Don't Blink!

Twist and Turns

After weeks of my Grandma pestering me to clean my room, I already overcame the laziness to do it. But I didn't know what evil I would unleash that day when the things in my room started turning.

I moved in with my grandparents already expecting a pretty boring life. Their house was built in the 1800s and was made almost entirely of wood. One can only imagine how unbearable the smell of decaying furniture wafts through inside it. The smell of old people, dead people, funerals, etc. The floor creaks when I step on it and the doors laugh like a demon when I close it so I can't sneak out like I want to.

Surprisingly, the house's still standing today, considering most of the rooms had holes and cobwebs in them. It had always creeped me out since I was a kid and praying every night didn't reassure me.

Every single night, my grandpa would light a candle, and my grandma, holding a rosary, would pray in a language I didn't know. She's mostly whispering so I wouldn't even understand it if I knew. The vigil usually took about twenty to thirty minutes depending on how fast they prayed. Nonetheless, it always bored me.

"It'll protect you from evil spirits," my Grandma said. She gave me a wooden cross to nail it on my wall. One of the things she kept nagging me about. I didn't believe in it as much as I didn't believe my nails would die if I cut it at night.

Grandma and Grandpa ordered a lot of things. "Turn off the lights to save electricity." So it's always dark in the house. "Always have spare water." So I had to fetch pails of water every day.

With only two of them in the house, I became their housekeeper. "I'm already old so you need to learn to take care of the house," My grandpa would say. "Do this and do that!"

I got sick and tired of them. Grandpa tried to teach me the responses in the vigil but my tongue just couldn't get the hang of it. One day, I deliberately came home late to miss the vigil. They didn't say anything but I know they were disappointed. I didn't care, so altogether, I came home late every night to also miss dinner that always tasted like boiled spinach.

I thought I could get away with it. But then, misfortunes followed.

The rain was pouring strong when I came home one night. I didn't have an umbrella with me so most of my things got wet. It started with those wet papers.

I placed them down in rows and columns to dry on my table. Then I just looked away for a second and one of the papers misaligned on its row. I thought it was blown by the wind but my ceiling fan was not on yet.

I didn't even think it's weird as I fixed it back in place. I left them there, only to find out they moved again when I was about to close the door. All of them were turned on the same angle.

There's no air flowing inside and I'm certain that's not how I arranged them. I watched for a minute to see if they would move again. But they didn't.

I figured that it must be my imagination. But I was wrong.

It was my chair, next it was my pillow. Always different from how it was before. It's easy to say that maybe I left it like that. Fair enough. But when the things that are fixed in place started moving, my table, for example, is on another level.

I got alarmed one night when I came home to find out that my bed was turned halfway.

I never told my grandparents about it. Just every night when I came home in time after the vigil, I'd find out something was turned from its place.

I begin to think about putting that cross on my wall and, finally, cleaning my room.

I started dusting the windows and moving my bed. And there I saw the writings engraved on the wall behind it.

They were more like tattooed except for one symbol. It looked like a wasp's nest and it resembled a slightly slanted "N" — but one of its ends was chipped. I scratched it with my finger and it all melted down like sand.

I fetched the broom and dustpan to clean it. But when I came back, all the symbols on the wall were gone.

At that moment, I decided I should hurry up setting the cross on my wall because some darkness was welling up over the room.

I climbed on a chair and positioned the cross. Then I pointed the nail on the heart of the cross and hammered it down. A blanket of sweat covered my forehead and when I came down the chair I was petrified. As if all the hair on my body had fallen and withered.

When I saw it with my very own eyes, how the cross started turning upside down.

I strutted backward, and all the things in my room started turning, no, spiraling, spinning, twisting.

I called my grandparents downstairs. They were sitting at the dining table like they always did. Except...except their necks were twisted at an angle that shouldn't be possible.

Their expression was horrid and their purple-bruised necks were squeezed like a wet cloth by two merciless hands. Their faces were grotesquely twisted and their eyes had no pupils. I held my hand over my mouth when my grandmother spoke in a language I still don't understand. What I know is that they were not my grandparents anymore.

It started getting dark inside the house. Gravity seemed to disappear as I lost my grasp of what's up and down. All I could feel was the warm trickle of urine between my legs and the field of my periphery — turning away slowly.