I took the keys out of the ignition and looked out of my car window at the house. The curtains were drawn, and I couldn’t detect any hint of light seeping out from the corners. I checked my phone to see if Michael had responded to any of our texts. He hadn’t. The only notifications I had were from our group-chat asking if I had stopped by Michael’s place yet.
‘Just got here, I’ll let you know.’ I responded and slid my phone back into my pocket.
Every step I took towards the front door filled me more and more with a general sense of unease. Michael hadn’t been responding to any of us for the past three days. It hadn’t been unlike him in the past few months to just drop off the face of the earth for a week at a time, but he would always respond to us with some perfunctory message or at least be marked as having read the messages we posted in our chat.
Michael had been becoming more and more withdrawn over the past few months, but he had always been a quiet guy and was known to have his cyclothymic ups and downs. It wasn’t until the second day we got worried – and I had been tasked with checking out his house to make sure he was alright.
I got to the front door and rang the doorbell – the chime echoing throughout the whole house and into the front yard, it sounded like his windows were open. I stood on the porch for around thirty or forty seconds without a response. I rapped my knuckles on the door and called out Michael’s name towards the open window next to the door.
Still no answer. I put my hand on the doorknob and gave it a slight turn – it wasn’t locked. The door drifted lazily open. I stood there, doorknob in hand, the door slightly open, considering whether to step into the house. Something inside me told me to just turn around and file a missing person’s report for him and leave the house alone. I pushed that feeling aside, ‘he’s my friend’ I said to myself and stepped into the house.
“Michael?” I called out, my own voice echoing back to me.
The house was cold – a combination of the windows being open and the heat being off. The house was dark, so I flipped on the hallway lights and took a few tentative steps into the house. Part of me was relieved that the house didn’t smell like death or rot – If he had done himself in I’m sure I would have smelled it from outside.
I walked into the dining room and the colour drained from my face in an instant, I felt a pit open up in my stomach and my eyes instinctively opened wide in shock. The long wall of the dining room was covered top to bottom in sheets of paper covered with writing and diagrams made with thick black ink. Some had arrows pointing to one another, some had tacks through them with lines of string linking them to other sheets of paper.
I came back to myself and took a few hesitating steps to the wall – I leaned in, but the writing on the pages was indecipherable. It looked vaguely like English handwriting, but something was off about it, and I couldn’t make out what anything said. The diagrams were all various shapes and interlocking circles with sections labelled and arrows pointing here and there.
This wall normally had two chairs and a small side table in front of it, but all of this had been thrown aside in what seemed like a flurry to make room for the bizarre decorating of the wall. I was startled out of my stupor by the buzzing of my phone.
‘Hey man, is he there?’ My phone read.
‘No.’ I said and put my phone back. Right after this the phone began to buzz over and over – presumably from the group chat, but I ignored it.
My eyes finally drifted to the centre page of the odd collage, and for the first time I could make out actual words. It was a page from the bible that had been carelessly torn out and tacked to the wall. Every single passage on the sheet was blacked out except for one. Ecclesiastes 1:18. I shuddered and finally managed to pull my focus away from the wall.
One half of my brain was screaming at me to leave the house, the other half was enveloped by a morbid curiosity to check the rest of the house. My curiosity won. I walked past the bathroom on the way to Michael’s bedroom and noticed that the bathtub was completely full – almost to overflowing, and from the door I noticed several dark shapes at the bottom of the tub. I stepped closer and looked into the water. It was all of Michael’s electronics. His phone, his laptop, his Xbox. Absolutely everything he owned that could connect to wifi had been drowned in his tub.
My phone began to ring. I looked at it, it was James, another one of our friends. I answered.
“What the hell man, answer our texts.” James said nervously.
“Sorry.” I said.
“So what’s going on?” James asked after a pause.
“I don’t know. Call the police.” I said, and hung up the phone before James could say anything else.
I put my phone away as I got to Michael’s room. Every hair on my body was standing on end as I pushed open the door to his room. The door bumped into something as I opened it up. I pushed a bit harder and looked inside. Michael’s computer monitor was on the ground and had blocked the door – it was completely smashed and looked like it had been hurled into the ground multiple times.
I looked up, on Michael’s desk was his PC tower – laying on it’s side. The side had been taken off and an axe was firmly lodged in the interior components of the computer. It was an expensive gaming computer that Michael had built himself, I couldn’t imagine what it was that could have driven him to do all this.
I turned and looked at Michael’s bed – it was neatly and carefully made, and on the main pillow was a small leather-bound book. I walked over slowly and opened the cover. It was a journal. The very first entry was labelled as February 37th. I scrunched up my face in confusion and skimmed the first entry. I flipped through the journal until I found the very last entry. None of the dates made any sense, they were all either dates that didn’t exist on a calendar – numbers too high, negative numbers, numbers written in fractions, dates referenced by the phase of the moon.
I read the last entry over slowly and the colour drained from my face again. I closed the journal and set it on the bed. I looked around the room for a moment before I began to fill with a terrible, overwhelming dread. I picked up the journal and stuffed it into my back pocket and immediately made my way to the front door of the house.
I slammed the front door behind me and hurried down the stairs. I jumped into my car and rammed the keys into the ignition, speeding away from the house. I finally slowed down when I had reached the bridge in town that spans our local river. I rolled the window down as I approached the bridge, and when I was halfway across, I hurled the journal over the railing and watched it sail towards the water below.
“There but for the grace of God go I, Michael.” I said to myself.