Long story short my family is being stalked by something. I hope I found the right thread for this. First the basics, I guess. I am 30F (Kyndra) and my wife is 31 (Iris). When my now wife and I first met and lived together we resided in Atlanta, Georgia. Recently my wife’s father decided to move to Florida and gifted us his fully paid off house in Ohio. As a born and raised Southerner I have never enjoyed the cold and the prospect of driving in snow was enough to spring tears to my eyes long before the first snowflake hit the ground. Regardless I would rather live rent free and pay property tax once a year than paying $1500 in rent every month. Sorry I’m rambling, my wife says I do that a lot.
We moved over into our new home/her childhood home two years ago. We packed up our two rambunctious pups and drove the Uhaul 11 hours to settle in Wyatt, Ohio. The first few months was spent updating the place from the throwback 1950s style that clung to the place worse than dust in an attic. I’m talking yellow painted kitchen walls with tractors and pipes that even my plumber was afraid to touch. The house is situated in a small township and when we moved back the neighbors were excited to see the return of the prodigal daughter. I guess her dad was a bigshot in the town after serving as fire chief for 40 years. Not to mention her family basically still runs the town. Cousins, aunts, and uncles are embedded so deep in the network of the town that you would think only their family was allowed to live there.
After the renovations were done, we had a housewarming party. I guess social gatherings are a big deal in a town like this since everyone, even people we didn’t invite showed up. The party was perfect, everyone brought food, gifts and insight into the things that had changed since my wife left. Unlike my extremely extroverted wife who mixes and mingles like salt, I was more than happy to focus my attention to the food on the grill. It was while I was standing at the grill that I first heard it.
‘Kyndra can you come here please,” it was my wife’s voice, but it seemed to be coming from the front yard.
I figured she had gone around to the front to grab something from our cars, so I sat down the tongs and made my way towards the front. Suddenly a warm hand slipped into mine and I came face to face with my wife.
“Where you going?” she chirped, pressing a kiss to my cheek.
“I—didn’t you just ask me to come to the front?”
“No,” her laughter filled my ears, “you always were a lightweight. Come on let me introduce you to my best friend Leslie.”
I allowed her to lead me back into the crowd of people, but confusion still played at my mind the rest of the party.
When the party began to wind down, I found myself nursing a bottle of water and staring into the slowly dying embers of the firepit. The chair next to me creaked as someone sat down. I turned my head to see Leslie whom I had met earlier. Leslie looked like all of the other women in my wife’s family: heart-shaped faces, golden eyes flecked with hints of green or blue, and dark brown hair life fresh ground coffee.
“Hey. You okay? You looked very deep in thought,” she said smiling.
“Yeah. Just—” I cut myself off, knowing how insane it would sound to say it out loud.
“What?” Leslie leaned back, the embers of the fire illuminating the curiosity in her gaze.
“Earlier I thought I heard Iris calling my name from the front of the house, but she said she didn’t. It’s stupid, I was probably tipsier than I thought,” I sighed and took a deep swallow of water.
For a moment, Leslie didn’t respond, causing me to turn my gaze back to the woman. The look on her face was one of pure terror. At the time I shrugged it off, thinking that it was some trick of the dying light, but now I’m not so sure. Never the less she dismissed herself quickly from my presence and soon after she and all the other guest left in a rush.
“That was a fun party,” Iris hummed, handing me another dried dish to place into the cupboard.
“Yeah,” I replied, focused more on watching our dogs happily playing outside, their energetic flips and pounces illuminated by the strings of light on our fence.
Iris’ arms wrapped around me, bringing my attention back to her as she laid her head against the middle of my back. I sighed and closed my eyes, chastising myself for overthinking a trick of too much alcohol and hickory smoke. I turned, putting my hands on her waist before spinning us to press her against the countertop. She giggled; her eyes seemingly darker as I moved in for a kiss. At that moment every light on the fence went out. Almost simultaneously we heard a yelp and the slam off our dogs’ bodies against the storm door. I threw the door open and both our dogs came racing in, immediately running to the living room. I stood there dumbfounded for a moment before a voice seemed to scream in my head.
CLOSE THE DOOR!
