The Thinning House

Sanity is the ancient lie, it’s a lie old as consciousness. Sanity is our imagined common denominator, that nonexistent place we are said to converge. Insanity is as real as anything else. Consider what goes on in the privacy of your mind. How often does reality cease to measure up? How often does the mystic seem to reveal itself, in feeling, in strange coincidence, in prophetic dreams. Probably you never talk about it. Probably you think you are alone in your suspicions. Its intensely subjective unfortunately, and insanity defies documentation. Probably you will never find the name or explanation for the thing that visited you in the night. Probably you’ve decided that it’s only you that’s not quite right. Thereby the lie prevails. This narrative of order is the myth. As Hunter S. Thompson said: “There is not such thing as paranoia, your worst fears can come true at any moment.”

All that to say, there is something wrong with the house on Maple Avenue. I wish I could explain it in a concrete way, but I’m scared the explanation exists beyond our scope of comprehension. So, we must base our truth on instinct. That place isn’t right. It’s unsettling, like a black and white cartoon. It’s the opposite of what a house ought to be. It is the opposite of home, the opposite of safe, the opposite of familiar.

My family no longer owns the place, it was decided we could do better for a vacation house than an old mansion in small town Appalachia. You could not imagine my relief. I was sure I would die in that place someday, sure it would catch me, eventually. But I wished they didn’t sell. Obviously, it wasn’t my decision, but still I argued against it. I tried to make it a sentimental thing. We’d owned it as a second home since I was a toddler. It was practically part of the family, I said. Saying that made me cringe, the gross irony of the statement. Probably why the argument wasn’t convincing.

When that failed, I talked about the investment. Think about what the property could be worth in ten years? In today’s market, it barely matters that a place might be haunted. Again, this was a weak attempt, money wasn’t an issue for my parents.

Secretly I was hoping to inherit the property. They could keep my trust fund, give it to someone who deserved it. Just let me have the house on Maple Avenue, let that be my inheritance. Give it to me, so I can start demolishing the place. No half measures, locking the doors and fencing it off wouldn’t be enough. I was genuinely planning to bulldoze the house, chop down the trees, and turn the grounds into a soulless parking lot. I’d sow the dirt with salt like the Romans did to old Carthage. Believe me, it would be doing the world a favor.

None of that is possible now, unless I’m ready to risk getting locked up on arson charges. The jury is still out on that. But I can write all of this down, as a record of what happened that night. I’m aware that nobody is going to take this warning seriously. But when this happens to someone else, whatever poor soul the house is digesting now, maybe they’ll know they aren’t alone.

These things are hard to say, not the sort of topic that comes up in regular conversation. It’s difficult enough mulling this over in the privacy of my mind. My memories fast turn to static. My sanity wants me to forget. This might be the end of me, someday. I don’t know if it’s right for me to pass it on, to speak this into existence.

Speak of the Devil, and he shall appear.

The house on Maple Avenue stands a little way back from the street. Tall sycamores line the sidewalk. Across the street is dense forest. It is very near the town.

The town you might think abandoned if not for the general upkeep. I don’t remember seeing or interacting with the neighbors. Whatever industry built this place dissipated long ago. Tall, rusted skeletons of twisted pipes and I-beams and smokestacks rest darkly among the trees and in wide lots of grass and asphalt. Broken farm equipment lies abandoned in the fields. Amidst scattered farms, a few small stores, the corporate supermarket chain, a tiny gas station operating out of pure necessity; the old Victorian houses lining Maple Avenue stand out from the woods and the shacks and the dingy ranchers, like Roman ruins in a medieval village.

The house on Maple Avenue is not isolated in the quiet town on the street with the big sycamores. It isn’t even the biggest and most impressive house on the street. But it seems to be. It’s strange I don’t specifically remember any of her neighboring houses. The yard and gardens are not overgrown, yet the house seems perfectly comfortable in the surrounding woods. It is not a large house, not imposing by any conventional definition, still it looms over you, like a brutalist monstrosity.

You could pass by driving down the street and never give the place a second look. It would pass by your window and be gone, forgotten. Which is a chilling thought. How many places like this do we pass every day, never pausing to consider their evil nature, because we are distracted by other things.

