sinnamongirl | Sunday: LJIdol week 2, The Missing Stair

As soon as they pulled up to the farmhouse, weathered gray and ivy-covered in its copse of shadowing trees, Laura felt a shiver. While her parents talked to the landlord and her brother read in the car, she wandered around the grapevines, past the falling-down paddock, to the front yard. She tripped up the front step, and for a few heartbeats the ancient holly bush was gone, and a woman in a long dress was pouring out drinks for children. A slow blink, and the tableau vanished. She ran back to the kitchen and tugged on her mom's shirt, the story spilling out in gasps. The landlord laughed and said, "There's plenty of ghosts here! They don't seem to bother people, just make for good stories."

Laura's eyes rounded in fearful delight, and the adult conversation continued around her. The house was so old it was registered as a national historic house; the landlords insisted they couldn't put in insulation because of the restrictions on renovations, and the downstairs walls were rough, unsanded boards painted a dark brown sometime in the early 1900s. They were unevenly spaced, some cracks wide enough to stick a finger into. At night the scratching and scrabbling of rodents would keep Laura awake. Her mother told her it was squirrels because she thought it would be less scary, but the cats would sometimes leave half-eaten mice and rats on the carpet. Two of the bedrooms were papered in thick dusty paper, in some places peeling off to show a layer of older, dustier paper underneath.

For months after moving in, nothing more happened. The landlords told stories about the pioneers who built the place, the 5 or maybe 10 or maybe only 2 children who slept in the attic and died of flu or maybe smallpox or maybe it was a fire; of the two blind brothers who strung a line from the back porch to an outhouse so they could feel their way to the shitter, refusing to move from their familiar home until they, too, died. Then Laura started having nightmares. She heard voices whispering, felt eyes watching through the windows, couldn't take the garbage out at night because the sense of being surrounded by cruel intent was so strong it made her skin crawl and her neck hairs stand on end. She awoke screaming on the nights when a black cloud came to hover over her bed and slowly, slowly descend, threatening to suffocate her.

Erik, Laura's brother, never noticed anything. Too logical and too wrapped up in avoiding everybody while he wrestled with puberty. Then one night a family friend came to visit. Nobody would tell Laura what happened, afraid it might give her bad dreams, but after a night on the couch he refused to ever sleep there again. Her mother saw children peeking around the door jamb between the dining room and kitchen, giggling. She chose to call them angels. When the sense of being watched in her bedroom became too much, Laura demanded her brother switch her, but still the black cloud found her at night, and the feeling of watchers was so strong she expected to see faces peering in through the windows if she looked up. She never looked up.

Laura's mom invited her brother over, recently converted from a life of drugs and drink to ecstatic religiosity, to drive out the spirits. Laura watched her uncle and her father walk through the house with an open Bible, praying, dipping their thumbs into a dish of blessed olive oil, drawing dripping crosses over every doorway. They were satisfied. Laura was not. She felt shivery, numb, and despairing at the same time. The house didn't feel cleansed, it felt dormant.

Well after the olive oil crosses had faded to shimmers, in the middle of a day in the middle of summer, huddled in the corner of the couch with that sense of being watched, being loomed over, but all alone, Laura made a break for her room. She bolted through the living room, the dining room, turned a hard left into the kitchen and ran up the first rise of stairs. Where the stairwell jogged to the right was a small landing, and despite knowing the stairs like the back of her hand, it was here that she tripped. Her hands slapped down to break her fall, but Laura was on her hands and knees, and when she caught her breath and looked up, it was dusk. The stairs were no longer painted a dark red; they were bare wood but polished, the walls also stripped of paint and covered in cobwebs. As she drew in her breath for a scream that no one would hear, a cobweb brushed her face, and she noticed three spiders crawl toward her, another dropping from the wall, its front legs waving with interest.

She shoved herself up, arms windmilling as she took a step back over what seemed to be a missing stair, and the spiders vanished. The cobwebs were gone. The stairs were no longer polished wood but the usual faded brick red, the walls thicked over with the usual brown paint. The midday sun streamed through the window at the head of the stairs, illuminating her way as she carefully, purposefully not counting the steps, picked her way up the stairs.

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From:

kickthehobbit.livejournal.com

This is deliciously creepy. :D

From:

shiny like tin

Sunday: LJIdol week 2, The Missing Stair

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