Entities We Can't Explain (Two Short Stories)

Twice we caught her eating out of the refrigerator in the middle of the night. Dad had gotten up and walked down the hallway to see what the rucks was in the kitchen, but then the whispers soon turned into laughter, and then the search for the mob started to clean up some spilt spaghetti sauce on the floor before Mom got up. That was the first time. The second time, well, that's the one I want to talk about, because even though I was in the house and now a teenager, this is the one that sticks with me. I spin it around in my head over and over again. I replayed the sounds and the screams, and yet my parents refuse to talk about it. On my own. I kind of call it the refrigerator incident. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. We lived in northern California and around that time we had some problems with the Electra company. They would schedule these blackouts do to the nearby fires, or there would be something going on that would cut out the Internet. My parents would often tell us not to open the refrigerator too much because things would get warmed up. It was annoying, of course, but we got used to it pretty quickly. Our computer and some other stuff got these devices plugged into them so that they wouldn't blow up when the power would come back. Well. Anyway, this night a Wednesday, because we still had school the next day, my sister and I had gone to bed at around ten thirty and stayed up a little bit longer with the TV on, waiting for some show to come on, something that she wanted to see. She got tired first, so I turned off the TV and also went to sleep. And they don't know around what time this happened, but suddenly everything got even more quiet. It's like when things are already silent, then they go still, unsettling and completely muted. It's what happened when the power would go out. Most of the time I never noticed, but when the natural hum of the house goes away at night, it was usually that. So I waited for something to happen for a few seconds before something broke the silence and I heard a thing outside was down the hallway. A light was shining through the kitchen doorway that led to the living room. I could see it from the bedroom door. For him, we used to keep the door partially open at night at least in our bedrooms. But I could tell that this light, it wasn't coming from the moon. It wasn't dim enough. This one was bright and cast these long shadows. I went all the way down the hall. I whispered to my sister, loud enough to wake her up that I heard something out there, asking her if she heard it too. And I just saw the blanket wiggle and heard it grunt. I figured that if I just peeked out over the kitchen, I would be able to see the source of the light. Amy, I said, did you hear that? She didn't move this time. I took the first two cold steps toward the door, the boards waking under me, but then I froze. I heard the door open, Mom saying something to my dad quietly from the bedroom. I know, I know. I heard Dan say as he walked from the far end of the hallway and then over the kitchen. I heard him walk normally past our bedroom. He got to the kitchen and stared at something. Amy. He whispered, what are you doing? I felt the blood rush away from my face right then. If my sister was out there in the kitchen, who was in the bed next to mine, I didn't think twice at that moment, and I flicked on the light switch to our bedroom. My sister turned around and covered her eyes with her forearm, grunting and trying to sit up. Amy was right there. Amy was asleep. I stepped out of the room and looked over the kitchen right as Dad was taking a few steps back. His face would say it all. He called for my mom, shouting down the hall and opening the front door. He came back with the broom and watch as a woman crawled along the floor and rushed over the front door, stopping to stare at my dad. Amy was wide awake by that point, and she was crying, begging to get out of the room, but I kept hushing her and pushing her back. Susan called the police that yelled for Mom. I was standing out of the hallway as Mom stepped out and screamed. This woman that thing in the kitchen was opening her eyes wide. She stopped and looked at me as Dad was approaching her, but she didn't care. She smiled at me with those dark teeth, cold mac and cheese stuck to the sides of her face, and black hair. She remained low to the ground like she was about to sprint. Dad got angry then and rushed at her, but she was faster. She sprinted toward me like a spider, and I didn't know in which direction she was going to go. After I stepped right into the room and I heard the door to the water boiler thing shut. It was this small door that we had in the hallway. It was four repairs and all that. Mom managed to close her door too. I could hear her muffled screams from the other side, but then she opened it again and started banging at our door. We opened it, and with one large sweep, she grabbed us and ushered us to the front of the house, passed this mess on the floor by the refrigerator, door had been left wide open. We stayed out in the porch until the police came in search. Dad was able to describe her as a small old woman, dark hair, with something not human about her, but that would be the one and only time that he ever talked about her. I remember Dad walking with the police officers into the house and around the backyard. They never found her. The space by the boiler was too small for anyone to fit in there, but they checked anyway, and was completely empty. Mom tried to almost down for a couple of weeks after that, telling us who she could have been and what she wanted. But from then on Mom only referred to her as some crazy woman who came in the house. But that always stayed quiet. It's almost as if you knew something else. Eventually we stopped asking questions, But every once in a while, I hear sounds in the house, and I'm unsure of what is scarier now, the uncomfortable silence of a power outage or noises from the kitchen. Sometimes I lay awake wondering who she could have been or what she wanted. Dad and I planned on making a trip to a lake where we used to go fishing when Grandpa was alive. It hadn't been there