That was all we needed to hear. The next day we planned a trip to explore the inside of the supposed haunted house. I remember being nervous because Jeffery had brought a screwdriver in case the door was locked, and I wasn’t comfortable with damaging anything to get inside. As it turned out, the front door was unlocked and we walked right in.
We were in the house for about an hour, exploring the first floor and then the second. At first we were making jokes and trying to scare each other, but with each room the oddness of the place seemed to draw us in more and more. It really did feel like a lived-in home from another time, or like some picture-perfect museum that managed to replicate the imagined feel of such a place. There wasn’t even dust on the tables or dead bugs in the windowsills.
Our growing silence was borne partly out of amazement, but also somewhat out of fear. While there was nothing obviously scary about anything we were seeing, there was a…wrongness to the rightness, if that makes any sense. I remember thinking about the pitcher plants my mother used to grow. She would show us how the insects would be drawn to the flower, venturing inside so deep they couldn’t escape from the bottom.
The bottom of the Ricter house was, naturally enough, the basement. And it was the floor we had saved for last. I wanted desperately for Jeffery to chicken out so I could too, but my stomach dropped when he headed toward what we had already figured out was the basement door. Determined not to look weak in front of him, I pulled out my flashlight and followed him down into the dark.
There were no lights down there, but then there were no lights anywhere. No lights on the walls or ceiling and no light switches or outlets that we could find. Still, what had been an eccentric curiosity looking through the sunlit rooms upstairs became another bad omen as we trudged down the wooden stairs into the oppressive darkness below.
The beams of our flashlights barely seemed to make a dent as we reached the bottom, and we had to walk forward ten or fifteen feet before I could even see the brick wall that made up one of the boundaries of the basement. Even then I was more aware of the light shining back at us as we approached. I had a moment of panic at the thought that someone was down here with us, but then I realized Jeffery was laughing.
It was a mirror. A large, ornate full-length mirror hanging on the far wall. Walking closer, I could see our shadowy outlines in the dim, reflected light of our flashlight beams, mimicking our motions as we studied the mirror and then began timidly looking around again for other things that might be down there.
Except there was nothing. The floor was dirt and the walls were brick, and aside from the pristine mirror hanging alone on the wall, nothing else was there. Except…as I swept my light across the dirt floor again, I realized something was there after all.
Footprints. There were dozens of footprint trails crisscrossing the dirt, most of them well-defined and seemingly recent, though it was hard to tell in that house. Still, I knew most of them couldn’t be ours, and I felt my heart hammering as I looked back to Jeffery to tell him we needed to leave.
That’s when I saw the figure in the mirror. It was standing behind Jeffery, a good two heads taller than either of us, and while I was seeing just a fleeting glimpse of its profile in the mirror, it looked strange, as though it was dressed in ill-fitting clothing or had a body that was deformed. I opened my mouth to scream a warning as I finished turning my head toward Jeffery, but it died in my throat when I saw nothing behind him outside of the mirror. I cut my eyes back to the mirror in time to see the thing reach for Jeffery. In the half-second I glanced away from him, Jeffery was already being pulled back into the dark, his surprised and terrified yells echoing off the bare walls as they faded further and further away.
This isn’t about me being crazy, but it isn’t about me being a hero either. I was a scared little boy, and as much as I loved my brother, as much as I hated myself as I did it, I ran. I went up those steps two at a time, more worried about my legs getting grabbed from underneath the stairs than the weakening screams I was hearing from my best friend in the world. I didn’t stop running until I was half a mile away from the house, my ragged breaths mixing with slobbering tears as I tried to make it back home to tell my family what happened.
I saw the smoke two miles before I got back to the compound. There had been some kind of government raid that morning after we left. Supposedly someone had illegal weapons or something, but I never knew all the details, despite being questioned by authorities after it was all over. They only questioned me once, and I got the feeling it was more just to say they had been thorough than because they thought I knew anything important. To the contrary, they seemed happy to stick me into the state system and forget about me, to forget about the whole mess.
Because somehow, while the raid was just starting, my parents’ house caught on fire. I never heard any explanation other than “electrical shortage”, which seemed like bullshit, especially given the timing. Regardless, by the time I reached the edge of the compound, I was being waylaid by agents telling me I couldn’t go in and our parents were already dead of smoke inhalation.
I did a lot of hating in those first few months. Hating myself, hating the agents, hating our friends and neighbors for not somehow saving them. And not knowing the details of what actually happened only made it worse. It was as though my entire world was taken away all at once and I didn’t even know how or why.
So I rebelled. Went through several foster homes in the first year. Got a bit of a juvenile record and went to counselors. Eventually I realized it took too much energy to always be angry, to always find reasons to hate everything. My current foster family was actually really nice, and though I didn’t see them as my real family, I did feel like I could trust them to treat me well and care if anything happened to me.
Which was more than Jeffery ever got. I had a hundred opportunities to tell people about him, about what had happened to him, and at first I took them. I told the police, I told my case worker, and I even told my first foster mother. It was all met with skepticism, especially the part about the basement, but they agreed someone needed to go check.
