed to lose the ability to talk when it was most important she be loud.  

Evie was none the wiser. It was more like she’d only rolled out of the bed and not bothered to stir. She didn’t mind the slow tugging by the creature taking her away to some dark realm in the night. She was busy with her dreams, or perhaps she was so deep in rest she believed the experience to be only in the world of her mind. Something about this fact frightened Claudia even more. Evie had always been the lighter sleeper. Just walking through the room could disturb her. 

Claudia clawed at the sheets trying to find some gap to wiggle her legs out of. “Evie, get up!” Still her words came out in a strangled whisper that did nothing toward waking her sister. Evie’s leg was now completely hidden under her bed. Claudia could no longer see the phantom claw. Nothing was about to stop it from going about its work trying to steal her away. There was one big tug as if in reaction to her thoughts. Evie was now half in-half out of the shadows, out cold. 

Claudia groaned in distress and pulled hard at the sheets causing an audible tear at the stitches.  She took only a moment to register why she hadn’t been able to come free easily; the blanket had been twisted almost taut and lazily tied around the left leg post at the bottom of her own bed. Her stomach sank somehow even further before she shook completely free and stumbled to the other side of the attic bedroom.

“Evie. Evie, come on, get up,” she wheezed out of breath, grabbing at her sister’s limp arms and yanking back.

She grumbled incoherently and started a sleepy battle under her sister’s grip. Claudia found it slightly ridiculous that she wanted to come free from her grasp but the creature’s grip was all fine and good. 

“Evie!” Claudia gave her one good shake.

“Whaaat,” Evie sighed, somehow still sounding pissed. 

Claudia gripped her sister under the arms and pulled her free from the pitched darkness easily, all the time searching for any sign of what she was sure she’d seen.

The night shadowed any chance of seeing anything so Claudia found herself fumbling around for the button switch of Evie’s lamp, the same lamp she had used religiously just months ago during a bout of night terrors. She hadn’t bothered with it since they’d moved and Claudia didn’t know if it was simply growing out of a fear or the security of sharing a room with her overprotective older sister. Perhaps a mixture of the two. Fat lot of good it’s done tonight, she thought. 

Claudia’s fingers found the edge of the thick button and slammed her fist down on it. Their corner of the room lit up bright yellow causing them both to squint painfully. Still with the illumination, there was nothing on Evie’s leg for her to find. No sign of a struggle whatsoever. Only her own fingerprints as she turned the ankle about showed up white, faded to pink, and then vanished a moment later.  

“Claudia, that hurts.”

She looked up at the kinky, sleep-wild curls fanned out around her sister’s angry face. 

“What are you doing?”

Claudia dropped her sister’s foot to the carpet and bent low to peer under the dust ruffle beside them. A pair of tennis shoes thrown forgetfully were underneath and something that could have been a spider or a large dust bunny. The boxsprings whined obnoxiously as Evie crawled back into bed. She had already laid down on her side, facing away from Claudia but was awake enough to mumble one last thing before falling asleep. 

“Why are you so weird sometimes?”

There was to be no more sleep for Claudia that night. She was decidedly awake after the experience and made her way downstairs to await the rest of the day. The cuckoo clock - the same clock that had hung right over the oven the day they’d arrived - read four fifteen, its little pinecones swinging back and forth beneath it like the feet of a teasing child, laughing at her for getting spooked by her own mind and unfamiliar territory. 

How long were these delusions going to go on? How much worse was it going to get?

She stirred the cream into her tea and glared sleepily out the kitchen window looking right out into the tree line. You could just make out the edge of the other house from that vantage point, only the back corner of its frame. 

Claudia turned her head to the side thinking over the recent changes, how everything felt like it was riled up inside her; dust on a bookcase, left alone for years. 

She didn’t like the building opposite her, she decided. There was no chance she ever would, no matter how long they stayed there or what they did to fix it up. But there was no tangible reason that everyone else had to feel the same as she did, especially if her mother seemed to love it so much and especially because she planned on leaving some day. 

