I had a terrifying nightmare the other night. I was riding my motorcycle on a mountain road through New York’s Catskills heading toward the city, and felt the subtle influences of an unseen presence along beside me, trying to make me crash. My destination was a very old Victorian style apartment and office building with Gothic influences such as the sharply pointed roofs, but not the symmetry of a Gothic building. At the front door, it attacked again, this time clasping me by the right foot and lifting me above the ground several feet, but then setting me back down as if its strength faded, as did my awareness that it happened. There was some kind of fog over my mind and these events were only impressed upon my unconscious, as I could not remember them directly.
The tenants of the building were expecting me, as I was hired to do some work for their company. They gave me a tour, which included a number of inhabited portions in addition to offices and public spaces, but also included a spacious, but very unkempt attic space, accessible only through a caved-in wall in an abandoned stairwell. The area was very dirty, with broken mirrors and other rubbish, but boasted a grand view from a large window several stories above the ground. This space had not been occupied in well over a hundred years, except by a prevailing coldness that disturbed the mind in subtle ways. I spoke to the owner about utilizing the space as an apartment, which I could fix up in exchange for a favorable lease.
I was answered with something to do with fire codes and its singular entryway, which gave the impractical impression that the architect had never intended for it to be found, but I didn’t wholly give up on the idea. Instead, I temporarily set up in a room in the master suite occupied by the owner’s family. The days that followed were as dreary as the overcast skies and the ambiance within the apartment, notwithstanding the brightly lit modern decor that contrasted the unused loft, which captivated my interest. I ventured alone back to that stairwell and into the space to find it occupied by a makeshift office composed of a table and file cabinet, which now stood as the headquarters of the clothing business owned and run by the lady of the house, and a rack of clothes, which were starkly out of place in that dusty room. I was surprised by the odd choice to use the space as an office without conducting renovations to plaster the bare lathe or at least sweep up the filth the blanketed the floor, but was also disheartened that someone else was now occupying the space that I had set my eye on for myself. I asked about it and she was somewhat dismissive, indicating that her son had insisted. He was a built man of about 35, and had some influence within the family, though he did not deal directly with the business.
The two of them exhibited a strange sudden interest in that loft in their behavior and mannerisms, but would not speak of it openly. In fact, their behavior generally had taken a turn for the strange, as if they weren’t quite thinking right and though it was none of my business, I mentioned it to a few other people there, one of whom brought my attention to an earlier remark that I had forgotten, about there having taken place some kind of tragedy there. I was surprised and not yet sure why I had learned and immediately dismissed that important fact. It seemed something that would have made an impression. I pressed for more details and merely got that a murder had taken place there and that the house had been somewhat famous in the past and had been featured in a film.
I retreated back to my room, somewhat forgetting again about the murder and house history and focusing instead on trying to comprehend the apparent haze that seemed to have settled over my mind in the past days. In fact, I couldn't really remember what had happened in previous days at all, nor much of what had led up to my arrival. I had pushed many things from the foreground of my thoughts that were important to me and instead had been on some kind of autopilot, settling into a strange old spacious building in a dark part of the city, and disregarding the parts of my life that existed elsewhere. It was while contemplating this that I drifted to sleep.
When next I was aware, I was lying on a couch, but I was so oppressively tired that I had difficulty opening my eyes. I was now in L. A.. I had not time warped there; I had traveled there, but could not recollect the journey or leaving New York. My former girlfriend, Kristalynn was waking in the bedroom down the hall and I could hear her movements, and then her going into the bathroom and closing the door.
I must have left New York because I was lonely and wanted some companionship. I couldn’t remember details of the night before, and wondered why we were not waking up in the same bed, and then recalled that I had been too tired and chose to stay on the couch. I had just needed a friend and wanted to be there with her, but as she finished in the bathroom and went back to her room without coming to check on me, I wondered if she remembered that I was there. I wanted to get up or call to her to come, but I was still too tired and could do neither. I flooded over with feelings of loneliness and dysphoria, with a touch of alarm that I was so weak and tired. She didn’t know that I was there and she would never know that I was there.
My consciousness faded back to sleep without the comfort that I sought and I awoke again in my room in New York, in the spacious apartment of my strange hosts and in the unseen gloom of that old building. It had all been a dream, Kristalynn, L. A.. It was then that I understood the significance of the dream. I could now name the mounting feelings that I had not been previously aware of, feelings of darkness, and I now associated them with the building. My mind had created the dream seeking escape from this place, a breathe of something other than its air, which was stale with something evil. Perhaps it was the lingering of old ghosts.
The revelation of something unnatural moved me deeply. It was then that I turned to the office computer in the loft to find answers. I looked in vain for some time, knowing that I had seen the building before. I finally saw some pictures of it that I recognized from two very famous films, which used its haunting and impressive image as scenery. This led me to old newspapers on microfiche. At last I came across clippings of articles from a century before that illuminated its dismal past.
I saw pictures of children on the screen, who had fallen prey to a serial killer in that very loft. It was as if they had new life in my psyche as I could almost picture the ghastly deeds that had taken place there. The lurid story enjoyed a significant run in the papers of the time. As this realization sank in, I suddenly comprehended the malignancy of the place. The fog lifted from my mind and I recalled being attacked on the roadway, the unseen being that lifted me off the ground by my foot, and the way the building’s occupants seem under the influence and direction of something malicious outside of their being. I knew the place was possessed.
I turned back into the main quarters, anger mounting over being manipulated, directing that fury toward both the unseen presence and the building itself. I began to knock things over and jumped up on the table and leaped over to the large cutting block in the kitchen. I didn’t care if the tenants saw me, or evil spirits haunting the place reviled me. In the course of my fit of temper, the landlady’s son emerged from a hallway, inflamed over my disrespect toward his house. At that moment I saw and spoke directly toward the demon inside him, who knowing that he had been made, revealed himself.
I challenged the demon, my fear being swallowed by my ire, and we lunged at each other, my hands closing around his throat. His face then morphed into a demonic shape, his eyes bulging wide and black, and his mouth expanding in a distorted, two-dimensional jack o’lantern smile. He was in wicked delight at the confrontation, but I was no longer afraid, sensing that his greatest power over me lie in the obscurity of my mind and in his subtle control, but with the veil pulled back, I was confronted by a mere man and I was determined to free myself of him.
It was here that I awoke.
