The Attic

I turned the key and the engine sputtered dead. It seemed to be oddly quiet once the chittering of my shitbox sedan halted. This neighborhood with its poorly aging three deckers and decrepit victorians had never been quiet when I was growing up. It had been filled with the sounds of children playing in the streets, radios blaring as hard faced men worked on their cars, and on a weekend day such as today, the smell of BBQ and the chatter of party goers would permeate the block. But none of that was happening on this unseasonably cold late spring afternoon. Not a person was to be seen, not so much as a bird chirped.

The somber surroundings seemed fitting as I eyed the peeling colonial that my car was parked in front of. The neighborhood may have once been filled with vibrant sounds, but inside this particular house things were never so merry. I had not been home in over a decade, and I would likely not have come home again if it had not been for the call I’d received saying that it was finally time to put the old lady in a home. Mother I thought with a sinking feeling in my gut, and from behind a ratty window curtain I saw someone shift, a dark shadow.

I climbed from the car, certain she had seen me and that I could no longer put off the inevitable. I walked up the cracked cement pathway to the house, noting that whoever I’d been paying to maintain the yard had been slacking off. It had never been a particularly nice property; my mother was not the gardening type, and my father had taken off when I was still a little girl. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the grass should not be quite so tall, and the hedges out front had become even more wild and unkempt than I ever remembered them being.

Opening the front door there was the same loud creaking that had always sounded at my entrance, and I softly called out “Mom, it’s me.” There was no response and I eyed the entryway where a pile of junk mail nearly a foot high had splayed out across the battered wood floor. I would have been miffed that the cleaner had also been slacking at her duties, but I had no doubt that this display was at my mother’s insistence. I could imagine her shrill voice yelling at some poor girl, “don’t you touch my mail, I am going to read it, I just haven’t had the chance yet”.

I moved further into the house and called out again with no response. There were no lights on in the house and despite the fact that the sun was out the heavy drapes seemed to block out most of its rays. This darkness was typical for my mother, but it brought up bad memories for me and my chest grew tight as I approached the kitchen. I felt certain I would see her sitting at the kitchen table, cigarette in hand and that hard look upon her face. In my mind’s eye she was the same age as she’d been when I was a teenager; the age at which I’d last seen her. Lips pursed she would spit, “where have you been girl?”.

A shuffling sound from behind me nearly made me jump out of my skin and I turned quickly, arms raised as though ready to shelter myself from some impending physical blow. But as I stared into the dark hallway there was nobody there. From the kitchen my mother’s voice croaked out my name and my blood turned to ice.

She sat exactly where I’d imagined her to be sitting, but she looked so ancient it was hard to recognize her at first. Her skin had sagged and her once dark hair was now entirely grey. Instead of a cigarette she had tubes strapped to her face, pumping oxygen up her flared nostrils. I noticed the hissing of the oxygen tank as she breathed and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been able to hear that awful sound as soon as I’d entered the house.

“You’ve finally come to kill me” she rasped, her voice scratchy from years of smoking.

“No mom” I said, and I had to break our eye contact. As changed as she was, that cruel, insane look in her bright green eyes was the same as it had ever been. “I’m going to help you transition to someplace more comfortable. Your nurse told me your condition is worsening and you need around the clock care.”

“You’re going to sell all my things aren’t you?” she asked, her wrinkled face twisting into an expression of contempt.

I wanted to tell her there was nothing worth selling in this rotting house, but instead I said, “I will clean the house out and put it on the market to help pay for your medical bills.”

“The government pays my bills” she huffed, and she sipped water from a filthy looking glass. It was not true; I had been paying to keep her alive and in her home, but again I did not bother to tell her so.

“Are you packed up?” I asked. She looked away from me with disgust on her face, so I followed up with, “is there anything else you need me to do before we leave?”. I regretted the question as soon as it left my mouth, certain that she would demand I complete some awful chore at her behest; something to humiliate and demean me. But her response was far more chilling than that. She said, “don’t forget to feed the man in the attic”.

My flesh broke out in goosebumps and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. When I was a child “the man in the attic” was always this horrific entity that my mother would threaten me with. “Be good or I’ll make you go live with the man in the attic” she’d say, and even when I was too old to believe in this boogeyman I still could not bring myself to go up into the attic for fear of what I’d find there. There were often noises from the attic, sounds that would send me shivering under my blankets in fear. But my mother spent a lot of time up in the attic, and in case you haven’t gathered, my mother was insane. It was safe to assume there was no “man in the attic”, and whatever sounds I heard were from my mother doing whatever bullshit she was into.