in years, so it was a whole month project fixing up the fishing tackle and even the small boat that we would take out there. But the day finally came, I was pretty stoked. One of my cousins decided to tag along, so of course we made him help out with the repairs too. I had finally made it a little later than usual because we kept stopping along the way. It was a Thursday night, we set up our tent and Dad wanted to sleep in the camper out of the truck, so it was only my cousin Joe, and myself in the tent. The place where we go, I can't really say the name because we know who runs It has two main lake areas, one of them with a dock and the other is more for experienced campers because it's right on the edge of this wooded area. In order to get the boat out there, we have to carry it down this steep hill of rocks and crossover fallen logs. We had gotten as clothes as possible to the edge of the water with a truck, but also had a tough time figuring out exactly where we were. So my dad told us not to wander off because the moon wasn't out that night and we could fall into the lake or get lost. Still, us, being pretty young at the time, thought it would be cool to use what we called our bathroom break to go out just to peek at the water at night. But that would be all just to step out come right back. So we grabbed our flashlights, put on our boots, and we were talking about some show we were both watching, in part because Neither of us wanted to admit that we were pretty freaked out, so when Dad said that it was going to be dark, he meant it. He couldn't even see our shoes out there without the flashlights. Plus the beam on those things were blinding whenever they hit a nearby tree trunk, so we mostly had the maim straight down. We had just made it to the edge of the tree line when my cousin suddenly stopped, stretching out his arms. One more step and we both would have been rolling down sharp rocks. We both let it out a sigh of relief, but still we stopped and almost simultaneously turned off the flashlights. And if I had to pinpoint it to something, I would say that this is where things got straight. For a while, we were staring out into nothing. When it's that dark, you don't know what's right in front of you or what's far ahead. So we simply assumed that the field, the dark one right in front of us was the lake. You'd hear the water splashing softly at the edge, with the occasional splash in the distance of a fish catching mosquitoes. But it was then when we heard it a clear hey was coming from out there. I could feel Joe's breath in the side of my face. When he asked if I heard that, I nodded my head and then, slightly more freaked out, Joe asked me again, did you hear that? And it took me a second to realize that he couldn't see me. No, yes, I whispered, there it is again. It both stood still. We were holding our breads out there at the edge of what appeared to be a whole new dimension, one that waited and spoke hey. We stayed completely still. I can see you, the boy said. It was a woman, a raspy, young voice. It reminded me of Virginia, this neighbor that had died a few years before that trip. She was in cheer in high school, and always wanted her to stop talking because it sounded like she struggled with it. We turned back to where to where we had come from, walked a few steps, but up ahead in the distance we could see some lights on the ground. That was the start of the other lake where the other people were camping. Had we walked the wrong way? Did we somehow miss those lights? When we were making our way toward the edge of the lake. Hey, you both heard, I can still see you, Joe screamed. He started running with no direction. He ended up hitting a branch at the top of his forehead fall the sounds he was making until I nearly kicked him, but we had nowhere to go. He both ended up sitting there, our flashlights moving around in the trees, waiting for something to pop out from the side of the trunk. But nothing happened. We started laughing a little bit, and I made fun of him for screaming the way he did and then running into a tree. He let out a chuckle and told me to shut up forgetting for a moment that we still had to find our way back. And then he reminded me of those sounds we heard out there. Hey, we heard it sounded just as close as ever. Our flashlights pointed at the exact same spot at the same time. Joe's bean started climbing up the tree first, as if he knew something was there. And yeah, my eyes followed it up there there was what I can only describe as a face. It was peeking out of one of the branches. It was pale, It's definitely human, with a wide smile shining bright against the beam of Joe's flashlight. It didn't move, It just smiled for a few seconds before it turned to the right, causing this branch to break, and upon realizing the noise they had made, it turned toward us and froze still. The smile faded, its dark eyes relaxed, and then focused right on us. We could see it climbing on the tree at an unnatural speed, even faster than just falling. We lost it with the flashlights and Joe screamed again, but I managed to grab onto his shirt as he pulled me along the forest. He got hit by branches and nearly tripped on roots and other things until we got to the clearing of the trees just on the other side. The whole time, I kept praying to myself that we wouldn't end up on the cliffs by the water. But I finally made it to the edge of the tree line. I could see some campfires and lights in the distance. All we would have to do is go around it, and eventually you would find the trail we used to bring the truck inside. Took us about half an hour to make it back to the trailhead. If we made it still, I couldn't sleep at all that night. He told that about it the next morning, after he asked why we were so tired mimics in the trees. He said that there are stories of back when he was a kid, that they would hear people out there, people that they knew, voices that came from the trees. I asked him if they had ever seen anything or what was making those voices, and he shook his head. Joey and I still talk about the whole thing. We told a bunch of our friends, and up until now, nobody, absolutely no one can explain what we saw that night. Sho