By J. L. Thurston

The piano began to pluck away a slow, incoherent tune. It was taunting me. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did. The house hated me. It did not want me here. It did not want me to have my baby and my friend and my nice, new life.

My mother’s house. Not mine. In this house, she roamed the rooms, drenched in her craft and her insanity. She kept dead crows in the windowsills and let them decay. She had jars of blood for drawing sigils beneath furniture. I have few memories of my mother, but one of them involves watching her pull the entrails from a stray cat because she wanted to read my future.

Willow, Aunt Pat had said when she called me to tell me my mother was dead. You need to light incense for her soul.

I didn’t think incense was right for her, though. Incense is warm, fragrant, and full of texture and intrigue. My mother was none of those things. Instead, I went to the liquor store and bought a pack of cigarettes. I lit one and left it on the sidewalk to burn out on its own.

I wondered if it was the house that hated me, or my mother’s restless soul.

Thunder cracked through the sky. Nyla and Jane both flinched. Confused, we stared up at the black clouds. The storm had come so fast. Bones retreated into the trees.

Sorry. Give me a second.

That was the last time I ever saw my dog.

I went after him a little ways, but I knew better than to go too deep into the trees. My heart was breaking. Bones was an indoor dog. He’d never been outside in a storm. I didn’t know what to do, so I returned to Nyla and Jane. The wind was whipping against me. I rushed to the front yard and rolled Nyla’s scooter onto my porch just before the rain came down. She was grateful.

The pork chops were almost burning. We attempted to eat, but all sense of normalcy was gone. That was when the power went out. I made the most out of it, lighting a bunch of candles in the living room. Jane slept on a pile of blankets on the floor. Nyla and I got comfortable on the couch.

We watched Netflix on my laptop, praying the power would come back on before the battery died. The two of us were curled up in the same blanket. At first just sitting, then she stretched out her legs so they became interwoven with mine. I felt her fingers and let my hand hold hers. She talked a little bit. Then her lips found mine. I froze at first. I think I was half-expecting it, but also thought it would never happen. But the longer the kiss went on the harder I realized how badly I needed it. I was a diver, finally coming up for air. I was Icarus, flying into the sun.

We kissed in the light of the laptop screen while the storm raged outside. We were still kissing when the laptop battery died. She had moved down to my neck, giving me sensations I had never felt. I wish I could have stayed in that place, that warm, tingling place with Nyla, but movement caught my attention.

The laptop screen on the coffee table was black. There was the couch, perfectly black in the reflection against the windows behind us. There was my head, and the slow-moving coiled hair on Nyla’s head as she worked her way down my collar bone.

We weren’t alone.

Behind the couch was a silhouette. A thin, human-like shadow paced back and forth between the couch and the windows. I use the phrase “human-like” because the head, torso, and arms were too long to be human.

“Willow? You okay?”

I couldn’t look at Nyla. I couldn’t feel anything but cold all over. The shadow person stopped pacing and stood just behind us. It bent down, long arms spreading wide, resting its clawed hands on the back of the couch.

I could hear it take in a long breath.

“I think I need a cat,” I said. Nyla laughed. I didn’t tell her why I needed a cat. She didn’t pry. Instead, she snuggled close to me and fell asleep as I played with her hair.

I stared at the laptop screen and watched the shadow creature as it watched me. It didn’t move, it didn’t do anything but breathe. I refused to acknowledge it.

When faced with spirits, you should pretend to ignore them. If they are harmless, they may be able to move on. If they are evil, they will only grow stronger if they know you fear them.

Aunt Pat had taught me everything she knew. I was not a practicing witch, but I was raised by one. I knew how to gulp down reactions. I also knew that the shadow person was different from a spirit, but whatever it was it couldn’t be stronger than a cat. Aunt Pat always had at least two cats in her house at all times. Cats are guardians. Their souls are half here and half in the afterlife. Aunt Pat believed that supernatural entities would not go near a cat for fear they would be sent away forever.

I fell asleep with Nyla’s arms around me, thinking of cats, listening to the breathing of Jane and the shadow person.

Around three in the morning, a voice shouted in my ear. “WAKE UP!”

Jane shrieked. Nyla sat bolt upright. I was panting, ears ringing. The power had come back on. I could tell because my laptop was charging. I leapt to my feet and switched on the light. Nyla was scooping up Jane and rocking her, eyes darting all around.

She’d heard it, too. We all did.

The rain was coming down in sheets. We didn’t say it out loud, but we felt trapped in the house. We turned the television on, but I didn’t have cable hooked up yet. The old antennae still worked, so we watched a black and white station with the volume up so high we couldn’t hear the creaking in the attic.

We couldn’t hear it, but we knew it was there.

Return to sunrise, another day in the House on Deer Creek Road