Singed Synapses and Deranged Dendrites

Spooked (#worried)

Beverly Higgins considered herself many things, but irrational was not one of them. As a middle aged professional, she commanded respect from her peers. She maintained a rigorous schedule and demanded punctuality and high performance from others. Similarly at home, her husband and teenage son regarded her as captain of the ship. Everything had its place at home. She knew where every object in her tidy home was and she liked it that way.

Efficiency and multi-tasking were her middle name and so it was no surprise that on a warm spring day while working from home she went down to the basement between zoom meetings to run a load of laundry.

The basement had never been finished. It was somewhat dark with a bare concrete floor and it contained many neatly organized racks. They contained bins of off season clothes, camping and sporting equipment, yard tools and her son's childhood toys. 

As Beverly opened the washer door an eerie mechanical laugh arose from the far corner of the basement. Beverly paid it no heed. She knew what it was. It was an old Thomas the Train, part of a rather large train set that had actually belonged to the neighbor boy but her son had played with it as well. As Beverly had plenty of room in her basement and her neighbor did not, she had offered to store it once both boys had outgrown the toy.

How the batteries still worked, she did not know. It had always had a rather creepy laugh and had always laughed at odd times of the day or night once put away in its bin. She hadn't heard it in years, but here it was as irritating and distinct as ever. 

'I must have shifted the box when I put away the sleeping bags last weekend,' she thought to herself. She started the wash and went back upstairs. 

But when she came back an hour later to put the load in the drier, Thomas again gave his spooky laugh.

A small corner of Beverly's mind panicked as it had when she had laid awake terrified at a sleepover in the third grade having just watched Poltergeist. It had been the first and would be the only horror movie she would ever watch in its entirety. Snippets of Chucky also flashed across her mind having watched parts of that movie with a boyfriend in college. 

'Nonsense,' Beverly told herself. 'You are a grown woman. You have faced the real horrors of the world. You know that life is terrifying enough that you don't need to be scared by your imagination.'

Thomas laughed again.

She repeated these things to herself as she marched over to her neighbor's house and to her relief found him also working from home. 

"I'd like to return the trainset to you, if you don't mind," she said. Her neighbor had forgotten they were there and was rather happy that the lovely wood set hadn't been lost.

"It's just one thing," said Beverly. "I'd take the old batteries out of some of the train cars. They are probably corroded by now."