I got the old woman into my car and dropped her off at what would be her home until she died. She did not say goodbye. I had not expected anything otherwise.

When I returned to the gloomy old house it felt less haunted with her gone. I opened the thick, cigarette smoke stained curtains and let in what remained of the late afternoon light. I walked about the house assessing its condition. I would have a realtor come by after I’d had time to clean it up a bit so we could assess its value. It would go on the market “as is” and I couldn’t imagine it would fetch much, but I’d been told the house had “good bones” so it would probably make for a decent flip for some ambitious person out there. I liked the idea of someone breathing new life into this old corpse; stripping away the yellowed wallpaper, demolishing the crooked cabinetry, and brushing a bright and hopeful coat of new onto it all.

I explored each room with attempted indifference, from the mold infested basement, to the dining room that we had never used, to the dust covered bedroom that had once been where I slept. Last was the attic, and upon approaching the attic door I felt a sense of dread so intense that it was almost painful. There is no man in the attic I told myself, trying to be convinced. It was important to be able to report on the state of the roof to the realtor, and besides, some small part of me was curious as to what my mother had been doing up in the attic all those years. It was only a very small part of me though; most of my being was wracked with intense fear and anxiety.

Taking a deep breath I walked up the rickety steps to the attic, noting how loudly the floorboards creaked beneath my feet. As a child I would often hear screeching sounds from the attic, and I now realized that it had simply been the sound of the steps groaning under my mother’s weight. “Nothing to fear” I said out loud, and as I stepped up into the attic I was taken aback by how neat everything was.

My mother was a clutterbug with no desire to clean anything, and thus I had expected the attic to be a hoarder’s nest of old magazines, dusty jars, broken furniture, and moth eaten clothing. Instead, the attic had a single set of very outdated but tidily arranged furniture. It was a pleasant surprise; one less cleaning task to tackle.

I eyed the roof looking for signs of water damage and was relieved to see that everything looked fairly intact. I had no idea when my mother had last gotten the roof replaced and I had been braced for the worst, but everything looked dry. I moved to leave the attic but paused for a moment to notice a rather beautiful vanity with a smashed mirror. How unfortunate I thought. This was the only thing I’d seen in the house that I might have liked to keep.

In the jagged pieces of the mirror I saw something move and suddenly my heart was hammering with the certainty that someone was standing behind me. The man in the attic I realized, and I couldn’t breathe.

The rational part of me tried to chime in; it had just been a trick of the light;  there was no boogeyman living in the attic. And yet my imagination continued to run rampant, imagining a dark creature with empty black eyes and long jagged nails creeping up behind me. I just about ran to the stairs and in my hurry I tripped over an uneven floorboard and went down hard.

Splinters bit into my hands as I scrambled to get to my knees, and then I noticed a growing shadow emanating from behind me. It hadn’t been my imagination; someone was in the attic with me. Stifling a scream I turned to look despite the fact that my entire being wanted nothing more than to run; to throw myself head first down those steps if that’s what it took to escape.

When I turned to the creature behind me I saw a being far more horrific than what even my childhood imagination had been able to conjure. A man with pale white skin stretched over sunken cheeks stared at me, and as he moaned I realized with absolute terror that his mouth was an empty socket; his tongue had been cut out.

He took several shambling steps towards me, each marked by a loud dragging sound and I saw that he had been chained at the ankle. Upon seeing this restraint I found the courage to rise to my shaking legs, take to the stairs, and flee from the house in a blind panic. Somehow I found myself inside my car then, keys in the ignition and doors locked as I came back to reality, the sounds of my hyperventilation filling the otherwise silent space around me.

I need to call the police I realized, but as I searched for my cell phone, part of me feared that I’d just imagined it all; that I had inherited my mother’s insanity and conjured a boogeyman. I stared at my phone for what felt like an eternity, and then I dialed 911.

“911, what’s your emergency?” asked the voice on the other end of the line.

With a shaky breath I said, “there’s a man locked up in my mother’s attic.”

“How long has he been stuck in there ma'am?” the voice asked, clearly thinking this had been a recent accident; perhaps a lost key or a jammed door.

“24 years” I responded, my voice flat and distant.

“24 years?!” the dispatcher replied, incredulous. “Could you please repeat that ma’am?”

Clearly this person did not believe me, but I knew quite precisely how long the man in the attic had been there because he’d been there since the day my father disappeared.