Chapter 1 – Chap 1

My grandmother's house has always frightened me. Not her, just her house. At night, listening to the coyotes howling in the distance, I would choose to stay under the covers until my bladder stung with pain rather than risking stepping a single foot onto the carpet and being whisked away into the darkness by the beasts I imagined waiting for me under the bed. My grandmother would let me know her dogs would keep the wild beasts outside away, that there was nothing to fear because God would keep me safe, and that I could sleep in her room with her, listening to her excellent stories she always told, putting on different accents for every character, and sending my mind into a world of imagination. In fact, I did believe the dogs would keep the monsters away and I did believe I was safe with her- in her room. It was just something about the staircase outside of her door. The staircase that led to the attic and the room across from it. I wouldn’t look at it. Wouldn’t step too close. Wouldn’t be caught dead going up the steps. Something about the darkness at the top made my hair stand on end and my core shake with frozen fear. There was nothing keeping me from it but intuition, but it was enough for me.

When I got older, I realized it wasn’t cool to sleep in your grandmother’s bed. Apparently, no one else had ever done that. In fact, at school, no one even liked their grandparents. They’d complain their parents were making them go for the weekend and seethe with irritation, claiming the old smelling houses were the most boring homes to have ever existed. I pretended to agree. In reality, my grandmother had been letting me watch “The Witches” late at night and eat brownies. Recently, she showed me “Predator” which I personally did not find boring at all. But the problem still remained, it wasn’t cool to sleep in Grandma’s bed. And what were my options? Her bed or the guest room, upstairs, across from the attic.

“I’ll sleep upstairs.” I announced upon entering her house with my Harry Potter tote bag. I stood tall and confidently, acting like I had made the decision easily and I hadn’t spent days gathering up the courage to even entertain the idea. My mother and grandmother each shrugged with an eyebrow cocked, most likely unsure why I had even made the proclamation. It wasn’t a big deal to them. I nodded and left them to talk in the kitchen. I hugged my bag to my chest, creeping closer to the staircase. Neither of the women behind me seemed to notice my hesitation. I breathed in, put my head down towards my feet, and sped up the stairs before I could stop myself. I swung the guest door open and flipped the light switch.

Oh.

It was just a room. Well, she had put literally every single doll she or anyone she knew had ever owned in there, so there were thousands of eyes staring at the bed, but I wasn’t afraid of dolls, so that part was fine. There were various toys I had remembered playing with as a younger girl spread throughout the dolls, a tiny antenna TV set in a corner, and a dresser to the right of the bed against the wall that was shared with the attic.

Psh. This was easy. I puffed my chest out, proving to myself how brave I was by circling the room with some strut in my step, feeling absolutely no fear. I was older, and that’s just what happened when you got older. All the childish fears melted away. I headed back downstairs casually, ate some, watched some movies with my grandma, and said goodnight.

I found myself staring at the staircase again. It was just… so dark up there. It was darker than anything I’d ever seen, as if some creature pulled in all of the sources of light to make sure it was entirely concealed in blackness, waiting for a poor soul to step inside. Well. That poor soul was me. I couldn’t back out now. My grandma would think I was a wimp. There was nothing worse than your own grandma thinking you’re a wimp. So, I looked down at my feet and rushed up, flinging the door open at the top and closing it fast behind me.

Whew. Made it. The room was just as normal as it had been before. What was the matter with me? I got myself ready and went to bed. Lying there, on the brink of sleep, I heard something. I was fully awake, then, listening. Oh god, it was that awful howling. Somehow, from upstairs, it sounded closer than ever before. AWOOOOOOOOO! Awooooooo! I pulled the covers over my head, shaking with terror. How did it sound so close?? It sounded like they were directly underneath the window, howling up at me, having smelt my fear from the woods. Then I heard my grandma’s dogs growling, snarling at the pack. They must be really close if the dogs are threatening them, but the sound of the dogs comforted me. “Get ‘em, Trapper.” I whispered into my blankets. After that I could hear the howls fading. Thank god…