She blinked a few times at the view before her then took a sip of her tea. The clock kept ticking what seemed like too loudly. She wondered how long it had been running on its own and who had left it there for them to adopt, if it was as old as the house perhaps. Claudia very much did not like clocks you could hear. The seconds audibly counting down your life threatened to drive her mad since she was a child. She glared at its ugly shape and hoped one day her mother would have the sense to throw it out or at least try to sell it, but the little owl glaring at her from the very top dared her to go ahead and try.

But something crossed her vision a second later, something that she hadn’t noticed the shape of until it moved. It was still dark outside and everything out there was labeled in her mind as normal because there was no way of seeing if it was not…unless it stepped forward. 

Claudia stood back a moment, leaving her mug solitary on the counter, steaming in the quiet morning. She squinted through the pane and was sure of it. 

There was a figure about ten yards behind the other house. At first she thought that it had to be a dog. A dog or maybe a coyote. It was something she had been worried about when they knew they would be moving out into the country. Evie wasn’t used to wildlife - not that she was either - but her sister had a habit of investigating what she found curious and new. God forbid she find a creature that looked like a stray dog and actually turned out to be something more wild upon further inspection. 

Claudia stared unwaveringly, waiting for some kind of sign as to what was to appear or for her vision to miraculously get clearer through the dimness of the early hour. But the creature stood motionless as if it knew it had been spotted. It was so long that she began to wonder if there was actually just a bush out there she’d never noticed before, shaped funny and swayed by a stray wind. 

Claudia didn’t like it and she didn’t trust the idea. She wasn’t about to be fooled twice in one hour and especially not by her own mind if that was what had conjured up these visions to punish and torment her. 

Her mug was left steaming itself away on the counter alone as she stepped toward the front door and a pair of boots she’d lazily left there the night before. The whole house was asleep but her.

She wanted to face it, only not if everyone was watching to see her go completely insane. It was better to see the messy facts for yourself and then ease other people into them later. 

The grass was dripping with dew in the darkness, she could hear it squeaking against the rubber soles on her feet. The temperature had dropped to something quite chilly and Claudia wrapped her robe tightly around torso, trying for once to be brave. But it was a very hard thing to do, before the sun had woken and in such an unfamiliar place all alone. 

I’m alone, Claudia let the sentence pass in a quiet kind of shock across her mind.

In some sort of confused way this was comforting to her for a moment. It was always other people that had caused her more harm than good, not spirits.

And then she had a different thought that caused her to pause her slow march around the side of the A-frame house she’d exited, an idea that this could possibly be just a regular wild animal that was just about as dangerous as another person. She racked her brain for the information of what to do if you were caught in the path of a wolf or a bear came charging at you. Weren’t there different rules for different types of bears? She didn’t think it had looked big enough to be one anyhow and if it did happen to be a full grown wolf, she was just going to run with the faith that it would be more afraid of her and escape to the safety of the trees. 

Claudia took a breath and stomped on, reminding herself that it was time to cut the grass down shorter again. 

The only sound was her boots stamp-squeaking in the dew ready for morning and the crickets thrumming against her eardrums. She told herself that she was unafraid, knew in her mind that there was no real reason to be, but the rest of her body betrayed her. The palms of her hands ran cold and clammy, not just because of the moisture in the leftover night air. She felt the palpitations in her chest coming before they were even there; her heart pumped like a horse missing its gallop, trying to crawl into her throat or generally up, someplace it definitely shouldn’t be. Everything but her mind wanted to protect her and protect her all the time so much so that even the silliest things posed a threat. She could not live her life, she thought angrily, and marched more determined past the evergreen bushes on her left. Her heart was not always right and most importantly, it was not the boss of her. If she was going to have these recurring delusions to “protect herself” then the only way to get rid of them, overcome them, was to face them head on and watch as they floated away without the fear they were looking to feed on. 

But although she had become bravely stubborn about the investigation for at least a moment, she halted on the little throughway between the two houses. 

Something was there. Right where she’d spotted it from inside the kitchen. 

