Short horror stories

Connie

When I was a teenager, my grandfather (my mom's dad) started suffering from dementia and came to live at our house for a few years. It was a nice time being with him, but it was also sad, watching him decline. The dementia went mostly as expected; strangely misplaced items, general confusion. But there was one really weird thing that my grandfather did that really disturbed me and my mom.

One day he started talking about "Connie." "Where did she go?" he asked. We thought he was talking about my deceased grandmother, but her name was Anne. No one in our family was named Connie, so we figured he was just confused. But he kept asking about Connie. I started wondering if Connie was some woman that had been in his life that none of us had known about.

The weird stuff started happening shortly after. He would randomly have his shoes already tied by seemingly no one (he had long ago lost the motor skills to do it himself) and when asked, he would, of course, name Connie. One day he casually explained there would be a storm coming, and shortly after, one would come. Again, he said Connie told him. There were lots of little things like this. Furniture and doors moving around. Mysterious footsteps at night. And always, he would say it was Connie. My mom and I started to think of Connie as a sort of kind ghost or angel looking after him in his old age.

Until one day, he was talking about Connie, and he grabbed my hand suddenly and looked at me with his eyes wide and his lip trembling. He looked terrified. "Where's Connie?" He asked, as usual. "She's not here," I said. (my usual answer.) "Quick, shut the door! Don't let her find me. Quick, before she gets me again!" A creepy feeling came over me. "Who is Connie?" I asked for the millionth time. But he just put his hands over his face and started to rock back and forth, moaning.

After that we heard less about Connie, but mostly because we were too creeped out to keep asking about the weird noises and the random things he seemed to know. However one night I woke up to the sound of footsteps and scratching. The footsteps were fast, like someone was running around the house. I hesitated to leave my room, scared of what I would find. I saw a figure down the hall, turning around the corner, and I almost stopped there and shut my bedroom door when I heard my grandfather's moaning and realized the figure was him.

"Grandpa?" I asked as I went over to him. He was scratching frantically at something. "What is it?" I touched him on the shoulder and he turned around startled. On the table was a ripped out page from a magazine ad of a woman, and he had scribbled in pen all over her eyes. "Connie's eyes," he said. "her eyes are missing. She's horrible. Why won't she leave me alone?"

My mother and I had no real way of comforting my grandfather through these nightmares and terrors he was experiencing. The doctors said it was normal for him at this stage, and we all sensed that he had little time left. When he died a few months later in the hospital, the nurses told us that he called out Connie's name in his worst times. My mother and I don't really talk about it anymore, and we just figure that it was all a symptom of his dementia. But sometimes when I hear weird sounds in the middle of the night, I think that maybe Connie is still with me, waiting to torment me with big gaping holes where her eyes should be.