Fear

Trista asked for scary stories for the trial run of the Scheherazade Project.

My grandparents' house in LaMarque was haunted. The downstairs portion of the house was innocuous. The way the house was laid out, when you walked in the front door, there was a room to the left, a room to the right, and a staircase right in the middle. If you walked up the stairs, you found a landing with a bathroom directly in front of you, and a bedroom to the left and a bedroom to the right. The bedroom to the right (as you faced the bathroom) was mostly innocuous. The bedroom to the left was bad. The closets in both of those bedrooms wrapped around, so that you could walk into the closet of one room and crawl through to the closet of the other room. The closets were horrible.

Whatever was in there did not like girls. It didn't matter if they were five months, five years, or fifty years old. It did not like girls. I remember one night when my brother and sister and I were visiting my grandparents. One of my cousins--I'll call him 007 1/2--, who was a little younger than my brother, was living with my grandparents. The four of us kids were sleeping in the bad room. My sister and I kept feeling that malevolence pushing at us, and it was really, really unpleasant. The guys thought we were pulling their legs, but it was real.

Later on, after my grandmother had died, my parents were divorced, and I had grown up, my mother moved in with my grandfather. I later moved to LaMarque, and moved in with them for several months, until I got an apartment with a friend. The bad thing was still there. And, natch, that was the room I slept in. I learned to live with the thing that was there, but never did feel completely at ease in the room.

One night I got the insane idea to write a short story for the "Twilight Zone" magazine. It was an extremely unoriginal plot with a doll who came to life when no one was around. Despite the banal idea, it was actually a pretty good story. I got a few pages into it before I was through writing for the night. I put the notebook down and went to bed and tried in vain to go to sleep.

I could not sleep for anything. The malevolence of the thing in the room combined with the intensely evil story I had started writing just made the room unbearable. I had to get up, rip the story to shreds and throw it away. There was no chance I was going to be able to sleep in the bedroom that night, so I took a pillow downstairs and crashed on the couch.

I don't remember when we learned what the thing in the room was. A neighbor, who had lived there for years and years, told us that the people who owned the house before my grandparents bought it had a son who was mentally ill. His mother was apparently (reading between the lines of the neighbor's story) pretty abusive, and locked him into the room quite a bit. My personal guess is that she went a step further, and locked him into that closet area.

No wonder the poor guy hated women.

As I read back over this, it sounds pathetic and lame. Trust me--it wasn't. If the thing could have been made corporeal, it would have been hot oozing black tar bubbling with hate, and would have coated every surface in the room. It was real. And it was frightening.