My mom fell down the stairs and into a laundry basket, where she shrank. She wasn’t my mom anymore after that.
I was five, and she didn’t fall.
Some people came and took her away. Cops or doctors, I guess.
I went to live with an old lady in a dirty house decorated with discarded cigarette butts and painted walls of nicotine. She occupied the living room in a cloud of second hand neglect and made me call her grandma.
The upstairs basement - better known to non-children as the attic - was the only place in the house that didn’t stink. I’d steal a package of bologna from the fridge and flee Grandma’s wrath.
I wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. She never forgot to feed me because she never remembered in the first place. Whining about it had earned me a whack across the wrist from her cane.
The bologna escape plan had been refined to procedure:
Up the stairs to my room; into the closet where an old dresser had been shoved; climb on dresser; jump up into the open attic panel and grab ahold of the floor edge above; pull self up; slide attic panel back over the access point; listen to Grandma clomp and shout and eventually quit looking for you; eat bologna in the dark.
I’d stored other food up here too, cookies and crackers and quickly learned I wasn’t the only one living in the attic. Mice would chew through anything and didn’t ask before moving into the pillow I’d stolen from Grandma’s bed. It was like Cinderella but with poop everywhere.
The day I found a flashlight beside the bologna in the fridge is the day I cried for my mother. I couldn’t quite remember what she looked like. The vague features of her face were permanently etched with paranoia. She was afraid of monsters. That’s what I thought. I remember praying they’d leave her alone.
As I stared at the end of the light beam, I recalled clearly her fall down the stairs. Her heels slid over the edge of the carpeted steps. She landed in a crouch in the laundry basket. The shrinking was subtle, minor even.
Her tongue fell out of her wide open mouth like she’d bitten it during the fall. She looked up at me intensely and then, it seemed, not at all as if the capacity to be worried had been exceeded.
The last embers of her fire were extinguished, and she ceased to be my mother because she wasn’t anyone after that. Somehow, her mind had been reduced to a blank slate.
I blamed myself. I cried until I fell asleep on the baby mattress I’d dragged into the attic. The flashlight was still on when I awoke. Mice were trying to approach my food pile. They crawled in irregular spurts, imitating dead leaves blowing across the ground, and would suddenly squeak and run away when they got too close.
The flashlight revealed a line of soot drawn around the food. I don’t remember organizing the supplies; I may have. But I know I didn’t make that circle. Had it been there the whole time? And why were the mice afraid to cross it?
Naturally, I put everything mice might eat or poop on inside the dark circle. I lived by the flashlight and only left the attic to use the bathroom and shower when Grandma would take her weekly trip to the grocery store. On one such excursion, I heard her complaining about a large icicle that had formed on the eavestrough.
“Sure as hell it could kill a fool!” she shouted at someone outside. She grumbled more about the city not helping the elderly enough. I went outside for the first time in many days to see it. Cruel and indifferent as Grandma was, she was not exaggerating about the icicle. In my head, I thought it resembled a large knife. A knificle.
Judging by its position on the eavestrough, it grew right outside a window where I lived in the attic. I’d never noticed a shuttered window before but immediately ran inside to check.
Sure enough, it was there, above my reach, at the opposite end of the attic where I’d made camp. There were boxes of Christmas decorations and more clutter than I’d guessed. I found a chair to stand on and struggled to turn the slats, which had been painted over several times.
I pushed too hard and my slender arm destroyed a section of rotting wood. My hand plunged beyond. My fingers wrapped around, instinctively, the knificle. The ice was smooth and I could sense its weight and destructive potential.
If it didn’t stab when it fell, it would still crush an individual below. I retracted my arm and looked outside through the hole and at the hilt of the knificle. I felt armed, powerful, and ashamed. Grandma was messed up, confused, but she didn’t deserve to die.
Even a six-year-old could understand that. I climbed down from the chair and saw that daylight had been admitted through the broken slat. I turned off the flashlight until nightfall.
A scream woke me up. Grandma was shouting, swearing, and breaking things on the first floor. The attic seemed to vibrate from the severe impacts below. I held my breath and listened.
“You think you can hide?!” she roared, punctuating the question with the sound of shattering glass. The rest of her tirade couldn’t breach the second floor.
The ranting and the destruction seemed to last hours but concluded with a more unsettling quiet. I didn’t know what it’d been about or what the final outcome had been. I kept still on the baby mattress until dawn where I finally risked peeing into a metal pale I’d found in the attic.
I heard Grandma’s car start and pull away. Time for a wash and a kitchen raid. Lowering the pee bucket onto the dresser first, I then dropped beside it as quietly as a cat. I used a wet cloth on my face and pits and drank as much water as I could handle from the tap.
