“Not much for introductions are you?”
“Nah, I do what needs be done and leave the formalities to you white collar folks.”
“Well, if it suits you fine, I’ll…”
Joe pressed white knuckled fingers against his temple. His head was pounding as fast as his racing heart. The smoky room did not help ease the pain, and the unnoticed television show with its almost inaudible voices was only a blaring obnoxious light in the dark room.
Unable to focus on the T.V. screen or the wall or anything around him, he slapped at the end table. Head bent down, he felt along the scratched wood finally grasping a hold of a bottle. Brown liquid sloshed around within the glass as he flipped it up and gulped almost all of it down. He sighed. It burned. But it dulled the pain.
He rubbed his temple again pushing into the skin. A centralized pain formed just above his eye. It grew in intensity until the dull throbbing of the head ache subsided. The relief was short lived. As he stopped rubbing his forehead, the aching began again. He groaned loudly wishing for a quick painless death, which did not come.
Shadows stretched across the wall behind him, their eeriness a reminder of his past unease. Floor boards seemed to creak overhead where the attic, filled with old artifacts from before the First World War, lay desolate and uninhabited; except for the rats, of course. Joe had heard them scampering around plenty of restless nights.
In the midst of the pain, Joe stood up and stumbled to the first wall he could find. He leaned against the smooth structure finding comfort in its stability.
“I’m a mess,” he said through clenched teeth. He inched his way along the wall and limped into the kitchen wincing as he put weight on his sleeping leg. As he grabbed hold of the refrigerator and opened the door, he squinted at the bright light. It took a moment for his pupils to contract before he could inspect the contents within the fridge. As if to speed him on, his stomach began to growl and his hands began to shake. “Come on, where are you.” He looked around for a moment. “There,” he grabbed a bag of bread, some lunch meat, and a bottle of mayonnaise.
Five minutes later, he plopped back down into the chair and began chewing on his rubbery concoction. Mayonnaise oozed onto his fingers as he tried to tear the bread with his teeth. Grabbing the remote, he turned up the volume.
On the screen, a doctor was inspecting a young man’s arm. The young man’s fingers were swollen and very blue veins showed through his skin. Neither person looked overjoyed. “It looks like we might have to cut off your arm,” the doctor was saying, “You are not getting sufficient oxygen to the muscles,” He began pressing around the swollen hand.
Joe could hardly swallow his food and quickly changed the channel. Dora the Explorer popped up on Qubo. The animated girl was running with Boots across an old rickety bridge. Much better Joe thought, flipping the channel again. He did this again and again until the obvious truth came as an epiphany to him. The Television had nothing vaguely interesting to offer at the moment.
Flipping the T.V. off, he sat in silence and gulped down the last bit of sandwich. He rubbed his still-throbbing head. Food hadn’t help. The migraine was still there. The medicine cabinet had been exhausted of its recourses. Cold wet rags had lost their magical powers, and no amount of distraction could stop the pain. Alone in the dark room, listening to the sounds of inconspicuous forces, he wondered how long his head would pound. And of Course, wondering didn’t help either.
How long had it been since he had breathed. How long had it been since he had felt the warmth of a fire, or smelled wet spring grass? How long had it been since his mind had been free to think normal human thoughts, not plagued by paranoid feelings and dark concepts. A very long time, he guessed. It had to be the house. In his rationalizing, he always came back to the house. Old, creepy, filled with dark secrets he was happy not knowing, the house had an evil history to it. People had died there. Some had been young and innocent. Others had not.
The large Victorian-like home had been around since the early eighteen-hundreds. Wheat, cotton, and tobacco fields had once grown around the house where phone lines and stop signs now stood. Slaves by the hundreds had worked hard within those fields. They had been beaten for the smallest offences, and had huddled in their hovels at night only staying alive by the comfort of family and other loved ones.
During the civil war, deserters had hidden away in the house. Afraid for their safety, they had cringed and waited, hoping their captains would not find them. Some had been fatally wounded and had bled to death. Joe looked down at the hard wood floor. Probably died on this very floor, he thought with a shudder.
Not much later, certain noble, revolutionaries had hidden runaway slaves within the tunnels that lay underneath the house. The structure, abandoned and overlooked by the state during that time, had been a perfect hiding place for the poor slaves. Now its old deteriorating walls, warped floor boards, and rain weathered exterior housed a lonely delusional man and his poor excuse for possessions.
Joe chuckled to himself and cringed again as pain shot through his head and into his neck. He was definitely not the most intriguing thing that had happened to the house. But, He thought, that was a good thing. He was very happy with a safe, uneventful life. All he really wanted was his T.V. and enough lunch meat to last him until the turn of the century.
Thoughts of the past running through his head, he leaned back against the chair and imagined himself in thirty years. He would be well ahead of his mid-life crisis by then. The old house would probably still be standing and he would be their, like a loyal dog, clutching onto the old structure waiting for it to toppled over or completely decayed from the elements.
As his imagination ran through different scenarios, his eyes became heavier and heavier. All of the sudden he was aware of a clock ticking somewhere in the house. The sound was somewhat mesmerizing adding lead weights to his eyelids and dulling his already muggy brain. Minutes ticked by and space and time seemed to fade out of his awareness until his head dropped onto his should. His hand went limp and slid off of the arm rest.
On the edge of awareness and leaning dangerously toward total obliviousness, He heard someone or something whisper into his ear. “Hmmm,” Joe mumbled barely processing the almost inaudible sound.
“Come out. Show yourself and face me like a man,” The voice was so soft that Joe passed it off as part of a dream.
“Who…” he mumbled, but couldn’t finish the sentence. As he dropped off the edge of consciousness, a figure walked out of the shadows and leaned against a doorway. He chuckled softly to himself and watched Joe snoring away in the rocking chair. “Sleep tight,” the voice said, hoarse and menacing. “I have a lot in store for you.” He laughed and slipped back into the darkness, his cackle echoing eerily throughout the house.
