Sihouette

I’d like to share something that happened to me a long time ago. I was eleven at the time, so… 14 years ago. I had a friend… I can’t seem to bring myself to type out his name. Let’s just call him Johnny. We were just normal suburban kids, doing kid things; playing games in the streets, climbing trees, riding our bikes, being pretty mundane, overall. Like most kids, we had a lot of fun! But also like most kids, we got bored.

I think that every little suburb like ours probably has at least one creepy old house. Maybe it was abandoned, maybe it was a gathering place for vagrants, or maybe it was inhabited by a dusty, grouchy old lady who everyone joked was some kind of witch. But it was always there, the token House At The End Of The Street. We had one too.

These houses accumulate stories like moss, and ours was no different. Most of the stories that went around the schoolyard about this house were that it was haunted. Again, kind of mundane! Kids would claim that they saw a shadowy figure in the window, or that they broke in and heard all kinds of sounds, saw full-bodied ghosts. I had never experienced anything particularly haunting about the house, but I acknowledged that it was creepy and did buy into the tales.

I’m sure you can see where this is going, but bear with me. This is no normal ghost story.

One comfortable fall day, Johnny and I were walking along the edge of the forest (I say forest, but it was really just a strip of trees that separated our neighborhood from the highway), as we often did between activities. If I remember correctly… I think we were running across the street in front of moving cars, or at least something equally as stupid. Hey, don’t look at me like that.

Anyway, we had been doing that for a little while, and maybe it was the adrenaline that spurred on the thought, but that was when Johnny broached the subject. “Hey, we should totally explore that old house on Marcus street! I’ve been wanting to for a while, so every time I pass by it I’ve been looking for a way in. There’s a part of the fence that you can bend up to get in!”

As I’d been curious about the place too, I was all over the idea. We made plans to go for it the following weekend so that we had time to “prepare”, as if we were going on a long expedition that we may never return from. We planned out and packed up a few things like flashlights and snacks, and that weekend we met up by the house and made our entry…

This house is etched into my memory. It was dilapidated, it had been uninhabited for as long as I could remember. The yard was overgrown, with weeds reaching up to three feet tall. The chain link fence was bent and rusty. There was a gated driveway, pocked with potholes and crumbling asphalt, leading up to a garage with a half-collapsed roof. Shingles and litter could be spotted through the grass, strewn about the yard. The paint was peeling and discolored, and it had faded to a dull and dirty yellow where there was still color to be seen. Vines had grown up the left side of the building to the second story.

Johnny led me around the right side of the house to a section of fencing that had started to warp upward in the bottom corner. He pulled it up, revealing a space just big enough for us to crawl through without getting scratched up by the jagged edge, and I led the way in. To our right, the alley between the house and the fence was so choked with grass and garbage that we wouldn’t have even tried to pass through, so we headed to the left toward the front.

The railing on one side of the stoop had broken off at the bottom of the stairs and was hanging on by a thread at the top as it bent off to hang in the air. The front door was painted white where it hadn’t peeled off. At the bottom there was a small, triangular piece of the door missing where some critter had probably gnawed its way in. Our excitement was definitely at a high as we approached the door. I was leading the way, and at the top of the stairs I reached out, and grasped the doorknob.

I went to turn it, but it was stuck. I had to grab it with both hands and push my weight against it, but the door did pop open with the cracking sound of warped wood and a shower of dust. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath while I batted the dust away, and when I opened my eyes again we had taken a few steps inside.

It was pretty dark, but there was enough light filtering through the windows and the cracks in the walls that we didn’t really need the flashlights to see, but we held them at the ready all the same. I remember that the first thing I noticed, other than the lighting, was how quiet it was. It’s hard to describe… It was strange. It wasn’t so much that we couldn’t hear cars or birds, or the usual neighborhood sounds, but more that there was a lack of any ambient sound at all. Like there was a void where all the sound normally was. The kind of feeling you get when you step into a room to get away from a party, and close the door behind you. Usually there’s a kind of relief when that quiet washes over you, but that space was filled with something else, something uncomfortable.

We took a minute to soak in the atmosphere and look around. There was… Dust. Cobwebs. Old wood. I’m not sure what I was expecting from an old house, but I remember being a little disappointed.

