Nightmare's Beginning

The teenage boy about fell off his bed at the sound of a large bang!, as though someone had taken a basketball and thrown it as hard as they could on the hardwood floor right outside his bedroom door. It was 3:00 A.M. and he’d been asleep for maybe half an hour, insomnia robbing him of precious rest needed for school the next day. All of that was lost now, in the rearview mirror waving goodbye to him.

Adam quickly rolled out of bed and stayed low to the ground, worried there might be someone invading the house. Oh dear God, please keep us safe, was the prayer that rushed to his mind, to just blindly pray and hope. From the doorway outside his own room, he heard his parents’ door open, so he rushed to his own and quietly edged it open. His mom was standing in the small hallway that linked his room to theirs and the staircase leading down to the kitchen in their old Victorian home.

“Mom?” Adam quietly asked, his nerves making his heart thud fast in his skinny chest and a trickle of sweat form at the nape of his neck.

“Did you hear that?” she mouthed, and behind her he could see his dad putting clothes on.

“Yeah, did you drop something, did something fall?” The questions tumbled out of him like raindrops from the beginning of a storm.

“No,” his dad said, “there was nothing. Do you still have your baseball bat in your room?”

“Way ahead of you,” Adam replied, already moving to the wooden bat nestled in a corner between the wall and his wardrobe. Beside it was a tall wooden staff he used for hiking, but right now he felt more comfortable with it in his hands rather than nothing at all.

“Thanks,” his dad, David, said as Adam handed him the bat. “You two stay in Adam’s room until I come back up.”

Adam stepped forward, “But Dad, what if there’s…” the question was left hanging uselessly in the air as his dad pressed on his son’s chest.

“If there’s someone here, I want you up here to keep you and your mom safe and call the police. Please, Adam, we don’t have time to argue,” as David said this, creaks and groans came from the floorboards directly beneath their feet, almost as if more weight was being put on them.

“What the hell?” Adam’s mom, Annie asked, mystified. “The house never makes sounds like this.”

“Just—just stay up here, okay?” With that David was off to meet any danger the house had in store with a trusty baseball bat. It was at times like this when Adam wished they owned something a bit more substantial than simple wooden sticks.

David walked down the forest-green painted steps, doing his best to not make the boards creak under his weight. It didn’t help that they lived in an old house with century-old wood that groaned like an old man’s arthritic back. There was no getting around it; David moved quickly down the remaining steps, sparing a glance behind him, to make sure his son and wife had done as he’d asked.

They were frozen in place.

David rolled his eyes and entered the kitchen, which gave him a good view of the front room to the left and the dining room to the right. He turned the light on, which unfortunately temporarily blinded him, but looking around he couldn’t see or hear anyone. He was certain by now that if someone had broken into their home, he’d find evidence of them. Besides, they lived in a pretty safe neighborhood. He breathed a sigh of relief.

That was when the second loud bang happened coming from upstairs. This time it came from Adam’s room.

Adam visibly jumped, spinning around, and clutched his wooden staff for all the good it did him. That was when he saw his small decorative pyramid on his writing desk fly across the room and embed itself in the wall inches above the headboard of his bed.

This was not the work of some home invader, or the creaking and settling of old woodwork.

Frost started forming on the window beside his bed, strange shapes he didn’t recognize; that, however, was not the strangest part of the frost. It was May, and they were in the middle of a heat wave.

He dropped the staff and moved towards the window as if in a trance, his mouth hanging open like a zombie from his favorite Romero flicks.

“Adam, don’t go in there!” Annie made a plaintive reach for her son’s rail-thin arm, but he was already out of reach.

“What was that?” Adam’s dad hollered up the stairs, turning the lights on there as well. He started walking quickly up the stairs.

“A loud bang came from Adam’s room, and that pyramid we got for him just flew off his shelf…”

“What!? How the hell did that happen? Did you guys see it fly?” David was a man who went by the creed of ‘seeing is believing,’ so they were used to his scientific skepticism when something he hadn’t witnessed happened.

But this was beyond strange, beyond normal, and certainly beyond home invaders.

Annie walked quickly to where Adam stood in his room, his face ashen and strangely absent, as though he was in a trance.

“Honey? Adam…Adam!” Annie shook his shoulders and Adam jumped.

