The Echo Of A Scream
Soundless and still, I anguish over what I saw. I know what is real, I’ve been here before. Breathing will help, and I’ll close my eyes as long as necessary. Let nothing stir, nothing sudden, no surprises for a while, please. Banish memory of that sound, familiar and awful, penetrating the room long after my screaming stops. Forget, if possible, that the echo of my scream had become a physical being.
1984
I had come to believe that the first scream was a farce. I was 9 years old and home alone one night with my older sister. I feared being alone with her because I knew she would try to scare me. She liked to freak me out when babysitting, and she was good at it. I loved it as much as I hated it. We had fun. One windy night in October we sat reading on the floor of my room. Vivaldi played from the cassette player. With mad eyes, my sister peered at me from behind her book. She jerked her head to the left, and then to the right, and slowly reached to turn down the music. When she turned back to me she was shaking. She whispered there’s somebody else in the h-h-house. That’s not funny, cut it out, stop right now or I’m calling Mom! She stood, turned off the lights, and said we need to hide. She moved a chair in front of the door, and sat down, frozen. Hide in the closet. Do it. Every so often she whispered did you hear that and I imagined that perhaps I had. Is it getting closer to us, she asked, terrified. Trembling, I agreed that it was. Do you hear that strange moan? I nodded, yes. The game went on a few minutes, where, in the dark quiet, she pretended to hear things, and in the same quiet, I heard things. Something changed in her when, in a broken voice, I announced that the intruder had entered the kitchen. I heard drawers open and close, didn’t you I asked her. Stop it right now! She was angry, and was now as freaked out as as I was. Ha. He’s in the silverware drawer, I told her. The knives, I shuddered. I heard the slow creak of the old pocket door that led to the dining room. The the door door the door the door, I whimpered. Did you hear it? Um, I think so, she said. I stood upright and declared he is on the stairs. I was certain I heard somebody start up the staircase, and abruptly turn to go back down. She must have known that she started this whole thing. Was I playing along? I had reversed the game on her, and in this way we both became convinced that there was an intruder in the house with us.
We had to make it to the telephone downstairs. We’d call the police and our parents, too. My sister whispered a plan — we check every room in the house, starting with the attic, and then close the door and latch it. When all the doors are closed, we’ll know there’s no intruder in the house. And that is what we did, uneasy as we examined the huge, empty attic. Nothing. Close the door. Then we moved on to the three bedrooms next to mine, each of them dark and foreboding. We established a system in which I opened the door quickly, and she immediately threw on the lights, and we both bolted around the room until we were satisfied that the intruder was not there. Close the doors. Bathroom, nothing, close the door. We crept down the rickety wooden stairs, slowly to the landing, and then faster down into the entrance hall, yelling WE HAVE WEAPONS. THE POLICE ARE ON THEIR WAY! No reaction — dead silence in our old house that creaked noisily all the time. We checked the living room. Nothing. The dining room, which always felt haunted, nothing. Close the door. The small study. Close the door. By the time we got to the kitchen my sister remembered she had made this all up. She started to open silly things in an effort to make me laugh. She opened the pantry. Nothing. The oven. Nothing here! The microwave, the silverware drawer. Nothing. She opened the cookie jar and looked urgently for our intruder there, and we both laughed. Let’s finish this nonsense, and we dutifully inspected the front room of the basement, nothing. The final room was deep into the basement. It was built to be a toy room, but was filled instead with neglected antiques. The room had a door, but no windows. If the intruder ended up in here, his only way out would involve getting through us, any way he could. The door was ajar, and we freaked out yet again. Chill out. Same plan, she said, waiting for me to throw the door open. She turned the light on, and we nervously peeked around. Nothing. Close the door.
We returned to the kitchen and my sister confessed that she made it all up, just to scare me. I didn’t believe her. Were you actually scared I asked her and she teased no, but you obviously were. Alright. Mom and Dad would be home within the hour but I wasn’t sure if I would make it. I felt a lingering dread. She tried to lighten my spirits, making popcorn and turning on the television. I asked her to crank up the volume, but it couldn’t penetrate the eerie silence of the house. Where was the wind? I asked her to accompany me to my bedroom. We walked up the stairs and stepped cautiously into the hallway. We expected to see a line of closed doors. At the same time we both saw that one of the doors was wide open. We were gasping as we ran into my room and slammed the door behind us. Did you see, did you see, did you see, I cried. Yes, it’s okay, she said, it’s okay — I think when we were slamming the doors we made a draft. The attic door blows open all the time. The draft from downstairs opened the door, that is all. An unbearable anguish rose from within me. She did not see what I saw. You didn’t see it, did you? This was when I screamed that horrible scream. I did not have the words to tell her that I saw something else.
She opened the door to reassure me, admonishing me to calm down as she dragged me to the the attic door. Look for yourself, there’s nothing here! I tried to wrangle myself free but my body wasn’t moving right. If I could have spoken I would have told her not to go near the door, to stay away, because there was, easily visible to me, not a blur, not a phantom, not a misty form, but a man, standing in the room. His eyes were locked on mine, and he screamed right back at me.
Like so many of my memories of my childhood, the events of that evening receded into shadow. I explicitly remembered the scream, but it must have been something ghastly that I conjured in my imagination. Was it part of sleep, or a part of waking? As a teenager, this memory was relegated to a ghost story I told from time to time. As an adult, I realized that this was no mere story.
