The Funhouse

(Explicit language, physical abuse, suicide or self harm)

At the intersection, I could go right and head home - but turning left would take me back to that rental where I had lived before. There was a haunting attraction to this place. It wasn’t a familial tie, or a long lost love. It was an obscure and dark fascination with a dark energy.

When I first moved into this small house, it’d seemed strange. There’s been carpet and small hand made crosses on every wall. I had moved in with my sister, and our relationship had always been difficult. It had started from a young age. Jasmine was as stubborn and wild as I was, if not more. She didn’t like to clean, because she couldn’t concentrate on it. We’d called here Jaz the Mass Mess due to her inattention to keeping things neat and orderly. I had to have everything neat in order to operate. We shared our room for most of our early childhood years. She couldn’t understand my need to sing, and I couldn’t understand her need to band around on things.

The little house we’d moved into seemed to play on our on our emotions. She had also brought in her dog, Shadow, a rescue. It was pissing and shitting around the place. At first, I’d blamed all the chaos on her and the dog.

Sure, the place had hairline cracks and leaned oddly as you were walking through each and every room. It had been through a major earthquake.

When Jaz told me that Shadow was relieving herself inside because she was scared, I highly doubted it. Until we noticed that she was following us everywhere, afraid to be alone in any room. The dog was distressed. I chalked it up to a new move.

I took the crosses off the walls and tried to make the house a home. It was difficult. I couldn’t sleep without nightmares. There were odd smells about the place. I ripped out the carpet, but they lingered. It wasn’t mold, but the smell of rot and sulfur.

My sister and I got into a fight that we wouldn’t had gotten into before. She actually almost bashed my head into the linoleum over a political spat. We agreed on most of what we were fighting about.

In any case, she didn’t like the house and how scared we all were, including her dog. The night after that, she left. I was depressed.

I called up my beau and went to his place. I couldn’t be alone at home, but also couldn’t stay at his for long. That boyfriend wasn’t real, and didn’t want me hanging about.

I went back feeling so sad. I wasn’t the type to give in, but I had visuals of hanging myself in the old dining room. I got out a step stool, got the vacuum cleaner out. The wire didn’t reach. Then it came to me how dumb this would be, having a son.

He was coming back home the very next day. The beau was coming over to paint the kitchen. While my son was outside playing, we fought. He saw that I had drawn sketches of moths using multiple colors of sharpie on almost every wall. He was yelling how you could never paint over sharpie, and no matter how well done the sketches were, they were there to stay. He hated them, saying they were creepy.

We made dinner. He decided to stay, and took my bed, while I slept with my child on our fold out in the living room.

I was sleeping on the outside to protect my child from rolling onto the floor or any other emergency.

There was a hard tug at the end of the blanket that woke me up. I heard my beau snore in the next room, looked over at my child, still sleeping. After another hard tug at the blanket, I saw a dark figure pass from the edge of the bedding to the closet in the entry way.

I thought of speaking with a preacher, a priest, anyone who could help. I spoke with my neighbor. She said that the family that lived there before hadn’t lived there long and didn’t seem to like the house either. She said that they had never said anything about the place.

I had noticed that she would invite us over to her place, but would always seem busy when I invited her over to ours. She seemed to refuse to even go up the steps at the back door.

I researched how to get rid of dark energies. I tried burning sage, reading from the Bible, singing hymns, chanting mantras. None of it had an impact for the better or the worse. It was as if the entity knew it had me and was taking its time in my undoing.

I couldn’t take the nightmares anymore and began drinking myself to sleep. I had my son stay with his father more and more, spending my time at the bars, with friends, anything to be in that house as little as possible.

I tried inviting friends over. No one wanted to stay. They would come in and make jokes about the place. Then they’d want to leave, offering to take me with them. They all said the place was off, and dark.

Then I started sleep walking again. I had done it several times as a child, but only around my room or my parents home.

I would be asleep a neighborhood away and find myself opening my door, not remembering walking the sometimes half hour journey.

I gave up, realizing the danger I was putting myself in making the trips about a busy city.

I was tight on money, so I began to drink and smoke cigarettes on the front stoop. I’d play light hearted, positive music and try to clean everything, and burning sage and incense.

The nightmares started swimming through the booze. I felt haunted and like I carried the energy with me at work.

I’d get random bruises and not be able to remember where they came from. Some looked liked I’d been grabbed, others as if I’d hit a sharp corner and would had certainly noticed the injury.

Then I began burning myself with my cigarettes. I knew I had to leave. The pull of taking my life in the old unused dining room was getting stronger by the night. The entity seemed to be darkening the corners more and more throughout the day.

I found a place with a friend and left. The nightmares stayed with me, but weren’t as intense. They were always placed in that house. Images of fires, moths burning and sounds of screaming would still haunt me.

One friend had called it the funhouse. It was anything but. Remembering the feeling of walking the floors, alternating between uphill and down, the stench, the random dark thoughts and hellish dreams, the very energy tied into the place, it was simply cursed. It had cursed me.

Did I really want to go back? The smell of rot and sulfur was already in my nostrils. The random pictures of moths were fresh in my mind. I felt the rooms were calling. The chord was hanging, waiting to wrap around my throat. Maybe I was going home after all.