I honestly wasn’t planning on making a second part, but after writing the first, things have started coming back to me. Like, my childhood was a lot less normal than I ever realized. It’s almost funny; my friends and I loved to joke about how we were pretty sure I was cursed. Most animals hated me, like my stepbrother’s dog, who would scream at me whenever I tried to pick him up. But crows flocked about me, even when I had no food, and even though I’m not one for superstitions, the family’s back cat, Samwise, loved me. At least once I week I woke up to write in my dream journal, some vivid nightmare or bizarre subconscious adventure that would stick with me for life. I noticed things nobody else did, saw faces in the dark and heard words in the white noise. This story seems pretty mundane compared to the first, but it still feels notable. I was twelve at the time.
Our house had a small, partially unfinished basement with one main room and a hallway leading off to the storage room, which had a concrete floor and exposed “industrial” ceiling. It flickered and hummed constantly with the water heated and deep freeze and whatever else we couldn’t be bothered to keep on the main floor. The walls were bordered with wire shelves stocked with jarred foods sent from my grandparents in North Dakota. I remember a few weeks my sister and I spent there out of every summer, where we helped Papa in his massive garden and Grandma bake pies and crumbles and tarts.
But the whole storage room is irrelevant to this story. The main room and stairs were covered with this ugly, faded yellow shag carpet that smelled vaguely of spilled milk and cat pee, no matter how many times my stepfather, Daniel, tried to shampoo it. He and his son, Liam, had an Xbox 360 down there that I only got to play on once every about 12 years since there was always somebody on it. Even my sister would sometimes steal it from the two boys. I, being the youngest in the family, never could.
One day in late December, when Liam was home with his mom for Christmas, I did finally get a turn. Danial had recently gotten Skyrim, which I liked, even though I didn’t care much for the storyline or the Elder Scrolls as a whole. I just liked killing stuff because I was, like most children, bordering on psychopathic.
That night I played pretty late, until exactly 1:26, I remember, because my mom had told me to be in bed by 1:30. I stretched and got off the floor, turning off the TV and 360. The basement had one light switch and it controlled the bulb in the main room.
Just as my head touched the switch, I heard something. Something from the top of the stairs, just past their 90° turn barely feet from me. I froze and strained my ears, crouching to the ground so my shadow shrank towards me.
The sound. It repeated. Sort of like if you were to bounce a rubber ball off a hollow piece of wood. It repeated identically four times, each “bounce” the exact same, like the “wood” was being hit with the same force and angle, calculated. Or like a recording.
It happened five times in all before stopping entirely. There was no sound from above me, only the still silence of a sleeping household. I was spooked but not only that: it was well past 1:30, and if my mom knew I was still up, she’d probably ground me for the rest of Christmas Break. For me, this meant she’d take away my oh-so-precious writing notebook, which I had halfway filled with ragtag stories. The last time that’d happened was a few months earlier when I forgot to tell her I was with a friend and she thought “something” happened to me. She never did elaborate on that, but I’m beginning to think she meant something by her vagueness.
The noise had stopped, so I turned off the light and mad-dashed upwards, towards the door, as I always did late at night. The whole basement was cast into complete darkness, but I’d lived in that house most of my life, so it was no trouble for me to find the doorknob and fling the whole thing open and reach for the row of switches on the wall just across-
Where were they? Where had they gone?
Like I said, I knew this house like the back of my hand. You could blindfold me and stick earplugs in my ears and give me a minute and I could get anywhere in that time. I knew that there were exactly 17 stairs leading to the second story. Where were the lights?
It was so dark and I fumbled against the wall, running my hands across cool paint and finding nothing but the smooth, solid, vast expanse. In one direction was the faint amber glow from the sliding back door, shining with streetlight, the other impermeable and inky in the night. The living room had blackout curtains and two doors, the interior, solid wood one, and the outer, heavy storm door, courtesy of living in the midwest, so everything was suffocatingly dark.
Well screw it, I thought. If inanimate objects wanted to move around, so be it. I was going to bed. It wasn’t ideal, and my skin was crawling at the thought (I’ve always been terrified of the dark), but I could find my way up the stairs, easy. Just as I made up my mind, I heard it again.
1… 2… 3… 4…
Rubber ball on wood. What wood? The floor was carpeted, the sound impossibly close, no more than a few feet away. I froze, sickened, not daring to move. If it was so easy for me to hear, how well could it hear me? I drew my breath gentle as water through my teeth, one hand clenched over my mouth the muffle it.
Click click click. The kitchen was tiled, claws playing along it like needles, or knives. “Samwise?” I called out hesitantly, my voice small and weak.
Nothing. The darkness drank in my words and gave me nothing in return. Selfish.
I pivoted on my feet, turning from staring at the empty wall to the kitchen, warm charcoal gray with streetlamps. There was a thin layer of snow across the ground, turning the outside world way brighter than it should’ve been. It’s the only reason I was able to see what I did, and I feel like that was a mistake.
Bright against the dim, it was… god, how do I even begin to describe it. It was a pillar, nearly grazing the 9-foot-tall ceilings, of swirling shapes, elongated diamonds and rhombi and polygons, trapezoids tumbling across irregular hexagons. Each time one fell, it clicked gently, tinnily, against the ground, bouncing off and rising up the column before spiraling down again. They spun and twinkled in the light, beautiful and unearthly and deeply unsettling. Somehow, I was not seeing their entirety, if that makes any sense.
They seemed to know I saw them, and they sang for me. Deep, whalesong notes rose from the shambling pile, a chant that stopped at me, hitting a wall and falling to the ground and sliding back towards the singularity. Entranced, I stared into the point of infinity, standing barefoot on the cold ground.
They were growing closer, as was I, stumbling as though attracted by gravity. And yet they pulled away from me, phasing through the wall so I had to throw open the back door and let in the cold winter air to follow. It seems dumb now, but I was utterly drunk on the sight, on the heady, ominous song, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, so I continued across the backyard.
The shapes rotated until the column was as thin as - thinner than - paper to pass through the fence before waxing and growing, sort of like charms on a bracelet. God, they were beautiful, colors than I could for the life of me name, shapes recognizable but unseeable, not letting my eyes focus no matter how I squinted. I would paint this scene if I knew where to start, the child following the Lovecraftian horror, but it seemed almost like the Greek story of Semele, who was vaporized the moment she set eyes upon Zeus. Divine, and not made for human sight. I’m still not sure what allowed me to see them that night.
The sidewalk must’ve been numbingly cold, and I was dressed only in pajama pants and a t-shirt, but I didn’t seem to notice. My breath billowed and sparkled on contact with the air, but even the frigid weather almost added to the magic and intrigue of the moment. It was wonderful and even now I wish I’d followed the column further so I could see what they wanted to show me.
But I guess that wasn’t meant to be. An arm threw itself around me as my mother picked me up, even as I struggled to go further. At the time, the look on her face didn’t register, but it does now: absolute horror. She’d seen them too, I think, and didn’t like them half as much as I.
She hauled me back to the still-open back door and set me inside, whispering frantically about how I was, under no circumstances, allowed to go outside without another person. And that if I saw the column again, she wanted me to come get her immediately. I nodded, more scared of her reaction than I was of the column themself, and was sent up to bed.
I was lucky to get nothing worse than a few blisters on my feet, no permanent damage or frostbite, but I can’t help but wonder, even to this day: what if I had gone further? What let me see them? Are they still waiting for me?
But I guess it’s all a part of my strange childhood.