It was still hard to tell quite what it was exactly other than a hulked over figure in the middle of the high grass closer to the forest line. For a brief moment, she remembered the girl from the last evening and wondered if the child had been sleeping outside in the cold. If this was the place that she had usually felt comfortable, lived, before they’d invaded. She had certainly seemed fine being in the place when they met before Claudia had shown her face, which she still found specifically strange and somewhat hurtful. Claudia had never thought of herself as a scary person but perhaps she resembled a threat to the girl. 

She planted her feet where they were, a safe distance away, and squinted into the dim light that was weakly growing above them. It was hard to tell but she could swear she saw the thing moving, like there was a blanket covering them that they couldn’t quite get out of. Her mind kept coming back to the little girl. Should I see if there’s trouble, if she needs help? What kind of kid comes running out of the woods looking all homeless like that? 

Claudia took another squeaking step forward and it grew. Whoever it was was not a child nor were they trapped under the weight of some kind of blanket. They stood most absolute and turned right at her as though they’d always known she’d been walking in their direction, watching. Like they were waiting for her to get close enough. 

“Aida.”

Claudia jumped, a small gasp releasing from her lips. Her mother, arms crossed against the cold, looked at her inquisitively from the corner of the house, as if she’d followed her own path out the front door and around only a few moments later. Claudia turned back and watched stunned as the figure in the field slowly walked into the tree line. She glanced at her mother in amazement, wondering why she hadn’t said anything yet about the stranger wandering in the middle of their property in the early hours of the morning. There was no sign on her mother’s face that she’d seen a thing, even with the figure out in the open as they’d been. Could it be? Am I really losing my mind?

“What are you doing out here? It’s freezing. And you left the sink running into the coffee pot.”

“What? I didn’t make coffee.”

Claudia marched past her mother, quickly spotting the fact that she herself was barefoot without even a sweater or a robe and what seemed to be mud already crusted across her toes. The pathway around the house was grass, high grass at that. 

She kicked off her boots and headed for the kitchen sink, knowing for certain that she’d find her steaming mug of Early Grey on the counter, in a mug she’d used for years, the three little cartoon geese with bows all lined up in descending order waiting for her on its side. There would be no coffee pot in the sink or if there was, she had not put it there. 

Her stomach dropped as she peered over the counter into the basin. The decanter sat alone under the faucet with water filled clear to the brim. The only other thing in the sink, her spoon laying face down. The mug was even gone and when she checked, it was clean and dry right in the same spot she’d grabbed it from in the cabinet. 

She felt very off at that moment. It was the sensation that the whole world was playing a joke on you, that you knew everyone was lying. A giant practical joke on one person. Her eyes gravitated toward that lone spoon. You can’t see the daisy from this angle, she thought, staring at the etched handle. 

“I told you. The running water woke me up.”

Claudia swiveled around to face her mother, suspicious. 

“Woke you up? What is this,” she pointed to the sink.

“What?” She had one eyebrow raised at her daughter, clearly playing innocent and confused in Claudia’s eyes.

“Why is there mud caked on your feet? It’s almost 6:30 in the morning. Where have you been?”

“Aida, stop shouting. You’ll wake your sister. Why are you yelling about mud?”

Claudia marched over to her mother and stabbed a finger toward her feet, dried debris falling off her toes onto the ugly linoleum. She glanced down at herself, seeming surprised by the fact that she was filthy and dragging it into the house. 

“Where were you?”

Confusion twisted her mother’s features. She looked almost as if she were in pain trying to recall the past hours of early morning. Something dark roiled in Claudia’s gut. 

The sound of smaller feet making the trip down the stairs broke up their conversation. Evie had woken to the shouting or perhaps her alarm. This was going to be her first day at the new school. 

Her sister came around the corner rubbing her sleep-puffy face and grumbled.

“You’re so loud in the morning. Couldn’t you have just let me sleep ‘til my alarm? First you drag me out of bed in the middle of the night and now you two are already arguing. It’s too freaking early.”

Claudia immediately felt horrible but paused when Evie walked to their mother to lean her weight on the older woman’s frame. Without seeming to think about it, she wrapped her arms around Claudia’s sister who looked as though she might fall back asleep there.

“I-,” Claudia started and then was struck by something more unsettling.

