Horror Stories

Whistler

Last year, at the beginning of June, my grandparents asked if I could house sit for them while they were away. They’re real active in their old age; since they retired they like to go on these months-long trips around North America in their RV. They offered me some money to boot, and the promise of easy cash isn’t something I often turn down (especially not when I’m unemployed). Plus, getting to spend a couple months in a nice two-story house down by the beach? Everything was lining up to make for a chill, awesome summer.

A couple of days before I was set to take up residence in my grandfolks’ house, my mom came into my room while I was packing. She touched me on the shoulder and said, a little weakly, “You know you can always come home if you change your mind about staying there.”

“I know, mom” I replied, a little puzzled. She hugged me around the waist and put her head to my chest. “I love you, kid” she murmured. I thought she was just being overly emotional about not seeing me much for the next few months.

In retrospect, I thought of a lot of things that turned out to be wrong.

By the time I got to my grandparents’ house they had already started out on their trek around the country. There was a note on the dining room table telling me about where to find grocery stores in their neighborhood, some good local restaurants, cool things happening at the beach in the next few weeks…pretty basic stuff. There was just one weird sentence at the very end: “If you see anything that looks amiss, it’s probably that way for a reason.”

I would never have thought to connect those words to what they ended up pertaining to, but at the time the strangeness of the phrasing didn’t even register with me at all; I was just upset that they forgot to leave their wi-fi password. Then I remembered that they still used DSL and that I’d have to plug my laptop into a cable to be able to connect to the internet. What is it about even the hippest grandparents being juuuuust behind the times enough to always leave at least one inconvenience when you go visit them?

The first night at their place was pretty chill. I watched some TV and strolled around the neighborhood: it’s one of those part beach, part forest kind of places, like someone stapled Brighton Beach into the middle of Montana. It was past dark when I got back and I figured I might go to bed early and try to do some more exploring in the morning (I’m not usually a Nature Calls kind of guy, but when in Rome…). After I locked up and turned out all the lights on the first floor I went up the stairs to do the same for the second floor when I noticed something peculiar: my grandparents had left the light on in the guest room. Easy enough mistake to make, I figured; who doesn’t forget to turn the light out in a room every so often? I flicked it off and went to sleep in their bed across the hall (I was willing to push the idea of sleeping somewhere that had hosted Grandparent Sex out of my head in order to take advantage of their comfy queen-size).

A digression, but an important one: Me and my mom never slept over at our grandparents’ house when I was young. Well, that’s not entirely true; the rare nights that we would sleep over, we would sleep in their RV, me in the bed and her on the couch. I didn’t think much of it at the time, since getting to sleep in a big car is something any little boy would find perfectly agreeable. The novelty wore off as I got older, though, and when I turned 13 I asked my mom if we could maybe just sleep in the guest room the next time we went to visit grandma and grandpa. “Maybe, sure,” I remember her muttering. I hadn’t visited my grandparents since; sometimes they would come to see us for important events like birthdays and graduation and stuff like that, but I hadn’t slept over on their grounds for nearly a decade before I took this house sitting job.

Now, as I said, the first night was perfectly chill. You could even extend that statement to account for the first week. I took in the beauty of nature, vegged out watching YouTube clips on their mediocre DSL connection, even met a couple of girls down on the beach (I didn’t expect them to call me, but sometimes just the fun of flirting can make up for the lack of results, at least for me). The Grandfolks had a big collection of old Flash comics from the ‘50s and ‘60s in their guest room, so sometimes I’d end the night by reading a stack of them, shutting the light out and going to bed. Again, a perfectly normal, unremarkable first week.