39
Jon could feel the presence of someone standing next to his bed long before he actually opened his eyes. When he did, he saw the same three children who had been watching him from the stairs a few weeks earlier. The one in the middle was a young girl. She appeared to be eight, maybe ten years old. She was wearing a white dress and had an enormous white bow in her hair. She was much too young to have a child of her own, but she was holding an infant in her arms.
Her face reflected a sense of desperation. Making herself known to him had to be a plea for help. The other two were young boys at least half her age. They appeared to be brothers, maybe even twins. They were dressed in dirty, ragged bib overalls. Dirt distorted their tiny young faces in the darkness.
As Jon sat up in bed, they became more translucent and distorted than they had appeared when he first awoke.
As the children began to fade, a taller, more solid presence took form directly behind them. Jon strained his eyes to make out the features of this new spirit. He was positive that it was not Edith; he had seen her enough to know her immediately.
This was an older woman, one he had never seen before. As she stood there before him, she wrapped her arms protectively around the children and gathered them closer.
As Jon lay there watching the small group, he was overcome by the scent of baking bread and cookies. These were the same odors that Carlie insisted she had smelled the first time they toured the house. Jon had never smelled them before, and he wasn’t positive that he was actually smelling them now. If this was Carlie’s aunt, it made sense that she would present herself to him with something comforting and familiar. Unfortunately, he had never met her or Carlie’s Uncle William; there was no way he could be sure who was standing in front of him.
Minutes passed and the apparitions never wavered.
Jon was completely awestruck by the experience. He couldn’t think of anything to say, even if he had wanted to. Their very presence spoke volumes. They were trapped here; it was exactly as Edith had told him.
A creaking sound started from the far end of the room, catching Jon’s attention.
Once his eyes adjusted completely to the dark, he could see the bedroom door moving slightly. With the windows closed, there was no draft to move it, yet the door continued to rattle in its frame.
Looking up at the children and the old woman, Jon saw that the disturbance had drawn their attention as well.
The door shook more violently this time, and the handle began to rattle.
Looking over at Carlie, he couldn’t believe that she was still asleep.
A moment later, the door exploded open. As the door slammed against the wall, the stench of death and decay was overpowering—nauseating; Jon gagged and retched.
A shadow rushed into the room, a shadow much darker and denser than the darkness of the room. It hovered silently, directly above the edge of Jon and Carlie’s bed. The shadow began circling overhead, faster and faster; the wind it created whipped paper and small objects violently around the room. Knickknacks crashed against the walls, and Carlie’s perfume bottles hit the floor, spilling their contents onto the rug.
Carlie was now sitting straight up in bed. She had a death grip on Jon’s right arm; her fingernails bit deep into his soft flesh.
The small group of children protected by the old woman were staring at the apparition swirling in ever-increasing speed around the ceiling. As Jon and Carlie stared on in horror, the old woman began to scream. The sound was hollow at first, as if echoing from the far end of a tunnel. In seconds, it was deafening. Jon looked over and discovered that Carlie was the one screaming. He shifted his attention back to where Carlie was staring. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The old woman was standing in flames to her waist. An instant later, the flames had completely engulfed her. As she struggled to escape, an invisible force held her in place.
As the old woman screamed in agony, Carlie and Jon watched helplessly. Her clothing quickly turned to smoldering clumps of sparks and ash dropping from her body and swirling into the air. The flames—now out of control—consumed her vulnerable and unprotected flesh. As she writhed and undulated under the control of the flames and their voracious need to feed, the skin on her face melted away, exposing white bone wrapped in pieces of blackened muscle and tissue.
The once comforting aroma of baking bread and cookies gave way to the sweet, pungent odor of burning flesh.
Jon’s eyes watered and his lungs burned. Carlie was hanging over the side of the bed. As she tried to sit up, she inhaled another lungful of smoke, causing her to cough violently and throw up. Her eyes were watering and her nose was running in rivulets over the edge of her upper lip. She couldn’t see a thing in the smoke-filled room.
In a last-ditch effort to survive, Jon pushed Carlie off the bed and onto the floor. Following closely behind her, he urged her forward to the door. When she couldn’t do it on her own, he crawled over the top of her and dragged her by the arm through the doorway and into the hall. Slamming the bedroom door behind him, he lifted Carlie to her feet and half-carried her to the stairs, where they took two and three steps at a time until they reached the lower landing.
Racing out the front door, they both dropped to their hands and knees on the porch, gasping in mouthfuls of clean, fresh air. Hacking and coughing up lumps of phlegm dislodged by the smoke, they spit them out into slippery puddles between their hands.
Jon was the first on his feet. He moved to the yard and inspected the second floor of the house. Expecting to see flames and smoke pouring out their bedroom window, he was shocked to see that there weren’t any. In fact, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
Carlie, sitting on the bottom step with her head between her hands, was shaking violently; she was dressed only in her pajama top. Goose bumps covered both her arms and legs. Her teeth chattered as Jon lifted her to her feet. Wrapping his arm around her, he moved her back toward the house, where it would be warm.
Only after she was positive that there was no cloud of thick black smoke or flames devouring the ceiling above her head did Carlie cross the threshold into the living room.
Jon wrapped Carlie in a blanket and then ventured upstairs alone to their bedroom. Tentatively, he touched the door. It was cool to the touch. Then he placed his hand on the brass door handle. It was also cool. Turning the handle, he pushed the door open slowly. The floor was littered with paper and small objects, and the room reeked of perfume, but there were no flames or smoke, or even a telltale trace that there had been.
Jon knew that what he and Carlie had experienced was a warning. A warning of what, he had no idea, but it wasn’t good—he was positive of that.