The Attic

Chapter 9 - Sanity

Day: Three

Date:  March 1, 2012

Time:  10:55 A.M.

     Aligned perfectly parallel to the floor, the door produced not a single squeak as I took my time opening it, my lungs not letting go of the deep breath I took as the living room revealed itself to me.

                I wasn’t ready for a wrestle with some bad guy, my hand seemingly becoming softer the more I created a solid fist with it. However, it lost its toughness on its own when there was no longer a need for it.

                 Everything was perfectly still as my eyes scanned for any possible signs of an intruder. There was none. The only clue I got was not how there could be an infiltrator inside my house, but how there could be none. My mouth dropped when my eyes found the lifeless television.

                Am I insane?

                Not wanting to be convinced that I needed a psychiatrist, I went closer to where the stylish 62” flat screen grinned menacingly back while felt the blood vacate my face as I turned into something paler than a ghost as traced the cord from the tip of the plug back to what it was connected into, and it went inside my television’s rear.

                It’s not even plugged.

                My double sockets were vacant.

                I let myself sink down the couch for a second to figure out stuff. My mind seemed to be playing tricks on me, and I’ve had enough. I really didn’t want to blame the house but I’ve never been like this when I was still with my dad in our old place. Having squared off our home at a price that seemed reasonable for me to survive on rentals, I burned my eyebrows as an architect at the tip of the pen, earning dollars ‘till I had enough to buy this nice, auctioned house.

                Now I’m having second thoughts if the house was nice.

                No, it was nice alright, just not nice to me.

                There’s something odd about this place, something I only feel when watching horror stuff. I confessed to having covered my eyes with one hand and settled to peeking in between my two fingers whenever I sensed a shocker part in a horror movie. I was sure that the scares and screams stayed inside the discs I bought for Saturday nights, but the things that were happening to me occurred only when those discs rotated inside my player, and I only saw the horror on a quadrilateral screen. Well, there were times when my hair stood, but that was it. Absolutely no hands-on experience on weird stuff until now.

                There was a fine line drawn between covering one’s eyes to skip horror scenes and hearing footsteps dragging chains when you’re completely alone in the house.

                I wanted to clear my head.

                I was only on my third day on this seemingly normal house when I looked at it from the outside, but it’s different whenever I’m in it.  Today didn’t seem to be the right day to work on the design after all. Noticing that everything went south when Camille left this morning, I decided that I wasn’t at my best today, and that’s not good while doing architect stuff. Making designs in my point of view required a healthy mental state – no disruptions while running lines and curves in the middle of points, no matter how distant. A second of losing focus could cost me the attempt, thus, rendering every previous effort useless. A blot meant I needed to start over, and blots happened only when my mind drifted off somewhere.