I remember the first time is stepped inside. I remember thinking the windows on the front façade looked like eyes and the door was like a mouth. Inside, the house came with all original furnishings and interior décor. I shouldn’t say original. I should say it was made to look like the original. This in itself was already disturbing to me. It reflected trends and styles that long predated my existence, the tastes of the dead. It was like spending a night in a museum, or a graveyard. Grotesque bourgeois decadence my ex-girlfriend once called it. My God she was the worst.

I remember a giant floor to ceiling window at the landing between the first and second floor, where the stairs swing around and rise to the opposite direction. The mirror was flanked on both sides by two stone cherubs, life sized babies with wings, weird. There were also giant mirrors in the library and the master bedroom. There were these huge golden chandeliers in the dining room, the living room, and the master bedroom. My pretentious uncle told me once these chandeliers were worth twenty grand easily. Their designs were of some kind of mythological inspiration, Greek or Roman I’d imagine, based on the anthropomorphized goats and satyrs and gargoyles holding up the glittering light fixtures.

I remember the hallway on the second floor, outside the master bedroom. I remember it, all furnished in a blazing red carpet, bizarrely combined in a satin wallpaper of equally ridicules saturation. The entire hallway, floor to ceiling, all dripping red. So red, it dizzies the optic nerve. Imagine being trapped in a blood vessel.

It’s important I mention the paintings. They were probably originals, based on how valuable my pretentious uncle insisted they were. By style and subject, they looked like something from the late 1800s, like Jane Austen characters. They were all doll faced, flat white skin, wide eyed, wide mouthed.

They have that quality old portraits have, the eyes following you. It was an interesting consistency. In every single painting, every figure was made to look directly at the viewer. Even when it isn’t anatomically consistent, their bodies seem to contort in an unnatural way to keep the eyes facing outward. These paintings are stationed like gargoyles throughout the house, one in every bedroom, a few in the hallways, even one in the master bathroom.
I resented that we kept them hanging. Something about a porcelain faced family looking over while you sleep chills the nerves. Let them whisper to each other in some dusty corner or the attic, I would say.

There’s something wrong with the house on Maple Avenue. It’s a doll house, someone’s idea of a house. It’s a toothy grin, a clown’s painted smile. It’s the candy house from Hansel and Gretel, a frilly, gaudy thing, hiding in the dark wood, luring you in to be eaten.

The place was a morgue back in the 70’s. we never learned much else about it, never even learned why it stopped being a morgue. It was on the market one day and my parents just on the opportunity. Wouldn’t have been my choice. Once a place crosses that Rubicon of playing host to the dead, it never returns to the hands of the living.

What makes a haunted house? Houses are built for occupancy, that’s their express purpose. If a house (or some part of a house) is left abandoned by people, it will be occupied by something else.

The incident happened on a Friday night, sometime in late fall, I think November. I was a sophomore in college at the time, Penn State. The day before, I had suddenly found myself without a relationship, and without a place to spend the night. I’d caught my then girlfriend cheating on me with my roommate. My roommate of all people! Imagine the audacity of stabbing someone in the back while sleeping in a bunk just below them. The inconvenience was the worst part. I would need to find a place to stay until student housing found me another room. All that hassle with heartbreak on the side, my god she was the worst.
I resolved to make myself scarce that weekend. When my last class ended on Friday afternoon I got in my car and drove off campus without a word to anybody. My parents’ house in West Chester was too far of a drive, and I wasn’t in the mood to explain my situation to them. But the house on Maple Avenue was barely a half hour’s drive from campus.

It was a few hours before sunset when I arrived at the house. The neighborhood was quiet, as always. No neighbors were visible as I drove in. The woods were filled with birds and deer and various other wildlife, but the sounds always seemed to fade as you got closer to the house. But my mind was elsewhere. There wasn’t much reason to be nervous about the place in broad daylight. It was lucky I remembered the combination to the front door. I turned the brass knob and passed through the foyer. For some reason my mind caught in the image of a gaping mouth.

The place felt big and empty. This was the first and only time I was completely alone in that house. I was alone under high ceilings with twisting chandeliers and maximalist décor. It was difficult to relax, already I was in a bad state. I occurred to me this was the first time a single person was alone in that house since who knows when. Nobody knew I was there, not my roommate, not my friends, not my parents. Id retreated from society and relationships and found myself…here.

