"Home" by Tyler Downs

Home

by Tyler Downs

I don’t know how old I am anymore.

The sound of the clock ticking on the mantle was a cruel joke. It taunted me. It reminded me that the world was still going through its paces outside these walls. Life proceeded as normal. I simply was no longer a part of it.

I pushed open the balcony windows. The feeling of warm night air on my skin was one of the few pleasantries I had left. A little taste of the old life. I slid a cigarette into my mouth, lit it with a struck match, then shook out the flame and tossed the match out the window. It fell two stories to the front yard below; an unruly jungle of weeds and dead grass.

A while back, I tried jumping out of this window to my death. I fell twenty feet and faceplanted into the yard and felt my neck snap like a twig. Then, right after everything went dark, I woke up in my bed, right as rain. It’s when the depths of this hell truly dawned on me.

I’m not sure how she managed to up her security measures over the years, but now, jumping was no longer an option.

I held my left hand out the window, and as my fingertips crossed the invisible barrier of this prison, they melted away like hot wax, dripping, falling to the lawn below. It didn’t hurt. For me, pain was no longer physical. When I pulled my hand back, the fingertips were missing. My fingers were gone above the second knuckles. I waggled my nubs and watched as they slowly grew back and repaired themselves.

It all started when I got my diagnosis—stage four pancreatic cancer. My wife at the time, Lisa, supported me the best she could. But as the tumor continued wreaking its havoc, and my looming death got harder to ignore, it started wearing her down. I asked her to leave and go live her life. She refused at first, but eventually relented. I didn’t want to leave her with the memories of watching me wither away.

That’s when I started hearing her.

Home.

It started with unexplained footsteps and creaky floorboards. I’d jolt awake in the middle of the night to the sound of slamming cupboards and windowsills. I chalked it up to delusions brought on by my illness and isolation. However, as time passed, I strangely began to feel better and more energized. As long as I stayed in the house, that is. Whenever I stepped outside, the sickness would quickly rush back in with a vengeance. So, I stopped leaving.

That’s when I started seeing her.

On some nights, I’d round the corner and see a dark silhouette of a skinny woman standing on the opposite end of the hallway, shrouded in shadows, panting heavily. And when I’d flick on the light, she’d be gone. While I slept, I often woke up to the sensation of hanging strands of hair tickling my skin and hot exhales billowing against my face. Then, in the mornings, I’d scrub the condensation off my foggy bathroom mirror after a shower and catch the reflection of a dark shape watching me from the doorway. Always there one second—gone the next.

Looking back, I preferred it that way.

She no longer bothered hiding from me now.

The first night I saw her, I heard loud, frantic pounding on the wall of my living room. By the time I arrived to investigate the commotion, a pale, veiny hand was protruding from a hole in the wall. Then came another. And those two skinny hands started ripping away chunks of drywall, bit by bit, until she was able to squeeze and crawl through the gaping hole. She flopped to the ground like a full-grown newborn baby; white as milk, with greasy dark hair, black eyes, and a sneering smile.

That must’ve been decades ago.

She’s never spoken a word to me.

But each day that passed, I heard her storming through the house like an angsty hurricane. She yanked open drawers and slammed cupboards. She threw rotten, long-expired food into a dirty pot and cooked meals for me. I knew it was time to eat when she screamed at the top of her lungs. No words. Just an anguished wail. And then I’d sit at the table, and she’d feed me spoonfuls of disgusting filth while I tried not to vomit, and she’d smile giddily the entire time.

When I’d read at night, I’d often see her crawling along the walls on all fours like a pale, lanky spider. She’d hang upside down from a wooden beam, and her long black hair would dangle from her face like filthy vines, and she’d hum off-key songs to herself, and grin with maddening glee while she swayed to and ‘fro.

In retrospect, cancer now seems like a blessing.

Perhaps that’s why I still smoked, hoping the black death might return someday and tangle itself around my lungs.

I took a deep, sizzling drag from my cigarette and watched as life went through its paces outside my window.

Then I heard it.

She screamed like a banshee from downstairs. The sound ran up through the floorboards, then up my spine. I sighed and flicked the rest of my cigarette out the window.

It was Home again.

She was calling for me.