“This is the most disgusting thing you’ve done.”
That couch. God knows I hated that couch. It was old, weathered, dark grey going on beige upholstery three seater with a small yellow diamond pattern that covered the entire thing. To call it tacky would be a compliment.
My younger brother and a friend of his took it off the curb before hard collection day. I still don’t know what was going through his head when he saw it, wow! You know what would liven up my bungalow? A decrepit old couch!
My brother has started to live in the bungalow on the other side of the backyard from the main house, the first act of his growing independence. But we were both still in high school so he wasn’t completely independent, yet. Still came to the main house to watch TV and use the computer, eat dinner with us, he wasn’t completely cut off from the family. But looking at this couch made me want to excommunicate altogether.
“It’s fine.” He said.
“It stinks.” I said.
“I’ll just use some air freshener, it will be as good as new.”
I looked over to him grinning, proud of what his self-diagnosed anosmia (lack of smell) as he called it. He gripped and shook my shoulder and said, “Lighten up. Look at this way, I’m still not out of the ninth grade but I have my own couch. Didn’t have to pay a thousand, two thousand bucks or whatever. It’s still in relatively good condition.”
I walked over to the couch and lifted the cushions, not a spec of dirt or anything. I turned my head to look back at my brother, still grinning, I then said, “there’s no way it came in this condition. You must have vacuumed it. And look here!” I was pointing to the stitching at the base of the left armrest.
But my brother just shrugged his shoulders. “Who cares? Beggars can’t be choosers. Why are you so worked up about this? Just chill, relax. You’re such a tight ass.”
I just rolled my eyes and walked out the bungalow.
That was the beginning of all the trouble.
Rest of the evening was uneventful. Had lasagna for dinner, binge watched old episodes of Lost instead of doing my homework and went to sleep playing video games. I estimate I got about two, three hours of sleep before I woke up to the sound of something crashing. Practically jumped out of bed, tripped over the blanket, and fell face first onto the hard wooden floor.
There was a little blood coming out of my nose but that wasn’t going to stop me from finding out the source of the noise. Got up, turned the lights on, walked out my bedroom and into the front foyer, and then into the kitchen where I found smashed plates on the ground.
It was almost like the kitchen had been transformed into a minefield it was that bad. My dad came down the stairs to check it out, asked what the hell was going on here.
Told him I don’t know I just got here.
“Plates don’t smash themselves.”
We then gave each other a look, the look that says: there may be someone in the house. I slowly crept through the shattered ceramic plates to search the back half of the house while he searched the front half. Won’t bore you with the search but after five minutes or so checking every nook and cranny we came up with bupkis. Nada. Zilch.
Apparently those plates did smash themselves. Dad and I were starting to become both anxious and angry. We started to get the idea that maybe whoever smashed the plates made enough noise to hide the sound of the back door opening and closing.
I also blurted out that maybe my brother did it. Dad would have none of it but he made me check my brother in his bungalow anyway while he cleaned up the plates.
My brother was fast asleep on his new couch but I woke him up anyway. Asked him if he saw anyone break the plates (thought it was obvious since he was fast asleep that he didn’t do it himself).
“I was asleep, how do you think I would see someone leave the house?”
Told him yeah, fine, whatever. Also told him that the couch was starting to smell as I was leaving the bungalow.
A day passed without finding out who smashed the plates. I still didn’t have a clue who did it, mom and dad didn’t want to think about a potential intruder in the house, and my brother didn’t care and was still gloating about how he found the ‘awesome couch’.
It wasn’t the sound of smashing plates that woke me up later that night, instead it was the sound of a woman crying. Thought it was mom at first and I really didn’t want to get in between my parents fighting. But then I realised the crying wasn’t coming from my parent’s upstairs bedroom but downstairs. Probably the bathroom.
Big boy pants time.
So I got out of bed, ready to do my best Dr. Phil impression. My parents hadn’t really fought before but maybe this was the start I thought. But it was only until I left my bedroom did I realise that the sound of the crying didn’t sound like my mom. I mean, I hadn’t heard my mom cry that much but the voice was deeper than my mom’s, I knew that much. I crept slowly through the dark hallways, the beating of my heart practically the only other sound you could hear in the house, and when I reached the kitchen I could hear this almost echo.
Those echoes seemed to be coming from the bathroom.
Thus, I crept up to the bathroom door and stood still. Her sobbing was deep and heavy. It just made me feel sad, really sad. I almost didn’t, but I worked up the courage to gently tap on the door.
“Mom, it’s me. I can hear you crying. Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Are you?”
Jumped. Out. Of. My. Skin.
I turned around to see my mom behind me, standing there holding a small torch.
We both stared at each other as the sound of a woman sobbing seemed to permeate the house.
“I thought you were crying.” I told my mom.
“I thought you were the one crying.”
My own mom thought I cried like a girl.
But insults to my manhood would have to wait since I realised I didn’t know who was crying in our bathroom. My mom motioned her torch towards the bathroom door handle, signalling me go check out the bathroom. Reluctantly, my trembling hand grasped the handle as I turned it and opened the door to a dark unlit bathroom.
Just as soon as I opened the door, the crying stopped.
I turned on the light and found no one in there. Even stepped into the room just to make sure, as if there was some sort of optical phenomena that made a crying woman invisible. All I could do was turn to my mom and shrug my shoulders in confused defeat.
As if that was some sort of signal, the crying started, only this time it seemed to come from outside.
“The crying must have travelled through the bathroom window. Go outside and check it out, I’ll wait here.”
Thanks for the support mom. Rationally, I suppose, a crying woman was no threat to me, but there was still something unnerving after failing to discover her in the bathroom.
