Hey sugar honey sweetie pies! I'm back to repost one of my fics! This one seemed to be well liked as a few people said it was one of my stronger works. If you're interested in seeing The McClouds deal with living in a haunted azz house, sit back, hook up your seat belt, and get ready for takeoff!
Seven months was all we could take. We were letting the bank take the house, we didn't care.
On that day, that fateful morning, Krystal and I piled what we could carry into our cars–our clothes, personal belongings, and of course Marcus and Emily–and we had no idea where we were going or how we'd get there. But we couldn't stay here, and that much we knew. Marcus and Emily would ride in the back seat of Krystal's Revla, luggage compartment piled high with our children's belongings and whatever small items of sentiment we could grab on the way out. We'd hastily put our clothes in the covered flatbed and backseat of my pickup, and Krystal would lead the way out. I gave one last look at the house, at the sand-tone stucco, terracotta roofing, and immaculate landscaping that we found so appealing in the beginning. Though almost indistinguishable from the houses on the street–same stucco, same roofing tiles, same brick paver drive, same, same, same, as the houses on either side, across, a couple houses down, and all up and down the street (since Cataleya Estates was yet another of those prolific upscale housing tracts). But the 10013 Camino Court address featured what happened to be the ugliest house.
The first sign of trouble was a couple weeks after we moved in. Utterly terrifying, a parent's worst nightmare, though we had no idea what we were really in for. Krystal had found Marcus when warm water had dampened the carpet outside the hallway bath upstairs. Opening the door, my wife was so frightened by the disturbing tranquility that it mesmerized her for a moment. But when she heard herself scream, the reality of the circumstances reasserted itself: the tile floor covered in an inch of water, saturating the bathroom rug and bathmat; the bath faucet valve open full throttle; our son submerged in the basin, breath bubbling from his mouth, dead-looking eyes refracting through the roiling bathwater. I ran down the hallway from the master suite when I heard Krystal scream like a mother whose child had been murdered, he may as well had been, because when I burst into the kid's bathroom, Krystal was frantically pulling our limp son out of the water. But his fist was balled tight, I realized, when we got him onto the floor to expel the water from his lungs and breathe life back into him. Coughing up water and inhaling, life returned to his gaze, and he was conscious again. Krystal and I hugged him, while he looked dazed, scared, confused, like he'd passed through the gates of Hell and back…
I exited the bathroom temporarily to get a fresh towel to dry off our wet, cold son, who was shivering with his damp, blue fur clinging to him.
As I reenter the bathroom with the fresh towel to enfold our son, I heard Krystal's voice undulating like waves of a whisper: "What are you holding?"
Wrapping my shivering son in the towel, kneeled down to see as she gently pried Marcus' fist open. His palms were gouged, bleeding from gripping so tightly the prongs of a four-pointed, small, silver necklace charm, whose origin and how our son obtained it we did not know: a Crucifix.
That was the summer we moved in, wanting to get settled so Marcus and Emily could properly start the school year instead of switching institutions during the middle of the grading period. This was the first home we'd ever purchased, having spent the previous years renting due to our constant moving around because of my job. I wanted Marcus and Emily to have a more stable life, be able to make lasting friends, instead of building relationships with peers that he'd end up never seeing again. What was so strange and scary was that Marcus seemed perfectly fine the day before, riding his scooter across the cul-de-sac to meet Krystal and I as we unloaded the Revla after a Trader John's run. Helpful and responsible as he was, he didn't utter a word as he put down his scooter and picked up a couple of bags from the back of the car, without us asking him to, and took them into the house behind Krystal.
I've tried to make sense of everything starting with that day, because everything seemed to turn for the worst like sour milk right after that. One of them was when I was out in the driveway shooting hoops with Marcus, and I saw Krystal standing in the upstairs window, from the guest bedroom. Though it was daylight, the window was a little dark, hard to see inside, but Krystal stared down at her son and I, somewhere between neutral and vexed, regarding us like a magistrate of a high court. Then, the front door opened and I looked down at the front porch to see my wife coming out to serve Marcus and I glasses of lemonade like the golden-age housewife role she performed so well. Confused, I looked back up at the guest bedroom window. Nothing.
Odd.
There is that moment where panic and confusion arrived, like a fish breaking the surface for a brief moment, flipping through the air, then slipping back in. I couldn't fathom what I'd just seen, but I could feel the image moving and shifting in my viscera as I digested it. But that panic and fear dissipated like a ripple until there was nothing, stillness, calm.
"Everything okay?" Krystal handed me a glass amicably. She looked a little concerned. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"It's nothing," I said. I took a great, refreshing gulp.