Predators like to isolate their prey from the herd. All the better if the target has a weak disposition.

The TV was in the living room. It was the one piece of modern tech in a place my grandmother would say was too old and too out of date. The TV and the couch would be my base of operations for the evening. It was a Friday night. Homework could wait, and I wasn’t in the mood to socialize. Id picked up some takeout on the drive down. This I laid out on the coffee table. I flipped on the TV. Takeout and Netflix is my guilty pleasure. It has the feeling of a divorced dad eating dinner in front of the TV. You also don’t feel alone when characters are speaking in the background. Which is totally irrational by the way, our brains may not know the difference between recorded voices on a sitcom or a podcast. But that doesn’t make you any less vulnerable, any less alone.

Between the binge-watching and the doom-scrolling, the evening passed quickly. My former roommate and ex-girlfriend messaged me several times. Where was I? What time was I getting back? We all needed to talk this through. All these messages were routinely ignored. Now and then I’d like a message out of spite. That made me feel better.

And the house wasn’t getting to me as you’d expect. Between the media consumption and the interpersonal drama, my brain was fried, too worn down to be scared. Random noises were easily brushed off. It was the standard stuff anyway. A branch tapped the window. Water gurgled through the pipes. There were occasional creaks and groans I couldn’t identify. It was probably the house settling, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Maybe it was the wind, maybe it was junkies trying to break in, who the hell cared?

The light through the windows turned gold, then red, then navy blue. Shadows grew and consumed. That’s when I found myself spending much more time in my peripheral vision.
I noticed something then.

From the center of the living room, where I was sitting, you could see directly into the adjacent hallway towards the Foyer from the big mirror on the far wall. There was another mirror on the right that reflected the dining room and gave a glimpse of the kitchen and the servants’ staircase. I thought about the huge mirrors in the library, the master bedroom, the second-floor landing. There were a lot of mirrors in this house. But I suppose it would make sense, anybody living in a place like this would have a massive ego.

That was one explanation. Another is that they were arranged strategically, like an early warning system, like security cameras. You would never be forced to turn a corner without knowing what was waiting on the other side. Maybe it wasn’t about vanity, maybe someone was being cautious.

Once I read about this tribe in Southeast Asia. When venturing into the jungle they would always wear masks with eyes and painted faces on the back of their heads. This is to deter predators. Tigers won’t strike if they think you are staring directly at them.

Do you think mice know that hawks exist? What’s a hawk to a mouse, is it even comprehensible? Do they have a concept of flying? Could they imagine the power, speed, and agility of the thing that’s hunting them? It can’t be that often that a mouse survives the encounter. But as a species they must know in some capacity. Hawks have been hunting them for eons. So, on some instinctual level the mouse knows the hawk, even if it can’t grasp the idea of a hawk. We assume that humans have no natural predators. Maybe that’s because we couldn’t even imagine them, like the mouse and the hawk.

It started to rain a little after dark. It started to thunder a little before midnight. I decided I needed a shower before turning in. I trudged up the stairs, past the mirror and the cherubs. My reflection was shown to me, dark and vague in the pale light of the chandelier. I looked as shitty as I felt. The second-floor bathroom and shower were down the hall on the left. Hot water is good to burn the pain away.

I locked the bathroom door, even though that should have been completely unnecessary. A strong wind was blowing rain and branches against the windowpanes.

There’s a certain vulnerability one feels, being naked behind a shower curtain in an old porcelain tub in a big empty house. The bathroom was wide and spacious. There was a window on the far wall. The wind moaned outside. Branches scratched at the glass. Shadows danced on the wall. The shower curtain was sheer enough to give you a degree of visibility, just enough to imagine amorphous shapes and shadows moving on the other side.

To this day, I know I saw something past that curtain. Something in the combination of the lightning and the branches and my own imagination took the form of a gaunt figure with long hands visible directly on the other side of the curtain. In the split second of my blurry vision, it was standing there, watching. The shape of it sent ice water through my veins.

