She always wore a long black robe that dragged behind her like a lizard's tail when she crept up the stairs into the night. It was the last thing you would see as it trailed around the corner on the landing at the top of the steps with the black aura that would follow her already vanished body upon the turned corner. Her footsteps would quietly fade despite a few creeks in the floor boards while carefully blending into the darkness night after night amongst the shadows and other entities that were probably hiding within it. There was an undoubtable feeling of a bad presence if not many in the house, especially at nighttime. An underlying feeling that you weren't wanted accompanied the presence making you feel slightly threatened.
It was always more bearable downstairs rather than up, so the best thing you could do was to just avoid the 2nd floor at all costs. But she seemed to accept the uncomforting feeling in the dark as her feet paced themselves so elegantly towards her bedroom on that haunted second story every night. It was obvious though that there was really such anticipation in her steps. Like a silently kept excitement in which her legs were secretly begging to run into the disturbing area of where she would sleep. No sane person would want to rest in the unsettling already occupied room, for you would be alone and at your most vulnerable with "it." By embracing the negative energy every night, it was like it allowed some kind of powerful void to mindlessly shift her feet forward though the dark hallway that led her to the thing that was always sitting on the bed. But she never turned on the lights. It was as if the thing on the bed summoned her night after night, and she would go to it without hesitation.
She had many bouts of anger and became increasingly more difficult to communicate with over time. She was easily agitated and would isolate herself the closer you tried to get. I couldn't speak it but I knew what was going on. She was possessed by a demon. But no one would believe it if I spoke it, they had to be there. They had to witness the ominous feeling in that house, the presence in the bedroom. They had to experience what it was like being around her before then after the supernatural phenomenon that was taking place.
I knew what I was seeing. The demon liked to make her rock back and forth in an old wooden rocking chair that sat in the continuously dimly lit living room of the house. Each rock forward and back seemed to be synchronized with an even paced ticking from a pendulum that mocked an eerie metronome from an old wooden clock hanging on the wall. Its rhythm seemed to stand out amongst the cold silence that noticeably filled the house the most of the time. Sometimes she would appear to be asleep but would still be rocking, each breath she took sounded like growls of agony. They made it hard to distinguish her from the demon that seemed to be snoring. Her facial expressions were strange and at times her face seemed to flush pale and contort. Her pupils would dilate so large that her eyes would become all black. They only matched the frightening smile that stretched across her face that was actually concealing a fiery uninvited rage inside. Eventually the thing that was inside of her began to change her brain physically along with her behaviors as a tumor was discovered forming within it.
Sometimes oncoming seizures would occur, some that would make it appear as if she was speaking in other languages or in tongues. There were others where she would go into convulsions foaming at the mouth, and when it was all over she had no recollection of anything. She was even uncapable of being able to recognize familiar faces or names of people for extended periods of time. She wouldn't remember the year or where she was at in the midst of the ongoing confusion. The doctors declared it was due to the tumor, but at this point I knew the demon was using her body as its own now more frequently. It was desperately trying to erase everything that she was to make room for it to completely take over the physical form of its inhabitant.
But then one day the tumor stopped growing. The otherworldly creature that always sat on the bed had disappeared, and the energy around the house seemed to change as the air gradually became lighter. Eventually it was completely lifted and everything was back to normal. Being so abrupt I find myself always asking, "Did the demon leave her? Or is it just lying dormant inside her? Has it been in there all of these years just waiting? Watching?" I ask myself, "Will it ever return?" I can only hope the best for my mother.
