Come stay with me

On Koonce Loop, in the south of Texas, you’ll find a dirt road leading to a lovely two-story detached house overlooking the clear Nueces Bay. As I remember the wonderful summers I spent there growing up, a tear runs down my cheek. In my mind, I picture life as it was before the shadows started to appear. It had always been a loving home, filled with warmth and happiness. I clearly remember my mother and her loving embrace, my father, a strong but warm-hearted man. But most of all, I remember my brother John. I remember how I always looked up to him, and how he felt he needed to protect me, at any cost as it turned out.

  For some reason, my mother is always cooking something in the memories I have of her. Although my final memory of her is dark and unpleasant, I choose to remember her as she was: a loving caretaker who would do anything to protect her family. My father, on the other hand, was a man who gave me the idea that anything could be accomplished in life. He was always working on something when he was home, and he always made sure John and I were there to learn from him. He even handcrafted a boat, which he made from trees he had cut down himself. With a little help from John and me. When it was finished, we went for a trip across the bay, mom stayed home to make us dinner for when we got back. She knew we would be hungry, and she was right.

That night I had some trouble sleeping, even though my belly was full, and I was still tired from the boat ride. Maybe it was the bright moonlight because the moon was full, the night was warm and some of the windows were open. Some bugs came in which made this annoying buzzing sound that woke me up, I thought. I remember going downstairs to get some water, but something scared me. At first, I thought it was just a bird or a raccoon. But all I could see was a small shadow on the floor. I thought nothing of it at first, but I was curious, so I investigated it a bit further with no result, other than that it could move. The next morning, I woke up and everything was fine. The windows were still open, and the sun was already making its way up to light the day. Back then I never realised that moonlight is also sunlight, reflected off the moon’s surface. Moonlight always had a bit of an eerie glow to it. But then again, I was just a child with a big imagination.

My father came down the stairs looking like he had drunk too much the night before, at least that’s what my mother commented. He looked pale and said he felt a bit sick. My mother suggested he should lie down and take it easy for a bit. He did just that, but two hours later he passed away. We were all heartbroken but also stunned at how a healthy grown man could just die like that. I later found out that the cause of death could not decisively be determined, meaning no one knew how he had died. Today, however, I know how it happened.

It took my mother two weeks to get back to taking care of us. She had been feeling ill since my father died, so my aunt came to stay with us. I wish she hadn’t.

As soon as my mother was back on her feet, we started getting our lives back. My brother and I felt comfortable with taking the boat out for a trip across the bay again, so we did. This time we took our mother with us and my aunt stayed behind. That night I slept like a baby (I was eleven at the time, my brother fourteen), but it was my brother who woke up in the middle of the night because he couldn’t sleep. But unlike me, he didn’t go back to bed. Instead, he had stood in the living room all night, staring at a shadow on the floor. When I came downstairs, I saw him standing there, motionless. The shadow was also still there, it hadn’t moved. I looked at where his eyes landed and got startled; there on the floor, was the same shadow I had seen the night before our dad died. Only this time it stayed in one place, and it was darker, stronger. Before I could say anything to my brother, I felt something grab me from behind. I screamed, it hurt. John woke from his trance and made a move for me, but the shadow he had been staring at moved faster. Before I knew it, he was completely engulfed, and I was let go. That day, my brother John died at the age of fourteen. He was far too young to come to his end, such a horrible end.

The official cause of death was suffocation, meaning the shadow had choked him to death. But there was no mentioning of a shadow on the autopsy report, even I knew that.

My mother could not take what had happened, there was nothing but a shell left of her. She wanted to leave, she wanted to burn down the house that had taken her husband and now her son. But for some reason, I felt compelled to convince her to stay. At the time, I didn’t know why I did that. But I do now.

Four weeks passed, and my aunt had decided to stay, just until things got back to normal. During those four weeks, I still saw shadows that I could not explain. Shadows that seemed to have been created by moonlight, even during the day. Some nights I woke up, sweating, breathing heavily. It felt as if something had been trying to choke me, but it never did. I say ‘it’ because we both know that whatever it was, wasn’t human.

Four weeks after my brother died, I found myself staring into the mirror in my mother’s bedroom. It was the middle of the night, and although there was a full moon that night, and there were no curtains covering the windows, there was not a single shadow in sight. Not in the room anyway. I woke up from the trance by a sound coming from downstairs. As I went down to investigate where it came from, I saw my mother and aunt sitting on the couch. This startled me because I had just left her bedroom, where my mother was sound asleep. As I slowly walked towards the front of the couch, chilling air surrounded me, taking my breath away. That would be the last time I felt fear.

My mother and aunt were dead, that much I knew at that point. As I came to the front of the couch, the two apparitions or ghosts looked straight ahead, as if I was not even there. I could see straight through them. I turned around in panic and fled upstairs, to my mother’s bedroom. I crawled in bed and hoped it was all a bad dream, but it wasn’t. It was not a dream at all. The shadows in the room seemed to slide from the wall and the floor; they came together to form something in the middle of the room, at the end of the bed. A person began to take shape, a young man by the looks of it. I was still hoping it was a dream, but no, it was all too real because he started to speak.

This all happened twenty years ago, it was the first time I realised who, or rather, what I was. You see, it was me who had choked so much life out of my father that it killed him. It was my shadow that engulfed my brother and killed him, just as I had killed my mother and my aunt. Similarly, I have killed more families over the past hundred or so years, since the house was built, than I can remember. Every time someone dies in my house, their shadow stays behind, becoming part of me. They feed me, protect me, keep me strong. The boy I once was had died a long time ago, just like it will soon be time for this new family, that just moved in, to die. But first I have to welcome them to the neighbourhood; it seems like the decent thing to do before you kill someone, don’t you think?