I audibly cursed and almost slipped in the tub, water and shampoo burning my eyes. Thunder rolled. The lights flickered. I splashed water in my face and tore the curtain aside, ready for a fight. Of course, there was nothing there. Nothing behind the shower curtain, nothing in the hallway as I stepped outside. To this day I’m not sure, maybe it was there, with me in that bathroom. Maybe my brain was trying to warn me, like I had caught the things scent, if you want to think about it that way. I stared at the mirror and slapped myself in the face, seeing the horror in my eyes, trying to force myself to snap out of it, cursing my paranoia.

Lighting flashed red on the wallpaper. The eyes on the paintings followed me as I headed toward the master bedroom, wrapped in a bathrobe like Hugh Hefner, or Tyler Durden. Far as the paintings were concerned, this mansion belonged to me. I doubted they approved of that. Regardless, tonight, we were living like aristocracy.

The bed was genuinely vast, a far cry from my dorm room. The ceiling loomed high overhead. Red velvet curtains draped over arched windows. The mirror stood on the wall, set between two windows. It made me look small, framed in a giant mirror on a giant bed in the wide bedroom in the big empty house. I felt like I should ring one of the servants to bring my tea. But I wasn’t too keen to see who or what would show up. I wondered why this room felt distinctly cooler than the rest of the house. Must have been something to do with the central air system.

Rain thrummed dull and rhythmic on the windows. The crisp air and warm blankets seemed to close in around me. I was fresh from the shower, and I was dead tired. It was strange feeling anxious about the big empty house when I should have been worried over finding a new roommate….and a new girlfriend. But I was here to forget all that, to forget this whole day ever happened.

I jumped when I saw the painting on the left wall. It was next to the door, where you couldn’t see walking in. The damn thing seemed to materialize out of thin air. It was man, almost life size, dressed all in black. His outfit looked like something out of the 1800’s, like Abe Lincoln without the hat. His hand was tangled in the bushy fur of a black he-goat. The goats’ horns were long, twisting into crescent moons. It was facing the side and I could see its one eye. The eyes of the man and the eye of the goat were painted to look exactly the same. Those eyes were demonic, budging white and lined in red. They were staring right down at me. It didn’t feel like staring at paint on a canvas. It felt like staring at something with a mind, something with intent, something that was staring back.

No way in hell I was sleeping with that looking over me. I thought of changing rooms. The voices in my head went into hysterical laughter at the idea. Look at this guy, so paranoid that he changes bedrooms because of the scary painting on the wall, fucking coward, no wonder she left you. Dragging myself out of bed, I took it off the wall and set it down facing the opposite direction. That felt better.

I tried falling asleep on the wide bed in the cold dark room in the big empty house. Lighting flashed periodically. In every flash, long fingers reached past the windows and along the walls. I found myself staring at a corner of the ceiling, far above my head. The ceiling was so high you could hardly see all the way up in the dark. It was like the walls ascended into nothing. Theres a nice thought, sleeping with a deep black void over your head. I refused to close my eyes. I kept checking the corners, surveying the mirrors, imagining things in the shadows. I was tired. Something wouldn’t let me sleep.

The high windows in the cold dark room in the big empty house looked over the backyard and the gardens and woods beyond. In the day you could plainly see low mountains past the trees. You could still see them at night, dark silhouettes against the stars.

I thought about the depth of those woods. I thought about the age of those mountains. I imagined sitting there at the window, all night in sleepless vigilance. What would you see if you watched long enough? Maybe you would see why we keep our eyes closed at night. Maybe you would see why our ancestors built fires against the dark.

Low thunder rolled in the distance. I think I drifted off around then.

I did not sleep well that night. I barely remember if I slept at all. The barriers between consciousness and dreams were thin in those hours. Sleeping with one eye open would be the expression.

But I did dream.

I saw the painting fall back from the wall, facing up. White knuckled hands gripped the frame. A head and a face ascended from inside. The eyes were staring, screaming.

Then I was falling.

Then I saw a desolate landscape, a grey moor of heath and heavy wind. I saw a ruined house, a stone manor, burned and abandoned. I saw the crest, carved in stone, hanging over the shattered door. The crest was a red hand of six fingers, with the shape of a brick wall below and two claymores crisscrossed overtop.