I stopped at the top of the stairs to view an intense fog of cigarette smoke. It filled the entire first floor, which didn’t strike me as impossible at the time. My simple mind thought Grandma’s smoke hadn’t disappeared because the windows and doors were always closed. It was winter. The smoke couldn’t get out.
The picture frames had been knocked off the walls, shattered glass piled at the bottom. I wasn’t wearing shoes, so I leapt over the shards and stayed low when I landed and listened: Nothing.
I moved swiftly into the kitchen, noting the overturned table and broken lamp in the hall. The living room door stood open, which was rare. Grandma liked her privacy. I don’t know why I didn’t just stay focused on the fridge. Crossing the antique threshold of her favored space felt like I’d breached the lair of a dragon. The nicotine stench stung my nostrils and burned my eyes. An electric fireplace from the 70s switched between two fake flames, while a vent pumped too much heat. I began to sweat.
The TV played a soap opera to an empty reclining chair and a plastic covered couch. A small pile of tobacco and rolling papers looked to have been abandoned abruptly. Yet there was no other sign of vandalism like in the rest of the house. Something or someone had drawn her from here perhaps.
Since I couldn’t see anything worthwhile to take, I left, slowly. Something didn’t feel right.
I closed the door, forgetting it had been open. When I reached for the handle to set it right, it turned on its own. I backed away. She hadn’t been inside. No one had. Nevertheless, the door opened outward, and there she stood.
It’s difficult to recall exactly her appearance. I remember teeth decayed nearly to the gums, and the wet interior of her mouth a stark contrast to the dry, powdery skin on her wrinkled face. Her dark eyes were so sunken into aged flesh they looked like a shark’s.
What she wore and the state of her body I don’t remember. She seemed neither fat nor thin. It’s the face that remains the clearest . That and the fact she could walk.
The tip of her cane jabbed my baby toe and I hopped back. She pushed open the door and swung, the cane shaft running across the top of my hair. I ran for the stairs.
“Get back here!” she demanded. I made the mistake of glancing over my shoulder as I rounded the bannister, and stepped right onto the broken glass I’d carefully avoided before. Pain shot through the arch of my foot, and my sock turned red.
Grandma’s rough arm wrapped around my neck and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. Despite her age, her strength exceeded mine by a lot. My small hands slapped ineffectually at her.
She breathed hot, fetid breath into my ear as she spoke. “Don’t you see? You’re going to die here.” The pressure on my neck intensified. I was about to pass out. But somehow - I think she must have adjusted her chokehold - my chin slipped below her forearm. I didn’t want to die. Without hesitation, I sank my teeth into her skin until blood filled my mouth, and she finally let go.
This time I didn’t look back. I ran up the stairs, ignoring the pain in my foot. There was so much blood, I slipped on the dresser leading to the attic. Grandma switched on the bedroom light as she stomped into the room. We exchanged the briefest look before she rushed for the closet. Her hand closed around my injured foot as I pulled myself up. The blood gushing from the wound saved me. Her fingers slid down my calf to my sock, which came off easily.
I put the panel over the access and sat on it. She pecked with her cane but gave up fast.
“Let it be your tomb then,” she seethed before clomping away. I reached the baby mattress with my foot and pulled it over the panel. Then I piled everything I could find except the food, which I left in the black soot circle.
Your foot. Don’t forget your foot.
It was like someone had whispered the advice directly to my brain. The wound kept bleeding and I felt sick. I started to panic and cry and desperately wished my mom would save me.
Don’t cry. You’re going to be okay. Take the blanket and wrap it around the cut.
Except for the first suggestion, I did as recommended.
Now press your hands down on the blanket.
It hurt to do so but I did it and soon the bleeding stopped, and so too my tears.
Listen. That woman is bad. She intends to kill you.
Panic seized my body again.
Listen!
A kind of jolt went through me.
When you hear her car again, go to the window and put your hand against the icicle.
“Knificle?” I said, and I had the strangest feeling whatever was speaking to me smiled.
What a creative, smart child.
I beamed. Then, the sound of Grandma’s car came from outside.
Hurry.
It wasn’t easy to walk or climb the chair with my hurt foot. The knificle felt wet in the afternoon sun.
Wait.
The nagging feeling I’d had before - that something wasn’t the way it should be - came again.
“Something is wrong,” I said. My child’s brain struggled to connect the scattered details. The engine quieted. A car door slammed shut. Periodic squeaking followed once, twice, three times, and there was grunting from some kind of effort.
Grandma was struggling to do something.
One more second.
“No. I don’t want to.” I began to retract my arm.
You will die. Do you understand? She intends for you to die. You have no choice. Do you want to die?!
I did not. My hand felt the base of the knificle.
Push. Now.
The base of the large icicle came away from the eavestrough so quietly, so easily. Sour acid filled my stomach.
