There's Something That Always Knows

I’ve lived in my house now for 10 years and I’ve heard the ghost stories of the abandoned church that sits down the street.  There are plenty of different stories that have been created over the years.  Like the transparent man who sometimes appears wandering at the back end of the church said to be there to taunt you with gifts of pleasure.  But anyone who actually knows, knows the man isn’t transparent at all.  Or the story about a body floating in the tree on winter nights will full moons.  That doesn’t happen either.  The only thing many of these stories have correct is that it is a man whom appears but he isn’t a ghost, he’s something far more sinister than that.  In fact, there are no ghosts in the church because I don’t believe him to be ghost.  However, there is something happening there that is quite unsettling.  Something mischievous and perhaps even evil.  over the years people have become infatuated with this strangeness that they have given birth to many different stories but only a few have actually experienced this horrible man.  Me being one of them. I’ve experienced one such occurrence.  Only one, that I cannot quite explain or have fully moved passed.

There’s a bus stop I used occasionally that sits off to the side of the church.  I used it mainly in the mornings but there were those rare instances where I used it in the late hours.  Every time I’m there I can’t help but feel that eeriness that people have so often felt.  Something about that place with the old abandoned church makes it feel as if something otherworldly is lingering about in the shadows.  Watching you perhaps even looking into your soul.

This particular time occurred around 9pm.  I was on my way downtown to meet a friend.  I sat down on the bench and pulled out my phone.  The evening darkness was beginning to slide over the road and houses.  There was not a person in sight.  After a few minutes of me making a few texts I noticed a man walking toward the bus stop dressed in a very nice silk suit.  It glistened in the faint light of the lamp posts.  His shoes were black and shined with a business luster.  He looked like a business man headed to a meeting but it was so late that he must be going to dinner.  I figured he was on his way to his BMW but instead he stopped at the bus stop and sat down.