My dream turned chaotic. I saw snapshots, flashes, a black he-goat wandering the heath, a ring of figures around a high fire, a hooded face. I saw the masks, of every form and type and expression. Some were those old Greco-Roman theatre masks with the wide, clownlike smiles or frowns. Many were the ornate operatic things you see at a masquerade ball. They seemed to flicker, as if in firelight. The expressions seemed to move, to smile, to speak. The eyes remained hollow and blank.

At one point in the dream, I was awake again, or seemingly awake. I was in the master bedroom, floating above the bed. I happened to look out the window, it was still dark. In the moonlight, through the curtains, I saw a man on the street, riding a large black horse. He was staring at the house, staring at me.

Then I saw the mob, I saw the pitchforks and the torches, burning like little red stairs in the black countryside. I saw the manor, high and terrible, looming up on the hill. And in that hazy flash, in the weird dream world of things that make no sense, the old manor took the exact shape of the little house on maple avenue.

The gates were thrown open. The mob flooded the grounds. The revolutionaries came a knocking at the door.

I didn’t see much after that. The dream didn’t seem to want to resolve itself. I had idea of disgust and depravity, with no image to inform the feeling. I felt the overwhelming decadence born of generations of wealth and idle isolation. I felt the horror and the revulsion those revolutionaries felt, when they saw the true state of their moneyed elite, and the hidden contents of that accursed manor.

Then I saw the ruins again, freshly burned, a black stain upon the earth. The grounds and the land all around seemed grey and putrid. It was utterly desolate, like the aftermath of Chernobyl. Red-faced preachers in black robes shouted at penitent masses, waving their Holy texts, speaking of the Amalekites, of the consequences of Achan and the fall of Jerico.
The crest flashed again before my eyes, the red hand of six fingers. I saw the masks and the goat a final time. The images faded into a long hollow scream.

Then I was falling again.

Falling.

Falling until I sat straight up in a cold sweat. I woke with a gasp, like a hundred-pound dumbbell had dropped on my chest. I saw the time then. It was 3:26 in the morning. It had been hours.

A single thought smashing into my mind like a sledgehammer.

Get out of the house. Get out of the house.

I barely registered what I did next. Blurred and dazed, I tumbled out of bed. It was bitter cold. I crashed through the door. Never occurred to me to get dressed.

Get out of the house now!

I want to be clear about something. I never saw or heard anything at that point. There were no physical manifestations. This was all a response to a feeling. That feeling was the deepest fear I have ever experienced. was visceral. It was in my bones. So, when I say I didn’t see anything, I don’t mean it wasn’t real. This was beyond real. This was the light beyond the cave.

In those minutes, my brain’s shallow interpretation of reality fell away. The veil tore, the glass shattered, the fog lifted, and there was only fear. Fear of something worse than death. Fear of something infinitely malicious, the hatred of all mankind, hatred beyond human comprehension. Imagine darkness so deep you can feel it, like a hot breath on your neck, like velvet.

My brain was screaming in a blind panic. Something was chasing me. Something in the house was chasing me. I was alone, and I wasn’t alone. Nobody knew I was there. Something was chasing me. There must have been some sort of explanation. But I would figure it out later. I had to get out of the house.

So, I ran. I ran like a hunted animal. I ran through the red hallway, practically falling down the stairs, tearing past the cherubs at the landing. Reaching the bottom, I gripped the baluster and swung the corner. My shoulder slammed the door frame as I stumbled into the living room. Adrenaline numbed the pain. The light in the living room was still on. The windows were black. The goatish chandelier swung lazily as if in a breeze. I briefly saw myself in the mirror. I barely recognized myself, my eyes looked like the eyes in that painting.

Through the dining room I ran, the kitchen lay ahead, past a narrow hallway. The back door was in the kitchen. That was my escape.

But something was waiting for me in the kitchen. I sensed it. My instincts repelled me, as magnets of like polarity. Memory called up the secondary staircase, from the servant’s quarters. A keen pursuer would have predicted my escape route, assuming it was familiar with the house. It was waiting to cut me off, before I could get out through the back door.

I reacted in a fraction of a second. It was too fast to consider my options, too fast to consider the stupidity of what I was doing. I sidestepped the kitchen, turned out of the hallway, and descended into the basement.

The crooked wood stairs murmured under my feet. The basement was pitch black. I’d forgotten to turn on the light. My bare feet were naked on the dirt floor. The stone walls were cold to the touch. The basement was an unfamiliar place. I’d spent the last five years avoiding it.