It was July 8th of that year, eighty-nine degrees, under sunny skies.
When the ambulance came, the paramedics checked our son out, saying he was fine, but they still put him on a stretcher and carried him out of the house to the truck in front of our driveway. He looked like a tiny prince on an imperial litter as they wheeled him out the front door. Carefully and quickly, they took our son out to the shuddering, flashing emergency vehicle. At that moment Krystal ran out to the driveway with the towel to watch, and under the setting sun and the illumination of the early-evening street lights, all four figures paused in tableau: the two slaves offering the victim to the altar (EMTs lifting the stretcher into the vehicle), the priestess brandishing the torch (waving the terry cloth towel), and the drugged sacrifice rising up on his elbows with an otherworldly look upon his face.
Krystal and I sat in the waiting room of the ER for what felt like hours, though it was more like thirty minutes in actuality. Marcus was taken to the GenesisHealth campus on Bloxsom-Carter Boulevard in the Administration District. In the emergency room he looked upon the doctors and nurses with a ghostly sense of disassociation. His green eyes didn't blink, and his body did not flinch when they stuck the needle into his vein to hydrate him with an IV. After a short while of running tests and checking his vitals, he was given a clean bill of health.
Dr. Adasokan, the doctor at the helm of our son's recovery, asked him:
"Son, what are you doing here? You scared the life out of your parents. You scared all of us."
Appalled at the doctor's implication, he gave verbally what was to be the first words of testimony of what happened to us over the next few months, which was useless as no one believed him at the time, not even Krystal and I:
"I didn't try to kill myself, Doctor. Someone tried to kill me."
I turned forty-three that past March. Marcus turned thirteen at the beginning of June that year, and Emily turned five on Valentine's day earlier that year, and would be starting first grade the following school year. Krystal had turned thirty-four that April.
The family man I am, I'd always gush over how beautiful my tribe was. Marcus was always going to be a bluer, more handsome version of myself, and even at thirteen, he was almost as tall as me and would be sure to dwarf me by the time he finished puberty. Emily, my daughter, was as beautiful as sunshine, and although I could not very well remember my own mother, I got to see her every day when I looked into Emily's eyes. My father had always told me of Vixy's kind nature and regal bearing, similar to how Emily behaved like a spoiled-sweet storybook princess. Krystal always took my breath away. She'd always ask me, chuckling, "What are you staring at?" when she caught me trying to remember every detail of her face, the shade of green in her eyes, to which I'd smile coyly and reply, "Nothin'." Krystal thought otherwise, but when I stood before a mirror, I struggled to see what Krystal saw in me, and what I'd lendt to my children. But the barely-average height, need for horn-rimmed glasses, and shock regarding my own graying fur foiled me every time. In short, I looked old. I was like a photographic negative, leached of color and youth, while my family, young and beautiful, was bursting with color and vitality.
The first guest we'd had in the house was a school friend Marcus met at the beginning of the school semester. He'd hit it off with our son, finding infinite topics to talk about in sports, television shows, video games, whatever young teenagers talk about these days. Krystal noticed that as soon as the young man walked in, his demeanor immediately went off-kilter, looking around the foyer as if he was being watched or listening to someone or something, trying to find the source of the noise. He regarded Krystal and I with a flush in his eyes the whole time during dinner, not as talkative and friendly as Marcus had originally described. We figured that he was a little nervous around his new friend's parents, but even Marcus knew something was a little off. I'd folded broiled broccoli florets, sauteed shrimp, and a parmesan-garlic sauce into angel hair pasta, and we'd all uncharacteristically ate it in silence.
Steven (that was the young man's name) asked to go to the bathroom when he finished eating, his second time speaking since greeting Krystal and I when entering the house. And because the water valve for the toilet in the powder room was incorrectly installed, I directed him up the stairs to the bathroom where we found Marcus four weeks prior.
I followed the young man, but only with the ghost of my imagination, as he ascended the kitchen staircase into the upstairs hallway. He felt heavy and oppressed, tired and slumped by the time he reached the top step, and the dark, dusk-lit corridor, shadows animating as he made his way to the only source of light, the cracked bathroom door. He entered the bathroom, did as nature instructed him, and washed his hands afterwards. This was all my imagination though. I knew nothing until Steven started screaming, pounding on the bathroom door as if desperate for escape. My chair at the table toppled over as I bolted out it to rush to the second floor, Krystal hot on my heels, and the pounding and screaming was louder at the source. I grabbed the door handle, expecting it to be locked, to be stuck, jammed. It opened without any issue as far as I was concerned, and Steven bolted out of the cramped, dewey space, rushing past us and down stairs.
