Two months after Jasmine’s funeral, we packed our things and moved to Whitaker Lane. We all needed a change, and the house was the only new beginning we could afford. Call it an escape from recent memory, our decrepit, dark and vacant getaway. Our eye of the storm.
“You’re very fortunate,” the realtor said, though I didn’t agree. “Your parents bought for a steal.”
Mom and dad slept in separate rooms and said I could have the room at the end of the hall. It was a dramatic departure from our studio apartment, with ample space and twenty-foot ceilings that resembled the starless sky. I kept Jasmine’s blanket on the rocker, guarding her scent fiercely from the winds and molds that bid to erase her entirely from the fabric. Each time I passed, I savored her smell, stealing a bit of her fragrance, dreading the day it too would be gone forever.
“You won’t be alone,” the realtor had said, showing us each room. “We made an agreement.”
Of course, they had. A struggling family can’t move from a studio apartment to a countryside manor, not after funeral costs and medical bills. Yet when I asked for details, my parents changed the subject. Explore the house and enjoy the yard, they said. Avoid the basement.
Four bedrooms, three baths, two kitchens, a dining room, a living room, a gallery. The pantry was larger than our old bedroom, and when I entered it, the door closed behind me, fingers rustling my dress.
“It’s the wind,” mom said. Old places tended to crack like dry skin, and they doubted there was any insulation in the walls.
“Don’t be scared,” dad said, his face darkening. “Whatever happens, stay brave.” I heard a demand, not a statement.
So I plucked up what little courage I could find in the garden when I thought I saw green faces peered out of the bushes; and in the bathroom, when the water’s reflection looked like my own, only different.
When my shadow flickered and flailed as if doused in flames, I learned that the strangeness worsened with fear.
But why; and what about the agreement? My parents wouldn’t answer, even after pleading and crying. They begged for me to calm down, don’t show too much emotion. Stop giving them too much.
But my emotions weren’t a faucet that I could shut off. When I stared at the impossibly high bedroom ceiling, something stirred in the corner—more than a shadow or phantom movement dancing in my peripheral. A mass strolled along the ceiling until it stood over me, a boy with white eyes and a ruffle collar.
I couldn’t breathe, yet the blanket over my mouth provided my only shield from the dark thing. The boy didn’t move all night, and neither did I.
When morning broke, the room now empty, I held Jasmine’s blanket to my nose to soothe my nerves, her smell fainter than the day before.
“Just stay strong,” dad said at breakfast. They ate little these past months, growing thinner each day, like Jasmine in the final days, and they spoke even less. Why do parents feel such a need to keep important secrets from us? They hadn’t mentioned Jasmine’s Leukemia until she spent nights at the hospital. Even then, I had to seek answers elsewhere.
That night, I found the courage to ask the source. The hairs on my arms stiff, scratching against the old blanket, I said to the boy, “Why are you standing on my ceiling?”
“This is my room,” he whispered.
“Are you upset that I’m here?”
The boy gave it some thought, then sprinted to the corner on all fours, disappearing without an answer.
The next morning, Jasmine’s scent clung to the blanket, the richest it had smelled in weeks. How soothing the aroma, how it boosted my strength. Stay brave, dad demanded. Perhaps I could.
When I asked the green faces why things were weird around the house, they seemed perplexed. “Things are weird everywhere,” they replied.
To the reflection in the bathwater of my older, twisted self, I asked, “What agreement was made?” But she didn’t know, and said, “That’s between your dad and mine.”
I asked my shadow, “Where are our dads?” and it danced off my socks, toward the basement door, which I had never touched, never stood beside for too long because of the wet breeze that drifted between its cracks.
I had overcome so many fears, so what was a door?
I muscled it open and waded through the wet gusts to find so many lit candles undisturbed in the wind tunnel. My parents knelt in the center of the candles shrouded in their red hoods and secrets. Both cried hysterically, and as I tried to understand why, I watched a towering figure robed in black enter their circle.
The figure pointed at me, and my heart ceased in my chest.
“Don’t be scared!” my dad cried, noticing me.
“They feed on pain. The balance needs to be right for this to work,” mom wailed. “Don’t be afraid!”
But my heart pounded fiercely to the point of pain. I fled the home and walked for hours, debating if I should ever return. What fed on the pain of others, and what would it do if I soured the taste of my parent’s grief?
When I finally returned, knowing I had nowhere else to go, and praying that my parents’ intentions were good, I found two figures standing on my ceiling: a boy and a girl. The ceilings were so high, I couldn’t see the details in either of their faces except for their white eyes.
“Are you upset that I’m here?” I asked them.
“No,” the girl said. The familiarity of her voice made me cry.
Her blanket drifted off the rocker and fell beneath my nose, its powerful and pleasant scents soothing me to sleep.
—
Steven Lombardi earned a bachelor’s degree in screenwriting from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and has published short stories in Planet Magazine, Bartleby Snopes and Blood, Blade, & Thruster Magazine. For over a decade, he has been a copywriter, corporate storyteller and content strategist for world-renowned brands like Microsoft, Capital One, American Museum of Natural History, Blackstone, Blackrock and Heineken.