A soft impact preceded the clattering of steel on wood and concrete. She let out a dismayed cry for help soon after.
I pulled my arm in and looked out at the empty sky while she continued to wail.
I climbed down off the chair and moved quickly to the panel, tossing my junk and the mattress aside.
Where are you going?
“Something isn’t right.” I couldn’t express the obvious any better.
No. Don’t go.
I ignored the voice and found my way to the front porch. My remaining sock drank in the wet snow. The wound on my foot felt better against the cold surface.
An old woman lay beside her overturned wheelchair at the bottom of a ramp. Blood matted her white hair. Her teeth weren’t rotted; they were white, dentures probably. A package of bologna and a box of cookies lay beside her, and batteries for my flashlight too.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Did you see that? Big icicle hit me in the head.” She tried and failed to get up to a seated position.
“Knificle,” I said.
“Huh?” Her eyes scanned the eavestrough where the icicle had been. She saw the hole in the window slat and looked back at me with a worried face. The realization of my betrayal, unintentional as it was, hit us both at the same time. That’s when she “shrank.”
I learned then what had really happened to my mother the day she fell down the stairs: Nothing. Not to her. It happened to me.
I rose into the air, but it didn’t feel like I was being lifted. The subtle decrease in Grandma’s size - and my mother’s in the past - was my own perception getting further away. The fear, the worry, leaked from her expression; this was beyond her ability to remedy. She wasn’t my Grandma anymore.
On a backward trajectory, I floated into the house, carried by something I didn’t understand then, and don’t fully understand now. I only know when the door slammed shut, I began to resist.
Stop it.
I writhed against the air. “No!”
Stop it. I can help you. I protected you from her. Grandma wanted to hurt you. Kill you.
The whispers in my head became a discordant choir of suffering people. Whatever entity forced their voices into singularity was losing control.
“That wasn’t Grandma.” I finally understood. “You are!”
I dropped to the floor, free, for the moment. I drew in a big breath and noticed the change in the house immediately. The nicotine coating had lifted, the odour gone. Daylight poured through windows I hadn’t noticed before. There was no door barring the living room, which also appeared more inviting. The electric fireplace was gone, and the television was modern, flat, and hung on the wall. Also, it was off.
The destructive debris from earlier was missing too, except for the shards of glass in front of the stairs. I was confused and seemed to drift to my room automatically. Getting the door open, however, proved difficult. Something blocked the way, allowing only what proved to be a me sized gap for my admittance.
Inside the bedroom lay the encampment I thought I’d made in the attic. The mattress was a twin with bedding and a pillow. I had apparently removed it from the bedframe. There were spots of blood on the carpet, which made me remember my foot. The fact I’d forgotten tipped me off to the reduced severity of the wound. There was a cut, and my sock was still missing, but it wasn’t gushing blood and probably never had been.
The food pile was in a corner, confined in the black circle. I touched what had been soot; it was wax from crayons.
Only one place left to check. I climbed the dresser in the closet, and found it more difficult to ascend into the attic than expected. When I’d managed to catch the lip of the floor above, my fingers brushed fuzz.
A dead mouse - deceased for some time - lay silent near the opening. The chair beneath the window was, to my disappointment, the same. I had almost killed that old lady. She’d bought me bologna and cookies and other food. I sat down and cried until a man in a uniform came up to collect me.
I was brought to a social worker who had a lot of questions, and wanted to know what had happened. She listened and wrote on a notepad and when I’d finished she gently corrected me on a number of subjects.
I was not six but eight. The old woman really was my grandma. I’d lived with her for years already. She’d been instructed to give me space. My mother had not been well. Apparently, neither was I.
My grandmother recovered and welcomed me back in, though she seemed distant and understandably cautious. I attended therapy and progressed well. I went to school, made friends, and usually believed the previous incident had been due to repressed trauma.
Only the empty space where the picture frame had been and my missing sock nagged at me. I hadn’t imagined those things. My therapist suggested I’d simply misinterpreted ordinary events.
And I might have accepted that explanation if not for the occasional and fierce sensation that all was still not well.
This feeling would be validated years later, when the memory of these days were firmly rationalized and sealed with medication. The entity tried again.
But even that incident wouldn’t be the one to kick off my investigation into Bridal Veil Lake.
That couldn’t begin until I understood that evil really does exist. It isn’t a metaphor or some subjective truth. It’s real and begins with them. Call them demons if you like, though it’s probably an oversimplification. Some see themselves as angels, and the rest don’t bother to define what they are because they simply don’t care.
I won’t be upset if you don’t believe me. I couldn’t accept it until one of them targeted someone else. Someone better than me. Someone I loved, and always will love, wherever they are right now. I hope they are relatively safe in a world where no one ever can be.