Consumption

I don’t know if I should tell you this, but there is something living under the house.

There was never any doubt when the land was purchased; this place was cursed. Stolen, colonized, then stolen again, and sold. We knew this place was built on decades of bad blood, but it was the only home we qualified for. We needed a change.

The house was barely hanging together, built of old, rotted wood, and had clearly weathered many storms. The price to flip was too good to pass up, even with its history, and we were sold on it long before we pulled up onto the winding driveway out in the country. Sheltered away by those giant oak trees and forest overgrowth, it was so secluded, so opposite from anything we had ever had before. There was the silence we desperately longed for. Just us, together, alone, moving into this shell to fill it with our new life.

That day, on the front porch, while you shook the realtor's hand, there was a moment I never told you about. It was gone as quick as it came, but in hindsight, I can practically feel it all over again. I never told you about the gap in the boards on the porch, maybe a quarter of an inch wide. My eyes had wandered off, looking over the old wood, a mix of indecision and excitement built in me. The feeling of possibilities. I don’t know why, but my eyes wandered down, meeting the gaze of another set of brown eyes, staring back at me. I blinked, and they were gone, making me wonder if I was having an episode again. It’s so hard to believe in yourself after struggling with trusting your own mind for so long. So while I know now those eyes were in fact, looking back at me, at the moment, I felt the stab of shame and of terror run through me. The fear that I would slip up again, that the episodes would come back, that our new life would be ruined by my inability to get a grip on reality. I gripped the porch railing and felt the hot, sticky sensation of tears well in the back of my throat. You didn’t notice this of course.

This thing, I don’t know what it is. There’s never been a face or limbs as far as I have seen. But it has eyes and it looks. It watches us. It watched us paint the walls a warm orange color. It watched us as we tried to figure out the stove the night of the kitchen fire when you let the pizza burn. It watched us while we brushed our teeth at night. It watched us the night you told me how you had decided that we would have a baby to bring home to your mother by next Christmas. It watched as I crumpled against the bathroom floor, the same strangling feeling in the back of my throat as I sobbed.

It knew our secrets. It knew the cracks in our foundation while we tried to fill the house with a fabricated version of us.

The day you were working in the shed in the backyard- do you remember it? I stood in the doorway between the foyer and the living room, consumed with the sensation of the breathing beneath my feet. With each breath, the living room floor swelled, higher, then lowered. An exhale and an inhale. It was so faint at first, but as I stood there, unmoving, every single breath lasted an eternity.

You never told me what you saw or what you felt in our home. But I could catch it in your eyes, a glance too long at the walls, your long frown pulling at the edges of your lips. There was a hesitation in your eye when I asked if anything seemed strange lately. Your mouth opened, and I could tell the words choked on your concern for me, and you simply let the question hang in the air. The disappointment that grew in me continued to be watered by your silence. You were so scared of causing an episode, I never even got to know what you were going through.

The screaming began the last week we were here. We both shot up in bed, scanning the darkness of our room for one another and stumbling over boxes unpacked and clothes left on the floor. With shaky hands, I dialed 911, and you scanned the house. My eyes glanced at the floorboards below, that same breathing sensation growing again. My hand trembled, and your eyes met mine, a mix of disbelief and terror.

The police came. They ripped out the floorboards to a solid stone foundation. They called for backup, and within an hour, an entire police station of cars and ambulances filled our driveway, stumping each and every worker that came along. They brought their sledgehammers and began hammering into the stone. The police thought someone was trapped, and the screaming persisted, growing louder and then twisting off into a moan as though something was writhing in pain.

After hours, it stopped, and I could almost hear a needle hit the ground with how silent the entire house became. No officer or EMT dared to speak. The officers were unable to get past anything other than concrete. They didn’t find a single pocket of air in that concrete for someone to have crawled into. Their advice to us was to call back in the morning, and they would have a crew come out to continue the investigation.

They never returned.

We called as instructed, but no officer returned to our house. When the screaming started up again the following night, I awoke in a start and shook you awake. You pulled a pillow over your head and attempted to continue sleeping through the scream. I had never been so angry with you before.

We lived with the wailing for several nights, calling the police station and never hearing back from them. Never so much as seeing an officer pass by the home. You told me that the screaming had stopped that night, and I must be “imagining” it again. My anger grew for you and laid the roots of resentment. Now I know you were scared, trying to protect my mental state, deciding that lying to comfort me was the best medicine.

Your scream was the one to wake me on the last night of our stay in this house.

You sat up, in a cold sweat, mouth opened at our bedroom door. The wailing continued, but it took me a few seconds to begin to realize it had become louder. My sleepy demeanor began to melt, and I watched in horror as the scream passed by our bedroom door, followed by a set of heavy footsteps running down the stairs. My eyes could not make out a silhouette, but it had come for us. The eyes, the screaming, the footsteps. The thing under our house had gotten inside, and there was no escaping it.

I screamed, and the footsteps grew louder as the thing ran around our home, crashing and breaking the furniture downstairs. I begged you not to, but you were already climbing out of bed, caught in the wrapping of our blankets. I cried out. This is when I felt the words of every unspoken conversation begin to bubble inside of me. If you knew what I had seen, if you would listen to me, maybe you would retreat back to our bed. Maybe you would be too paralyzed with fear and come back to me, back to the safety of us. You disappeared into the darkness of the hallway, down the stairs, and I waited with baited breath to hear your footsteps, your movement.

I received silence.

Whatever has become of you, I will never know.

When the rumbling began, I felt my own scream, my own wail match the sound of the thing. The foundation shook, the windows burst open. I felt the whole house shift downward, as if I were being consumed by the thing itself. It had to take all of me and you together in its vengeance. The floorboards broke, and it was then I saw it.

Not human, not animal, not demon, nor beast. But a giant mouth, filled with rows of teeth in an endless spiral down the throat of this thing. It lurched forward, biting more of the house. I was to be consumed.

As I sink deeper now, I am left thinking of you, watching the pieces of our life spiral down around me and into the mouth of this creature. In another life, I wonder if the room I’m watching get destroyed could have been our nursery. Maybe we would have been good parents. It makes me smile just before the teeth close in around me.