I really didn’t want to, but I stepped into the backyard and listened intently for her sad morose sobbing. Carefully, I shuffled towards her crying, farther and farther away from the light of the back porch, and closer and closer towards my brother’s bungalow.
Was it…a girlfriend of my brother’s? Now I really didn’t want to get involved for a whole other reason.
But, being the responsible person that I am, I knocked on the bungalow door and said, “Is everything alright in there?”
No response from my brother but the crying seemed to get louder. So I waited for a few moments, processing what to do, before I decided I just wanted to go to sleep and I swung open the door into the dark bungalow.
Again, the crying stopped.
The only sound I heard was my brother snoring. So I turned on the light and there he was, sleeping on the couch again. Shook him up and woke him. Told him about the crying woman and asked if he heard anything, he waved me away and told me to “piss off and let me sleep”.
By the third night everyone in the main house was on edge. We made sure to lock all the doors, shut the windows, and I even drew the curtains closed for good measure. Nobody wanted to think about some crazy lady stalking our house at night.
Not that my brother cared. He was still over the moon about his couch, practically sat on the thing all day, ate every meal on it. Went down there once and the smell had started to become unbearable. He told me I was just a hater who was trying to bring him and his couch down. I just didn’t have the patience to deal with something such stupid belief so I tried my best preparing for a good night’s sleep.
Not going to happen! This time I woke to the tapping of my bedroom window. Thought maybe it was the scratching of a tree branch. But it was too persistent, too measured. After what happened the last two nights I just didn’t want to deal with it. Buried my head underneath the pillow and then pulled the blanket over the pillow. Two layers of comfy sound proofing to block out the noise from outside my window. There was silence, or at least only the faint sound of tapping from outside.
But I could sleep with that.
But it kept getting louder, and louder, and louder. What started as a tapping turned into a knocking, from knocking it morphed into a constant drumming, from drumming to pounding. I was starting to sweat and my blanket fortress of solitude was turning into an oven. The pounding was starting reverberate through the room, even shaking my bed.
Where was mom and dad? Could they not hear this?
With the shaking, sweating, and pounding seemingly surrounding me, I snapped.
Threw off the blanket and then the curtain open where I was then met with the horrifying visage of some brunette woman with a faint sliver of blood running down her left cheek that seemed to glitter in the moonlight. The sight of her threw me back onto the ground and when I lifted my eyes to the window again, she was gone.
I was like a man possessed, I found the intruder from the past two nights and I wasn’t going to let her get away. I charged out the front door, didn’t bother closing it behind me after I bolted to the center of the front lawn and turned around in complete circles looking for this woman. But nothing, again.
Confident I chased her off, I withdrew back inside to tell my parents my valiant victory.
But she was there, inside the house, standing at the end of the hallway, looking at me with a vacant expression, blood still streaming down the left side of her face, shining in the distance.
“Wait. Get out of here.” Not dwelling on my contradictory orders, I sprinted down the hall, waking up mom and dad, but losing sight of this mystery woman. When I reached the end of the hallway, I then saw her face through a window looking into the backyard, where she was heading towards my brother’s bungalow.
I wasn’t going to let her get away. Not after she invaded my home, smashed my plates, tormented my sleep.
So I burst out the door and in no time at all reached the door to my brother’s bungalow. I looked around to see if she was hiding in the bushes, behind the bungalow, even peered over the backyard fence to see if she hopped into the neighbour’s property. But nothing. I couldn’t find her.
As I stood still, I could feel my legs tremble from the fear and adrenaline from this woman. But as I stared at the bungalow a horrifying thought came over me…
What if she is in there?
I stood at the door of the bungalow and listened in. The only noise I could hear at that moment was the sound of my brother’s snoring.
Slowly, I turned the knob and opened the door only slightly, where I then slid my hand in the gap to turn the light on. Then, I threw the door open, only to find my brother asleep on the couch.
That stupid, smelly couch.
I woke my brother up without any real purpose in mind. I think I was just frustrated that I let that crazy woman escape for a third time in a row.
He wasn’t happy.
“Can’t you see I’m sleeping here?”
“Well, I’m glad you’re sleeping, because you’re the only one in the family who isn’t being woken up by that crazy bitch.”
He got up and tried to push me back out the door, muttering “piss off” as he did so.
Tired, sleep-deprived, frustrated, I pushed him back.
“Be useful for once! We would have caught her if you were obsessed with this stupid couch!” I said with a swift kick that broke the front of the couch with a fierce crunch.
“You broke my couch!” Cried out my brother.
“I’m sure I didn’t break it.” I protested. “If you look closely you’ll-“
I was cut short by my own discovery. Popping out of the crack I made in the couch was a human finger, a woman’s finger.
It was all kind of a blur after that. We screamed out to mom and dad know straight away, and after dad’s sloppy work with an axe we discovered the rest of the woman’s body, complete with brunette hair and a sliver of blood down the left side of her face.
The police got involved shortly after that, although they took an hour getting there at that time of night. They took a few photos, asked us a few questions, especially asking my brother where he got the couch and when, then they took her body away.
Turns out she had been living with her boyfriend, right where my brother got the couch from. As far as I know, they still can’t find the boyfriend, seems to have vanished into thin air.
Neither did we learn her name. Seems a bit weird when she lived with us for three days right? Maybe…maybe it was all our imagination. Maybe it was a coincidence that the plates broke that night, maybe it was a rat. Or I could have been sleepwalking. Possibly. Then maybe I was so sleep deprived that I imagined hearing and seeing things that weren’t there.
But maybe we relive our final days from beyond the grave, or from the couch, so to speak.
Anyways, not that any body believes me when I tell them this story. They just roll their eyes and say I’m being dramatic or making this up. But I thought I might tell Reddit just to get it off my chest.
We ended up replacing the couch as well, buying a new one at a furniture store this time.