Two Corneria City Police squad cars had parked outside our residence, a few minutes later than what was customary. Because of the nature of the call, and the account given to the officers from Krystal, the police weren't all too sure as to how to proceed, but still decided to humor us and do a sweep of the home. They wrote it off as a break-in or burglary, purporting that two vagrants, a man and a child, had secreted away into our home, but none of that made any sense. A walk through and examination of our home revealed that, aside from the door I opened to air out the greatroom, all the doors were closed and dead-bolted and all of the windows were locked and intact, no broken glass or jimmied locks. Nothing out of place or that didn't belong (though the sodden carpet in the upstairs hallway and the dirt caked to the bottom of the tub were curious anomalies on their own).
Krystal's story didn't make sense either. While I'd gone upstairs to prepare Emily's bath and prepare to wash myself, Krystal had gone to the kitchen to steam some brown rice for the beef stew while Marcus sat at the casual dining table to finish his homework. They talked amicably for the few minutes it took Marcus to finish his algebra work before he retired for the evening, leaving Krystal alone. She turned on the television to take in the evening newscast and for some background noise while she emptied the dishwasher. The feeling - uneasiness, discomfort, dread - was sudden.
Forgetting about the pot of rice on the cooking range, Krystal climbed the auxiliary stairs, and she'd said she'd felt unusually tired, physically oppressed, and unable to breathe as though the air were made of lead. The hallway carpet was sodden-wet, and she could hear the bath faucet running.
"No…" her voice quavered. She rushed into the bathroom to find… Emily playing in the bubble bath. A wave of relief washed over her, though she still felt that nagging discomfort at the pit of her stomach.
"Hey, my special girl!" Krystal cooed, walking over to the bath to shut off the tap. Peculiar, the bathroom floor was completely dry. Why was the hallway wet? That uneasy feeling told her to get our daughter out of the bath. She quickly wrapped Emily in a towel and carried her out of the bathroom. The window of Emily's bedroom was open, and the air was still. Krystal had just walked through the threshold, and suddenly the air was freezing cold. There was this smell, this wet, rotten, sour smell that wafted into Krystal's olfactory senses, making her stomach roil. Dread made her grip our daughter tight. Something sad, remorseful, hateful, evil consumed her emotions, and she began to sob. Sensing a presence behind her, she turned around.
Standing before her at the door's threshold was a pair. This was no ordinary pair, though, not burglars or interlopers, which would have been easier to deal with at the time… not by any means. This was a man and a child, hand-in-hand; the man dressed in a suit, all black like a funeral, and the child was in a lace floor-length sleeping dress. The thing that took her breath away was that these were the figures she'd seen in her dreams. Flesh rotten and bloated, facial features obscured by decomposition, clothing soaking wet and dirty like they'd been at the bottom of a lake for two decades… And that smell… it nearly made her stomach flop. In the fraction of a second it took for her to take this all in, the taller figure pointed and said the following in a low, deep, rumbling voice:
MADDIE WANTS A PLAYMATE…
In the days following that incident, our interest in the history of Cataleya Estates increased. Added to our curiosity was a layer of suffering, immaculately silent, visible in the redness of our tired eyes and the way we were left without sleep, without breath, and would stare aimlessly for long periods until a friend or loved one would break our trance. Fear made us wander, our family started to fall apart. Marcus would stay away from home as much as he could, and we even received phone calls from the Corneria City School District with reports of Marcus' changing behavior: acting out (from stress) sleeping in class (from slumberless nights), and refusing to come home after school (preferring to walk aimlessly in to downtown shopping strip, replete with brightly lit windows of retail and cafes that served overly-priced coffee drinks with exorbitant amounts of cream and sugar. Once he didn't come home for almost a day and a half. We were on the verge of filing a missing persons report, when the Corneria City PD called us themselves to tell us that they'd found our son thirty miles away in Clairwood, tired, famished, and dehydrated. We were told that the Friday when his school was dismissed for the day, Marcus had forgone getting on his school bus to come home, deciding instead to walk down to the corner and board Corneria City Transit Administration bus, rode it to the bus terminal, and took a transfer, and rode that to the end of the line and began walking. We figured that he'd gone to a school friend's home, but we felt his desperation and need for escape when they told us that construction workers at a due-to-be-completed apartment complex found him passed out at the construction site. On the second floor of the timber-frame structure, presumably to escape the inclement weather as it had rained that weekend.
We felt no need to punish him for that escapade, as we could relate all too well to his sense of fear and imprisoment.
