Asleep again, she stepped back into her father’s house.
The green room still had its long and short feel, the ceiling never being that high to begin with, and Mac still felt an ominous energy coming from the closet at the other side of the room. Despite knowing there had been nothing in there except old clothes and Christmas decorations for inside the house, she still didn’t trust that this dream was completely harmless. Painted floorboards covered in discount store carpets and two twin beds with aging, hand me down sheets, framed the rest of the room giving it the appearance that two children could have lived here. But the spiders in the room alone had kept Mac sleeping on the couch or in the pink room when it was suitable or bearable to be in.
She made her way from the windowsill, but when Mac tried the door handle to the rest of the house, she found that it was locked; a very old lock that had been missing a key for years had been replaced by something newer or at least something unfamiliar. With a big sigh, Mac climbed out the window and shut it behind her, shuffling back to the edge of the roof and hopping down into the grass as gracefully as possible (the wood pile had been good for getting up, but she could only imagine it falling apart and hurting herself as they tumble on rolling chunks of wood). She looked out into the field, trying to catch a glimpse of the man and his daughter. Still nothing. In the distance, a storm was collecting in the clouds, little cracks of lightning dancing through the heat of the afternoon. She missed the late day storms of her childhood. A check of all the other windows that were accessible left her with similar results: the window might have been open, but the doors inside were locked sturdily and wouldn’t budge. A good amount of climbing and finagling later, Mac resigned herself to a porch swing that creaked with rust at every rock.
As the chill from the rain started to set into the afternoon air and the breeze made Mac’s sweat feel like ice, she decided that breaking the glass was the way to go.
“It’s a dream. Who the fuck cares?” she mused in that moment of lucidity.
Stepping up to the door, hand wrapped in a T-shirt she found in the backseat of the car, Mac steadied herself to break the glass, but a little hit of intuition had her lay her hand on the knob again, finding that it twisted and opened right up. It had been locked before, Mac had felt it, but now the door opened as easily as any summer morning she had spent running in and out of the house to get coffee or a second round of cereal during her breakfasts on the porch. She stepped into the entry way and softly eased the screen door closed; the banging always startled her because the hydraulics never worked on the hinge that was supposed to softly close it itself. With the sun hidden by clouds, the fog on the windows from the rain, and the general windowless-ness of the house, the room felt very dark, the stairwell feeling even darker with the upstairs rooms closed with locked doors.
“Never use stairs in the creepy, dark house, no matter how familiar it is,” she told herself.
Mac had seen enough movies, whether cellar or attic, the stairs in old houses only ever led to some jump-scare or a light flickering before burning out. Floorboards creaking underneath her broken-in boots, she made her way into the kitchen, the room with the greatest amount of light, and sat her things down on top of the quick mosaic kitchen bar that became its own kind of catch all for inside the house. While wondering where these new belongings had come from, she noticed a cat sleeping gently, so gently it looked dead, but opened its eyes to acknowledge Mac when she stepped back from it, a little check and reminder of boundaries.
“You got it.”
The cat let out a softly little push of air through its nose before closing its eyes and returning to its nap.
She made her way through the kitchen, checking the tap and refrigerator to see if the utilities were still active, a brief pause before opening the door of the refrigerator, anticipating a rotten mess. The light clicked on, and when she tried it, the tap sputtered and produced water. Despite spending so much time here, intermittently as it was, there was so much she didn’t know about the place, how it worked and what the parts of the year felt like between her visits. She turned off the tap, and the silence of the house rang her ears. When she was a child, early in the morning while her dad and stepmom were out feeding the animals, the house felt like an emptiness and unsettling that couldn’t be named, even knowing that there was life in it. The cat followed sun beams around all day to make the best napping spots as everyone moved in and out of the house, but the moments of silence left Mac in a world of her own. She felt that same stillness and loneliness, but now it felt almost calming and welcoming.
She heard the groaning of the floor, and a heavy hand grabbed the handle before a door slammed upstairs that shook Mac and the cat back into awareness. With the slamming of the door, all the light in the house had gone out, sun included. She steadied her breath and reached out a hand for the comfort of the cat. A deep growl and hiss came from the darkness, encouraging Mac to recoil her reach. She turned, trying her best to remember the layout of the house at night, trying to divine her path back to the front door. She found and followed the runner from the kitchen to the front door and fumbled for the handle. She yanked the door open to the gesticulating maw of some monster tearing apart the bodies of the man and little girl, her bones smeared across the flaking paint of the porch stairs. The golden light no longer surrounding her, the voice of her mother shrilled out of the child.
“Help me, Mac!”
As Mac sat upright, the vision faded in the early dawn pushing through the window. She was fucking cold, her floor bed being less useful than she thought, so she couldn’t tell if the shiver was a remnant of her dream or the wintery temperatures setting in.
It had been raining when she went to sleep, but Mac had woken up to a soft dusting of snow covering the lawn and street of her mom’s apartment complex. The gentle snore of her grandfather asleep in the living room recliner echoing back the gentle cat sleeping on mosaic tiles in her dream and how little her presence had mattered. The next few days were going to be rough, so Mac tried her best to roll over back to sleep, only to frustratingly get up ten minutes later with aching hips and shoulders.
“Good morning starshine…”
Mac peered out the window, answered by only little snowflakes and rippled clouds obscuring the sun.