The Bathroom Light
Craig
Shay
“Doom
is the House without a Door −
‘Tis
entered from the Sun −
And
then the Ladder’s thrown away,
Because
escape − is done −”
−
Emily Dickinson
It is calling me across
layers of distorted time, needling at my senses through
an endless void of formless frenetic static, dragging me again through the
grass into its formaldehyde abyss, and singing me towards a nightmare of
destruction.
I was outside alone at dusk trying
to avoid the wrath of another disappointing report from the school. It had
already become too much and I was old
enough to know where I stood in the social hierarchy of it all. I was at peace
letting the catastrophe of my academic career sink peacefully down with the
dead dreams of the people around me.
Night arrived in a hurry,
wrapping itself like a plastic bag inducing
asphyxiation. Did everyone know this town
was haunted but me? The new season had sprung itself upon us and it was
time to start wearing a sweater. Beckoning me from the corner of my eye was a
steady pulse of vibrant bluish light emanating from a side window of the house
across the street. I noticed this light for the past few nights while outside.
As the sunset slowly kissed the tired eyes of the town descending into a world
of shadows the steady pale blue light came alive, a somber muted projected from
a room towards the back of the
house. Why did no one else see it or take
notice? I felt cursed for having been the only one.
The next evening,
I noticed the blue light again streaming from the same window of the house across
the street. I wasn’t sure if anyone was still living there. The place was a
rental and changed tenants quite often. At this point the house was rundown and
always gave off a dark vibe when I looked at it for too long, as though there
were faces looking back at me from within the windows. There was something in
its past that was unresolved, something that afflicted everyone who came close to
or lived in it, including myself. I had many dreams of the house, sometimes
horrible ones of a family that lived there years ago. What did they do there? What
was buried beside the house? In my
dreams, I was always finding bodies lying in the ground behind and around the property;
some were dead and some were dying. Had
it been a portal where the undead gathered at night? The soul of the house
was restless. The dreams persisted.
There was a tall
tree in the front yard that stood over a hundred feet high with large
tentacle-like branches. I had a vision of a girl who once lived there long before
my parents had even moved here. She was on that swing. I used to see everything
that was there before I was even born, and like I said, the whole town was
haunted. The torn yellow wallpaper in the kitchen, the sound of the backdoor closing,
newspapers on the floor and windows, the dark corners within the mudroom, and
then the basement, where I was never sure what happened, since I couldn’t see
through the cloud of darkness engulfing the property. There were many nights
when the insomnia was overpowering.
I even saw a ghost
of the girl on the swing. These
apparitions always presented themselves when I was alone. She appeared one
afternoon out of nowhere as she locked eyes with me. As I went to speak to her,
she jumped off the swing and ran into a shadow. It happened so fast I believed
it to be a waking dream. That’s the only way I explained it to myself. In that
moment I felt reality melt away as an unknown fear swirled about my head. I
remember how dizzying the scenario was and how my eyes briefly turned to static,
and my hands had no feeling. I had temporarily
dissolved.
The red house was
very quiet tonight. There was a car parked behind the maple covered in pollen.
It was an old car that looked ready for the junkyard. The house was almost
always completely dark, and the lawn grew knee high. Mail had been accumulating
in the box outside and there were a few phonebooks resting on the sun-baked porch,
but no sign of life.
I was familiar
with that monstrous tree which I also had nightmares about; I remembered
climbing it many summers ago when I was younger when a kid named Jorge lived in
the house. He sometimes rode his bike into our yard and would stare at the
ground for a long time as though he were possessed. We were “friends” and used
to ride bikes around the neighborhood. His mother was very grateful that I was
kind to him since he did not have many friends and was in a self-contained
classroom at school. Jorge could climb trees pretty well and had climbed the
tall tree and gotten up pretty high, higher than I’d seen anyone else. I remember
Jorge’s mother yelling at him when she realized where he was, “¡Vamos Jorge,
bájate ahora!” Then Jorge became frozen some forty feet up. His mother asked me
to go up after him towards that place where Jorge was perched to try and help
him down. I didn’t want to climb up there, especially not that high. I thought
for sure Jorge was going to fall and seriously injure himself, if not die, and
I knew I’d get hurt too. Even though I was terrified I started to climb. As
neighbors gathered to watch, I had to reassure Jorge it was okay to climb down,
which he eventually did, and then fell about twenty feet and broke his arm.