I slammed the both the storm door and wooden ones closed, locking them both. Iris laughed and reached for the lock.
“Calm down everyone, the breaker probably needs reset. I can get it,” she said her voice tinged with laughter.
“NO!” I shouted.
My yell brought her up short and she stared at me for a moment. I tried to find the words to tell her that something in the back of my mind was telling me that we shouldn’t go out there right now.
“The boys seemed spooked by something. Colt and Hex aren’t easily frightened,” I finally said, using her soft spot for our twin dalmatians as leverage instead of saying that it seemed like there was a presence outside.
I wasn’t sure how to explain to her that even then as we stood next to the door it felt like we were being watched, as if someone were standing in the darkened yard watching and waiting for us to venture out.
“True, but I could always just take the gun with me,” Iris offered.
“We can go in the morning, besides one of the boys may be hurt. Remember the yelp we heard.”
“My babies!” she shouted then running off to the living room to check on the dogs.
I double checked the doorknob pulling it hard to make sure it didn’t budge. It didn’t but as I leaned in it felt like the presence I mentioned earlier moved closer. I stared into the darkened backyard, squinting to try and force my eyes to adjust. I gave up and joined my family in the living room where our two dogs were now curled into either side of my wife as she reclined on the sofa.
Colt and Hex have been our fur babies for two years after adopting them both from an animal shelter in Atlanta. The two are pure breed dalmatians that were dropped off at the shelter after the mother rejected them. Iris jumped at the opportunity to take them in, having come from a firefighter family and having dalmatians as the family pet her entire youth. Our boys were fearless and had proven that they were willing to go toe to toe with anyone and anything that sought to harm us. They had proven as much when our apartment was broken into while we were away at dinner one night when we still lived in Georgia. They had confronted the would be robber and forced them to hide in our bathroom, then barked until our next door neighbor came to check out the commotion and called the cops.
So, seeing them cowering in Iris’ lap disturbed me. Iris had shrugged it off saying that the power going out had probably startled them and that Hex only had a small cut on his paw. She also reminded me that she had grown up in this neighborhood and more than once she had found herself aimlessly roaming the darkened streets with her friends for fun.
“There is nothing here that will hurt us,” she had said as we laid in bed that night.
I wanted to believe her. I still want to believe her but a few nights later things got weird again.
I awoke from my sleep with a jolt, my eyes unfocused in the dim light of our bedroom. Sweat drenched my brow and I figured that I must have been having a nightmare, but the dream was fleeting. It melted away from my conscious brain like ice cream in the Georgia heat. I stood, swung my legs over the side of the bed and trudged into the master bathroom. Groggily I clicked my phone to life. 7am…disgusting. After using the bathroom, I had lain back down, tucking the covers underneath my chin when I heard it.
“Kyndra,” my wife’s voice broke through the fog of sleep that had begun to settle on my mind like fresh fallen snow.
I groaned, swung my feet back over the side of the bed and walked towards the bedroom door.
“Where are you?” I asked reaching for the handle.
“Kitchen.”
“What?”
I bolted fully awake, my mind registering that I had heard overlapping voices. Slowly I turned to see my wife still lying in bed, but her gaze was fixed on me, her brow furrowed.
“What are you doing?” She asked, yawning then sitting up to wipe sleep from her eyes.
“I—I was going to check on the boys,” I lied, I’m not entirely sure why.
“I’m sure their fine. Come back to bed,” she purred, inviting me over with the coil of her finger and a soft smile.
I returned to bed and later that morning I awoke to our dalmatians asleep on the hardwood outside our bedroom door instead of on the couches in the living room where they had slept since we moved in. As I made my way downstairs, my gaze drifted to the front door. It was still locked, but there was a soft breeze coming from somewhere, making the floor cold under my feet. A window in the kitchen was open. The one that gave the view of our backyard.
Since that night I have heard the voice three more times and each morning I find the dogs outside our door. Once their insistent scratching to be let in jolted me from sleep, and once they were inside our bedroom an insistent nagging at the back of my mind told me to lock it. I haven’t told my wife about this. I’m afraid that she will think I’m insane, but something is out there stalking my family and it’s getting bolder.
Any ideas of what it could be and how do I stop it?