She turned sharply to the angry owl on the wall, his little house with a clock’s face still ticking. 

6:23. How? 

Somehow she had lost over two hours of the day. The sun was already creeping up to shine rays through the trees. 

Two hours?

“Aida, could you start some breakfast since you’ve been up? I apparently need to take another shower.”

Claudia felt like the world was spinning and stared at her mother and Evie. Neither of them knew. They hadn’t noticed a thing.

“Mom, I still need to get ready for school. Don’t hog the bathroom,” Evie whined as they both went walking into the next room. 

Two hours to make tea and walk around the side of the house. Impossible.

She glanced back into the sink where the spoon still lay against the full coffee pot. It was her last tether to reality. Anger began to spread from her center down to her fingertips, directed almost entirely toward her mother. What were these games she was suddenly playing? None of it made any sense. She realized it couldn’t all be her doing, but the feeling of betrayal was worse than anything, brought on even stronger by its abruptness and lack of reasoning. 

She could deal with hallucinations but the possibility that her mother was a part of making her feel less than sane, after everything that had happened. 

Claudia felt sick to her stomach. She leaned into the fridge and reached for the carton of eggs labeled farm-fresh. The idea of opening them and seeing the runny insides made her want to vomit even more.

Today is our first day. Let’s just make it through that. She sighed and cracked the first of the bunch on the edge of the counter.

The first full week in Pennsylvania was tiring for their little family. Everything in their new life was still slowly being settled into place and the growing pains were evident. None of them had ever lived outside of a city before. None of them had ever been so far from other people. Claudia found her ears ringing in the prolonged silences for the first few days before she became restless and marched on toward a part-time job at the very gas station she’d had the incident at on her way in. She overlooked the fact that the girl she’d slapped was no longer around, leaving a perfect space for her to fill. She hoped as she applied on paper that no one would recognize her, that they hadn’t seen the camera footage from that day. Clearly, they had not. Her first shift started the next day at eleven. 

Evie found her feet quickly at the small middle school. Immediately she was asking their mother if she could bring friends over and Claudia silently wondered if it was a “haunted house” effect.

Perhaps there were rumors about their property throughout the county and beyond. The gas station owner had raised her brows slightly at the address she’d scribbled onto her application but made no audible comment. The simple fact that she was quiet and good with numbers had them hiring her almost on the spot. The only thing she had said that stuck with Claudia was to let her know two weeks in advance if she decided to quit. The last girl had just walked out in the middle of a shift.

The weekend arrived with their mother employing her on renovation duties and in the middle of a break from peeling, scraping, and sweeping old wallpaper into piles, Evie brought sandwiches over to the older house. 

“You two eat. I need to check those pipes upstairs. If I get them to turn the water back on Tuesday, I don’t want it shooting out of that hole in the wall,” her mother explained, climbing the staircase on a mission. 

The two sat cross-legged on the living room floor facing the front windows, a makeshift picnic between them. They were both quiet for a moment before Evie asked, “Has mom been working over here every day?”

Claudia nodded, swallowing the dry corner of crust she’d just bitten off and taking a sip of water when it tried to stick to the walls of her throat. 

“She really likes this place, doesn’t she?”

Claudia felt that nervous, uncomfortable sensation in her stomach again, like there was a thread sewn into the lining of it, tugging when it got too close to something “wrong” and trying to guide her to a safer place. She said nothing and took another large bite from the bread and turkey and other fixings between her hands. 

It was not long before they heard their mother banging and tinkering upstairs and decided to move on with work on their own.

“Could you sweep this up and put it in those trash bags over there? I’m gonna go use the bathroom.”

Claudia handed Evie the broom and walked out the door with their plates stacked in one hand, their mother’s sandwich left uneaten on the very top. She would wrap it and save it for later, she decided. I’ll probably have to drag her away from whatever project she’s fixated on in an hour or two. 

