Entangled

It is a strange thing to have seen something, yet not to believe it yourself. I suppose you won’t believe this either. It doesn’t really matter though. All I can say is that I saw it with these very eyes.

I knew the house was haunted. Being six years old made that part easy. It was haunted--I tell you now with the deepest conviction. Why, I cannot say. Maybe it was built on an old Indian burial ground, as I believe. Or, maybe it was the site of a civil war massacre. I can’t say.

It wasn’t an ugly house: it couldn’t be called old. It was one story, brown brick, three bedrooms, two bath, with green shutters. There was no dark basement, and if it had an attic, I don’t remember it. The yard was large, an acre I guess, relatively level except for a few grassy mounds in the back yard. Graves? I don’t know, but I always felt like something was down there--scratching away--hair and bloody fingernails grown grotesquely over the long years.

A large deck grew from just outside the sliding glass door to the living room. The deck was stained red, like all of them were then, it seems. Beneath it was our sandbox--sand provided by my father--with Tonka truck roads and water hose rivers. To this day, I can’t figure out how we were never spider or snake bit.

In this house, I found out that Elvis had died. I remember the headline on the Oconee Enterprise: THE KING IS DEAD!. The letters had to be an inch or larger. I had my first (and last) pet rabbit there. It escaped from the laundry room one day when the door was carelessly left ajar. I haven’t eaten rabbit since.

We were happy there: football games, bows and arrows, birthday parties, and Christmas.

But something was wrong.

I felt it before I knew. Left alone in a room there, it was always too quiet. There was a feeling--a coldness--a shiver, a shudder--every hair on your body trying to stand on end. Doors opened and closed on their own. Poltergeist, some might say. A settling foundation...imagination? You can say what you like--I saw it happen. There was no one there; yet, the door would swing shut.

I saw it.

There was one night that convinces me that some things just can’t be explained. I know I have no rational explanation for what happened. It simply couldn’t have happened the way I say--but it did.

I shared a bedroom with my brother. Our bunk beds were laid side by side with two paper shaded windows on the wall to their right. The closet was opposite to the beds, and the door to the hallway was to the left.

It’s this door I mean to tell you about. Not an unusual door, I guess. There might have been shapes in the grain of the wood, speculated about by curious children, but I think that must apply to most wooden doors. I even remember the poster we’d put on the inside of the door: it was a man in mid-air on a muddy dirt bike, his face obscured by a black visored helmet.

This particular night, my brother and I awoke suddenly. This in itself was unusual since we normally had to be poked and prodded to get us up and ready for school. It was dark--too dark--lightless. We stumbled to the light switch and turned it on. There was nothing but a futile click, click, click.