When my uncle passed suddenly last week, I decided to go and stay with my aunt for a few days. Believe me when I tell you, I did not make this decision lightly. Most of the people in my family don’t talk to Aunt Warn. She’s odd, sure, but everybody’s odd in their own way. I think her house is what make people nervous. I swear, everyone else in the family but me has been scared off by that thing.
Aunt Warn’s house is out in the country. It’s kind of a creepy house and it’s perched on the edge of these woods that are like something out of a sci-fi film. The trees are impossibly tall and impossibly green and crowded so close together that walking beneath them makes you feel claustrophobic. When you look outside the house, it makes you feel as though you and the trees are packed in like sardines, in a dim tin-can of a world, a world with pine needles instead of sky.
Personally, I like the place. I think it’s beautiful and atmospheric. And I don’t think it’s fair that Aunt Warn has to grieve her husband’s death alone just because people are scared of seeing bears in her front yard. So yeah, I decided to come out here and stay with her. I got here yesterday night. She didn’t say much, but she hugged me really tightly, and her eyes were glittering with tears when she pulled away.
“You look good, like you always do,” she said to me, and then we went inside and she showed me to my room. It was cozy and small, tucked in a corner upstairs, with a tiny, oval window like an eye that peered into the dreary forest.
We had tea and tarts and played crib before bed. Aunt Warn still didn’t say much, but she seemed happy to see me, and that’s all I cared about.
Until 4:38am this morning. I woke up to something tapping on the north wall of my bedroom. I blinked and sat up. Everything around me was an incohesive blur of charcoal grey, and it was pitch black outside the little oval window.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap.
I swallowed, felt my heartrate quicken. Perhaps it was just a branch knocking against the house in the wind. But as far as I could tell, there was no wind. The faint shapes of the trees outside the window remained as still as standing stones.
The rhythm went on. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Like Morse code. Like a message. I laid back in the bed and closed my eyes.
Relax, I told myself. This is an old house. Old houses make weird noises. No need to get worked up over nothing.
A few minutes after that, it went quiet. The noise stopped just as soon as it had started, and I fell back asleep.
Now it’s 8am and I’m awake. Awake and wondering what the fuck that was.
I tiptoe out of my room and make my way downstairs quietly, not wanting to wake Aunt Warn. Grieving people need their rest.
Downstairs is quiet, undisturbed. I relax a little, and go into the kitchen to search for instant coffee. It’s when I’m nose-deep in the cupboard that I hear a noise, and jump, and whip around, cursing under my breath.
Aunt Warn is standing just behind me, smiling. Her smile isn’t quite right. It’s a genuine smile, don’t get me wrong. Warm and wide and welcoming. It just isn’t hers. It isn’t the kind of smile that belongs to Aunt Warn.
I feel something stir inside my stomach as I stare at her. “Good morning, auntie,” I say with a watery smile.
Aunt Warn does not answer right away. First, her smile slowly disappears until there’s nothing left of it on her face - until she’s just an empty face, with no thoughts and no memories.
“Ideas are powerful things,” she says, slowly…deliberately…without emotion.
This scares the shit out of me, but I continue the charade of being undisturbed. “Have you had any coffee? I was just about to make some.”
Aunt Warn smiles again with the smile that does not suit her. “Yes,” she says slowly. “Please. My husband Gareth was fond of coffee. He passed, you know.”
“I - I know,” I say, struggling to hide my worried frown, “that’s why I’m here.”
Aunt Warn laughs - shrieks is the better word. “That’s not why you’re here,” she says, the smile receding into emptiness again as she sits, stiffly, at the table. “You’re here for me. Because I need you.”
I laugh awkwardly. “That’s what I said.”
“Did you hear me knocking?” Aunt Warn asks after a few moments of silence.
“Knocking? No,” I mumble as I fetch a pair of mugs and two spoons.
“In your bedroom, last night?”
I freeze as I set down the dishes. Then I turn around and stare at her. My aunt is not what she should be. She looks inhuman when she smiles like that. She looks like she is made of teeth, and skin, and hatred.
“It was me,” she says sweetly. Too sweetly. Drool is dripping from the bottom of her smile. “I just wanted to visit. I wanted to see what you looked like. And I know it’s just my breathing, but it sounds like knocking.”
This is when it occurs to me that my aunt usually takes medication. Perhaps, in her sadness, she forgot. Maybe she’s been here, all alone and scared and fucked up, off her meds this whole time. When I realize this, the part of me that’s terrified of her behavior buckles beneath the part of me that pities her. I feel sad for her, staying here alone, estranged by her family. And she just lost the only person that couldn’t live without her.
I sit down at the table next to her and take her hand in mine. “It’s going to be okay,” I say in a trembling voice. “I’m here. You’re going to get through this.”
Her hand remains stiff in mine. Cold. Mechanical. Curled like a raven’s claw. “Nothing,” she whispers.
I lean in. “What is it?”
“Nothing…is….okay,” she croaks out, and for just that moment - as she says those words - she looks like my Aunt Warn again. And she looks frantic. Her eyes cling to me, desperately. “Do…you…understand?”
I nod fervently. “I understand. I know it’s not okay. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to be comforting.”
She does not answer. Her face is hollow again. Blank. I don’t think my words sank in at all.
