I was alone in the house and Christina was at work. She worked nights as a labor and delivery nurse, so I knew that I would have the house to myself until at least six in the morning. That was all right with me. I love my family, but there’s something very relaxing about being in a house that I know will be empty for an entire night. I would sink into my couch with a bottle of whiskey and doze contentedly and uselessly knowing that nobody would expect anything of me until sunrise (and not even then, really). I am well aware that those nights weren’t my proudest moments, thank you.
I had drawn all the blinds, dimmed the lights and turned on the TV so that I could watch a movie I’d already seen a dozen times before. With the house suitably darkened I embraced the warm fog of drunkenness and resolved to only get up from the couch to stumble into my garage for a cigarette or take a piss. Most likely, I would pass out on the couch and wake up just before my wife returned from her long shift.
As a drunk, there’s something wonderful about a buttoned-up house. Your world becomes small and manageable and you don’t have to face the guilt of looking out your window into a world where people are going about their days being productive members of society. I would luxuriate in the hopelessness of it all as another familiar story played on the screen in front of me. The best part was being too soused to realize how fucking pathetic that is.
This night was just one more in a long and consistent series. I settled in with the bottle growing warm and sweaty in my hand. My throat ached from chain-smoking, and I had to pee a little but not bad enough to get up yet. My vision was starting to double a little bit. I was listlessly happy over a veneer of misery and self-loathing.
Then I smelled roses.
That doesn’t seem like it warrants its own line, but at the time Christina and I were living on a tropical island, and roses were not something one smelled. Moreover, my senses were so numb by this point that I shouldn’t have been able to smell a house fire, much less roses. I tried to focus on more pressing matters like the whiskey I had just spilled in my lap, but the aroma only increased in ferocity so that I began to feel as if I were choking on it. I tried not to gag and reluctantly heaved myself up off the couch to investigate.
Bent over and gasping, I tore through the house trying to locate the offensive smell’s origin. I was frantic in my desire to end this disturbance and was on the verge of having a temper tantrum at having been so disturbed. The room spiraled deliriously while I became more frantic, tearing open the linen closets and ripping open cabinets. I shook my head like a mad animal and scratched at myself trying to locate its origin.
It wasn’t until I looked outside the window that it stopped as if someone had turned off a switch in my nose.
I was staring at the mango tree in our back yard, its canopy of dagger-like leaves looked like a frozen plume of smoke in the tropical night. A warm, salty wind hissed across my yard and the tree quivered sensuously. My wife stood underneath it, her feet bare and standing in a carpet of rotten mangoes which I had promised I would clean up. her small brown hands caressed the tree like an old friend.
She had her back to me so that I could only see the long teardrop of her pearlescent black hair reflecting the light from the kitchen. Her figure was canted to the side and lilting casually, but I thought I saw in her a subdued tension, as if she knew she was being watched and was deliberately trying to appear nonchalant. In that moment she looked more like a bored cat, and I was afraid of her.
I didn’t rap on the window to say hello and I didn’t yell a challenge through the window. In truth a part of the reason for this was because I was drunk and embarrassed for myself. I didn’t want Christina to see me in this state. It was far easier to downplay how much I had imbibed the night before than actually face my wife when I was deep in the throes of a shameful, alcoholic binge. But that wasn’t all of it. Underneath the haze of alcohol an acute fear stabbed upwards towards the front of my mind, sharpening my senses. Switches in my brain were being flipped and sirens were blaring. All hands to battle stations, something is up. It wasn’t enough to pull me completely from my buffoonish stupor, but a needlepoint of clarity began to grow in the center of my vision. She shouldn’t be out there. She was at work.
Then she turned around and confirmed the worst of my paranoid fears. Her almond eyes the color of warm chocolate gaped so wide they were bugged out grotesquely like the eyes of a botfly. Her hands quivered with furious excitement and she frantically rubbed her hands together like a carrion bug. Her flat gaping eyes lit up with (not joy) when they landed on me and I saw a grotesque parody of my wife’s kind smile expand into a starving rictus stretched over yellowed teeth, and then keep stretching beyond the boundaries of human possibility so that her cheeks were distended. The grotesque smile kept peeling back over her face so that surely the top of her head must fall off her jaw. Soon all I could see was that smile as the face warped and twisted around it like warm clay.