That was the last time Steven ever visited our home, and the last time he ever spoke to Marcus, and he rushed home to tell his parents about what happened in the bathroom, the same space where we experienced our own horror when we first moved in.
When we were waiting for Marcus to be discharged from the hospital, I'd held the Crucifix, examining it while the world around me, the ER waiting room disappeared while I concentrated on it. I was brought back to existence when the charge nurse approached Krystal and I to inform us that our son was out of danger. Tearfully, we thanked her and the other medical professionals for saving our son's life.
But I couldn't figure out where he'd gotten the cross. It was 20-karat gold, absolutely beautiful, with a small bale at the end of the upper part of the stipes so it could hang as a charm from a necklace. Did a friend give it to him? Did he find it on the playground? For whatever reason, I wanted to know.
Our neighbor was the head of the Homeowners Association, and as nosey and gossipy as she is, we were surprised and grateful she didn't make a spectacle out of our crisis and post it in the community newsletter. She felt that there was not enough space between the front-page article on how the community would switch to the use of a pavilions of cluster mailboxes at the entrance of subdivisions, in lieu of mailboxes at the curb in front of each home, and the back page of residents posting photos of their lost pets.. The only newsworthy article in that edition concerned the unusually high turnover rate of the purchase and sale of homes the next subdivision over (foreclosures and bank repossessions, no explanation), but that was on page 3 below that publication's article about the "Yard of the Month."
When we returned home, Krystal and I lost sleep worrying about our son. We pressed the issue with Marcus a few times, though he preferred to sweep it under the rug. We decided that he'd talk about it in his own time. One day, we randomly asked about it, calling it "Marcus' Accident" rather than what we originally, really thought it was, acting as though he simply slipped and fell into the tub. With objectivity and precision, however, already lived a life that bored us of violence, we (wrongly) thought our son had done the violence to himself. Peppy also found it odd that a thirteen year old boy would "accidentally" drown in a bathtub. There were all these questions as to our son Marcus, and the logistics, mechanics, and logic as to what happened and how. Marcus was kept under observation at the psych ward for about a week. The mental health notes didn't denote him as suicidal or unstable, but everytime they asked him, he kept answering that someone tried to kill him.
Who tried to kill our son?
We returned home with Marcus on the seventh day during a summer thunderstorm. As we turned down the neighborhood thoroughfare, a vacuum stilled the air outside of Krystal's Revla crossover wagon. A gust of wind stirred a plastic bag, which lifted, rolling, into the lower branches of a juvenile oak tree the HOA planted along the street with others as botanical decoration. As we turned onto Camino Court, the vacuum broke and it began raining cats and dogs. As the sky grew black, we moved surreptitiously down to the end of the cul-de-sac.
We pulled up to the garage as the bay door was opening. It was Wednesday and the night Krystal would make her chicken chili. Krystal climbed out of the car, using her purse to shield herself from the rain, and at the same time, I climbed out, using my hoodie as a tarpaulin to protect myself from the torrential downpour. While Krystal worked on unfastening Emily's car seat, I helped Marcus out of the back of the station wagon. Slamming the car doors, we ran for our lives into the garage.
Krystal and I, as well as anyone we vented to all had their own theories as to what happened. Peppy suggested that maybe he's going through puberty and didn't know how to process everything he was feeling and happening to him. We felt Falco was a little crass and off-color in his assessment, though it's still fair to consider, adding that: "Maybe he's gay and didn't want to tell you."
The popular neighborhood theory at the time held that he had copied a girl a couple streets over, in that older phase with the high home turnover rates. Carmina D'Angelo was around the same age as Marcus, and her family had not seen any noticeable change in her demeanor before she was discovered having drowned in the bathtub. From what little of the story we remember (her family had immediately abandoned their home and let it go into foreclosure), she was a pretty calico Felid girl with an angelic face who lived in the Verano subdivision of Cataleya Estates. We lived in the slightly newer Valle del Sol section. Somehow, because we knew no better, we surmised that maybe Marcus met her and developed a crush, and was deeply saddened by her demise. But we couldn't remember Marcus ever meeting Carmina or even ever talking about her. We didn't see anything in his social media timelines or online video blogging platform of letsplays and game reviews mentioning her name or even so much as an implicit heart emoji.
The sentient mind, as powerful and amazing as it is, can be fickle. Sometimes we make up facts to fill in blanks or to even deny the real answers. There was always one fact that didn't occur to us in the beginning: Carmina's alleged suicide and her family's departure from the neighborhood was a week before we pulled up to our own home with the WeHaul truck. Knowing when we found out, there was no way Marcus could have ever known Carmina or of her death, especially as the family who had all the information regarding the event had moved themselves and their three other daughters far from Cataleya Estates, from their 5-bed, 3.5-bath, 3-car home, into the father's mother's cramped 3-bedroom house, two cities over and a generation past a direly-needed renovation.