“What? When did you get in here? Adam asked, completely oblivious to his mom.

“What is it, Adam? What are you staring at?” She desperately needed to know if her son was okay, to see if he was safe.

“Mom, look at the ice crystals.”

“Yeah, I see them. What could be causing that, for God’s sake?” She wondered aloud. She looked around the room, but she felt Adam’s fingers on her jaw, and he guided her face back to the window.

“I mean: Look. At. The ice.”

Formed in a perfect curl was what appeared to be a number. Six. Below that, impossibility revealed itself to the Jewitt family in the form of letters. It was like someone had etched letters in a jagged script not just into the ice, but the glass itself.

MINE, it read.

None of them slept that night, and Adam refused to sleep in his room, instead sleeping on a pull-out bed in the front room, and then only during the day. For some reason daylight gave him succor; hell, if someone tried throwing a wedged object right above where another person slept, they’d probably make the same choice.

After that night, Adam asked his dad to buy a digital recorder, which he did, albeit reluctantly.

“I don’t know what you hope to gain by using that thing,” David said skeptically.

Adam held the recorder to his mouth and, smiling mischievously, replied, “Answers.”

David shrugged, “Whatever you say. I’m not too comfortable with you and mom trying to contact…whoever…but do as you will.”

Once night fell on Spring Street and David shut himself away in his office to work, so Adam and Annie went to Adam’s room, where the last of the activity had happened. There was still a huge gouge in the wall above Adam’s bed, so he instead took his computer chair and sat in it, while his mom sat in the reading chair in the corner of the room. Painted in deep scarlet and golden colors, the room should’ve felt warm and inviting, as it always had, but now it felt oddly cold, as if they were trespassers in their own home.

“Do you want to begin or should I?” Adam asked his mom.

“Hey, this is your rodeo, I’m just along for the ride.” She smiled, doing her best to encourage and support him. In truth, (a part of her she wouldn’t want to admit to herself) she was scared; a chill of ice ran down her back, because whatever her son might find would be something she and her husband didn’t know if they could handle.

But the strongest terrors of the night could be chased away by even the smallest flickering light. And this family shone brightly when united.

Adam pressed a button on the recorder, and asked his first question, the most basic question. “Is there anyone here with us right now?”

He played the recorder, and the softest hint of a muffled noise came through. “I didn’t catch that at all,” Adam said, disappointed. He turned up the volume on the recorder and went over to his mother, sitting on his bed next to the reading chair, and played it again.

Softly, lowly, a growl and rasp came through. “Yes.”

Mother and son looked at each other, eyes wide like capital O’s.

“You heard that, right? Adam asked, looking for confirmation and validation in equal measure.

“You’re damn right, I did,” she replied in a way that was unlike her, not the genteel woman she normally was.

They played it again several times before Adam worked up the courage to ask the next question.

“Who are you?” Annie asked before Adam could speak. “What are you doing in our house?”

They waited a few moments before playing it back, but before they could a loud BANG like a nearby thunderclap shook the house. Out came David from his office, a panicked look on his face.

“What in God’s name was that?” He asked them, coming into the room where they sat on the edges of their seats.

“I-I don’t know, honey. It just happened, all we did was ask a question and then—”

“You know the rest, Dad. Hold on a moment, let’s play this back,” Adam finished what his mom was trying to say. All of them were agitated, nervous wrecks at this point.

First, there were a series of mysterious bangs from out of nowhere, then an object flying across Adam’s room, and to top it all off an iced-over window—in May—with writing on it. How much more messed up can this house get? Adam wondered, feeling besieged by the weird.

Playing back the recorder, each member of the Jewitt family leaned in close to the microphone.

“My. House.” The same raspy voice said, though louder and with more emotion behind it this time.

Anger.

They all leaned back, and none of them were able to think clearly.

“Listen, buddy, I don’t know who you are, but this isn’t your house,” David declared to nothing and anything at the same time, the two existing in the same place in his mind.

“Who are you?” Annie asked this time, desperate for peace and answers.

They crowded around that blinking red dot, the black grille where cosmic beings forced their way through to reach their ears.

A voice came through. It was clear. It was vindictive.

“Six.”

It was not a number. It was a name.