I jerked the curtains shut.
“Baaaaaaaaaaaaabe?” It was lilting and flirtatious, my wife’s voice pulled over something manic and gleeful. This creature was reveling in the effect it was having on me. I felt with certainty that this creature was meant to torment me as the scent of roses came back so strongly that I doubled over and tried not to vomit.
I had two thoughts of equal urgency simultaneously tearing my mind in two: “Is my wife dead,” and “I must lock the doors.” I felt schizophrenic while I stumbled through the house throwing deadbolts and window locks. Front door. Back door. Is that thing wearing my wife’s skin? Side door. Window. Did something kill my fucking wife and steal her skin? Window. Window. Check. Check. Did something kill and eat my wife?!
With the house secured I sunk down to the tile floor onto the cold ceramic and hopefully sober up a little. The downstairs hallway was in the centermost part of my house and had no visible windows and so I was able to pretend it was safe. At that moment my phone buzzed in the pocket of my ash-stained bathrobe.
A text from my wife. “Wanna get breakfast when I come home?”
“Baaaaabe? Are you druuuuunk?” The imposter accused me from behind the kitchen window. I heard a delicate tapping while she ticked on the glass with a long fingernail. Hot tears threatened to spill over my eyes when I heard that undulating mockery of Christina’s voice. Every disappointment and failure that she’d had to suffer because of me played like a blooper reel from my memory. Years of me drifting through our relationship as a hollow fragment of myself. Was this normal guilt or thoughts summoned by a Devil?
I heard the odious creak of the screen door opening, and the back doorknob rattled as it tested the knob. I heard a soft, wet giggle from the kitchen door, then a voice garbling gibberish on the other side of the door. I could hear mouthfuls of spittle and furious nonsense flying from its mouth for a time, switching octaves and pitch chaotically. Then it would coo again in a sing-songy lilt. The voice was reminiscent of a parrot imitating human speech, or an infant attempting to learn how to speak.
The doorknob stopped rattling for a long moment, and silence fell over the house. I hunched there for several minutes, not daring to move while I waited to see if this creature was done with me.
“YOU FUCKING DRUNK!” And a ferocious pounding at the back door so hard that I could feel the house shake through the floor. Footsteps pattered away and I could her bare feet tearing through the yard around the side of the house.
A sour pang of anxiety twisted my guts. Something I had forgotten bubbled up through the thick soup of my drunkenness. A pinpoint of clarity had yawned open and I could almost start forming coherent thoughts. With my partial sobriety came a terrible clarity. I had forgotten to lock the garage door, and the big bay door leading into my garage was open because I had just been smoking in there.
A rasping giggle faded my tormenter disappeared around the corner of the house. It would be very close to the garage now. No time to think. Run.
I was already tearing up the rounded staircase towards the second floor when the lights in the house cut out with a sickening thud. I knew instinctively that this was done for the sole purpose of tormenting me. It was very effective.
I know that this thing was not my wife. Whether it was an alcohol-induced nightmare or a spiritual manifestation of my guilt at being a bad husband I couldn’t tell you. What I could tell you with certainty was that this creature would know things that my wife knew. Some dark spirit had latched onto something familiar and taken through osmosis my wife’s memories and knowledge. This left me with very few options in terms of places to hide.
Christina knew everything about our house that I do, save for one secret that I had discovered during a spring cleaning. There was a secret compartment in linen closet built into a hollow underneath the stairs to the attic. If one crawled behind the sheets and craned their neck right it would reveal a secret compartment which curved away into invisibility. I opened the door to the linen closet and slid the wall of comforters out from the bottom shelf. I crawled in on all fours without dignity, and turned around to pull the mass of sheets behind me like a refugee hiding from the secret police. I was hidden behind a wall of fleece and down; As barricades go, it was pretty piss-poor.
I huddled there in the pitch dark and inched my way back into my secret cavity like a child hiding from his abusive mother. I thought I could hear the tortured rattle of the garage door swinging inwards. I imagined the sound of bare feet, caked with rotten mangoes and red dirt stalking through the house towards me.
