The Bureau

I feared the dark. To others, it’s simply the absence of light; to me, the shadows, the furniture, myself—all seem to change, all become different.

I never truly believed in the paranormal, ghosts, haunting voices, or curses. But as a child, you have an uncontrollable sense of dread. A part of you knows that living in an old apartment by a cemetery comes with strings attached.

Throughout my life, I’ve had a connection to death. I always find myself at a funeral or mourning a pet—never at a wedding or a baby shower. I hear words like cancer and that Uncle Jer simply didn’t want to be around anymore. Never that a ghost took him, or a curse. But still, I was scared.

Truth is, I didn’t sleep in my own bed until I was eleven years old. It’s pretty pathetic, but that’s just one of those things about being a scared child. I would sneak into my parents’ bed and cocoon myself in their bedsheets. It was warm, like an embrace. It felt safer than a battalion’s protection.

A bunk bed was the perfect solution—my brother would sleep on the bottom, and I slept on top, my face almost pressed against the ceiling. Perfect, I thought.

I remember that as kids, my brother and I would sneak around the house at night and call it *sneak out of bed.* There wasn’t much to it really; we’d just see how far we could go in the living room before Mom or Dad put us back to bed. I miss those things from youth. How simple it all was, our only concern being the monsters hiding under our bed, in our closets—the ones you only seem to see when you’re a child.

But this wouldn’t be a story if nothing had actually happened. If one night, my brother hadn’t gone to sleep in my parents’ bed, leaving me alone in the treacheries of darkness.

The thing about being a writer is that you can’t write without experience, without ever being truly scared. Your heart pounding in your chest, falling into your stomach, making you feel sick. I mean that kind of scared. The kind you feel when your life is in danger.

To this day, I’m not sure what was worse—the actual experience or what came after: the nights of endless thoughts, trying to convince my parents that it really happened, that I wasn’t making it up for attention. Grown-ups are silly like that; whatever doesn’t fit in their mold of their narrow definition of reality, simply can’t happen.

The problem was, saying I saw a man in the house, sitting at my dad’s desk, was exactly the kind of thing a kid would say to get attention. 

I didn’t have a clock in my room, but I knew it was late. The house was still, sleeping, quiet. Darkness blanketed the outside world, and the only light in my room was the reading lamp I had clamped to my bed frame. It was bright enough to chip away at my fear, to keep my sanity safely tucked away a bit longer.

Usually, I’d wake up to the sound of the TV playing after Mom and Dad had tucked us in, but not tonight. It was the weekend, so silence in the house meant it was late. 3:00 a.m. Not even the sound of my brother’s breathing could be heard.

I clung to the guardrail and dipped my head down to see if my brother was awake, too. Even that scared me—dipping my head down into the unknown below.

But he wasn’t there. I was alone downstairs, alone with whatever creatures might lurk in the vast apartment. I suppose I could be brave, bury my head beneath the covers and hide from my imagination, but that wasn’t possible, for me at least.

Slowly, carefully, without making a sound, I climbed down the ladder from the top bunk. I kept my night light on and imagined the dolls and toys from a seven-year-old’s playroom coming alive. It could have been a happy thing, but not in my mind.

If I was a dull, lifeless thing, forgotten in my owner’s closet, I wouldn’t be enthusiastic for a greeting.

I imagined the darkness reaching out to me, gripping its cold arms around my small body and dragging me into the dreary world of night. Mom says there’s a certain sanity in the crazed imagination of a child’s mind—that to be truly sane, you must imagine the horrible, take it in, and what you do with it determines what kind of person you are. But I wonder if my imagination as a child was normal. I’m not sure what kind of person I’ve grown up to be. I’ve learned to accept the sins of man, yet I fear it—more than anything else, I fear death.

The door to our bedroom was open, wide. My brother must have left it that way on his way out. Anyway, I insisted it stay open. I’d rather let spirits in and out of my room than possibly be locked in with one. I was young and weak; it would have taken too long to push down the door handle.

I walked out of the room into the apartment’s first hallway. It was a grand place, well over a hundred years old. At night, the hallways and rooms twisted and warped, and everything became somewhat undesirable, especially to a little girl.

There was a light in the distance, bright and blue, coming from my father’s desk. It was his computer. I was relieved that I wasn’t the only one awake. The dining room was colossal in my eyes, with a table that stretched across and fit my entire class during birthday parties. I had to cross it to reach my father.

My little feet patted against the fishbone floor, but I halted when I reached the room. I didn’t say anything when I saw him; I was simply too confused. There he sat, my father, though a strange feeling loomed. He wore a soft green shirt I’d seen him wear countless times before, and his striped pajama pants. I wanted to call out his name, but it was too bizarre. He just sat there, staring at the bright blue background of his computer screen, as if he were asleep, his face dazed and emotionless—almost transparent, not like the kind one of the father I knew.

After a moment, I decided he was just getting work done in the middle of the night. It’s one of those things you do as a kid, just assume it’s normal.

I made my way up the tall spiral staircase. The upstairs was enormous, and after climbing the stairs, I could see my parents’ bed. I could see my mother sleeping, my brother next to her, and next to him… my father.

I didn’t look down the staircase at the blue light below. I didn’t look back. I sprinted faster than my little legs had ever carried me and cocooned myself in the bedsheets next to my sleeping father.

It’s something I think about now, more often than I care to admit. What would I have done if it happened to me now? Now that I live away from the old cemetery apartment. Now that I live in a big house in the countryside, far from any cemetery.

I reassured myself that it was a dream—there’s no man in my house who wears my father’s skin. That’s impossible. I’m simply being silly, that’s all.

The next morning, though, I didn’t wake in my own bed. I was in my parents’ bed. It hadn’t been a dream after all. 

To this day, my imagination has a tight grip on me, I hear things at night, and can’t help but feel that I am being watched, things I can not explain, perhaps it was never the apartment that was haunted, but me.