It’s way too damn hot in this house. It’s been three days since the hurricane came through and took out half the power lines in my neighborhood, and with them, my escape from the suffocating heat and humidity of central Florida. Not having lights or digital entertainment is a hell of an inconvenience, but without air conditioning I might actually die. Well not like actually actually die, but I sure feel dead after a few days straight of sweating my ass off with no reprieve.
Lying here in my bed, tossing and turning in the sweat soaked sheets, I wonder for maybe the thirtieth time in the last few hours how people even managed before the comforts and innovations of modern society. I mean realistically the heat alone won’t kill you so long as you have a roof and fresh water, but way back then it’s not like they had pipe systems, prebuilt houses, or even supermarkets to get all their supplies from, they would have had to go out and do stuff in the two-thousand-degree weather, and frankly, I couldn’t be arsed to do all that. If I was alive a few centuries ago I would have simply given up and shriveled into a human raisin (a haisin?), but regardless of how shitty my situation is, sitting here and lamenting my poor luck serves absolutely no purpose.
I turn my head around to glance at the alarm clock on my nightstand: it’s blank, right, because the power is out… shoulda gotten an analogue clock, or at least something that runs on batteries. Despite the lack of a functioning time keeping device, I’m still pretty sure it’s around ten pm. Sleep is a cruel and fickle mistress under the best circumstances, so I’m well versed with lonely nighttime hours of silence and boredom, and God I’m sure bored right now. I’m not especially thirsty at the moment but If I don’t get up and do something to break up the monotony of my sleepless night than my head will explode, (and I don’t want to do that to the poor emergency service folk who no doubt already have enough on their hand with hurricane aftermath related activities), so I roll out of bed and start off towards the kitchen. I almost flip on the hallway light switch before remembering the current ineffectuality of the gesture. Instead, I sigh and reach out to the wall as a physical guide.
It’s funny, a few days ago I was still scared of the dark and, more accurately, all the terrifying monstrosities that could be lurking around every corner, but now I’m too lazy to fetch a flashlight from the drawer and opt to feel my way around instead. My childlike but pervasive fear was overcome by nothing more than a minor inconvenience, I suppose all abstract horrors pale in comparison to any sort of tangible mental or physical discomfort.
On that note I try and reign my thoughts back in and focus on just making it to the kitchen. One foot in front of the other, put the hand in front so you don’t crash into the other wall, make a left, you have arrived at your destination. The kitchen has a window with just enough moonlight to make out the contents of the room and… Oh shit is that a ladder outside? I almost pump my arm in excitement. The electric company must have finally made it to my house and are fixing my AC this very moment.
It takes me a second to realize that there must not be a repair truck in the area since I can’t see the flashing lights, and there’s also no utility worker in sight, and, in fact, the ladder seems to be the only evidence of repair at all. I mean weird but not the end of the world, he probably just left to get some supplies or a tool or something and just left the ladder, so he didn’t have to set it up again. What’s also weird is I just assumed that it was a male worker even though I really have no idea either way. I mean is that sexist? I think statistically it’s just a solid guess based on the gender demographics of utility workers. Sure, assuming is still part of the problem but I’m only human and isn’t acknowledging the societal biases that cause that assumption mo - I pause - the fucking ladder is floating.
I quickly jerk across the room to get a better view out the window and, sure enough, the ladder is floating about two feet off the ground what the fuck? It’s not hanging, it’s floating. I mean obviously it’s hanging from something because ladders don’t float, but there’s nothing for it to be hanging from. In fact, now that I have a more complete view, it doesn’t seem to have a visible top either. Instead of ending, it simply continues up into the sky as far as I can see, and equally concerning, it’s still hovering. Logically, it must be some strange trick of the light, but the absolute bizarreness of the situation sends a shiver down my spine. I glance all around trying to find the supports, or a tree, or a truck, or really any explanation for the suspiciously hovering ladder in my back yard, and… nothing, it seems to truly be held up by nothing. This just can’t be right, that’s not how physics works. I’m equal parts terrified, and confused, but as I find myself walking towards the back door, I realize that I was also feeling a far more powerful third emotion: curiosity.
Something really fucking weird is happening and I’m about to find out what. Occam’s Razor says that the ladder is some sort of optical illusion or hallucination, but I tend to trust my eyes and it’s not like I can just leave it alone and go back to bed now. I open the door and step out onto the lawn; the ladder is still hovering. I slowly and cautiously step across the grass, inching closer and closer like any sudden movement might scare it away. A few feet away now and the top of the ladder still seems to stretch into infinity, the bottom hovers off the ground just above my knee level, and I can see that it’s made of dull dark gray metal. I pick up my foot and use it to sweep the area directly underneath the ladder just to confirm what my eyes are seeing, sure enough, no contact.