Faded memories informed me that it was divided into several spaces. Most of these spaces were storage for random clutter. Somewhere was the laundry machine and a water heater. On the far end was the cellar. The cellar, I remember, had these concrete steps that led up to an old hatch door and out into the backyard. The cellar was my last way out. Otherwise, I’d be in the house forever.

I stumbled in the dark, bashing my hip on the stone wall. There was a crash as I knocked over a pile of boxes. I heard a sound like glass shattering. The noise reverberated through the house.

My panic came roaring back. I turned. Nothing was behind me. I imagined long fingered hands materializing from the dark to encircle my neck. A dim light flowed down from the basement stairs. I didn’t remember leaving the door open.

I ducked through an opening in the wall. Standing there at the bottom of the stairs felt suicidal. There was a long groan from the tangle of pipes just above my head. The fear was overwhelming. But running was impossible in this place. At any moment I could stumble over some old furniture or bash my head against the wall. It was the worst claustrophobia I have ever experienced. It felt like slamming the gas and the brake petal simultaneously.

I walked with my hand following the wall. Again, I stopped when I came to a corner. Another thought materialized. I remember there was an opening to my left, just around the corner. This led into another storage room, on the other side of the wall. This storage room also had direct access to the bottom of the basement stairs. Meaning, if something had followed me down the stairs, it would have gone straight and around, or it would have taken a sharp left. If it had gone straight and around, it would be right behind me. But if it had taken the left, it would have proceeded through the adjacent room and followed parallel along the wall. In which case, it would be waiting in the opening, just around the corner.

I took my hand away from the wall, stepping back. I did not breathe. My eyes were partially used to the dark now. It was enough to spot, straight ahead, my salvation. The opening to the cellar was on the far wall. I could make a break for it. I poised myself, like a runner. If something was just around the corner, it would certainly see me. Maybe the thing had guessed my plan already, same as it predicted my escape through the kitchen. It knew me, it was smarter than me. It knew this house. But I had this one opportunity.

Eyeing the cellar, I broke into a full sprint. The terror roared upon me, howling back, a thousand times stronger than before. I ran with everything I had; Death snapped at my heels. A single misstep would have been my destruction. At any moment I expected something to tear out my legs and send me heard first into the dirt. At any moment I expected hands to grasp my neck and cut off my momentum. My eyes and mouth gaped wide; tears streamed down my face. I charged through the opening, tearing through the cellar. Then I laughed up the steps, drunk on adrenaline, hardly conscious of what was happening.

My full momentum was behind me when my shoulder connected with the wooden hatch.
There was a thud, a snap, and a crash. I tumbled out into the lawn. The grass was wet and cold on my arms and back. I scrambled back from the cellar’s yawning door. Nothing emerged. On my feet now, I ran barefoot across the lawn towards my car in the driveway. Sliding into the driver’s seat, I locked the doors and turned the key.

Just like that the fear left me in a gasp. My body deflated in a deep sigh of relief. I actually started laughing. This was all in my head. These things aren’t real. Monsters aren’t real. Ghosts don’t exist. Houses aren’t haunted, people are haunted. I had taken all the anxiety and loneliness and pain in my head and projected into that house. Mental illness, now that was certainly real. I definitely needed some kind of medication. It was all in my head. It was always in my head.

For a long while, I sat awake in the car. I was gasping for air, woefully out of shape. My shoulder hurt. I reminded myself to go to the gym more often. The windows were glazed in fog. Maybe it was time to go back inside. I looked back at the house, rising in the dark with its sharp gables and dark windows. Fear repelled the idea of going back inside, and I didn’t care to fight it anymore. I knew then I couldn’t go back. It wouldn’t be smart to risk another mental breakdown. That was how I justified the feeling.

My adrenaline began to crash into paralyzed exhaustion. I closed my eyes, not necessarily planning on sleeping in the car, but having nothing against the idea. I leaned my face against the cool glass, my heartbeat started to slow down, and everything faded away.

It was just after dawn when I woke a second time. I groaned and sat up. In those first few moments I was barely lucid. The previous night’s events were a blur. If I hadn’t been waking up in my car, I might have assumed the whole thing was a dream. It felt like waking from a brutal hangover and trying to remember everything you did that night.