But when police went, they could never even find the house, much less some twin there was no record of. This was well before I was placed in foster care, but when I tried one last time to tell Judy, my first foster mother, she just smiled like she understood and said she’d make some calls to see what she could find out. I knew from her expression she’d already heard about them not finding anything when they’d looked before, and it wasn’t much of a surprise when I was back in a state orphanage later that same month.
So I learned to pretend that he didn’t exist. I would tell therapists that I made it up because I was so upset about my parents’ deaths. They didn’t question it any further after their initial due diligence that I wasn’t delusional any more, and over the years it became easier and easier to believe myself. Not that I ever really believed he wasn’t real, but the mind is a very flexible and selfish thing. I found myself thinking about him less and less as I became more adapted to my new “normal” life. My ideas of guilt and loss were slowly being overwritten with new friends and dating and applying to colleges.
And then the other day I took my standard shortcut between my house and my weekend job. And there he was, murdering that girl, his eyes dark and unreadable as he stared at me. Sitting at the coffee shop, running back through the memory, I realized that while his eyes looked strange and his skin seemed pale and clammy from a distance, he otherwise looked just like me.
His haircut, his light beard, his…his fucking clothes.
He was wearing the same clothes I was.
I ran back home as I tried to get someone to answer—Rick or Patty, my foster parents, or their biological daughter Sierra. No one picked up. Rounding the corner onto our street, I saw no signs of trouble, but wasn’t sure what to look for anyway. I wanted to go ahead and call 911, but I had held off initially because what I had seen on the path was so bizarre and I couldn’t be sure I real
ly wasn’t having some kind of delusion this time. Now, as I raced home to try and warn them, I didn’t want to slow down to call until I knew they were safe.
When I reached the house, I saw just how safe they were. They were sitting down to a nice family dinner, which was always a big deal on weekend nights. I had a momentary pang of disappointment that they were starting without me being home yet, but then I realized they weren’t.
Because Jeffery was in there, smiling and laughing. I watched in horror as they all took their places and Rick had everyone bow their heads to bless the food. Everyone closed their eyes and prayed except for Jeffery, who turned toward me at the window. He just stared silently at me for several moments, baring his teeth like an enraged ape or rabid dog as his eyes rolled back toward Rick, who was finishing up the prayer.
As everyone looked up, Jeffery was back to smiling at his new family.
I heard seven words and now I’m in Hell
I was a reader for two years before I met Elliot Stoffel. A reader is just what it sounds like—I read to the elderly and the disabled several days a week. The pay was never great, but I enjoyed the work and there was no denying it would look good on my applications to graduate school.
There was a time that meeting an esteemed sociology professor like Stoffel would have been exciting. We actually used one of his books in an undergrad class I had junior year. But that man, whoever he had been, seemed long gone when I first met the shattered ruin he had become.
Stoffel was supposed to be in his early fifties, but this man looked past seventy at least. And while the professor's books and reputation in sociology circles made him out to be a very articulate and intelligent man, the pitiful figure before me vacillated between long bouts of drooling, dead-eyed silence and brief interludes of incoherent screaming and thrashing about at some new imagined horror.
The company I worked for would get brief medical condition summaries on prospective clients along with emergency contacts and known allergies. We were not allowed to give any care or aid under our contract, but depending on the client, some readers got “combat pay", meaning they were going into a home in a dangerous area or with a potentially combative client. Stoffel paid the extra money.
His file said he suffered from “non-specific delusional ideation, persecution complex and moderate catatonia”. Below this, someone had written in “hallucinations-paranoid schizo".
I knew what all that meant, but it didn't really prepare me for what he was like. Most of my time as a reader had been with sweet little old ladies or people who needed company as they recovered from a debilitating injury. Not a madman that rolled his eyes fearfully toward the corner of the room as I read to him, his lips trembling as he closed his eyes tight against something only he could see.
His primary caretaker was his younger sister, Hillary. She was a kind and pretty woman who, if not exactly friendly, was at least always pleasant and polite as she headed out the door, off to take advantage of the break I was giving her. It wasn't until I was there for over a month that I saw what a toll it all was taking on her.
I had gone into the kitchen to tell her I was leaving for the day—this was the first time she had stayed home when I came, but I hadn't glimpsed her after she initially let me in. When I stepped into the kitchen, I saw her sitting at the table, her lips thin and her eyes sunken. I found myself surprised at her expression to the point that, before I could reconsider, I'd asked her if anything was wrong.
She gave a small laugh and gestured toward where her brother lay in the other room. “Aside from that? Aside from him? No, everything else is just peachy.” She glanced up at me as she said the last, and her gaze softened slightly. “Sorry, I don't mean to take it out on you.”
I shook my head. “No need to apologize. I know handling all this is hard. Is there anyone else to help?”