The rest of the day, I sit with Aunt Warn. I read to her. I eat with her. I go for a walk in the front garden with her. She is quiet, and not herself, but I don’t blame her. I begin to feel bad that I got so terrified before.
But then I remember the tapping.
I can’t forget the tapping.
It’s getting late in the evening when Aunt Warn’s head droops and she dozes off. I put down my book down on the couch. Then I stand and help her up the stairs. Once we get to her room, she collapses into bed with a faint smile in my direction.
“Goodnight,” I say, kissing her forehead. It has more wrinkles than I remember.
I call Mom as I’m getting ready for bed, to tell her that I think Aunt Warn is unwell. She doesn’t seem concerned.
“Your aunt gets wishy-washy like this when she’s going through things. She doesn’t really make sense.”
This doesn’t help me feel better. “Do you know where she keeps her meds? I don’t think she’s been taking them.”
“If she’s anything like she was when we were kids, she stores them underneath her pillow,” Mom says, laughing. “Where the Bad Thing won’t get them.”
“The…Bad Thing?”
“Yes, the creature she was always on about. She kept her medication underneath her pillow so the Bad Thing wouldn’t find it.”
I frown as I process this. “Thanks, Mom,” I say. “I’ve got to get going now.”
“Okay, sweetie. Call me tomorrow.”
After I hang up, I stand in front of the phone for a few moments. For some reason, the piece of information that I’ve just been given feels extremely unsettling. I sit with this unsettling feeling, and as I do, an idea comes into my brain that I can’t quite put away.
So I head up the stairs. I pry Aunt Warn’s door open, just a crack. She’s swathed in her sheets, unmoving. Out like a light. I come into the room and stand over the bed. Heart pounding, I reach behind her sleeping head and slide my hand beneath the pillow.
As my fingers spread across the mattress, I feel something cold touch my hand, and I freeze. It’s a cylindrical bottle. I pull it out from underneath the pillow slowly, and back out of the room. Once in the hall, I sit down on the floor, against the wall, and study what I’ve found.
It’s a pill bottle, alright. But it doesn’t have medication inside it. It’s full of something else.
I open it. Inside are tiny, slimy, black things. They look like poppy seeds, but larger. As I lift the bottle closer to my face for inspection, I smell them, and I gag.
Then something happens. Something I can’t really explain. I feel a sweet sensation near the back of my throat. As I breathe in, it stings me. The stinging starts inside my throat and spreads into my sinuses and eyes. For a moment, everything goes black.
I hear Aunt Warn’s voice in my head. “You’re here for me.” The voice sounds like her, but it isn’t hers. It never was. I know that now.
“You’re here for me.”
I stand up quickly, letting the bottle fall to the floor. My vision is clouded with grey but I’m starting to see things again. I’m starting to see the walls of Aunt Warn’s house.
Except…they don’t look the same. They’re old, and peeling with rotted wallpaper. In fact, as I look up and down the hall, it all looks old, and rotting. Unkempt. Unloved. Abandoned, long ago.
I feel dizzy, and fall against the wall. A noise is coming from Aunt Warn’s room. A throbbing rhythm. A sharp, horrible rhythm:
Tap-tap-tap.
Tap.
Tap-tap-tap.
Tap.
Against my will, my feet carry me back towards the room. I resist silently. I scream without noise as I claw at the wall, trying to keep myself away. The rhythm grows sharper, more insistent. My head pounds.
Then I am inside the room. And on the bed, sitting where my Aunt Warn should have been, it sits. I look at it and it knows me. It smiles with her smile, even though her smile does not belong on its face.
“I am the Bad Thing,” it says, and sewn into the skin around its wrinkled mouth, I see the bones of my aunt’s fingers - of my uncles’ fingers, too. They tap against each other as the creature breathes in.
Tap-tap-tap.
It breathes out, and the finger-bones clack shut like pincers.
Tap.
I fall backwards. I writhe against the bedroom floor. The stinging in my head is getting worse.
“I am the Bad Thing,” it is saying to me without words, as it breathes, over and over. I am the Bad Thing. I am the Bad Thing. I am the Bad Thing. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap.
I rally the strength I have left, and get to my knees, and careen out of the doorway into the hall. My cell phone is ringing on the carpet somewhere close by.
I have to get to it. I have to pick it up.
Sensing the vibrations in the floor, I feel my way forward. As my hand closes around the phone, as my finger swipes the answer button, my vision clears. The pain is gone.
“Hello? Mom?”
“Sweetie? Are you okay? I just wanted to check in on you one more time. I know visiting your aunt has made you nervous, but I’m proud of you for doing it. I love you, ok?”
A smile that is not mine begins to spread across my face. “Mom?” I say slowly, stiffly. “How nice of you, I was drifting off to sleep.”
“Are you sure everything is fine?”
Tears are streaming down my cheeks. My knuckles are white as my hand grips the phone. I want to tell her the truth. I want to tell her the truth so bad that it’s breaking my mind. But I can’t. All I can do is smile and tell her that I’m fine. Because the Bad Thing needs to feed her with ideas. Ideas that make her think I’m only pretending to be strong out here, on my own. Ideas that make her want to get into her car, and drive to me, and visit me. Ideas that will urge her to open up the medication bottle and plant the horrible little seeds in the front garden.
Ideas are powerful things.