Pancakes for Supper

It began with the distinct sensation that there was a spider in my shirt.

I was getting up from the kitchen table and I felt its legs scurrying up the bare skin on my back.

I panicked. 

Ignoring the strange looks from my wife and two daughters, I sprinted to the living room and pulled off my shirt, squeezing and pinching the fabric as I pulled it over my head, hoping that I wouldn't inadvertently transfer the little devil to my face.

I turned my shirt inside out. 

I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. 

Nothing. 

I slid my shirt back on and walked to the kitchen where the family was finishing up their pancakes.

"What's wrong Daddy?" Esther asked, her eyes wide.

"Wha wong?" Elizabeth chimed in, her face and hands covered in syrup.

Bea looked at me with amusement.

"I just thought there was a bug in my shirt, that's all," I said, sheepishly.

But it wasn't just any bug. It was a spider. I was sure of it, though I couldn't explain why. It was shiny brown, one of those with a large bulbous abdomen, and of course, eight hairy legs.

"You're funny!" Esther exclaimed.

"Funny!" Elizabeth echoed from her highchair. Bea was wiping her face, somewhat unsuccessfully.

I walked back into the living room, the floors creaking with each step. 

We lived in an ancient house, one of our neighbors said it was almost 200 years old. 

The walls were wavy and uneven. The doors were cut in odd shapes to compensate for the sloped floors. All the windows were painted shut with layers of off-white and ivory paint that probably dated back to when my grandfather was a little boy. 

"It has a lot of character." Bea liked to say when friends would come over and comment on the house. About half of her friends were appalled at the imperfections of the house and the other half were jealous of them. I was indifferent to all their opinions. The age and imperfections of the house made it affordable. That’s what counted in the long run.

I felt the sensation again. I could see a sharp image of the little creature, its legs moving up and down my back, looking for a place to…

"Daddy!" Esther came bursting through the doorway.

"What, honey?"

"There’s a strange man sitting on the front porch! Mama told me to get you!"

I felt the sensation grow stronger, the spider's legs moving up and down my side like little wires. I closed my eyes and slammed my hand into my side a couple of times. Nothing. No cold wet bug guts.

The sharp prickling sensation stopped for a moment at least.

"Daddy?"

"Yeah, I'm coming."

Bea was standing at the window. She turned around with a jerk as I came around the corner. 

“Steve…” she whispered as she pointed toward the dark window.

"Who is it?" I asked. We rarely got visitors. We lived down a gravel driveway, tucked behind a stand of trees. No one could see the house from the road except in the winter when the leaves were all down. But it was late summer, and the house was hidden away from any eyes that came from the road.

Bea shrugged. I walked to the window and looked out and around at the little wooden bench that was built into the exterior wall of the house. The warm porch light lit up enough of him to make out a dim profile.

"What the…”

I covered my mouth as I looked over at the girls, then whispered, “Is he Amish or something?"

The man was in some sort of work clothing and suspenders. He had a long gray beard and wore a straw hat.

"Should we just turn the light off?” Bea offered. "Maybe he’s homeless and he'll move on?"

"No, no... I'll see what he wants. He didn't knock or anything?"

Bea shook her head.

We looked at each other for a few tense seconds, the noise of the crickets leaking in through the window.

My mind tried to rationalize, but there was no reasonable explanation for why someone would be sitting out on our front porch at 8:30 in the evening. If someone drove up to the house at this moment, they would assume he owned the house!

I felt the spider again, crawling up toward my neck.

"Ahhh!" I let out a frustrated breath and pinched my shirt.

Bea looked at me strangely, then reached for the handle of the door.

"No! I got it! There's just something in my shirt..."

I grabbed the old door handle and yanked it open.

Whoever this guy is, he picked the wrong night to come asking for money.

I pushed open the storm door without much concern for the loud squeaking sound I knew it would make.

As I walked towards him our eyes met briefly. He had an amused expression, almost mirthful, the corner of his mouth turning up as I approached.

"Steven! How are you doing friend?" He said, looking at me briefly and then looking ahead at the yard and the moonlit trees beyond.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Have a seat buddy!" he said, gesturing to the spot on the little bench beside him.

I usually hate being called "buddy." I've even been in a couple of fights over the use of nicknames I didn't like, but somehow, coming from this man, it felt... warm, somehow.

"Have we met before?" I felt the words slip out of my mouth and was surprised at the warmth I heard in my own voice.

