red_flynn

Story time. This is something my mom wrote and submitted to a local paper for scary stories. One thing to note, I am the 'Tim' in the story.

Fillmore Street house

I lay in bed, on the side nearest the wall, my back to the door. I had been asleep _ I think. In the fuzz of just awakening, I heard ... or sensed Tim, 6 years old, coming up the stairs. It must be Tim. Nate, two years younger, would never venture up the old enclosed unlit stairway alone, especially in the middle of the night.

Tim entered the room. For no good reason other than being relaxed and comfortable, I just waited until Tim came up to me, to say, "Mom," before I would open my eyes. Tim did come around to my side of the bed. I waited for the "Mom," but after a few heartbeats of silence, I opened my eyes.

There was no one there. I wasn't scared. After all, I felt what I took to be the presence of my beloved first-born, not of an evil spirit entering the room. I sat up, and looked around the room. No one.

Yet I was sure someone had entered. Did I hear someone coming up the creaky steps, then crossing the wooden floor? Maybe it wasn't a sound that awoke me. I couldn't identify just how I knew Tim was there.

We were sleeping in a house recently rented from a pleasant woman in her mid thirties. She and her husband had lived in the house a few years before, but decided to move to the country. The basement still held many of their belongings. They had planned to use the basement as an in-town bedroom if they were too tired to drive home after a night out. In fact, there was a bed set up there, with her husband's cowboy boots sitting next to it.

Their staying in the basement was not a part of our lease agreement. The previous year, her husband had gone to school in another state. As a means of saving money, the wife had moved into the country home of a close friend. I learned later that the three of them had been very close since their high school days.

Several days after "the presence" entered the bedroom, I received a call from the mother of the woman we rented the house from. She explained that her daughter, son-in-law, and friend were dead _ the result of a jealousy-driven double murder/suicide.

I had never known anyone who had been murdered before. I certainly had never lived in a house owned by someone who had been murdered. And I had never been awakened by someone entering my bedroom, when no one had entered the room.

Bett