I reach out to touch the bottom metal rung and pause, suddenly realizing how wrong all of this is. I gulp down the sudden lump of discomfort lodged in my throat and touch it anyway. Nothing. It feels like any other ladder despite its seemingly gravity defying properties. I give it a quick shove downwards, but it doesn’t give an inch, I try again with a little more effort, but it remains completely fixed. Upon experimentation it appears to infact be fixed in all directions, shoving side to side yields absolutely no results at all. Well, that’s even weirder than floating. I muster all of my courage and prepare to start the climb because I’m not the sort of person to leave alone what doesn’t concern me.
First one foot, then the other, now my whole weight is on the ladder. Somehow there’s still no sway or give, this is the single most stable ladder I’ve ever been on despite having no visible points of fixture. I climb another rung and pause, taking in the strangeness of this night, just a few minutes ago I was sweating myself to sleep in my bed. Now I’m climbing a physics defying ladder in my bare feet. I let the moment pass, and then continue climbing upwards, rung by rung. Nothing particularly interesting happens until I make the mistake of looking down and realize that falling from my current height would likely result in serious injury. And, while the ladder seems pretty stable at the moment, I have no guarantee it will stay that way, so the logical thing to do seems to be to back off and regroup.
I climb back down and shake my head, having both feet on solid non-ladder ground again makes the whole situation seem suddenly ridiculous. Schizophrenia doesn’t run in the family as far as anyone’s ever told me, and it’s been several months since I’ve consumed any hallucinogens, so this isn’t just a weird trip either. Aside from the floating part, it seems to just be a normal ladder inexplicably placed in my backyard and I’m half tempted to just go back to bed and call it a dream because that still seems to be the most obvious reason behind tonight’s midnight madness. Climbing back up again is tempting, but I’m not quite adventurous enough to blindly throw myself at something this weird. In the daytime I would almost certainly be a little more courageous, but the something about the still night air and the oppressive heat stand to remind me of life’s frailty.
Well, my bad habit of standing around waxing poetically isn’t going to change the situation. I’ve eliminated further physical exploration of the ladder as a viable option, (citing safety concerns), but forgetting about it altogether is also off the table (curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back). After a moment of deliberation, it came to me: get some video evidence. My hand instantly reached for my pocket, forgetting that phone was lying dead on my nightstand, and after a mental facepalm and a few seconds of recalibration, I remember that I still have a real camera tucked away in the living room closet. New mission: find camera, get pictures, take names, and kick ass.
I walk back across the yard, stopping to wipe my feet off before I go back inside, and start chuckling at the absurdity. Here I am either suffering from a mental break or experiencing a supernatural occurrence, and my utmost priority is making sure I don’t track dirt in the house, maybe I am going crazy.
I navigate through the dark kitchen using what little light is provided by the window, and then feel the rest of my way to the living room. I slowly inch around the room with my hand on the wall to feel for the closet until my fingers brush the door frame. I pull it open with a loud creak that contrasts with the otherwise dead silence throughout the house. Stepping inside, I feel around for the right shelf and reach into the corner where the camera has sat untouched for months, hoping that the batteries are still charged. After holding the power button for a few seconds, my fears were proven unfounded, and the screen blinks to life with the familiar Crayola logo, yeah that’s what I meant when I said “real” camera.
Now armed with a toy camera, I retrace my steps to the kitchen and peek out the window, half expecting the ladder to be gone. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, it’s still there, glinting in the moonlight, decorating my backyard with its menacing and peculiar aura. Suddenly the dichotomy between the ladder and my camera makes me burst out into laughter for the second time this night. Imagining the digital memory filled with hundreds of low quality closeups of everyday objects taken in my youth directly next to images of whatever weird fever dream type bullshit is happening outside right now overflows my stress addled brain, and it takes a while to regain my composure.
After the laughing fit passes, I raise the camera to my eye and center the ladder in the frame, through the window. Click. The camera blinks for a second as it loads the final image and then displays it on the screen, where it’s impossible to make out anything but a few blobs of color. I should have known that the night vision on a toy camera made for kids wouldn’t exactly be high quality, but the image is still grainy enough to be disappointing. Maybe getting closer and turning the flash on would be enough to at least tell what the picture was supposed to be, but I’m no longer as hopeful as I was a few moments ago. I walk outside again while trying to find the flash button, everything is so much harder in the dark that it’s almost comical.
