When I was pretty young, maybe 9 or so, when I experienced the worst thing that a child can imagine. I was home alone during a thunderstorm when, without any fanfare or warning, the power went out. I’m not exactly sure what happened, maybe a falling tree took down a wire or what have you, but the point was that I was suddenly alone in a completely pitch black house. And I was terrified.
My parents had gone out to a dinner party earlier in the evening and were not expected home until much later, well past my bedtime. They had left me with strict instructions not to contact them unless a real (emphasis on REAL) emergency came up. The sort of emergency that would require the police they said. I know it seems odd for them to have neglected to leave me with a babysitter at my tender age, but I was something of a precocious child, and I guess my parents thought that meant that I could be trusted to perform my bedtime rituals on my own. As an intelligent person, I knew that a black-out was not a police-worthy emergency and that, as such, my parents would not need to be contacted. However, I was still a child, and being abandoned in my house with no electricity was still extremely frightening.
At first, I tried to stay in my room, hoping to get an early night’s sleep and wake up tomorrow in a populated, relit house. However, I found sleep to be utterly unachievable, due largely to my extreme fear of the dark. Even at 9 years old, I still slept with a night light. My friends made fun of me for it, calling me a baby, yadda yadda yadda, but I needed it desperately, as, without it, my mind invented all sorts of monstrous shapes in the darkness, carving them out of the shadows and endowing them with a sinister sort of life. As I sat in my blackened room, night light disabled by the storm, I saw all manner of horrors creeping from the shadows of my closets and the corners behind my bookshelf, and I decided that the best course of action would be to move elsewhere in the house, ideally somewhere with more windows that would allow the glow of lightning to illuminate the room.
As I stepped out of my room, I had a sudden epiphany. In my short life, there had been another black-out, maybe 2 years back, and I recalled that my parents had brought out handheld, battery-powered lanterns to light the house in the absence of power. If I could find these, I thought, I would be able to return to my room and maybe even fall asleep. I decided that the best place to search would be my parents room, the only other room besides mine and the bathroom on the second floor.
As I walked toward their door, however, I heard a noise from downstairs. At first I was unsure of what it had been, but a repetition told me that it was a voice. My mother’s voice. Calling to me from downstairs. My heart filled with excitement and relief as I heard her call to me. “Michelle! Honey! We’re home! Come here. We brought a treat for you,” the voice echoed up the stairs. In my rush of joy, as I bounded quickly down the stairs yelling “Mom! Dad! There’s a black-out!”, I managed to forget that my parents had not planned to return until later in the evening. I was just so excited that I wasn’t alone anymore, and I followed her voice towards the kitchen, still blabbering about the power and how excited I was that they were home.
Just before I reached the kitchen, though, my mind caught up to me and I paused as I noticed several strange things. I hadn’t heard my parents’ car arrive, nor had I heard the door open. It also occurred to me that Mom had only been repeating the same phrases over and over again, in slight variations. “We’re home! Come here!” or “Michelle! We brought a treat for you!”, each time with the same inflections and tonal variations. It occurred to me that it sounded very like her voice when she and Dad had returned from the store a couple of days ago with a piece of cake for me. In fact…it sounded exactly like that. Every word was the same.
I gulped, as I now stood in the doorway of the kitchen, staring into the dark room and completely terrified. “Mom?” I dared to say, almost at a whisper. At that moment, lightning burst outside and the brief light that filled the room showed me something that most definitely was not my mother. It was about the same height, and it looked a bit like her, but… if you know about the uncanny valley, that is definitely the effect I got from looking at its face. Its eyes and mouth were particularly unnerving, seeming too wide, too excited, too hungry to be my mother. As the light and thunder faded, leaving me once again in the darkness, I heard it say “Michelle! Come here!” one last time before I bolted away, scrambling up the stairs and into my room, locking the door quickly behind me.
I don’t know what would have happened if, by some sweet sweet miracle, my real parents had not arrived home just moments later. I heard the door open, and I heard my mother call “Michelle! We’re home!” and I had a brief flash of panic. But as she kept calling, explaining that she and Dad had returned home early to avoid the worst of the storm, I knew that there was nothing uncanny about this voice. It was her. The real her. I raced back down the stairs and hugged my parents tighter than I had every hugged them before, now crying relentlessly into my mother’s shirt. When prompted, I told them that it was simply because of my fear of the dark, as I knew that they would never believe the true story.
I never saw that creature again in the rest of my time in that house, and I am grateful for that. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned to be wary and cautious, and to always check thoroughly when something seems too good to be true. Most importantly though, I learned that sirens are not only at sea.