Krystal did her own investigating, deciding to do her own version comparable to my late-night queri-search binges. Being psionic, she is of course attuned to the energies within the house and the grounds on which it was built. She decided to see what had the land disturbed so. The witching hour was approaching a couple nights later. In the sitting room of the master suite, she prepared: set out her yoga mat on which to sit, burned sage, lit candles, and turned out the lights to let the fireplace animate the shadows in the was more than guided meditation, as she would tap into the ambient energies radiating from the soil itself. Across the room, I sat on the bench at the footboard of our bed, and watched her sit down, crossing her legs and placing her hands upon her knees in the Sukhasana pose. As she sat in front of the fireplace, her small frame eclipsed a big shadow over me. The flames crackled. And after a few minutes, she perked up, whipping her head to the left to look at something through the doors to the balcony. It suddenly became freezing cold in the room, and suddenly my wife fell over, flopping on the floor like a dead fish.
"Krystal?" I got up, rushing over to her to lift her off the floor. "Krystal!" I called again, feeling her as limp as a drowned rodent. This was all from my perspective… However, Krystal's point of view was much different.
In her relaxed state, she was hyper-alert to her surroundings. She remembers looking towards the balcony doors, and through the glass pane, she saw them, just beyond the glass, the taller one's hand outstretched to her. But this time, Krystal was calm.
YOU OR THEM… SOMEONE COMES FOR MADDIE.
Krystal at that point calmly offered herself, and got up to go with them, leaving her physical form in front of the fireplace, and that's when I got freaked out, tending to my unconscious spouse, who'd stopped breathing.
I yelled, shook her, even slapped her to wake her up, but it wasn't until I went to the bathroom for a vessel of water, returning to splash it onto her face, that she started breathing again… She was rudely pulled back into the physical world. She told me what she saw from her point of view, and that's when I made her promise not to try that ever again.
A couple of months passed without any more major events taking place, but throughout that time period, Krystal would catch glimpses of them out of the corner of our eye, or in a dark room, behind us in a mirror… but nothing more than a brief glimpse. Just enough to remind her that they were still watching…
That event seemed to also be the end of Marcus acting out… He once again became a normal young teen in every aspect, and became interested in video games, comics, and took up photography. Krystal did relate the story of what happened to her that night, but it seemed to mean nothing to him at that point. Who really listens to their parents anyway? But those glance sightings would shake her for days, to the point where she'd watch our children like a hawk… Drove Marcus crazy, to say the least.
We had another visit to the GenesisHealth ER again. This time it was more severe.
Even since that young man Steven, Marcus did not have an issue making more friends. So much so, that a customary sleepover was in order. After getting the necessary permissions from both sets of parents, the night was carte blanche. About thirty minutes before the street lights came on, Marcus and his friend Robert hopped on their bikes, deciding to ride from our home to the local convenience store for a junk food run. Mind you, it was dusk, and they were two kids wearing dark-colored sleeping clothes. Not exactly the easiest to spot in the twilight. And that proved itself as they crossed onto La Cataleya Parkway, the gateway boulevard to Cataleya Estates.
I just want to establish that my son was struck by a car before I continue.
However, the way Marcus explained the accident took my breath away to say the least. He remembers that the car narrowly missed Robert, because when he looked to his right, all he saw were headlights and a big chrome grille. Marcus said that did remember the initial impact of the full-size crossover against his ribcage; but he also remembers watching the drama unfold before him, as if some other kid were run down by the vehicle, as he disappeared beneath the vehicle with his bicycle and was dragged another fifty feet as the car came to a frantic and screeching halt.
Robert pounded on the hood of the vehicle, screaming at the driver to get off the other child, while the woman driving was in hysterics herself as she tried to back the forty-five hundred pound Willard Terrene off of the boy's leg and mangled bike tire. Even with all the yelling, screaming, and chaos ensuing, Marcus found himself and the scene to be disturbingly peaceful. And bright, even brighter than high noon, though it was half past seven in the evening when he and Robert got on their bikes. My son remembered several things... A warm, inviting light above him shaped like a tunnel, and a LOTS of people. Standing and watching him, though he felt no threat from them, and no one he immediately recognized Confused, Marcus looked around; the area was deserted when the accident happened, and suddenly it was like the Stockwood Music Festival.
Where did all of those people come from? He wondered. Who was that kid under the car? Why were they not helping him? That was when he turned to a woman standing next to him and asked her what was going on. She smiled, warm and gentle.
"It is okay, young one. It is not your time yet. But you must go now, there is danger imminent."
That was when he saw them. Whomever–whatever they were–they stalked towards Marcus, the taller entity's hand stretched towards him, while everyone else gave the two figures a wide berth, as if fearful of them. Marcus was scared too, not sure what he was witnessing.
Things began to get foggy, and the air began to swim as Marcus started fading back to reality. The screaming of the boy began to get louder and louder... The warm, pleasant feeling in his body began to slowly give way to excruciating pain. What was that above him? A car's oil pan? An exhaust manifold?
He was back. Beneath the car, with the driver slowly and painfully backing the vehicle off of his leg.