It hadn’t been more than ten minutes when Claudia had finished up and left the younger house to head back to the older, following the usual already worn path through the grass and past the rhododendron bushes, when she heard a woman scream. It was the sound of agony. A long note held out like steam escaping from a pressure cooker. She froze, in spite of herself. A flock of birds even exploded from a copse of trees off to the side of the other building from the shock of the sudden noise. Her heart raced in the pregnant silence that followed. I should be moving, she pointed out to herself. Her feet allowed her to budge with this understanding and she was racing across the property to the ominous grey mass that was the structure before her. 

Claudia stormed into the echoing foyer, the only sound now her own breathing bouncing back at her.

“Evie!”

She couldn’t hear the scraping and clanging from the upstairs bathroom any longer and no one else seemed to be on the first floor with her either. 

“Mom! Evie! What was that, I heard you scream?”

It was as if she’d been alone in the building all day. She was more than a little afraid to walk up the stairs. There was the faintest idea that what she would find up there had the face of her mother but was not her. She had no clue where this thought came from. Nothing like that had ever happened before, not that she could really recall. 

“What do you think?”

Claudia jolted back, her foot on the first stair ready to ascend when she heard the woman speak quietly. It was as if a stranger was picking out drapes in a store and asking your opinion in passing. Blue or beige. Floral or stripes. 

Claudia swung around immediately trying to place it. Again the room was filled with only her movements and the scuffling of her shoes on the dirt and dust of the floor. Dread suddenly deep in her chest at what she might find there, she wandered into the next room. Her eyes scanned the empty cabinet with its doors swung wide. They only ever seemed to stay open no matter how many times she tried to push them shut. There were long scratches dug across the pale floorboards that she was almost certain hadn’t been there before. Two parallel lines like a large piece of furniture had been dragged from the left wall in an arc toward the door where she stood. 

She stared at the blemishes as if it would help her find Evie.

“That’s enough!” The shout came from the kitchen on the opposite side of the house. Before she could react, the back door, the door she’d walked through the very first time she had stepped foot in the place, slammed shut. A fraction of a second later, she heard glass from its window crash to the ground. 

Claudia shrunk in on herself, terrified. What the hell?

It was important that she move. 

No matter who’s back there, you need to move.

All she could manage though was to peak around the door frame and through the stair railings. From this angle, all she could see was a sliver of light from the open kitchen. 

Listen for the furnace grate. 

Immediately, she jerked back at the thought. The response was impulsive, habitual.
She no longer lived in that other house where it was sunk into the floor of a carpeted hallway but the sound of the furnace grate being disrupted had stuck in her mind so clearly as a warning sign. If she could just get out before the grate clanged against its frame, jostled by a strangers boot, this wouldn’t happen again. 

Claudia felt as though the air of the little space she occupied in this house was being sucked out like a vacuum. The very frame of the building wanted to consume her, right down to the oxygen that had made contact inside her lungs. She did not want to fall to its floor and thought that just maybe, if she caught herself with her hands, it would be the end of her. The house was waiting to make this contact, for her to sit still just long enough. 

Her heart pounded in her ears at a slower and slower rate. She knew she was passing out and that it was already at the stage now where there was nothing to do to stop it. Using the wall for support, she slid reluctantly down to a sitting position, tucking her hands in on herself so as to not feel the soft, hungry wood beneath her. 

Then she heard it, the sound of the metal jostling and rattling from a person roaming across it. 

How? How is that still possible?

It’s too late.

She had the distinct feeling that her cheeks were bright red from the heat suddenly burning in her face. If she let her eyes fall closed the real danger would begin. The house would latch on and never let her go. The intruder would finish her this time. 

For a moment, as the room around grew darker and darker threatening to swallow her, Claudia thought she might just float away. Like there was a massive balloon filling up in her chest getting ready to take her up into the clouds. She hoped that would be it, that if she had to be devoured, let it be by the sky.

She was slipping then. The lights were just about to go out, any second. Movement caught her eye to the right and as her neck no longer wished to hold her head up, she squinted sidelong at the face that peered around the corner at her. The woman wore a grin. The kind of smile you saved for someone you didn’t know and didn’t care about, as you stepped around them in their pain. 

As she shrank into the different shades of darkness she had the strongest feeling that they had almost resembled her mother.