I decided this stranger reminded me of my great uncle John. 

I worked with my Uncle John for 2 years as a young man fresh out of high school. One summer night, like this one, we got stuck on the side of the highway in his old Ford. It was always breaking down, we almost expected it. We hadn't been out there 2 minutes before several cars had stopped, asking us if we needed a ride or some help fixing the truck. Everybody knew old John, everybody would do anything to help him.

"No, we haven't met." the man said. "But I know about you all the same. My name's Charles, most of the neighbors called me Charlie."

He looked at me again, his face covered in a grin as if he had just said some knee-slapper of a joke. I looked at him a little closer as he laughed. He had a ring on his left hand and was wearing some sort of boots I had never seen before. I looked up at his straw hat and flinched backward a little when I saw a long, old-fashioned pitchfork leaning against the side of my house on his right.

"Uh, nice to meet you, Charlie. To what do I owe this little visit?"

"Ohh, I was just coming by to check on the house, that's all," he said with his southern drawl.

Okay?

I looked down the driveway expecting to see a car (or maybe a horse and buggy), but there was nothing.

"Well, that's nice of you Charlie. Where did you park? I don't see a vehicle around."

He laughed. "There's no need for that. I just came up Myer's road." He pointed to the woods.

"Myer's road? Never heard of it. How far is it past the woods?"

"It ain’t past the woods, it goes through the woods. That road there was abandoned about 80 years ago. Comes out right at your yard."

I squinted my eyes as I looked into the moonlit forest at the edge of the yard. I couldn't tell if it was my imagination or if I could really see it, but in the thick of all of the large oak trees that made up the woods at the edge of the yard, there was an area with fewer trees. The brush was sparser as well and I could imagine a little old road running through it, years and years ago.

I looked back at Charlie, who was studying an airplane flashing across the night sky. We sat in silence for a moment as he tracked it as far as the treeline overhead. 

I was slowly beginning to think that Charlie wasn’t Amish, he was just ancient, like the house. He was probably one of those old-guard farmers who smoked a pipe at the downtown hardware store on Saturday mornings, talking about the ‘good old days.’

"Things have changed a lot around here," he said, as if confirming my own thoughts. 

"Uh, Charlie, I appreciate you coming to check on the house, but, no offense, I really don't know you from Adam. Do you live through those woods over there?"

Charlie didn't answer for a long while. Bea looked out the window and I smiled, giving her a thumbs-up. 

I thought about just telling him to leave, but there was something about him. I felt sorry for him. He was a lonely and lost old man.

"I built this house, ya know." he said in a low voice. 

Lonely, lost, and maybe a little delusional.

"Charlie that's not possible. This house was built in the 1800's."

"I built it, Steve. With my own two hands." He picked up his left hand and looked at it, studying it. Then he placed his hand on the wooden siding of the house, closing his eyes.

"Well, if you built it, can you explain why you only put one closet in the entire house?" I said, laughing. This was a point that really irked Bea about the design of the old farmhouse.

"Ida didn't care for closets and we didn't have many clothes back in those days. My girls, Helen and Rose wore out their dresses playing in the yard here, but Ida always patched them up."

Maybe he was confused about the date the house was built, but that didn't mean he didn't live here, long ago.

"You and your wife and two daughters? That sounds like our little family. Those girls can be a handful." I said.

He nodded.

We sat in silence for another moment. I thought again about getting up and leaving him there.

But that would be like leaving Uncle John on the porch alone, wouldn't it?"

Uncle John had grown a bit confused himself in his later years. I took him to an auction on fall break after I decided to go back to college, but ended up bringing him home shortly after we got there. He kept asking where we were, begging to go home. He looked at the auction yard as if it was an alien planet, even though he went there almost every weekend when I was in high school.  

Another thought crept into my mind. First I considered it a small possibility, but as I sat there with Charlie in silence in the dark, the thought gradually filled my mind and I accepted it as a certainty.

He wants you to invite him in.

I decided to try my hand at small talk again. I talked about the house, the interesting design of the fireplace, and the way the bathroom door wouldn't clear the toilet.

He knew about every one of them and had an explanation for them all, still claiming he built the house himself. He told me about the things we had changed in the house since moving in, the floorboards I had scuffed when we brought in the piano, the new kitchen sink I installed. 

Somehow, he knew what we were eating just before he came up on the front porch.

"Pancakes for supper? Ida used to make those," he said.