They moved out not long after and new tenants moved in.
The light from the
house across the street hummed and buzzed along with the cicadas and the
sonorous flow of highway traffic. At dusk it looked like something from a black
and white film. Perhaps that’s why the bluish light was so appealing, like the
light of a film projector expanded out as an elongated trapezoid on the
overgrown lawn. It was a spinning projection from another world, a steady and
static light which beckoned me to see it.
I took the basketball in my hands and punted
it high into the air. It landed in the tall grass across the street. Now I had
a reason to go and investigate. The ball landed close to the tree. I crept
through the grass and picked it up. I was closer to the light now, but it was
still too far to see inside the window. All the details which I could not see
from across the street were now well defined. The house was dark and lifeless
except for the bright light.
I stepped onto a
low branch of the tree and climbed out a few feet trying to look inside, but
from the position I was in I could only see the tiles inside what looked like a
bathroom. I kept climbing, but the leaves covered my sight, and no clear
details could be seen. I climbed down, picked up the basketball and positioned
myself against the side of the house. I was soon in the frame of that fluid
blue beam and saw it moving as though something were flying across the light source.
The picture it beamed onto the grass resembled abstract art, as though a raw
naked picture were emblazoned onto the still grass. Like a symbol from another
world, it was communicating its message in slow formless shadows, as though
holding onto ancient and mysterious clues, which defined and reformed
existence. It held my contemplation and I studied it, determining it to be a
warning sign from an unseen world.
Slowly I stepped
closer to the window with my back against the house, a thief in the night. The
window was about seven feet off the ground, and I had to step on the basketball
to hoist myself up in order to peer in. I listened closely. There were no
sounds, only a faint steady buzzing. I pulled myself up using the frame of the
window as an anchor as my sneakers scraped against the shingles. I held my body
into position while doing a type of gymnastic pushup and I was able to look
inside at the brightness of the blue light. Suddenly, I felt my arms collapse
under the weight of my body; down I fell onto the basketball, causing my torso
to spring violently to the ground. There was dirt and grass in my face and pain
shooting through my arm, but I had already begun to sprint across the yard and
into my parents’ driveway, running without thinking, a steam-powered machine
galloping free and unbridled away from the light. I bolted up the steps inside my
house and dashed into my room, closing the door behind me. I maneuvered under
my bed where I sat in disbelief for several minutes as the dazzling flashbacks
had already started to reappear across the movie screen in my mind.
It was a discovery
I wished I hadn’t made. The blue light from the window was a reflection of the
solid blue bathroom tiles, a blue sink, a blue toilet and blue tub inside a
bathroom. Only what surrounded the light bulb were many flies, causing the
light to flicker and blink. When I had poked my eyes into the frame of the
window, I saw something, something unexpected and shocking. What I saw inside was
a normal bathroom, but with what appeared to be a human foot sticking out of
the water at the edge of the tub. The foot was pale white, almost grey. A
colorless foot, like I remembered from museum statues, those Greek and Roman
figures muscular and lifeless. The foot was solid and heavy, plump and still,
cold and bloodless. The rest of the body was unseen behind a curtain.
My heart and lungs
were on fire from running so fast and trying to process what I had seen. A foot? A
body? A corpse? I had curled
into a ball underneath my bed attempting to erase the image from my brain, but
it remained there clawing and pecking like a vulture. I had turned all the
lights on in my room because I was too terrified to be alone in the dark. My
arm hurt too. I wasn’t sure if it was broken. I couldn’t ball it into a fist
without flinching
I gently opened the blinds of my bedroom
window, sickened with grief. The blue light was still there on the lawn across
the street. It was probably a body. But
whose? Whatever happened to Oscar? I thought to myself. It was probably Oscar’s
mother. The
memory was already overwhelming. I hadn’t seen Oscar for some time; he’d been
suspended from school for selling drugs and then went to live with his father
in another town.
