Chapter 51: Cursed
When I was about 8-9, we lived in a house that my father built for us in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. My parents owned a small business that often brought clients to our remote little homestead, and over the years, we met some rather odd people. One such person was a strange man that gave me the heebeejeebees as soon as I saw him. He arrived at our home in a black car with tinted windows, wearing all black, with a black hat and dark sunglasses. His demeanor was very strange and he was very interested in our black Persian cat named Mercedes.
Nevertheless, he left after his consultation with my parents, but later at dinner, everyone admitted that he set them on edge. That night, Mercedes came down very ill. A few days later, after an illness the local vet couldn't diagnose that included the cat vomiting up gobs of what appeared to be black tar, Mercedes died. In her final moments, she would swat and hiss at something in the air. I'll never forget the chill I got when she took her last breath.
After this, many strange things began happening around our home. We'd find footprints in the show that started and stopped out of nowhere. Noises in the middle of the night, the wallpaper would be torn halfway off the walls. My mother, who has always been somewhat of a sensitive person, claimed to start seeing demonic creatures around the house and became rather withdrawn.
I had asthma, but had been a long while without an attack. Soon after all of this began happening, I started having episodes again. I was very sick one night, so I slept on the floor next to my mother's side of the bed in my parents' bedroom. Under their bed and around their were a bunch of boxes: family photos, wrapping paper, etc., things that we'd been meaning to store elsewhere.
In the middle of the night, I had a particularly bad asthma attack. I heard my mother wake up screaming "GET AWAY FROM HER!" and trying to get to me. Every box from under the bed and around the room had been stacked between where I lay on the floor and my mother's side of the bed, preventing her from getting to me. She finally reached me and gave me my inhaler, and she cried all night.
She never told me what she saw that night, but strange things continued to happen for several more months. We had the house blessed and tried everything we could. Eventually, the activity started to slow. My brother and his family live in the house now, and they hear unexplainable sounds every so often, but nothing like what happened that winter. I grew up to be quite a skeptic, but I still can't explain what happened that year. I just tell myself it was all in our heads.