I turned slow in the driver’s seat. That’s when I saw the car window. I recoiled. My thoughts were still in a haze. The realization was slow to materialize. Slowly, I placed a shaking hand against the glass. A pale, wide-eyed reflection stared back at me.

I jerked back. Then I pulled the lock and tumbled out of the car. The light was grey. Frost glistened on the grass. A thick fog hung around the car and the yard and the woods. The trees were like tall dark scarecrows in the fog. The house loomed high among their branches.

For ages I stood there, frozen, overwhelmed in primal terror. All rational thinking vanished out of my head. The world burned before my eyes. I lost all vestiges of thought, of consciousness. Only fear remained, the fear of a hunted animal. I realized what I was in that moment. I wasn’t a person. I was prey.

My mouth was agape. My paralyzed scream came out like a hollow moan.

In the years since, I’ve had an echo of that feeling several times. It’s subtle, you could easily mistake it without a point of reference. Id described it as a tinge of anxiety, a prickling feeling. People often talk about the sense of being watched. Usually, Its barely there. But in some places, it’s stronger. It’s a Gieger counter. When I feel it hit me, I turn and go in the opposite direction until it fades away. Sometimes on long drives It grows and grows and grips me for a while before fading again. In those instances, I keep my eyes forward and bear down on the gas. I never stop.

I’ve traveled and been on the road since graduating college. Never been able to hold down a job. Drug and alcohol abuse haven’t helped. After a while it felt parasitic to stay with my parents. That’s what I tell people, makes me seem like a better person. In reality I was fed up trying to live with their disappointment.

In my travels, I’ve kept a list, documenting the times that fear manifested itself. Maybe I’m hoping to find a pattern. I felt its echo when I toured Auschwitz. It was strong once on the train through the Carpathian Mountains towards Bucharest. New Orleans was so bad I was forced to cut the trip short. One particular section of Rome is best avoided. Some of my worst moments have occurred when long drives take me through the mountains and woods of Appalachia.

But nothing compares to the terror of that night, the terror of that moment.

Handprints……the car was covered in handprints, every inch of it, the hood, the doors, the roof. Long ragged scars stretched where it tried to pry back the metal. The door handles were loose from being pawed at relentlessly. One handle had been torn clean off. Every part of my car had been clawed and pried and chewed and jerked and ripped.

This was hunger. This was a craving I couldn’t imagine. I saw the claw marks and the handprint on the windowpane. I remembered sleeping with my face against the glass, one thing layer of glass. This vehicle was my shark cage. If I hadn’t locked the doors….

My horror grew as I studied the prints. They were nearly human. Nothing is worse than nearly human. The hands were twice the size of my own. The fingers were long and thin, emaciated maybe. To this day I swear there were six fingers on those handprints. The hands must have been caked in dirt, judging by the smudges they made. I try not to imagine from where the dirt came……a dusty attic, a muddy cellar, an open grave….

The worst part was realizing I was not insane. Id sensed it the whole time. Moments pass where I still sense it. But in that moment, standing there in the fog, that feeling broke the surface again. The hunger was watching, staring, waiting…For some reason my mind went to the second story window, the master bedroom. But I never looked back at the house. I got in my car, and I drove off and I never looked back at the house. If I had, I think I would have seen it then. But I will never go back. You couldn’t bribe, threaten, or force me within ten miles of that place.

That feeling, I believe, is innate. Everybody has it, even if they can’t place it. It’s an evolutionary adaptation, a survival response, a sixth sense. We’ve come to discount our fear, and we are paying the price. Fifty percent of murders in the United States go unsolved, twenty five percent of missing persons are never found. We aren’t the only intelligent species in this world, and the others aren’t our friends. Our ancestors knew, somewhere in the void of mythic history. They gave it names after all. You know its names. They knew the evil was out there, hunting us.

But I discovered the truth then, in the house on Maple Avenue, and I haven’t slept a full night since. We are but sentient apes, wandering in a dark forest. We exist in the shadow of terrible cosmic entities, and we rest only in their momentary indifference.

There is no such thing as paranoia.

Your worst fears can come true at any moment.

Credit: Benjamin Dover