The House Across The Lake

Do you remember?

Do you remember how I used to forget the speeches I spent hours practicing with you the night before? My knees would go weak and once I had actually fainted in front of the class. I was so embarrassed I remember. The teacher forced me to ride in a nineties-shrieking wheelchair for the rest of the evening.

Those next few moments were kind of like that. All the fight in me, all of those imagined scenarios as we watched horror movies Friday nights, all those times we would tell each other how stupid the victim of a murder or possession was, we were wrong Will. There at that moment where I should have fought back, perhaps the last moment I could have gained my freedom, I flopped and my knees weakened, my head sagged against his back. I was truly a rag doll forced into submission of the predicament.

I held my breath and perhaps I imagined it, but I felt that maybe he was holding his too.

I wondered if he would drop me there, forcing me inside on my own feet. Instead, without saying a word, he proceeded forward, the concrete crashing clumsily into black and white tiles turned brown by years of weathering. As he stepped forward, the burdened rhythm of his steps seduced me into a sense of lethargy, the effect that long car rides have on children.

More gingerly this time, the tile turned into mildewed wood, splotched with molding carpet. Here and there little spotlights of light pocketed themselves inward. From them, I could see a squirrel scatter across the floor. The floor snapped under my abductor's shoe. The snap transitioned into a groan and thud as he proceeded up an unsound stairwell. Near the top, one of the last steps caved in slightly.

This was a tumultuous moment, for he stopped again, using his one free arm to steady himself on a rocking banister while I flopped from side to side, he balancing both himself and I. After dragging his foot out of the newly created hole he swore slightly and I was surprised at how light the voice was, fragile sounding as if it would break any moment just like that stairwell. Not at all the gruff voice I had imagined, or like what you would mock me with whenever we would venture out into the nearby woods and you would pretend to be the villain of a grand adventure.

An old frame knocked off the wall, sliding down the steps in a cacophonous thumping. It landed so that had I been upright, I still would not have been able to see what was entombed inside the wooden frame. Hat-man grumbled but ignored the fallen frame, already continuing forward before the frame stilled on the ruined floor. We moved slower now, trudging toward what I assumed to be the last room at the end of this accursed hallway.

We entered a room where finally, curiously, he laid me down on something cold and jagged. It was a box spring with a broken bed frame. The darkness of the night hid his face from me and my vision keep blurring in and out from the headache only now starting to ebb away. Quickly he swiveled out of the doorway but before he closed it behind him, I saw him turn to watch me. The hallway was too dark to see his face but as he closed the door, I could see two gleaming orbs, like eyes staring back at me, staring into me, I remembered the eyes of the hat-man at the party, how they left me hollow, stranded in that room packed with drunken dancers. Now I knew, to stare into the eyes of death, is a much colder, darker, place when you are alone. As the door clicked, latching shut behind me, for a very brief moment, I lost all sense of hope.

But like a trance, that feeling broke almost as soon as his footsteps faded into the night air, the sound of the branches clattering against the wooden frame somehow brought me back to the little room. I heard the fluttering wings of bats playing in the open night sky. The cry of a coyote echoed from beneath the window, somewhere near the yard I think.

When the entire family was on vacation a few years ago and I was too sick to go, I spent the last night that everyone would be away reading a horror book not interesting enough to remember. However, that night these same noises that would lull me to sleep otherwise transformed into a sinister menace.

Funny though, even though I expected my reaction of the noises to simulate that night, I found that it didn't frighten me nearly as much now; not compared to his eyes. In fact, those sounds had brought me a sense of comfort. Perhaps it was to hear the evidence of life beyond the four-cornered room and to know that somewhere in this world, happiness still existed. Perhaps, it was because it reminded me of the past, both that sleepless nights alone, as well as all the others; the peaceful ones.

Ha, Perhaps I am becoming overly poetic.

What more is to a sound than a bit of frequency and amplitude.

Remembering the headband, I took it off of my head. Mindlessly thumbing the fake fur of the right ear, I scrutinized my surroundings.

Like a cliche, the full moon on a Halloween night streamed through the window as the disco ball bounced off an aura of fractured lights in the community room. Except, the luminescence of this light gave off a dreamy depression. Instead of masquerading an ordinary room in the splendor of fractionated light, the pale light streams highlighted the broken dissonance of a room abandoned to the elements. The silhouette of a writing desk hid its decrepade stage under the skeletal claw of a branch. The branch poked its way through a glassless window pane like a peeping Tom. The simple chair which would have accompanied the desk, leaned lonely against the corner of the room, missing a back leg, it's resting place becoming the foundation to a village of dust speckled spiderwebs.

A small picture was placed carefully on the desk, far away from the grasp of the tree branch. It was the only thing that seemed well maintained The wood was worn, the printed lines worn into a smooth surface. It was handled often, from here I could not see well what the picture frame hosted, but I could tell it was of people. A family, I deduced from the height discrepancies of the silhouettes, two shorter figures, children, or teenagers, and three taller, perhaps two parents and an older brother or sister. I could not tell for sure, and I really did not know, but for some reason thinking of this brought me a sense of comfort too.

Perhaps because it made me think of you.

The first thing I would discover later on was the reason the hat-man left me alone in that room was to replace the picture frame in the hallway, where there too, the only well-maintained objects was the cluster of mismatching frames, teetering on those tiny nails, wedged into the crumbling plaster.

I discovered this in my first of multiple attempts to escape. As I rushed past the stairwell the next day, the frame had been replaced.

I am forever monitored by those same picture frames, all-encompassing extravagant adventures, toothy smiles, pivotal life moments of the man and what I can only assume is his family.

Will, I am stuck here.

(To be continued)