A Harbinger's Dream

A Harbinger's Dream.


The memory carries with it the essence of a terrible dream; that you wake with sweat and dread, and then relief. Memories such as this are unique in that there is no retrospect or reminiscence; there is only a dreadful fog with black serpentine shapes wriggling just beyond the clarity of sanity. I can only tell you the story in the rawness that it exists within my mind. I am no writer but a victim of abhorrently extraordinary circumstance.

Halloween always seemed to be a ridiculous holiday. In my adult life, more a Hollows Eve then not, were spent watching scary movies with friends or binge drinking at some masquerade. But that momentous October 31, I found my way home.

Aunt Mary's 50th birthday party was on November 1st and my family congregated from all over the Midwest to celebrate her decent of the proverbial hill. She was among the more popular members of the family, the glue that bonds. Aunt Mary was a planner. Boredom wouldn't dare slither from its den when she was near. Planning was her virtue and activity was her sword. In the eve of the celebration, Hollows Eve, she had made plans to tour a less than famous true haunted house. You can find them on Google or Yahoo, they are surprisingly numerous, especially in the city.

She wouldn't settle for the cheap thrills of the fire-fighter's haunted fire barn or the high school's haunted mansion. She would only settle for the real deal. She said it was a huge Victorian home nearly an hours drive from the city. According to Aunt Mary, a family had been murdered there, not before a long night of evisceration and other horrors. I remember her constantly reassuring my mother that it would be worth the drive, that it was something she would never forget. She had a friend of a friend, one of those deals.

Considering the long drive, we still managed to recruit a sizeable pilgrimage. Because of our natural disposition, that is our morbid curiousity, we could not resist the enchantment of a true haunted house. Leading the pilgrimage, in a tan escort, my Mom and Dad rode along with Aunt Mary and Uncle Don who went nowhere without their temperamental border collie Murray. I had van duty. I drove my grandparents’ full-size white Chevy van. My cousin Robby sat shotgun with my sister and her husband behind us. Behind them two rows of giggling children swatted and played. We departed at 5:00 P.M.

I remember looking forward to our walk through the house. Of course there would be a cheesy re-enactment of the murders and people dressed like creatures of the night. The women would scream and act silly and they would follow behind Dad, Uncle Don, and I as we would escort them through the unnatural abomination with the chivalry and bravado of knighted boy scouts. I didn't believe in ghosts, the only horror in this world is that brought on by flesh.

I have lived by a verse in psalms since I read it in boot camp several years ago; it says "What can flesh do unto me? The Lord God is with me". It clung to the deep fibers of my heart and soul the moment I read it and it has reared its grace in time of need ever since. Ghosts were for Halloween costumes.

It was an unusually bright Halloween. More often than not Halloween carried with it a gloom of weather. I had developed a theory early on, that God showed his discord for such an unholy celebration by pouring ice cold rain upon the sweet-toothed demons and goblins prancing through the evening streets.

The sun was still shinning through a deep blue sky as we pulled into a dirt and gravel drive cut through a hulking pine valley. The rebelling sun was obscured, then shadowed by the hulking green beasts. It pierced through the foliage and danced across the faces of the vans occupants in an entrancing splay of light and shadow. We snaked through the many curves of the drive for some time before we reached a clearing.

The century and a half old Victorian home commanded our attention. Even from the drive it towered over the shrubbery and appeared even larger than it was because of the small clearing of turf in which it rested. The lawn stretched out to the very edge of the drive so we had to park a fair walk away. I stopped the van, wondering if the front tires were on the lawn, and deciding that they weren’t, I put the van in park and hopped out. I asked my brother-in-law to watch the kids for a minute and Rob and I walked over to the Escort. As we walked toward the car, we witnessed the house for the first time in its virgin splendor without having to look through the van's dirty windshield. It was beautiful, more perfect than any of us expected. It looked like it had full-time professional upkeep, and that thought excited the group, for more revenue meant a better product, or service in this case. The beautiful house was an island in bright green grass, an island yet in the deep green of ancient pines, which only intensified the radiant blue of an abnormal October sky. It was wrong.
There were no other cars and no one to greet us at the door, but it added to the spooky experience and that was Aunt Mary's specialty. As we walked toward the house my Aunt decided it would be best if the four of them, or the five of them rather (including Murray) should scout ahead and take the tour first in the case that it was too morbid for the children. Then Rob and I would lead them through later; if it was suitable. We shared an inside joke that my brother-in-law was one of the children.