“It’s — quiet,” Johnny said, his voice dropping down to a whisper between the two words, as if he cringed at how loud his normal speaking voice was. I just nodded in response. I had such a profound feeling that speaking would be wrong here that my throat just kind of closed up.

We walked around the house quietly, occasionally whipping out the flashlights to illuminate a dark corner or examine the detail on an old piece of wooden furniture. There was a lot to take in. While most of the small home goods seemed to be taken, either by the previous owner or other would-be explorers before us, it seemed like none of the furniture had been removed, giving the home an eerie, unnaturally empty feel. In addition to that, the furniture that was left, while covered in dust, dirt, and cobwebs, was surprisingly nice to look at. I could tell that this place would have been pretty classy in it’s own time.

As interesting as all that was though, our visit was pretty uneventful. Other than feeling ill at ease, we hadn’t experienced anything that we would consider supernatural. No ghostly shapes, no floating objects, no whispers in our ears. Just that looming silence.

We had made our way around the first floor, climbed the creaky old stairs to the second, and poked our heads into what were probably a couple bedrooms when something finally caught our attention. At the end of the hallway, we had come to the last door on the left. When Johnny turned the knob, it swung open, smooth and silent, and as we got our first glance into this completely barren room, something washed over us. Not a gust of wind, or a cloud of dust, but more like an intangible torrent of feeling. At the time I didn’t notice anything more than the sting of tears in my eyes, it was only thinking back on it later that that swell of emotion seemed so dense, a whole suitcase of feelings to unpack. Then, quick as the malaise had come, it passed.

We stood there for a moment, conflicted now that we found ourselves face-to-face with something that we both could sense was beyond the natural… But that was what we had come for, so we tentatively stepped inside and looked around.

There wasn’t much to see. Like the other rooms upstairs, it was barren save for the dust and cobwebs, but this one did have a closet door in the corner. We went to and opened it, to see something surprising: A light switch, right in the center of the back wall of the closet. We were drawn to it, and crowded into the closet, me standing right behind Johnny. I watched as his hand reached out for it, everything inside my body telling me to leave, stop, go somewhere else, anywhere else. But I was no longer in control of my body, and I don’t think Johnny could stop himself either.

He cupped his hand and turned it so that the side of his finger came up and touched the underside of the switch, and I watched as he flicked his wrist and the switch clicked to the on position.

All hell broke loose.

There was an eruption of noise, a cacophony so loud that I couldn’t tell if it was erupting inside of my head or crashing down all around me. My mind immediately clouded over, and I felt as if I had been reading nonstop for days on end. Fatigue seared through my body and I collapsed into a ball on the ground, commanding, begging my numb arms to press my hands to my ears. My eyes squeezed shut but it didn’t stop all the colors from flashing rapidly before my vision. I was losing my mind.

Gradually, my senses started to, well, make sense of things. The flashing colors turned into shapes, features, faces, words, and objects. The sounds became shrieks, screams, garbled voices, saying words that were too numerous to distinguish from one another. Raw emotion became anger, sadness, joy, hate, betrayal, loss, relief, confusion.

Confusion. My mind grabbed onto that word and I heard my own mental voice saying it over and over again. The familiarity of my own thoughts drew me towards them. Ironically, that word helped me cling to sanity. I felt myself anchored, remembered that the wooden floor boards were beneath me. I felt them there under my knees and suddenly my body was my own again.

I opened my eyes, saw Johnny on the floor next to me. I told my arm to reach out for him, and this time it listened. When I touched his sleeve I could see the entire weave of the fabric in my head, I saw the whole pattern design as it regressed through its stages of development. Threads, being pulled this way and that, the dye undoing itself, a bath of cold water, a man’s hand, a man’s mind as it transferred the image to paper with a pencil– I pulled myself away. I felt as though I could have kept going like that, witnessed the entire making of the world as we know it… Fortunately I had the sense to stop myself from going down that rabbit hole. I don’t think I would have come back.

Pushing those thoughts aside, I grabbed Johnny’s shirt sleeve and pulled. We fell on top of each other, but that seemed to help the both of us, as we started scrambling to our feet and out of the closet. One thing that added to the surrealness was that I still couldn’t hear anything over what I can only assume was the wailing souls of the damned or something. I could feel my hands and feet connecting with the ground, but there was no audio feedback.