She stared off wistfully. “No, our parents are dead and neither of us has married. When he came back from his trip on the medical transport plane, none of his professor buddies even bothered to show up or visit. It’s like he's already dead to them. Bunch of jealous, selfish assholes.”
Talking to her, I felt like I was walking across an unfamiliar frozen lake. I wanted to go further out, but I had no way of knowing where the thin spots might be. After a moment of silent debate, my curiosity won out.
“What happened to him? Did he just have a breakdown?”
Hillary studied me for several seconds before gesturing to the chair across from her. “No one knows for sure. I know he had gone to stay with a primitive tribe in the Amazon rainforest. The Ugtatu I think is how you say it. He had been before, and though they generally didn't care for outsiders, over a few years they had grown to tolerate him well enough.”
She looked down at her folded hands and sighed. “Apparently he was much more coherent when he first reached civilization after his latest trip. He told a colleague there that he had gone through the first step of a “purification ritual" during his stay. The ritual was supposed to take three days in total, but after the first night he woke to learn that the tribe’s holy man had died in his sleep. After that, no one else would talk to him or even acknowledge his existence outside of making a sign to ward off evil.”
“After three days of trying to get back in their good graces, he had headed back out of the jungle. By this point he was already acting strange, and within another week he was much like you see him now.” She sniffled. “They don't really know what's wrong with him. I looked at his notes, but they were mainly gibberish as far as I could tell. The most I could make out was that during the first part of the ritual, the holy man had said a phrase in Elliot's right ear while holding something he calls a “whisper box" against his left. My brother said the box made a strange sound, and he seemed to think that the combination of that with the sounds of the words the holy man spoke somehow flipped a switch in his brain, making him see things. He was trying to find a way to reverse it when he slipped into a fit and then became more like what you see now. A shell of the man I knew.“
I didn't know how to respond. The story was interesting, but seemed very farfetched. Odds are, I thought, he had been slipping towards insanity for years, and when he finally had a break from reality, this hocus pocus was the form it took. After sitting through an awkward silence, I said I had to be going and let myself out.
****
It was a few days later, when I was back reading Stoffel “The Great Gatsby", that I noticed the small wooden box sitting on the table near him. I tried to focus on the Fitzgerald book, but my eyes kept being drawn back to the box. It wasn't overly ornate or special looking, but the wood had an odd luster and I found myself wondering if this could be the “whisper box" Hillary had told me about. Had he somehow brought it back with him?
I told myself to stop being stupid, but after another thirty minutes of trying and failing to get my mind off of it, I sat down the book. We were alone in the house, but I still looked around as I reached for the box. I had no intention of stealing it, but I did want to see what it was. See if it opened, what was inside.
If it made any odd noises.
There was no lid or way to open it, and giving it a light shake produced no rattle from inside. Still, it was much heavier than I'd expected, so I didn’t think it was a solid piece of wood. There was something else inside.
I gave Stoffel a cursory glance, but he was just staring off into space, a thin thread of spit stretching an impossible length between his pajama shirt and his lower lip. He wouldn't mind me messing with his box a bit more. So I stuck it to my ear.
The sound was immediate as soon as the box was close to my ear. It reminded me of the sound a rainstick makes, but much higher pitched. While the noise itself wasn't unpleasant, I found my vision beginning to swim. I went to pull the box away when a hand covered my own and pressed it back against my head even as I heard Hillary speaking into my other ear.
“Weasel. Dish. Firelight. Thimble. Amber. Jack. Chimney.”
By
the time I was able to react and move my head, she'd already finished. And whatever she had done, I knew something was wrong.
I looked up at her, my eyes seeming to gain and lose focus moment to moment. “What…did you…did you do to me?”
She stepped back, almost as though she thought I might attack her, but I could barely stand. “Something that I hope will help my brother. I'm sorry, I really am. I wish there was another way, or that it had been that nasty nurse that Elliot first had once he got home instead of you. But I just figured out the words, you see. It's not just the sounds of the words you have to replicate. You have to understand the words too. Elliot, he understood the Ugtatu language. For you, I had to find English words with the same sounds. It really was a challenge.”
Now I considered attacking her after all. She had done something to me and now was patting herself on the back instead of answering me. “Did…you do the pur…purification thing on me?”
She cast her eyes down like a schoolgirl caught cheating. “I did. Or the first part, which is all I had, of course. Though I may have fibbed a bit on that part. According to Elliot's notes, the Ugtatu called it ‘Khazit chureharu me’. I think it means ‘The Purity of Joining’. That may be off though.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Bunch of superstitious nonsense, regardless of how effective the technique may be at…”
She stopped as her face lit up with a brilliant smile. I turned to see Elliott Stoffel reaching for me, his hands like iron as they closed around my neck. I tried to struggle, but everything was swimming. I felt like I was moving through the darkening waters of some deep, midnight sea, and as his grip tightened, I watched the world fall away.
****
When I awoke, I was at a bus stop ten miles away. I could see and move better, but I knew something was still wrong. I wasn’t sure what until I was a few minutes down the road on the northside bus.
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