I can still remember the smiles and jokes that passed between the seven of us as Rob and I walked them to the door. Like an old photograph I can see the smiles on our faces even as we walked by tombstones protruding from the cracked earth. There were five of them total, three quarters of a century old, maybe more. But at that moment there was nothing wrong with the cracking mottled tombstones in the adjacent of a beautiful well kept home. They were props in a hokey act of a jovial play. The cold erect stone, watching our smiling faces through veils of moss.

Rob and I left our cohorts at the enormous front porch. We watched them disappear into the yawning French doors. I felt something awful then. For the first and only time in my life, a fog fell where there was no fog and my heart pumped dread. It was wrong. The tombstones, the beauty, the evil. It was wrong. I don't know where that feeling came from, only with hindsight can I tell you that I felt it all along and it was masked by the love that tightly knit families share when gathered. It seemed as if the world blinked and in that microsecond I saw the truth. I had a horrible glimpse of a terrible truth that was the seed of all lies. It was a melting world, black, where people only knew weeping and gnashing of teeth, where the other things ruled.
Rob shook my shoulder with a smirk on his face.

"Earth to Mike" he said.

He didn't see it. Or feel it, rather. He shoved me in the direction of the van shaking his head. Then for reasons I will never understand he bolted into the house. A scream caught itself in my throat. I thought I was losing my mind. The thought of Rob being swallowed by that Victorian leviathan shook terror into my core. No words in our English language or any other could describe what I felt at that moment except to say that it was a tangible oily malignancy borne from the nightmares of a thousand children.

Then the moment had passed. I still felt the hangover of an apocalyptic dread, but I rationalized like any person would. I remember thinking then what about Murray? In the movies dogs always have a sixth sense. They are always alert of a supernatural presence. He hadn't acted abnormally whatsoever. He trod into the house happily, like the others. And so I had maneuvered through the forest of devils and found myself once again in a clearing on a brighter than usual October evening. There was the empty car and the white Chevy. The children were there, waiting in silence.
They had seen the look on my face or maybe they had felt what I felt. Whatever the reason their sugar induced hyperactivity was relinquished and replaced by silent solemn faces, it hadn't affected Al, my brother-in-law. When I opened the van door he greeted me just as he always did; rudely.

"Aww, hell. Your ma always has to ruin shit. She talked em' into leavin' us behind din' she?" He didn't wait for a response.
"I hope there is ghosts in there. I'll show em' somethin real scary, won' I hun?" He asked my sister, apparently not interested in a response from her either, because he started telling the kids his version of what happened in that house so many years ago.

Whatever my Aunt Mary had feared the children would see, I'm sure it wasn't as traumatizing as listening to Al for those ten minutes.

I was too anxious with visions of tangible evil smoldering inside my skull to listen to anymore. I shut the door of the Chevy and stood with my hands pressed between the small of my back and the van door. I felt naked there with nothing between me and my deliverer of terror, but I doubted I would feel any better in the van. My thoughts kept bringing me back to the children...

Her children...
My sister and I...
My mother is in that horror. My God....
I can remember thinking that as if it were a revelation, a new development. Immediately prayers started buzzing through my mind.

...Lord protect her. Lord protect them. Lord protect me...

I chanted those words over and over again inside my being, my soul a distress beacon in this Godless place. Despair. I shook away the thought. At least I tried.
...God is in all things. Lord protect me...

My prayer must have been an insight to my immediate future because my body moved though I wasn't aware of wanting it to. I opened the door to the van and leaned in making eye contact with Al.

"Watch the kids Al. Watch them with hawk's eyes. I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere!"

Then I turned toward the house away from Al's gripes of me "always leavin' him behind and shit". I started toward the house then stutter stepped and turned back to the van, opened the door, and removed the keys from the ignition. I wanted to be sure I had a way out of that black place.

The wrongness tried to consume me even while I consciously fought it. In science, you learn that everything has an opposite; Newton’s third law of motion, negative and positive charges, acid and alkaline, light and dark, absolutely everything. In that small clearing I found the opposite of everything that was ever good and right.
I walked through the bright green lawn, passed the moss laden tombstones, over the long buried remains of the bodies that once housed the malignant souls that now shrouded me with palpable evil. I walked up perfect wooden steps onto an otherwise beautiful wrap around porch and approached the yawning jaws of a gargantuan beast.