A soft giggle wafted from downstairs, and the voice took on a disturbingly girlish affect. It was almost impossible to hear through the whoosh of blood rushing through my ears.
The scent of roses had returned, much gentler this time. A light dusting of perfume drifted through the house, barely perceptible.
This was happening to me because I was a piece of shit, on some level I was sure of that. Hot, drunk tears spilled down my cheeks while I huddled there in the tight darkness. I wondered if my wife had sent this demon after me, or if it had been born from the quiet resentment she bore after years of watching me stumble around the house drunk off my ass while she went to work. These dark thoughts intruded on my linen closet, and I was certain that whatever was going to happen to me tonight would be what I deserved.
I burrowed in like a tick and listened while memories of hide-and-seek replayed in my head. We all remember how it would always go. First, you would feel the eager thrill as the countdown began and you ran away, then the smug satisfaction of finding that perfect hiding spot and squeezing in. The countdown would end, and you would comfort yourselves with the knowledge that this time you wouldn’t be found. You all remember how that always ended. Every time.
“Baaabe,” the creature thrilled softly from downstairs. I couldn’t pinpoint the voice, but maybe the living room? “Have you been drinking again?” My wife had never asked that questions out loud, but I knew that she had wanted to, and hearing them in her voice was torture beyond the dread of being found. These were her secret thoughts here to kill me. This was her resentment of me made manifest to torture me like I had been torturing her.
The first step creaked. It gurgled a soft sound barely above a whisper, then it hushed. She would go quiet now while it mounted the steps. These last few meters were crucial for the hunter.
I wouldn’t hear the demon coming. But the house felt heavy with its alien presence now and my home had become a hunting ground. At some point my fear had given way to petulant frustration. Why had I just crawled into the damn closet? I cursed myself for giving into this childlike impulse and knew that I would have to escape. Hide and seek only ever ends one way.
I called myself every horrible name that I could think of as I breathlessly reached for the doorknob and turned it with agonizing slowness. The softest click would alert her to my presence, and the door would be jerked open so that a pale leering smile could yawn open to tear into me. The knob turned millimeter by millimeter and I could feel the bolt sliding softly through the mechanism of the doorknob. Thankfully the bolt deftly receded as quietly as if it had been wrapped in cotton, and I was able to push the door out one inch. I waited. Nothing.
I only prayed the creature was busy investigating one of the bedrooms. I prayed that it wasn’t in the hallway just watching me with gleeful amusement waiting for me to emerge so that it could leap from the shadows like a jungle cat.
I used the pads of my fingertips to push the door open and inched my head out. The dim light from the moon was enough to paint an ultramarine suggestion of my upstairs hallway. No wild-eyed figure twitched there.
I crawled out of the closet on all fours and realized that I was now sober as a judge. I inched my way down the hallway towards the staircase, my salvation. All I needed to do was make it to the bottom and run out the front door. I didn’t have a plan beyond that; I just knew that I didn’t want to be contained for a moment longer.
I had slunk down the hallway towards the stairs and almost made it when I felt cracked, wet lips on my ear. A fat, wriggling worm pressed against me in the dark as something licked the side of my face. I felt bony hands clutching and tearing at me.
I screamed and jerked, throwing my weight over the edge of the stairs as hard as I could. I tumbled down painfully, feeling every jagged impact until I reached the terminus, where I landed face first and was knocked out.
I woke up in a hospital that morning. My blood alcohol content was .36 and for those of you who don’t know, that’s high. Part of me wondered if it had been a dream, and I would have thought that were it not for the deep scratches on my arm where I had torn myself from the creature’s grasp. I didn’t drink the following night, or the next. I wish that I could tell you that I quit drinking entirely after that experience and that I stopped making my wife suffer for me; However, my fellow alcoholics will know that as the trauma of the latest drunken horror or embarrassment slips away, the excuses will quickly take its place. It took me three more years to finally come to my senses and get sober.
My wife, my real wife, was patient with me. Too patient, probably. I’m almost four years sober now, and although I’m not a perfect husband I’ve tried to make our beginnings up to her. I owe her that much, and more. As for staying sober, it’s not so bad. Every time I consider picking up a drink I hear a wet giggle drift from my memory. I take the warning for what it is, and drink seltzer.