The Seventh Day : Day Three

If you haven’t read the past installments the links are below.

I – II –III– IV– V–VI–VII–VIII– IX

My alarm was loud and obnoxious. Anyone who has lived withme while I’ve had it abhorred the sound, but that was why I picked it. Once the blaring started you were up and ready for the day. Today was the rare exceptionand I had to fight to wake up enough to turn it off. Exhausted and achy, evenminor movements were tough. Eventually I couldn’t take the beeping anymore androlled over to blindly smack at my night stand until the piercing noisestopped. I rolled further until I was on my stomach and hit my head onsomething hard. Opening my eyes, I screamed and rolled so fast the otherdirection I landed on the floor.

I pushed up to my knees and glared at Johnny Two Wings. “Tyler! You’re and asshole!” I yelled loud enough that no matter where in the house he was, he could hear me. I couldn’t believe that this idiot would risk breaking this thing for the sake of a joke after committing at least one, if not more felonies by stealing it. I was now beginning to wonder if this whole thing was a joke. This wasn’t an expensive museum piece but something he got at a Halloween store or yard sale just to screw with me. If that was the case then it also meant no money forthcoming either.

My anger built over the situation and I picked it up with half a mind to throw it on ground while Tyler watched. I stomped to his room with statue in hand and threw open the door without knocking and without considering that he could have been in the middle of something I didn’t want to see with a likely freaky looking girl. But he wasn’t there and his bed still looked untouched. I tossed the statue on his bed and went to the front window where I found the only car in the driveway, was mine.

 I retrieved my phone and called Tyler three times with no luck. On the third call I left him a nasty voice mail and threatened to throw the damn statue away. I was sure, however, that he would know it was an empty threat.

The last thing I wanted to do was go to work today, but I was determined to try because I so rarely missed. After working there as an intern for over a year they hired me on full time before I even graduated and so far, I haven’t missed a day and haven’t used any vacation time yet. My boss appreciated it and I was looking to move up as soon as possible, so I didn’t want to take off now.

Even after a shower and a shave, I still looked like a wreck but gaunt and glassy eyed or not, I was going to the office. With my bag packed and coffee and bagel in hand, I went to the door. The moment my fingers contacted the door knob, I was awash with an overwhelming wave of anxiety unlike anything I’ve ever felt. This level of palpable fear was entirely foreign to me and I had no idea how to make it stop.

 In my entire life I’ve never had a panic attack but I’m sure that’s what happened. My chest tightened until I struggled to breath, dizzy to the point of falling over, and I was overcome with the fear that if I walked out the door, I would die. I fought my way to a kitchen chair and gripped the table tightly until the room stopped spinning.

With the vertigo gone, the anxiety started to pass as too thought my heart was still racing. Running short on time so I forced myself to try and leave again. As I stood from the table I felt a presence behind me and before I could turn, someone whispered in my ear “Do not leave!”  Thought faint, it was unquestionably a menacing order and not a concerned plea.

Finding the kitchen empty sky-rocketed my anxiety about leaving and at the same time forced me to get out of the house. As I bolted for the door, my anxiety grew worse with every step. In that moment an angry disembodied voice trumped what I knew to be irrational fears.

I swore something unseen chased me as I cleared the twenty feet between my kitchen table and the door. As creepy as that was, it helped me fight back against the panic that enveloped me when I grabbed the knob and threw open the door. I practically jumped onto the porch and had to grab onto the rail so I didn’t tumble down the steps.

I looked back at the house just in time to have the door slam shut and told myself that it must have been the wind. Slowly, I approached the house with my keys in hand to lock up, but the deadbolt clicked into place before I even got there. I tried the knob and found it too was locked. “I don’t think that was the wind,” I said to myself, barely over a whisper as I backed slowly away from the door.  

Fed up and terrified, I slunk down the steps and to my car. When I threw my bag in the passenger seat, I realized my coffee and bagel were still somewhere in the house. Exasperated I flopped into the driver’s seat. “He can have it,” I sighed. With my heart still pounding away in my chest, I looked in the review mirror half expecting to see something sitting in my back seat, but it was thankfully empty. Before I buckled my belt, I turned around in my seat to check the back to try and settle my whirling mind. Apart from some fast food wrappers and a coat, there was nothing amiss.

Sitting in the driveway I was fighting with myself. I wanted to go to work and couldn’t fathom being in the house right now after what had happened this morning. There was also something else, something deep inside telling me I’d regret leaving. The nausea was getting worse and my left hand ached terribly as I gripped the wheel but I started to back out of the driveway regardless. When I paused to let a car in the road pass, I briefly looked up to the house where the front curtain had been pushed back. The car shook as I slammed on the brakes and threw I into park. I looked up at the window again but this time the curtain was closed.