I wasn’t sure
whether it was Oscar’s mother I saw in the tub. It was somebody dead. The
pictures in my mind returned and would
not leave. I turned on the Sega Genesis console and started mindlessly playing
whatever game was in it, anything to distract me. I played for hours, until
everyone in the house was asleep. Then I looked out my bedroom window again and
saw it. It was even brighter now. I
contemplated going back outside to get another look, a better look.
I darted across
the street with my arm wrapped in a sling, holding the empty garbage can. I
felt like a burglar, but nobody cared. I turned the garbage can upside down outside
the window. I stopped before looking in; the glass was hot like a spotlight, or
police light. I’d had an encounter with a police car a month ago while walking
home late from a party. I felt that same intense fear rippling through my body,
like electronic lights had been sent into my brain in waves of static, making
me frozen and incapacitated. It was an amplified stillness which coursed
through my mind, reverberating with horrifying images and scenarios. The police
officer had questioned me about where I was coming from, which I had to lie
about and not let on that I had been drinking with other minors. There was
violence in the officer’s commands. Now petrified with that same level of fear,
I moved away from the window.
The closer I was
to that light the more I realized that I didn’t want to see that tingling image
of horror, Death’s handiwork gone completely unnoticed by the neighbors. It
was a discovery for someone else to make.
Not me. I’d seen a dead person at a funeral last summer. That empty shell
of a body looked so disrespected in the frilly casket. It was a waxy
doppelganger of the person I’d known. I was aghast by that horrible smile that
the mortician had created. It was a poorly concealed smile. It was the grim
smile of a corpse vacant of life. It was the grinning smile of a skull, laughing
to itself because it knew the cards fate was holding. But
the walls broke
away
in the calm
the toed foot
hovering in the
glow
a church-like
silence
the white skin
and brown water
all at once
murdering my mind
I stepped off the
garbage can and back home. Before going inside the house, I quietly crept into
the adjacent neighbor’s yard and opened their cellar door a crack. There was always
a cooler which contained uncountable beer cans floating in lukewarm liquid. They
never knew how many beers were missing.
The rest of the night I stayed up and drank
with all the lights on in my bedroom. I didn’t dare go to the blinds, though I
knew the blue light was there, waiting
patiently. I eventually drank myself to sleep, woke up, and went to school. Two
days passed. I was outside again as the evening painted the sky a reddish
purple. I heard the buzz of highway congestion, of earth-shaking trucks and roadsters,
and the endless commuters passing through on their way home from their
miserable employment. It was starting to feel colder. Leaves were gathering in
colorful piles in the corner of the driveway and floated down upon me as I stood
in the driveway. I’d had to remind myself to put on a sweatshirt tomorrow
night. Out of nowhere, I noticed confusion across the street. Someone was
banging on the door of the maroon house. Then several police cars and an
ambulance pulled up and all hell broke loose. Family members arrived and
screamed and broke down crying. Police taped off the driveway. It unfolded like
a movie. Finally, I saw Oscar arrive and collapse in tears onto the hood of his
mother’s brown car.
They took Oscar’s
mother out in a large black body bag on a stretcher and loaded her into a quiet
ambulance. Only its blue lights flashed on all the houses in the neighborhood.
The police didn’t stay very long. The house was a frequent place of drug
activity. Oscar’s mother was a waitress and would often call out for days, so
nobody thought anything was wrong that she did not show up to work for nearly a
week. I saw Oscar and he walked over and told me that his mother was a heroin
addict and that she’d had an overdose about a week ago. It was like a dream,
really, or an accident. This wasn’t the place it
used to be when I was younger. I didn’t know what an O.D. was or what
addiction meant. Oscar said that he thought her boyfriend had killed her and
asked if I’d seen his red Pontiac around. I didn’t recall seeing the car.
The
next night the
bathroom light was off, and I never saw it on again, but a nightmare was
waiting for me behind the curtains of a thousand rooms. It was in the cherry
blossoms opening before me, their pithy material falling away into the wind. It
was here, and now I know it is everywhere, a hungry villain attuned to my
fears. It is in a thousand shoeboxes of vanishing photographs. “Can you see me
now?” the ghost girl asks beyond all glimmering illusions, “I am in the drops
of rain as you bicycle below.”
