Tim Meyer - The Switch House

“I know the feeling.”

“What do we do?”

Angela shrugged. “I talked to the realtor earlier.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. No bites. Not so much as an inquiry. She wants to drop the price down another ten large.”

“Well, that just sucks.”

“I can’t keep living here, Terry.”

“I know, babe.”

“This house. This town.”

Terry sat down next to her and rubbed her shoulder. She leaned her head on his arm. “I grew up in Red River,” he said. “It’s the only place I’ve ever known.”

“There are other towns,” she told him, wrapping her arms around his midsection. “I can’t live in this one anymore. It’s tainted. For the last eight months, a dark cloud’s been floating over Red River and it hasn’t left. The air tastes funny and always smells like smoke. I’m suffocating here.”

He stroked her hair, pushing the golden clumps behind her ear. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Will we?”

“Of course.” He kissed the top of her head. “We always do.”

The clock on the nightstand read 3:03 a.m. when she kicked the covers off her body and got up to pee. She hustled to the bathroom, her bladder feeling like it was on the cusp of bursting. In fear of it emptying involuntarily, she elected to skip turning on the lights. Squatting on the toilet seat, she urinated in the dark. The sound of her piss hitting the water drowned out the drone of the air conditioning unit. As she relieved herself, she stared ahead at the bathtub, the site of many fond memories.

Ma-me.

Bubble baths.

Ma-me.

Bubble fights.

Ma-me.

A small ocean infested with rubber duckies and Power Rangers.

She forced herself to look away. Her eyes settled on the wall, immediately drawn to a peculiar white dot in the center of nearly-absolute darkness.

What the hell?

She wiped herself dry, yanked up her pajama bottoms, shut the toilet lid, flushed, and then crept across the bathroom to the far wall, her eyes glued to the small pinprick of light showing through.

Close enough, she knelt down before it.

Sure enough, she was face-to-face with a small hole in the wall, no bigger than a popcorn kernel, and it was letting in a considerable amount of light, heavenly white, the kind of brightness that would blind if shone directly into the pupil. Confused, Angela stood up and looked out the window, into the backyard. She peered down and saw nothing but shadows and the pale glow of the moon and the stars. Not enough light to produce the brightness she was seeing through the hole.

She shuddered when she glimpsed the overturned soil in the backyard. Terry had never bothered to put seed down after the police had combed it, leaving the whole area to look like a long row of prepped graves sans caskets. In some vague way, the backyard was indeed a burial site.

An empty one.

Angela bent down on one knee and stared at the small hole. She debated whether to look into it or not. Some feathery sensation swept across her neck, lacing her bones with chills. The hairs on her arms rose, becoming so erect her flesh hurt. She swallowed an invisible ball lodged in her throat. She didn’t know why, but she felt she should wake Terry, that he should be here to witness this tiny phenomenon along with her. She looked over her shoulder, back toward the bedroom, contemplating whether to disturb her sleeping husband. Terry hated being roused for any reason, especially when something wasn’t an emergency. He valued his sleep the same way bears did, dealing with intrusions just as angrily.

No, she wouldn’t wake him. She turned back to the hole and closed one eye, putting the open one in front of the porthole.

(open water, choppy and endless, stretching beyond the fog-filled horizon. A small wooden ship she’s seen in movies about pirates, complete with black sails and a crew of grimy bandits, twenty figures in all. They’re distant. They’re shouting. Barking commands at each other. She can’t tell what they’re saying, she’s too far. They scurry around the deck, working, fighting, yelling. Suddenly, the water around the boat bubbles and churns. Something rises from below. Tentacles, eight total, larger than the ship in scale, ascend the misty-gray atmosphere, climbing the air well above the ship’s mast. The men on the deck scatter in a panic. Some hurl themselves overboard, screaming. Others work double-quick to carry out their captain’s demands. Both acts prove futile as the tentacles come crashing down, smashing the ship to splinters. As the boat lay in ruin, Angela spots something else, just beyond the destruction: a lone figure, dark, shadowed, and watching. Not the scene. But her. The unknown shape spies her from a distance, floating above the flotsam with its arms folded across its chest, examining, waiting, ready for)

She pulled herself back, breathless. Her chest heaved and she placed her palm over her heart as if to stop it from leaping out of her chest. Another frosty, feathery something ran down her spine, the wintry sensation twisting and curling as it went. Her breath caught in her throat as she stepped away from the hole, the glimpse into her own private dreamworld.

What did I just see? She followed up her question with a more important one: Was it real?

She crossed the threshold and closed the bathroom door out of precaution. Surely whatever was behind the wall, the decimated pirate ship and the gargantuan sea beast, could not come through, but the situation disturbed her so much she couldn’t help but think anything was possible.

She tiptoed across the carpet, over to her side of the bed, climbed in and pulled the covers up over her head. Sleep was far from her thoughts. Staring into the darkness for the next four hours, until Terry’s alarm went off, Angela cried and questioned her own sanity.

On his knees, Terry craned his neck toward her. “You saw what now?”

“I told you. There was a tiny ship with little men on it.”

Terry’s eyes widened with alarm.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

He returned his eye to the hole. “I see pink insulation. It’s an outside wall, love. Whatever created the hole didn’t go through the sheathing.”

“I know that now . I’m talking about what I saw last night.”

“Uh-huh.” Terry frowned. “And you saw… tentacles?”

Angela chewed on her lower lip and looked elsewhere. “Yes.”

“I see. Uh, babe…”

“Don’t.”

“No, I believe you.”

Angela eyed her husband warily. “You do?”

“Of course. I mean, I don’t think you actually saw what you think you saw, but it’s possible you had a waking nightmare of some sort.”

“A waking nightmare?”

“Yeah, you know. Like you were awake but still dreaming. That’s a thing…” He said this last part as if trying to convince himself it was true. “Look, I’m no doctor. But I think the stress of coming back here has put your mind in a frenzy. Hell, last night, I had some strange dreams myself.”

“Oh really?”

“Yep.”

“What were they of?”

Terry arched his brow and looked up as if the images in his brain were projected on the ceiling. “I don’t remember exactly. But I do remember them being strange.” He sighed and reached out to grab her hand. She let him. He squeezed gently and, for the moment, she felt safe and secure, the fear for her own sanity had all but subsided. “We’ll get through this. We will. We just need a little more time. Once the checks from the show start rolling in, we’ll start getting serious about this house hunting thing. We can move anywhere you like.”