It was as if he was connected to the house itself, knowing every board and nail but desperately missing… something. 

He wants you to invite him in.

As I sat hostage on my own front porch, I began feeling all of my initial warmth for this man begin to drain.

"So," I said. "You came down Myer's road to check on the house. You didn't knock. You just sit here on the front porch like the house is yours..."

"It is mine, Steven." He said. "I never sold this place. It's mine."

His voice had a strange, threatening power. With each syllable, the night grew darker and the air grew colder. My bones ached. My mouth became strangely dry and it burned. 

I began to dread what I knew was next. 

Somewhere, in the recesses of my mind, I knew I was about to go and open the door for him. I was going to let him inside my house. I was going to do this, against my own will.

But with the little bit of free will that I had left, I fought it.

If it's your house, Charlie, why aren't you going inside yourself?

He needed me to invite him in. And so, there was hope. 

-Drip- 

"Steven." He said in a low voice. "You don't understand. I lived in this house. I drug those stones across the field to build the foundation. I was happy here until they...."

He let out a frustrated shriek that seemed to shake the floor. The crickets stopped singing as the sound echoed into the woods beyond us. 

"....Until they took me away." 

We sat there, still as statues. 

-Drip-

Over and over again, I kept replaying one thought in my mind.

If it's your house, why don't you go inside?

If it's your house, why don't you go inside?

That's right. You won’t. You need me. And I'm not going to help you.

A gentle breeze blew across the porch. 

Charlie smelled weird, like sour, dusty clothes and like… nickels.

-Drip-

A thought shot through my mind like a lightning bolt. I felt faint, my vision darkening around the edges like a closing curtain.

"Charlie," I said, trying to hide the fear in my own voice, "Why did they take you away?"

He said nothing, but I could see his breathing grow faster, more deliberate.

"What happened to your wife, Charlie? What happened to the girls?"

He seemed barely able to contain himself, rocking back and forth on the seat as he made that awful shrieking sound again. 

I leaned forward until I could see his right hand on the other side of the bench.

It was covered in blood, dripping into a puddle on the porch floor.

The curtains began to close again.

No! No! Stay awake!

I looked up at the pitchfork and saw something moving at the end of it. A large, brown spider was slowly crawling to the tip of the sharp tine. 

I'm not sure what it was about seeing the spider that changed things. Maybe I was in more shock than I realized, and something about seeing that spider brought me back inside the house, back to eating pancakes at the kitchen table again.  But when I saw that spider, whatever spell that was holding me was broken for a short second. 

So I ran.

I stumbled across the porch in a few steps. Charlie got up off of the bench. I know this because I can still hear the clump of his boots hitting the floor, the scrape of the pitchfork against the wall of the house.

I can still hear his feet stomping up behind me as I fumbled with the storm door, expecting to feel cold metal stabbing through my back at any moment. 

It was as if time had slowed and my fingers and hands were frozen as I slammed the solid wooden door closed and locked the deadbolt, then the chain, then the doorknob lock.

Bea was picking up the sticky plates from dinner and stacking them together. 

"Bea! Where are the girls?" I asked, running past her.

"Steve, what's wrong? They're in the living room!" she said, putting the plates down and following me.

Esther and Elizabeth were playing on the floor, fighting over a plastic horse.

I went back and looked out the window. Bea walked up beside me and looked too, and the next words out of her mouth were pure music.

"He's gone."

-----

Kevin,

I wrote this attached account two years ago. I never expected to actually show it to anyone, but for some reason writing down the events of that night helped me to process what happened. 

We moved out of the house to our current neighborhood on the other side of Barnes County within three months of the incident described in this letter. Some things aren't worth saving a few bucks on.

I had heard another family moved into our old house and I became very concerned after Esther came back from school yesterday. She told us about how your daughter had seen an old man wandering in the woods near your backyard.

We’ve never met officially, but your other daughter, Alex, plays tee ball with Elizabeth and I'm sure you've seen us at their games.

I honestly don't expect you to believe one word of my story. You can chalk it up as a weird welcome to the neighborhood. But I had to send you this, I couldn't sleep until I did.

Whether you believe my story or not isn't really my concern. I sent it to you to frame a very important piece of advice after all, and if you follow it, you'll probably be alright.

That piece of advice is this: If old Charlie comes out of the woods and decides to pay you a visit,

DON'T INVITE HIM IN.

-Steven Dawson