...Lord protect me...

The doors were heavy, much heavier than they should have been. I had to lower my shoulder and push as if there was something or things on the other side, pushing against my progress. Once the door cleared half way it flung open violently, with purpose. I fell with my hands out, hard into a banister of ornately decorated stairs leading up. And the French jaws closed hard behind me.
Inside the house there was sound where there was no sound. I can't explain it. It was a putrid cackling static, a cancerous thrumming that had depth and color yet had none, as if it came from inside me. I looked left and right and again felt terror so thick it seemed to seep from me as sweat. That moment I still held on to sanity. I didn't think that would last if I took my time. So I moved.

The house of lies.

Where are they?

The living room was to my left. From my vantage point it looked so clean and unoccupied, but then was it? A small boy was secreted from the molecules of putrid air into the middle of the room, sitting Indian-style, staring at something away from me so his back was toward me. I watched for half a moment, his little body, maroon with scabs, mottled with something slick and black, swelled and shriveled to the beat of thrumming evil. His head began to turn slowly and sanity trickled from me. I had made my decision. Up.

I ran up the stairs hard and fast. I could feel her then, somehow. She was closer. As I went up, the house filled with decay and its architecture became that of a rotting corpse. The paint peeled from the walls and fell up. I kept my eyes straight ahead then, and reached the top of the stair way. It only led one direction, to a hall on my left. In this house of a thousand terrors, I struggled to ignore my new reality and keep my mind on my task.

..Lord protect me...

Just on my side of a threshold at the end of the hallway stood my father. He was trembling and looked as though he were debating going into the room or not. I ran to him and as I approached I saw that there was no debating going on behind his milky eyes. He just stood there swaying and trembling like a tower in high winds.

"Where are the others, Dad? Where's Mom?"

He stood silent and stared passed me, at nothing.

"...teeth..."

His lips moved and he uttered something less than a whisper, and he repeated it again and again.

"...it had teeth...it had teeth..."

What did you see?

I grabbed my father's shoulders and squared him toward me.

"Dad! Aunt Mary, Mom, Rob, Uncle Don? Where are they, what happened?"

He stood trembling in my hands.

"...it had teeth..."

"What about Mom?" I shook him. "DAD, ANSWER ME!"

"DEAD! DEAD DEAD DEAD!" His scream was unnatural and shrill.

I couldn't waste any more time, if time existed in this House. My mother was still there, dead or alive, and I was going to find her.

...Lord protect me...Lord protect me...Lord protect me...

I thought of nothing else or my loose grip on sanity would have surely failed and my fate, as well as the fates of my father and mother would certainly be doomed to that of the original inhabitants of the damned place.

I turned the knob of the door and punched it open expecting resistance where there was none. In the instant that I passed through the threshold into the room, all that was and should have been was turned upside down, backward. The eye was deceived. The noise that was not grew to an intolerable blast of constant screeching static. Sanity was lost in that room where the terrors of terrors fed. It was a place man was not meant to be, yet two of us were.

Through a presence of an unnatural world, opposite of me, my mom cowered, shaking, most likely in shock from something I prayed I wouldn't have to endure but she was alive. She was in the fetal position facing the corner where rotten wall met soft mottled floor. I saw her as I would have if I were looking through the heat waves atop a blazing fire. It was there. The thing that feeds on pain and rejoices in lies. The terror of terrors. I felt infected. If I didn't leave then, I would not just die but become part of death.

Somehow I summoned something within myself and turned terror to fear, fear to rage and rage to fury. Then, with teeth bared and muscles flexed, I pounded through the presence that had reduced my mother to her petrified infantile state. I reached down to pick her up from under her armpits. When I touched her she let out a scream that, from looking at her face, was violent and full of horror, but in that room where right was wrong and horror was king, no sound escaped her lips, only the all consuming thrum of tangible evil could be heard. I lifted her up from her nest of horror and drug her out of the room as quickly and deliberately as I could. Though she screamed she didn't resist. Whatever the presence in the room was it had convinced her of its malicious omniscients. As we crossed the threshold together the sound held, but the pressure of it subsided. My father was still there, swaying in a horrific trance. But at the sight of my mother something came alive in his eyes and a milky fog cleared. I looked at him desperately and I remember telling him and my mother (and maybe mostly myself) that we were safe, that God was with us.
The Lord God is with us.