I sat silently for a few moments before he said something to me.
“Nice night huh,” he said pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Yeah, its not too cold.”
“Oh yes, I never liked the cold.  I love it when its really hot.  Those are the best days.”
“Yeah, hot days are nice but I don’t like it too hot.  But I bet on those really hot days you can’t wear your nice suit huh,” I said trying to make a joke.  He was kinda cute.
“Oh, the weather never dictates what I wear.  I wear what I want for the purpose of the person.”
I shrugged my face not quite understanding what he meant but definitely catching the scent of arrogance.
“Phil,” he said as he extended his hand offering me a cigarette.
“Lilly,” I replied as I waved away the offer.
“Not a smoker huh.  You don’t mind do you?”
“Not really and I smoke sometimes.”
“Just not now,” he said sliding the pack and lighter smoothly back into his pocket.
“Well, just when I’m drunk.”
He let out a small laugh behind his smirk.
“What do you like drinking Lilly? I’m a whisky man myself.”
“Vodka mostly.”
“Ah yes, Vodka.  Remember, a glass for the vodka.  And for the beer, a mug.”
I smiled and looked over at him. “I’l try and remember that.”
“Is that where you’re going?”
“Yes, going to meet a friend downtown for a few drinks.”
“Well, should be a good time.  It’s a perfect night for drinks.”
“Yes. I could use a few drinks after this week.”
“Long week?” as he took a drag from his cigarette.
“Too long.”
He let out a quick flash of smoke before sucking it back in.  “Relaxing over a few drinks and enjoying the moment is what makes it bearable to do it again. “  I nodded in agreement. “I say, have drinks.  Have sex.  Enjoy the pleasures that life has to offer because life can seem long but its really not.”
I smiled, “drinks and sex are two different things.”
“Are they really?”
“I’m meeting a girlfriend actually.  Well, a friend that‘s a girl.  Not actually my girlfriend girlfriend.  Just a girl who’s my friend. So um, yeah.” I sunk my head down in slight embarrassment.
“Oh, even better,” he said taking another puff. I just smiled and quickly turned my gaze to my phone.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“Amy.”
“Does Amy like threesomes?”
“Excuse me?” I said in slight disbelief.
“You know, threesomes.  Like you, me and her.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said throwing as much attitude as I could.
“Believe me, if I continued with this meaningless chatter that’s where this was headed Lilly.  If you want, it can be just us two.”
“If you think this is working in your favor, you had better get a clue.”
“I don’t need anything Lilly beside your pussy.”
I was taken aback and could feel the situation getting tense.  I threatened with the only thing I could think of.
“If you don’t stop, I’ll call the police.”
“Go ahead.”  He just sat calmly taking drags of his cigarette as he leaned back into the bench.  I got up to walk away but before I could go he said, “Do you think your father Ray is burning in hell?”
I stopped in complete shock.  How did he know my father’s name?
“What did you say?” I asked as I turned reaching for the pepper spray I kept in my bag.
“Your father died two years back, right. Do you think he’s burning in hell?”
“How do you know my father’s name?”
“I know a lot of things about you Lilly.  I know a lot of things about everyone.  You know, I think he would have loved watching me rail you and your girlfriend Amy in your bedroom.  I would have made him watch too.  He always wanted a threesome but your bitch mom wouldn‘t do it.  Maybe that‘s why he cheated on her.”
“How do you know that ?  Now I’m really calling the police.”  I began to dial and when I put the phone to my ear all I could hear was static and a faint moan of pain like it was off in the distance.
“Did you hear that?  That moan?  Yep, its what you think it is.”  he said in an arrogant tone.  He kept smoking his cigarette and outstretched his arms on the back of the bench.  The fear started filling my chest and a tense terror straightened my spine.  What was going on here?  What was happening?
“Come on Lilly, sit down.”
“If you talk to me again I’m going to pepper spray your fucking face.”
“I wouldn’t like that Lilly.”
“I warned you,” I pulled out the can and pointed it at him.  He just sat calmly puffing away at his damn cigarette.
“Try me.”
I was so scared that I didn’t hesitate to spray him but it didn’t have any effect on him.  He just sat there staring at me.  I stood there in shock as fear and horror filled my eyes.
“It truly amazes me how easy it is to fill you all with fear,”  he said standing up and flicking his cigarette on the ground. “But at the same time, its just as easy to buy you with the simple pleasures of life.”  He calmly walked over to me through the mist of pepper spray.  I was frozen in shock and couldn’t move.  He grabbed my wrist and pulled the pepper spray can out of my hand.
“Why not enjoy the pleasures life has to offer?  Isn’t that what you want?  Isn‘t that what you did?”
I finally screamed for help and tried to get out of his grip but it was like an iron clamp.
“Who’s going to help you Lilly? You didn’t help your father as he laid there dying.  You weren’t even there when he let out his last breath.  Where were you?  Oh yeah, fucking your boyfriend because the grief was too much to handle.  Isn’t that how you justified it to yourself?  You hated him for cheating on your mother and how did you drown out that hate?  By satiating in your pleasures.”
I was absolutely horrified with what he was saying.  The worse part was that it was true.  How did he know about my deepest regrets and guilt?  My sins? How? I looked into his eyes and they had nothing behind them, no emotion, no life, just stone glossy eyes that I felt staring straight into my soul reflecting my horrified face.  I felt all my emotions in one jumbled mess,  overwhelming me.  I felt guilty, sad, horrified, scared, lost and shocked all at once.  I couldn’t control anything about what I was feeling and finally toppled over in tears.  He let go of my wrist and just stood there watching me cry.  “Pathetic,” he said finally.  I just stayed there hunched over on my knees sobbing and drooling over myself.  I looked up and he was nowhere to be found.

I don’t know who he was but I can’t get him out of my mind.  I feel I’ve forever been tainted by him.  He’s always in the deepest recesses of my mind.  No matter where I am, he is those dark reminders that creep up and over my mind leaving me in unsettled fear that perhaps he is peering into me right at that moment.  Laughing at me, enjoying the pain of my life.  I sit here alone, but I still feel him, hovering over my shoulders.  Watching.  I live in fear of my own thoughts because I know he watches.  He watches all of us.  All our guilt, regrets and sins.  Its horrible knowing he knows of my existence, its worse still that I have nightmares of me having sex with him.  On lonely nights, only the deep voice of my greatest fears provides any kind of thought and in the darkness that lingers around us all exists things waiting for our greatest weakness.

The Door

I have stayed awake for days on end with the blur of darkness shading reality into one giant fog in fear that I would end up just like my cousin. Was I awake?  Was any of it even real?  I have pondered these questions in full sincerity at one point in my paranoia.  Questions for the fear that consumed my very existence.  I found rock bottom at one time and continued further into the depths of my own madness.  I was in a lucid dream state paranoid of reality and what was actually real.   It was that door, that hellish red door that haunts me to this day.

I was about ten or twelve when I first saw it.  My cousin and I were playing in an old abandoned house at the edge of town.  Kicking stones and flinging sticks in our boredom, letting our curiosity lead the way.  When we first entered the house it had a creepy ominous ambiance to it.  A soft glow of light slid in through the heavily stained windows giving the rooms shadows of all shapes.  Some seemed alive and unattached to anything.  Old chairs were on their sides and a few tables were overturned.  All the rooms had brown rotted paint peeling from the walls.  A urine stench filled the air and the yellow glow of the tainted windows made it look urine stained as well.