I knew something was seriously wrong, either with me or the house. Possibly both. For my entire life I had been ambivalent about the existence of ghosts. Maybe they were real and maybe not. Either way I didn’t really care since I never experience anything remotely supernatural. But now I was leaning heavily towards ghosts not just being real, but also living in my freaking house.  Ghost or not, I still needed to get to work so I put the car in reverse and pulled out in the street.

I checked the clock and probably could have reached Kris before she left for class. If anyone could talk me down right now it was her, but I also knew she’d lose her mind for me going to work today against the doctor’s orders so I turned up the radio and tried to think of anything else on my short drive to work.

In the first fifteen minutes at the office, no fewer than ten people stopped to ask if I was ok. Apparently, I “looked like hell” and it seemed like most of them were trying to be generous. For two hours I got nothing done, I just stared at the computer screen and ignored the phone. Every time I tried to look at the screen, I got the feeling that someone was behind me.

The combination of feeling progressively sicker, increasingly anxious, and paranoid was wearing on me. I wanted to go home, no it was more than that. I needed to go home and despite everything I did, the thought wouldn’t go away. I told myself it was from the exhaustion and vowed to stick it out.

One of my colleagues, Stan popped his head over the cubicle and had a question about some coding errors again. I went around the block of cubes with my stomach churning the whole way. “What seems to be the problem?” Halfway through the question I had a slight burp as I fought to keep down the contents of my stomach that seemed determined to come out.

I only half listened as Stan talked about an error he was getting and how the coding looked right to him but just wouldn’t work. Scanning the code in the area Stan highlighted everything seemed fine until I got halfway through the second line. I reread a small section three times, getting increasingly nauseous with every pass through, chocking back more and more bile that was burning my mouth and throat. It read ‘youshouldhavestayedhome’.

Unable to breath I stepped back from Stan’s cubical and at the same time, tried to catch my breath and not throw up in the middle of the office. Only half successful I was getting air in and held back the vomit, but ended up with a mouthful. The bathroom was too far so I shoved Stan out of the way and ripped the trashcan from under his desk and expelled the contents of my mouth.

A puddle of thick black liquid, unlike anything I’ve seen come out of a human body stared back at me from the trashcan, but at least I felt slightly better.

“You alright?” Stan asked.

I slowly nodded. “I’ll be ok. Sorry for puking in your trash can.”

“Its ok, you may want to go home though.”

“Not the worst idea ever.” I tied off the trash bag in Stan’s can so I could take it back to my cube to throw away. As I slid the can under his desk I happened to look up at the screen that was now totally white, save for a small bit of text in the middle followed by a blinking cursor. “Four Days”. The nausea and dizziness came back immediately. I ran to the bathroom as fast as I could and burst through door, almost knocking over the janitor in the process.

I didn’t know I could possibly vomit that much on an empty stomach. Far more troubling than the volume was the presence of the same black liquid I left in Stan’s trashcan. It floated on the top of the water in a solid mass, then to my horror started to pulse and move. The mass coalesced into the shape of a face, then two horns sprouted from the top of the head and three holes opened up in the middle. Two eyes, and a mouth formed. I pulled on the handle over and over, but it did nothing.

I fled from the stall and took off for the door, only pausing when I caught my reflection in the mirror. My eyes, usually hazel, were now much darker. I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t just seeing things. Unfortunately, I wasn’t, and they were now almost dark brown. As I leaned over the sink to take a closer look, the toilet finally flushed by itself so I bolted.

I grabbed my stuff and stopped by my bosses’ office to tell her I was sick and needed to go home. She spoke to me with a tissue over her nose and mouth while she retrieved a can of Lysol from her desk, and said to go home and come back when I was better. I nodded and began to leave when she stopped me. “Second thought, just come back next week and work from home once you’re up to it. No need to risk infecting anyone else,” she said looking terrified at the prospect of anyone else getting sick. I gave her a thumbs up and ducked out the door before the cloud of lemon scented disinfectant could reach me.

The trip home was surprisingly uneventful and my stomach felt somewhat better the closer I got to home. I pulled into the driveway and watched for several minutes for any sign of movement in the windows. Eventually I went to the door and slid my key into the lock. It didn’t want to go in, but I still felt the draw to get inside. For a brief moment I talked myself out of going in and started to withdraw my key but was stuck with a searing pain in my stomach. Doubled over, I worked the key back into the lock. The aching began to subside so I took a deep breath, opened the locks and stepped into the house.

