My bedroom was the one with the moss green carpet.\u00a0 Or was it olive drab?\u00a0 It was this green-but-not-a-real-green-carpet (that’s cruel.)\u00a0It was the first room on the left of the long hallway.\u00a0 On the right was a bathroom and then my folks’ room, and there was a room for my sister and a guest room at the very end again on the left.<\/p>\n
There was always something wrong about that last room on the left. Besides sounding like the name for an excrutiating drama (aren’t they all?) or horror flick, it started with a bad feeling.\u00a0\u00a0 Nothing specific, just a discomfort, like I wasn’t supposed to be there.\u00a0 It was never off-limits, exactly (except to keep it nice for guests) but there was something wrong with it.<\/p>\n
I tried, like a kid does, to tell my parents.\u00a0 From your perspective, it makes sense, right?\u00a0 You know, because you’ve been reading, that there are things Beyond that try to intersect with our world, our reality, and they really aren’t good for us.\u00a0 Most people have at least one ghost story they can tell, and that’s my rule of thumb there.<\/p>\n
So from the perspective of a kid, absolutely, let’s look into this.\u00a0 Let’s get an exorcist in and let them do their thing, just in case.<\/p>\n
Do you know what an exorcist costs?\u00a0 You can get a lot of services over the internet, but you’re going to try to bargain-watch this one. Someone who is going to want you to give their organization a donation is probably your best bet, but remember the size of that donation should reflect the fact that they are pitting their soul (loaded word, remember) against the evils of what\u00a0 is there.<\/p>\n
Yeah, as a grown-up, you’re not so quick to listen to this.\u00a0 Besides, you’ve been in that bedroom.\u00a0 You’ve made the bed.\u00a0 You’ve been in the closet.\u00a0 There’s NOTHING THERE BUT YOUR\u00a0 IMAGINATION, and why are you so worried about the guest room anyway?\u00a0 Do you not want Grandma to come?\u00a0 Is this some kind of bizarre repressed sibling rivalry?\u00a0 Did you do something disgusting in there?\u00a0 Do we have any clean sheets that fit that bed in the cupboard?\u00a0 Go look in the cupboard for clean sheets.\u00a0 I don’t believe you’re making me make the bed again and I have to go pick Grandma up from the airport and she’ll be waiting another fifteen minutes and she’s going to tell me all the stories about all the times I’ve been late in my life, and it’s all because of you<\/em>.<\/p>\n As a kid, you’re not likely to make that mistake again.\u00a0<\/p>\n You could go all Frog Brothers, or even Monster Squad if you’ve got friends.\u00a0 Or even just forget that cold chill your Grandma complains about every morning even though it’s 85 degrees before noon.\u00a0 After all, it isn’t your problem.\u00a0 Probably an overactive imagination, or so your school shrink says when you come visit on Wednesday afternoons because your 3rd grade teacher wasn’t so hot on your story about the vampires living in your basement.\u00a0 (That one was totally made up, but it was good urban fantasy, and you don’t know why they confiscated the picture you drew with the best blood colour you were able to make with the bleak selection of coloured pencils you stole from the 6th graders doing their yearbook assignments.)<\/p>\n If it weren’t that you had bad dreams.\u00a0 You really resonated with that line from Hamlet, and even though the shadows seem wrong (how can a place without much light have shadows?) you sneak into the guest room while Grandma is fussing about the kitchen with your mom.<\/p>\n Grandma has her own smell, but so does this room.\u00a0 You like Grandma’s smell, it reminds you of visiting her and the little bathroom she had on the right with the National Geographic magazines and the crocheted toilet paper containers, and the funny saying on the wall that you didn’t get until you were older.\u00a0 It reminds you of firm kisses on the cheek and that she’s always been nice to you.\u00a0 The smell that competes with it is a dusty smell, even though you know your mom went crazy with the cleaning, and it smells like something old.\u00a0 Grandma may be old, but she’s not like this smell.\u00a0 Or maybe it’s the sound, the sound of slithering, if slithering was music that set your spine on edge.<\/p>\n It’s coming from the closet, of course.\u00a0 You move around Grandma’s suitcase, careful not to touch anything in there.\u00a0 You want to turn on the light, but you just have this feeling that if you do, you’re going to lose this tenuous connection with the wrongness, like light really chasing it away.\u00a0 Your mom said you were too old for night lights, but you know this is why you want them, even if your sister says it just lets you see monsters better.<\/p>\n It’s that moment, the moment in your dream that you can’t turn away, that the veil is pierced.\u00a0<\/p>\n I can’t tell you I saw anything.\u00a0 But I brushed aside Grandma’s coat, and there was a something there, a darkness within a darkness that sounded like sadness and tasted like neglect, and smelled like something forgotten so long that it no longer had a scent.\u00a0 Something in it moved and I gave serious consideration to screaming or wetting my pants, but instead, I felt a flow of anger.\u00a0 Anger comes from fear, and instead of flight, this once I chose fight.\u00a0 It reached out from my left hand, and I gestured with the flow as if just closing a curtain, smoothing something down, wax-on, Daniel-san, a curiously non-obscene repudiation of the evil of the moment.<\/p>\n To my great surprise, it went quiet.\u00a0 My hackles (wherever they are, just about the gills that turn green, I guess) lowered, and real silence, combined with the sound of mom yelling that she did too add the orange juice to the cranberries, and the smell of turkey roasting, and my sister laughing because of something on TV, and it all filled the room like it had been a vacuum.<\/p>\n The smell of Grandma.<\/p>\n I took a moment to breathe it in, and then made my way back out.\u00a0 But I guessed then, even if I hadn’t known for sure.\u00a0 It felt kind of like being a hero.\u00a0 I had faced the darkness and won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s that moment, the moment in your dream that you can’t turn away, that the veil is 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