We went upstairs and saw it.  It was a reddish brown door with a symbol drawn in crayon or something on the top center.  It was a circle with five small stars around it.  It was a thick heavy looking door with etchings around the border.  The door didn't seem special or particularly interesting except for the symbol and even if we had known what it meant we would have still went into the room and explored.  The room was completely empty save for a chair facing the far corner away from us.  The one window it had overlooked the back weed-infested yellow yard.  

We began to walk out when my cousin noticed dead bolt locks on the door.  So we closed the door and began messing with the locks a bit.  We fumbled around with locking and unlocking them.  There were three of them.  Then we realized the locks were backwards with the turning mechanism on the outside and the key hole on the inside of the room.  Then all of a sudden all the locks wouldn't open again.  We were about to leave when the sound of soft scratching began coming from inside the room against the door.  We stood silently for a few moments listening and tried to convince one another that it was a mouse or a rat; but when we realized the scratching wasn't coming from the bottom of the door but rather from the center we froze in fear.  Our curiosity faded when we began to hear low moaning whispers slip out from under the door. 

We couldn't move.  Our fear had completely overtaken us and that ominous ambiance from before had grown to something more sinister. The whole house felt darker and the light that been there had faded to almost nothing. It was as if though the dark bowels of hell itself had come with its long black drapes to cover the house.  Shear panic boiled inside my gut but the fear killed every rational instinct and kept me from moving.  We stood there listening in fear to the hellish scratching coming from the other side of the door.  It sounded like finger nails gnawing away at the wood bit by bit.  We could only listen as the raspy whispers began to get louder and formed into moans of agony and pain.  

Finally, panic overwhelmed us and we both ran down the stairs to the front door but it was now locked.  Our eyes bulged in disbelief and paranoid thoughts of death and pain entered my mind.  We were scared beyond our wits.  We stood there yelling for help, crying and banging on the door.  Then fell silent as we heard the dead bolts upstairs unlock themselves.  Three clicks one right after the other.  We couldn't move.  I could barely breath.  The tears were rolling down our faces when we began  to hear something dragging itself across the wooden floor.  We couldn't see upstairs to the door from where we were but we could hear every horrifying sound coming from there.  We could hear something sliding closer.  The absolute terror finally overtook me enough that I grabbed a chair and broke open a window.

I've spent countless years of my youth trying to forget that day.  I was even happy to hear they were bulldozing that house.  I've tried to convince myself it didn't happen. I was even close to doing so until one night when I was 16, I woke up around 2 am to a man's voice muttering incoherently to himself.  I slowly opened my eyes and looked across my dark room into the far corner and there sitting in a chair facing the corner was a man whispering madness to the edges of the wall.  My eyes widened with fear and that same fear again kept me frozen where I lay.  I finally realized after a few moments I wasn't breathing and let out a small breath.  That's when he said something to me.

"Sometimes I close my eyes so tight it hurts, but the terror never goes away Will."

I realized then it was my cousin.  He turned to me crying with bloodshot red eyes and said, "I've been in the room Will.  You know which room.  I know you haven't forgotten about that door.  I've been in that room not because I went back there, no.  It followed me Will.  I was asleep like you and when I woke up I was laying in my bed but behind that fucking door.  I would recognize that door from anywhere just like I know you can.  I tried opening it but it was locked from the outside.  Remember.  I couldn't get out Will.  I kept scratching  and pounding but I couldn't get out.  See.  Look."   He rose up his hands showing me bloody scabs where his fingernails used to be and dark bruises on his forearms where he was banging.  He began shaking violently and fell to the floor in a convulsive shock.  I rushed to him and called for my parents.  He fell into a coma that night that he would stay in for 4 years.

Since then I wake up in paranoia almost every night afraid I too will be behind that door.  I had it under control until finally something did happen to me about 2 years ago.  I was living in the city at the time.  I was sitting in bed with my bedside lamp on reading a book.  I had my door cracked halfway open as I always do now because I can't sleep with any door closed anymore.  As I looked over to the dark doorway, shadow filling the hallway, a face lay there on the ground looking up at me.  I jolted and gasped in complete horror as whatever body it was attached to scurried backward into the darkness.  I recognized the face, it was my cousin's but that was impossible he was in a coma, lying in bed in a hospital.  It almost felt like something was goading me to follow it.  I didn't sleep or move at all that night.  The next day I got a call from my parents telling me my cousin had finally passed on in the night.