We fell over each other out of the closet and began to get up, only to witness even more maddening horror. On my hands and knees, I picked my head up and saw flickering lights and colors. Instinctively, I squeezed my eyes shut against the scene, lights still dancing on the inside of my eyelids. I sat for a moment, hardening my thoughts against this new invasion into my senses, and then I forced my eyes open and looked again.

Trying to blink my way through the bleariness and gritting my teeth, the colors and lights took on a slightly more intelligible shape. There were creatures, shadows and silhouettes all over the room. Some had limbs that made me think they may be, or may have been, humanoid, but others were just vague shapes, tall and skinny and rounded at the top. They were all moving rapidly, erratically. Like… Well it almost takes away from the horror of it all, but in retrospect, just to give you all something to visualize, they were kind of like those wacky inflatable flailing tube decorations. Silly as that may sound, to me at that moment it was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen, completely surrounded, inundated with those flailing creatures. They filled my vision and moving my head made me nauseous.

I looked around wildly searching for my friend, and I saw him next to me, getting himself to his feet, a beacon of sanity in this world gone mad. Inspired, I started to stand up, and he reached down to help me. When we found our footing we started running for the exit, clutching onto each other.

It wasn’t just that room, it was the whole house. We stepped out into the hallway and were greeted with those same creatures, flickering and seizing, twitching and leaping around. They were everywhere, they filled every inch of the dead space in the house, overlapping with each other and with us. We plowed through their incorporeal forms and ran down the hallway, then down the stairs.

As we hit the bottom of the stairs, I started reaching out for the front door only a few more steps away and realized that I didn’t have Johnny in my grasp anymore. Still deafened, I didn’t hear it so much as feel it, but something happened behind me and I spun around to see that he had tripped on one of the last steps. He was sprawled out on the floor, picking his head up and looking to me.

I… I try to believe that I thought I could… I dunno, throw the door open and pull him through. I don’t know why that was my priority just then. I was just a kid… Maybe I was so scared that for a moment I only cared about myself. Maybe all the sensory overload was too much and impacted my decision making, whatever decision making skills an eleven year old may have. Maybe I thought that I could only save myself.

Whatever the reason, seeing Johnny on the floor like that… I turned away. I took the last two steps to the front door and threw it open. I turned back, and he was still there, shadows and silhouettes surrounding him, dancing in the background like some kind of rave. Leaning over him and tumbling over one another. lurching their way between the two of us, making it that much harder for me to go back. I hesitated there on the threshold, I don’t know for how long. My body was locked up. My mind was at war with itself.

I don’t know if it was my sense of self-preservation or one of those things in that house that did it, but something shoved me out the door, and all too suddenly I was in control again. My legs forgot how to work and I tumbled down the stone steps into the front yard and scrabbled my way backwards through the tall grass. While I looked on in horror, the door slammed shut with a resounding BANG.

As I sat, hyperventilating against the fence on the far side of the front yard, my normal senses started coming out from wherever they had hidden. The cold air blew gently across my face. The sun in the bright blue sky was so radiant. My hands dug into the soft dirt to my sides, filling my fists with soil. I swallowed, tasting bitter panic and bile. I took a breath and the smell of grass filled my nostrils. Somewhere in the distance a helicopter chopped away at the air.

An echo of the colors and creatures still danced behind my eyelids. My ears still rang from the din and clangor of that other world. I still saw Johnny’s face, his hand reaching out to me…

No. No, I didn’t. Something was wrong. Before my mind’s very eye, I watched as his face blurred out of focus. His features melted away. I tried to think of his hair color, and just like that it was gone. His clothes had colors– And then they didn’t. He had no clothes. He had no body to put clothes on. All that was left were his shoes, no they were gone too. His name… What was his name…

I have a confession to make. I witnessed my best friend’s undoing that day. I don’t call him Johnny because I can’t bring myself to say his name, I do it because he doesn’t have one. He did, I know he did… He must have existed… I think. I didn’t go into that house alone, that at least I remember. Someone was there with me, and now they aren’t. Every memory I have of something I did with them… There’s just a blur. I can just as easily remember them happening with me, alone.

No one came to me to ask about what happened to my friend. Did their parents forget them too? The school? Certainly we went to school together… Probably even sat next to each other. I remember we were close. But… There was no trace of them. No empty seats, no missing posters, no questions.

I went home and the world just… Closed up over the hole where they had been. Now that hole only exists in my memory… A scab. A silhouette of a person.