Inside I physically felt better almost immediately. Mentally though was a mixed bag. The unstoppable yearning to go home that racked me with anxiety was gone, but was replaced by an oppressive air of dread that permeated the entire house. Nothing felt right at all. Sounds, smells, textures that I had become second nature all seemed off and everywhere I went, I felt watched.

My breakfast was still sitting on the table untouched, which meant that Tyler never showed up. I called his phone and sent another text with no immediate luck. However, I didn’t see any sign of that God forsaken statue, so maybe he had come by. I gave the house a quick once over but didn’t see it and was truly starting to wonder if Ty was pissed at me about something likely involving Kristi, and was using that thing to play a series of really screwed up jokes on me. That, combined with stress from the Kris situation and being tired and foggy from fighting off this bug seemed to be the most logical explanation for why the world seemed so screwed up. For the second time in as many days I fought to convince myself that I was indeed not crazy nor was my house suddenly haunted.

With a lot of time left in the day I sat in the recliner to play some video games. I must have been more tired that I realized as the next thing I know, the TV was very dim after putting itself in sleep mode and my controller turned itself off. I pressed the button to bring it back to life and noticed it felt wet. “Seriously?” I growled. The cut on my left hand had opened up and my controller and my shirt were covered in blood.

“How in the hell did I do that just sitting here?” I realized that I was talking to myself but at that point didn’t care. As I headed to the bathroom to rebandage the wound I saw blood on the hardwood floor leading in multiple directions both towards the kitchen and to the back part of the house.

I headed towards the bathroom first and only got halfway through the living room when I got stopped dead in my tracks. In the middle of floor was a small pool of blood with a large kitchen knife sticking out of it. While terrified of what else I might find in the house, standing there staring at the knife in the floor with a bleeding hand did me no good.

I forced myself down the hall and pass my door with red smears on the handle, to the bathroom and was thankful to find no blood in there. With my hand rebandaged I reluctantly followed the blood trails throughout the house. Other than the door my room was free of blood, but the kitchen was a nightmare.

How long I spent in there I don’t know, but regardless of time I was busy. The handle and door of the refrigerator were covered in smears and bloody hand prints. I had been in the milk, then apparently got a glass of water that I only drank part of. The finger prints on the glass were so clear that I took a close-up picture on my phone and zoomed it. It was a perfect match for my right index finger. All doubt that I alone did this was erased. Save for the butter knives and one sticking in the floor, every other knife we owned was piled in the sink with bloodied handles. “What the hell was I doing?” I wondered out loud.

Though I still felt awful and my left hand ached, I went about the grim task of ridding the house of any signs of blood. All the while struggling to figure out what I was doing with the knives while I was sleep walking, or delusional, or hallucinating, or whatever caused me to lose such a large block of time.

As I put the soap in the dishwasher I remembered the large chef’s knife was still in the living room and went to retrieve it. I stared at the knife for a moment before I picked it up. While this entire episode was unsettling, the large blade protruding from the hardwood floor was exponentially worse. It made even less sense than pulling every last knife from the knife block and drawers. When I plucked it out of the floor I immediately dropped it when the briefest of visions flashed in my mind. Light glinting off the end of the cutting edge while Kris screamed in the background.

I went to the kitchen for a set of tongs to pick up the knife, having no interest in touching it again. As I struggled to grab it in just the right way so it wouldn’t slip out, I became aware of someone else in the room. as looked around the empty living room the scales had tipped back towards there being a ghost.

With the dishwasher running and the last of the blood almost cleaned up my phone rang and thankfully it was Kris. Mondays were her busiest day of the week between classes and work so I usually didn’t get to see or talk to her until late in the evening. She asked about my day and though I knew she wouldn’t be happy, I told her about work. As expected, I was thoroughly chided for going to the office against the doctor’s orders. Since she had a valid point I didn’t bother to argue.

I didn’t tell her about the blood or the knives. My ability to even convince myself that nothing was amiss in the house was now gone and Kris was the last person on earth I wanted to get wrapped up in it so she needed to stay far away until I figured this out.

At 10:00 I headed off to bed, despite it being an hour earlier than I usually went to sleep. Before I brushed my teeth, I opened the medicine cabinet door to avoid the mirror all together. If my eyes were still dark I didn’t want to know right now. Some may say it’s irresponsible not to deal with reality when there could be a legitimate problem. However, when reality is so skewed that you don’t know what’s actually real, it’s a risk you’re willing to take. 

© 2018 Robert Crouse  All Rights Reserved