Next, I remember being at the bottom of the stairs ushering my father and my mother through the French doors while the poltergeists raged. The chandelier above the foyer convulsed. The walls vibrated and cracked in the wake of a furious invisible behemoth. As glass and plaster rained down on me from above I looked into the depths of the house. Within the reverberating darkness of the living room, where the boy was sitting, an enormous black shape now stood with red eyes and, surely, rows of a thousand jagged teeth. I ran outside after my parents.

At that point terror had pierced deep within my heart soul and mind. The feeling that I had been infected intensified into a benign certainty that if we were inside another moment we would no longer be of this world. We would become spores of death and hate, blackened putrid malignant souls.

I sprinted to the van. I remember getting into the drivers seat and putting the key in the ignition while my parents scrambled in behind me.

I had started the van before I realized the two seats behind me were empty. I looked back with anguish and disbelief. Such a simple request, STAY HERE. My sister couldn't have followed Al inside. I couldn't process that information.
"Why? WHY DIDN'T YOU LISTEN?!" I screamed.

And when my father realized that his little girl was inside the house of disdain, he started toward it. He trod toward the house drunkenly, in a horrified stupor. His eyes wet and red and swollen. He wore the frown of a frightened child.
Though I thought I had reached the maximum depth of terror that a human being could experience without succumbing to it, I found myself not swimming nor drowning but at the floor of terror's oppressing black sea. My father was climbing the stairs to the porch.

"DAD! Come back, Dad! It's too late!"

As I rawly pleaded and wept, he kept walking toward the door. He couldn't accept the thought of my sister being inside.

"Please Dad, Please!"

I was sobbing at that point. I knew his fate if he walked through those innocent looking French doors. As he reached for the handle to the door that led to the tenth circle of hell, a figure smashed out from inside one of the porch windows. It was drenched in black slime and had sharp white teeth. It shook off the unholy goop in the manner of a canine. It was a dog. It was Murray! His tongue sagged from his mouth and he wore the grin of a nervous dog as he nudged himself between my stunned father and the door to the abomination.

My dad only spoke of that terrible day once since, and all he said was that he saw himself in Murray’s eyes just then. He saw, in his reflection, a thing that was once a man. He said it was his face with bulging yellow eyes and small black hole in the middle where a nose once was. No lips, only his teeth sneered back at him. After that he said something that didn't make any sense, and I never asked for clarification since nothing made sense that day. Something about Murray’s voice.
By Murray's grace, my father accepted the finality of Al and my sister's fate, and jogged to the van with Murray by his side. We drove away in silence. Even the children were quiet, as though they had been in the house with us.

Time. It heals us. That is very true. It has blessed me, marching forward, separating me from that wretched place. I went through many very difficult years in the beginning. It was similar to what they called shell-shock, when the soldiers came home from Vietnam. I believe it has a new name, post-traumatic stress syndrome, but it's the same thing.

We stopped at a hotel on the way home that night. Even as the sun shined on that small clearing, it was well into the night when we were on the road in our reality again.

No one slept. I remember hearing the children, or maybe it was my father, whimpering in the darkness. Over coffee in the hotel lobby the following morning, my parents and I decided to keep the truth to ourselves. When you enter a world of lies how can you tell the truth about it? We brought the children home and told the amassed family the dismay of the previous night. We told them of our drinking and the argument between my father and Uncle Don. How Aunt Mary and Rob joined him as he sped off into the night, angry and drunk. How we had dropped my sister off at home that night after the joy-kill argument. Nobody asked about Al.

Of course there were investigations when the family reported the missing persons. We knew there would be, but there was no way to prove anything. We couldn't prove our story was true and the police couldn't prove it wasn't. I heard some time later that they went out to the sight of the house we had visited, and found absolutely nothing. There was no drive only a small walking trail, which they followed, not to a clearing, but a patch of brush and brambles. They found the remains of a vehicle, but couldn’t identify a make or model as it was in its final stages of rust corrosion, the tires long melted away. The only thing they did find amongst the brambles was afew crumbling tombstones and an ancient decrepit house that was nearly falling in on itself.

Scott Sylvester
10-20-2006