Finally, I find the button and the logo pops up in the corner of the screen. By this point I’m close enough to get a good shot and waste no time lining up the bottom of the ladder for a close-up and, after a brief flash. Click. This time the ladder, while not high definition, is both visible and distinguishable as a ladder. There are several weird distortions in the image that give the ladder the impression of being rusty and stained, but altogether not too bad for the decade old toy that it is. I quickly snap a few more pics of the bottom of the ladder and then start panning upwards, taking rapid fire shots as I go.
As I pan the camera up more and more, the splotchy, rusty patches continue to show up in pictures and the overall quality decreases even further as the comparatively bright backdrop of the sky replaces the ground. A few clicks later however, and I have bigger problems on my hand. As my path of pictures reaches just above the zenith of my earlier climb, they start to come out darker with even more corrupted, rust like splotches showing up on the ladder. And when I notice this, my next picture comes out with a thin row of bright white distortions along the upper half of the photo. Distortions that almost seem to look like… teeth. I really am going nuts.
Obviously, the moon is starting to cast some weird patterned glare on the lens and I’m jumpy from my long night of confusion and stress. I take a break for a second to brush it off and then aim a little higher and snap another picture only to be met with another line of jagged white shapes just above the original, the other row of teeth, now it’s a whole mouth. The idea that the patterned glare could be the mouth of a strange creature perched on the ladder, while preposterous, was gaining traction in my mind, and I could feel a slight jitter in my hands as my adrenaline circuits switched on. I kept the camera as steady as possible as I lined it up a little higher and took the last picture. Click.
The same two jagged lines of teeth on the bottom, and two dull eyes right above. It was undeniably a face, a face with a Cheshire cat grin staring directly at me. A jolt of terror shoots down my spine and I drop the camera, frozen. Without the aid of the camera, the ladder is once again just a ladder, but the terror remains, MOVE. I jumped into gear and scrambled backwards faster than I’ve ever thought myself capable of moving. After sprinting the rest of the way to the door, I swing it open and slam it behind me, quickly locking it just to get one more barrier, however placebic it may be, between me and whatever the fuck, is on that ladder.
I still don’t feel safe, but running to my room and cowering under the blankets until whatever that thing is either leaves or comes to kill me seems like a bad idea. I need to arm myself, I rush across the room towards the knife block, intent on getting the largest one I could find, and, as I pass the window, the ladder is gone, well shit. I don’t know whether to be relieved at this new development, but now that I have a weapon, it seems like as good a time as any to retreat to my room and hunker down.
I make my way back to my room as fast as possible in the oppressive darkness, hands shaking and heart thumping all the way, constantly on edge as if something was about to reach out and grab me from the shadows. But eventually, the seemingly infinite hallway gives way to the doorway to my room, which is again unceremoniously slammed in my wake, supplying another physical layer between me and the ladder thing.
I hunker against the back wall of my room gripping my knife so hard that my knuckles turn white. Maybe it really did just leave. Gradually, my heart slows, and my grip loosens as nothing happens for minutes, and then hours, and then suddenly my head is resting against the side of my bed frame, and my eyes are drifting shut.
Then next morning, I am awakened by a woodpecker from somewhere outside. I shakily stand up and walk over to the window and attempt to gauge what time it is by the sun’s position. Probably somewhere around eight. Last night’s events were already foggy and slipping further away by the moment. Despite this, the kitchen knife on the floor combined with my sore back from sleeping on solid wood all night is enough to convince me that it wasn’t all a dream. Get the camera.
In a jolt I remember the camera, presumably still sitting on my back lawn somewhere. As I walk to the kitchen, the whole series of events seems surreal and, maybe even comical. The harsh light of day seems to wash away any creepy or supernatural sentiments, and the idea of the whole thing being some sort of strange sleepwalking event combined with a vivid nightmare seems more and more likely with each step. And when I open my back door to take in a whiff of the familiar humid fresh air, it’s almost a shock to see the camera partially hidden in the grass.
I walk over and pick it up. The idea of some random blotches on a toy camera screen instilling terror in me now seems ridiculous. But as I scroll through the memory, the sick, and frightening feeling in my gut comes back, and I realise that what I experienced was no delusion or dream. The face is clear as day in the final picture. Two rows of teeth, sharp and foreboding, and two dead looking eyes, as if it was bored despite the grin. And upon closer inspection, the rusty splotches that appeared on the ladder in the pictures looked a lot closer to blood stains than rust.
I posted these pictures online to exactly the response you would expect. Comments of “recorded on a potato” and “bad photoshop” were the only things being said. No one had any real info on sightings or even ideas about what the hell happened to me. I am once again afraid of the dark, and I urge all who read to not let curiosity get the best of you.