I closed my eyes again, still under the covers, just in case. This time, I fell asleep fully. Unfortunately, I’m a light sleeper. I woke to another sound. A different sound. Skkkkkkrrrch. Skkkrch. A slow, deep scratching. I froze, unable to breathe. Skkkkrch. Louder, closer. I felt a chill through my body and a sheen of sweat on my forehead. The scratching was coming from the dresser. What the fuck? What could be inside of a dresser? SKKKKKKKRRRCHHHH. It was so loud and so near, I almost screamed, but it was caught in my throat. “God?” I said in my head, remembering that my grandmother told me to pray in times of fear. A very deliberate scratching sounded right next to my ear. Tears welled up in my eyes. It must be from the attic. There is no way something that big could fit into the dresser. All at once the scratching stopped. I had barely a second to let my breath out when a loud bang crashed on the wall to my right, as if a fist had gone straight through it. My body began to shake so much, it was making the bed move. Wait… was it me moving the bed? I squeezed my eyes closed so tight they burned. I sucked my breath in so much I thought I’d pass out. But nothing else happened. It was still, it was quiet. All I could hear were the sound of the bugs buzzing in the trees outside. I stayed exactly where I was until morning.

The next day I asked my grandma about the scratching, trying to sound casual.

“Oh drats, those darn mice again!” She said, hitting her palm on the counter. “I thought I got em all last time. They’ve been eating up that dresser for a year now.”

I felt all the worry pass through my feet, washing away to make room for my newfound “older kid” courage. Of course it was mice. How could I have been swept away by such a silly fantasy. So, that night, I prepared myself for some scratching and some howling. No big deal.

The howling was more distant, and the scratching sounds seemed less aggressive now that I knew what little rodents were responsible. I just decided to turn on the TV and ignore it all. Well, nothing was on that I was interested in, and I fell asleep watching the Olympics. The sound of dull static woke me. UGH. Waking up this often was getting old. I opened my eyes sleepily, ready to find the remote, but instead, my eyes latched onto a shadowy figure standing right next to the buzzing TV. “This is not happening, this is not happening.” My head swore. My eyes disagreed. I couldn’t look away. The figure didn’t either. The more I stared, the more I could make out. It wasn’t really a shadowy mist, but a person. A woman. She was looking at me. I couldn’t make out many features, but she was familiar to me. “Grandma Bunny?” I whispered, grasping the sheets with white knuckles.

The figure lifted her head from the slightly bowed position it had been in. Suddenly a whoosh of air filled the room as she rushed towards me. I opened my mouth to scream out, but her face was already on top of me, frozen above me in midair. I stared into her dead eyes with my wide eyes and gaping mouth. “Run.” She whispered, a hurried and haunting sound. She was gone before I had the time to process. My chest heaved, my heart raced. Sweat trickled down my spine. The TV was back on, telling me to buy OxyClean.

“Grandma, I had a bad dream last night.” I decided to talk about it. I always found guidance in her words. She was chopping an apple in the kitchen. I sat at the bar, waiting for breakfast. “I saw Grandma Bunny.”

The knife stopped on the cutting board. I saw her still hand gripping the end of it. I waited. Silence.

“She looked sad.”

Grandma scoffed. “Well I’d imagine so.”

It was no surprise to me that she’d react this way. My grandma had not gotten along well with her mother at all, though I only had fond memories of her. Most of my family tells me I was too young to know any better. I sighed, dropping the subject. But the subject wasn’t washed away for me just yet, just from my grandma’s attention. I believed I had seen her, really, because when I was very young, my mother said I used to warn her not to talk to certain men at stores that she said looked perfectly normal. I also remember having a dream that Grandma Bunny was drowning, and I was called out of school the next day because she had passed. I even predicted my dog’s death the previous year- in a dream as well. I had believed it was my fault, as if my dream had conjured up the reality, but my mother disagreed. My mother believed I had a sixth sense, a “gift from God” she had called it, so that I could protect my loved ones. At first it hadn’t seemed like a gift at all, but at that age, I always ended up believing whatever my mother said, and I started to get quite smug about it. Thought I was a very important person. So I sat there thinking to myself that Grandma Bunny telling me to run was very significant, and it was my duty to find out why.