I couldn’t put them through that torture. I begged Mom to just leave. The phone went all crackly and disconnected.
My only choice was to go back. I couldn’t live with the guilt otherwise.
Of course, as soon as I was back, things got much worse.
Dad had trouble working with his broken fingers. He got so frustrated that he told off his boss and they put him on unpaid suspension. We had enough money tucked away to bridge the gap. Even though the weather was hot, the house had turned cold inside. I would have to wear a sweater and long pants. Then, when I went outdoors, I would take it all off and switch to a t-shirt and shorts. I had the idea that the house was punishing me for those few days of freedom. It was saying, “I’m more powerful than you understand. If you leave again, I will really make you suffer.”
It didn’t weaken my resolve to get away. I just changed my tactics. I thought maybe I could force Mom and Dad to move and then we would all be out from under the spell.
I couldn’t burn it down or blow it up. Anything I did near that place, the house would know.
The mortgage was paid off, so there was no way to get a bank involved.
Then I found out about property tax. Mom never balanced her checkbook. It would have been difficult anyway with the checkbook missing half of the time. One of my jobs was to get the mail and take the outgoing mail to the box. I knew the property tax was due soon, so I waited. When Mom wrote that check, I made sure that I had a letter to mail as well and I took both out to the box. Only my letter went in. I ripped up the property tax bill and then I stole the town report when it came out a couple of months later. It wasn’t a great plan, but I was just a kid.
The collector ended up calling mom to talk about the delinquent taxes. She was miffed about the interest, of course, but she just paid that off too. Like I said, we weren’t poor.
I was getting desperate by that point. I couldn’t destroy the house and I couldn’t get the government to take it from my parents.
I had to resort to the unthinkable—I went to the library and I did research.
From what I read, we didn’t have a haunting. The type of activity we were seeing almost had to be demonic, and that’s not associated with a place, but a person. That meant that one of my parents had a demon attached to them. I kept thinking about my Grandpap and the way the house attacked him when he threatened Mom. So it seemed logical that Mom was the one who the demon was attached to. Also, Grandpap was Dad’s father, and it seemed like the demon would have stopped short of killing Grandpap if it was more aligned with Dad than Mom. Honestly, though, I had no way to be sure. All I was sure about was that I didn’t think that it was attached to me. For one, the activity kept going even when I was away. You remember, Dad’s hand was broken while I was in Raleigh. The more I thought about it, things seemed to happen around my mother instead of to her. Still, I had to find out for sure before I could decide what to do.
I got them alone, one at a time.
I waited until I was off from school and then I hid my Dad’s lunch. He couldn’t find it when he was on his way out in the morning, so he figured that the house had taken it. That was a pretty normal thing. I had also taken his money, so I knew he couldn’t buy lunch. In a rush, I knew what he would say—he would ask Mom to bring him something.
I volunteered for the duty.
All I had to do was make him lunch and ride my bike down to the office where he went between service calls. I brought lunch for him and me as well. It was easy to talk him into letting me eat with him. We sat at the picnic table behind the office. It smelled like oil, but it was a good lunch. When he was mostly done, smiling over the sandwich I brought, I introduced my idea.
“Remember when you used to talk about moving south,” I said.
“I talked about that?”
“When Dallas was in the playoffs, you said how much you liked it there, remember?”
“That’s not really south. It’s more west.”
“But you lived there?”
“I did, for a while. It was about as warm as here in the winter, but we didn’t get those evil storms off the coast. In the summer, it was like being under a broiler. That sun would try to cook the skin right off your bones. Still, I liked it a lot. And the football was raucous. Not like here.”
I said the next line with him. It was something he said a lot.
“There’s no football team to root for here,” we said together.
Then, alone, he practically spat when he said, “Carolina Panthers.”
Dad used to love to hate the Panthers. When the team was first started, he went to a couple of games and then something must have gone wrong. He hated them before they even finished their first