The psychiatric team's reports on Marcus take up most of the discharge notes. After talking with Marcus, Dr. Adasokan diagnosed the event as a suicide attempt, explaining that the attempt was an act of violence spurred by the replevin of growing adolescent libidinal impulses. To each vastly different three ink blots, Marcus responded, " A cucumber." He also saw "a rose," "a chain-link fence," "a river," "a pet cat," and "Corneria after losing the Lylat Wars." When asked again why he tried to hurt himself, he only said, "I didn't," and shut down when Dr. Adasokan pressed the issue.
"Despite the severity of this event," Dr. Adasokan explained to Krystal and I, "I don't think he really meant to harm himself, and perhaps just desperately wanted your attention." He recommended that we spend more time with him and listen to him without judgment as much as we could. He also suggested the idea that his transient childhood of moving around because of my job and suddenly transitioning to a permanent environment was a shock to him, and the sudden arrival of his younger sister may have caused us to direct our focus elsewhere, leaving him feeling emotionally abandoned, if slightly. Those things were too much for his young, adolescent emotions to process. "He is not a troubled child, you did a good job raising him. But parenting, as you and I know, doesn't not come with a playbook to go by. We have to take things as they come, good, bad, and ugly, and deal with them on a case by case and event by event basis."
From that point on, our lives began to change. Almost every day for the rest of that summer, when Krystal and I weren't teaching Emily the ABCs, we would keep a close eye on our son, sitting with him in the living room while he introduced us to a new form of entertainment media we knew nothing about on Animation Network on TV. Or while Krystal sunbathed on one of the chaise lounges out back, reading the latest novel for her book club and occasionally looking up to see him wading across the swimming pool.
We enjoyed making more time to spend with Marcus, though in the back of our minds, we didn't completely agree with the doctor, slightly affronted at his oblique (though unintentional) suggestions that we were failing Marcus as parents. We weren't poor, we knew we weren't abusive or controlling and felt our son was responsible enough to have a lot of freedom. He is emotionally independent, often lost in the joys and angst of a young teenager, and we allowed him the crucially-needed space to self-define.
Even so, Krystal wasn't all that keen about our lenient parenting style anyway, figuring that kids with too little structure would allow for lack of fiscal responsibility and a teen pregnancy. Also, some of Marcus' and my habits (which I'd chalked up to being a teen) started to annoy her since we started spending so much time together. She felt as though she were standing in the middle of an exhibit at a zoo. Having two men roaming the house, she'd get aggravated at our (admittedly annoying) propensity to finish off the carton of frozen yogurt and put the empty vessel back in the freezer drawer, and we openly and crudely discussed sex in front of her. She was definitely glad that her second child was a girl. Once she was old enough, the battle lines would be drawn: it would be girls against boys.
One night as the midnight hour approached, we'd been sleeping for a while, and the house was quiet. The moonlight cascaded through the balcony doors of our bedroom, giving the space a quaint air of dimly-lit melancholy. Krystal spent half the night tossing and turning. I woke up when she elbowed me in the forehead, and I was about to reproach her, but she was battling something in her HVAC system was at a constant 70 degrees, but Krystal said later that she was freezing but hot enough to wake up with a sweat.
While sleeping, she'd been at the lake behind our house thirty years ago, back when it was owned by a small farm, back before the land was reclaimed by the Cornerian Government. The land sat empty for another twenty before it was sold to Whyndam Carlton Homes to break ground and add to the area's proliferation of moderately expensive luxury home developments. She was tied up, legs and arms bound, and something terrible was happening. She was defenseless, not just from having her extremities immobilized, but from being only a child who knew nothing. Why was this happening? Why were they doing this? What did I do wrong?
All the while this was happening, she saw images of people. The victims. She felt their anger, their hurt, their moans of pain in their current state, writhing in agony and misery. As clear as she could see their eyes, their mouths, their features, somehow she couldn't make out exactly what they looked like, as though their visages had decayed into unintelligible masses of rotting, waterlogged clay. She knew they weren't Cornerian. And when they were dumped into the lake, the water chilled their already physiologically cold bodies, the chill never leaving their bones.
Krystal woke up choking, gagging, gasping for air. The chill didn't leave her bones either.
Disclaimer: Yall can miss me with the BS; I don't own shxt.
Thanks for (re-)reading the first chapter! I'll post the next one within a week. Leave a review! Chao!
~Alero