1995
I found an affordable one bedroom apartment after college graduation, and was excited to live on my own for the first time. The neighborhood was safe by daylight, but arguably threatening by nightfall. The apartment occupied the entire second and third floors of a three-story house in Pittsburgh. The kitchen and bathrooms on the second floor were cheerless and kind of gross, but the bedroom was nice enough. There were plenty of quirks left by hasty repairs and modifications. Holes in the walls were fixed with paper plates. Floors were a patchwork of peeling linoleum. Broken windows were taped over with plastic. I was thrilled, though. I knew I could fix the place up, and that is what I did, putting considerable effort into cleaning, painting, and decorating the second floor. The third floor had one unfinished room that was cold, damp, and dark, yet I was excited about it more than any other room. It was barely habitable. The only outlet was attached to the overhead light fixture in the middle of the room, and there was no heater. The ceiling was sloped all the way to the floor as it was the roof of the building. Two walls faced one another on opposite sides of the room, one had a window, and on the other, a large expanse of wood paneling had been taped to the wall, blocking what I assumed would have been a matching window. I would make an art studio up there, a place to set up my painting supplies and produce the kind of large-scale paintings I had been wanting to work on. I was fortunate to have a space to be creative in. But that is not what happened. After a few months it occurred to me that I had not once opened the door to the third floor. In fact, from my first day the door had remained locked, with the key hidden in the back of a kitchen drawer. I couldn’t gather the will to enter the room I was most excited to occupy, so I wondered, casually, remotely, if I was somehow afraid of it.
One night I had a nightmare too detailed to be a dream, too frightening to be real. Voices from the street woke me up. They sounded like an angry mob, growing, and moving with tremendous speed. I got up from my bed and staggered toward the living room. From the window, I saw a monstrous crowd brandishing torches and weapons, piercing the silence of the night with hateful cries. They were one block away, approaching my street from the avenue it crosses. They must have seen my silhouette from the window, for at once they stopped and pointed up to me before fixing their course straight towards my house. They would burst through my apartment door and find me with nowhere to hide. Only one interior door had a lock; the door to the third floor. I could lock myself up there and it would buy me some time, or hopefully, they would take what they wanted and just go away. The mob was at my house now, terrorizing me from every direction. If they were going to break in, it would be a matter of seconds. I fumbled around the junk drawer and found the key. I unlocked the door and reluctantly crept up the stairs to the third floor. What I saw there, in the middle of the room, stopped me cold. I heard the scream come out of my mouth. My bed from downstairs was positioned in the middle of the room. In a languid motion, a man sat up from the bed and turned to face me. He looked exactly like he did in the attic of my childhood home. His face morphed into the astonished anguish of a frightened child. He was crying. No, he was mimicking my fright. He tilted his head to the side in mock sympathy. I ran downstairs, slammed the door, and locked it. I propped a chair under the doorknob. The street was completely empty and silent. By imagining the attack from outside, I had fooled myself into going upstairs. I slid down the wall onto the floor and sat, afraid of the windows in the living room, afraid of the bed in my bedroom, afraid of the street. Every option I had was unsatisfactory, so I stayed on the floor, watching the door, overnight.
I woke up in my room, in bed. Had I moved back in here? Or had it been a dream, after all? I was exhausted. I lingered in bed, wishing for the memory of that man to go away. If it was a dream, it was like nothing I’ve had before. This is absurd. It’s fine. Get out of bed and go see. I recalled that I moved the chair in front of the door last night; all I had to do was go see if it was still there. I stood up from my bed and slowly walked toward the kitchen. In a few steps I’d have confirmation of whether this was a dream or not. The chair was not there. A dream — of course it didn’t happen. I was relieved, but not satisfied; I had to investigate the room upstairs. The door would be locked so I needed to retrieve the key, but my hand went to the doorknob anyhow, just to see, and it turned. unlocked unlocked unlocked how how how. There is no doubt that I locked it last night. It was always locked. The door swung open.
I climbed the stairs, expecting to see the bed and the man right away, but I did not. The room was empty. I approached the wall with the makeshift wood paneling, and I had to know what was behind it. I peeled away layer after layer of old tape, revealing a tight row of nails, hundreds of them, as if this panel was not to be taken away easily. I used my fingernails to pry the nails from a section of the paneling. I slipped my fingers between the paneling and the wall, and with a forceful pull, all of the remaining nails popped out of the wall one by one, and the paneling dropped heavily to the floor. The clearing revealed a large chamber. I wasn’t sure that this made architectural sense. What was below it? My bedroom? I stepped into the room and my eyes adjusted to the dark. I am awake I see what I see. On the far end of the room, again, was the man. A revolting reality dawned on me; there is something following me, growing stronger, and nobody can help me. The man tilted back his head, and his mouth twisted into the shape of a scream from which came an incomprehensible silence. And then horror flooded sharply through me, escaping my mouth in wretched, unspeakable tones. His scream was coming from me. He was making me scream for him.
Today
Every morning starts with the same cruel revelation. This nightmare is real, and immune to my running away, to my slamming and locking doors. I’ll not be able to howl it away. Breathing will help. I’ll close my eyes as long as necessary. Soundless and still. No surprises for a while, please. Banish memory of the sound, familiar and awful; forget how it fills the room long after my screaming stops.
Another ghostly story:
