Post #261686 by procinema29 on Thu, Oct 19, 2006 3:34 PM

"The Necklace"

PART SIX

The sound lingered there a moment, then it started to cruise slowly towards me. My legs felt rooted to the spot.

I did not want to consider the unspeakable things that were about to happen, only allowed my dread of them to motivate me. There was only one thing to do. I knew what it wanted. I pulled the necklace out of my pocket and flung it at the thing advancing on me. Finding my legs free to move, I turned and ran and didn’t look back.

It took me, at the speed I was running, only a minute to reach the house. I scrambled instinctively over a number of rocks which might have tripped me had I not been in such an electrified, such a totally aware state. The moment I turned and ran, I knew that my life depended on my immediate flight away from this place.

I felt my dread subside gradually as I rounded the bend and saw the large house. The rain appeared to be subsiding too. I had escaped.

I slowed down and approached the place. The lights were off, all the windows completely dark.

And all of a sudden, I was consumed by a feeling--not an alarming one, but one that arose instantly and which was startling at that moment. I had sensed the quality of the silence that hid beyond the murmur of the fading rain. I knew I was alone; I knew that, when I got to the front door, I would find no one inside.

I went up the front steps, opened the door, and went in.

Inspecting with the cigarette lighter as before, I found the floor bare; all the furniture was gone; the floor looked much older than it had before. I saw with astonishment that a number of the floor boards were broken in or missing.

I stepped outside, placing my lighter back in my pocket and resolving not to let the dawning horror paralyze me. When I got in my car, I averted my eyes from the place and trusted and hoped that nothing further would go wrong this night. I started the car up, turned it around on the road, and got myself out of there.

For several days following, and my friends will tell you if you ask them, I went into seclusion. During those days nothing seemed solid around me; I spent most of the time sitting and thinking. Sleep was fitful when it came.

Though I do not profess to understand the nature of the events which befell me, I do believe that, when I was experiencing them, I was exposed to some unknown type of energy, the effect of which stayed with me for some time after the exposure took place. I believe that my consciousness, my mind, intersected with that infinite aspect of reality that modern science does not yet understand, that realm in which people’s intentions, their desires and apparently their personalities continue beyond their physical end. The Henrietta Phillips I had talked to had proved to be illusory, but I had talked to her, had somehow received a phone call from her that morning. I find it disturbing that during my period of seclusion, I was awakened two or three times in the night by the ringing of the telephone, which I answered each time to find only a dial tone. During these occasions I noticed that the telephone never seemed to ring more than a moment after I’d come awake, seeming to cut off, or fade off, shortly after I opened my eyes.

I was also plagued by dreams of a frightful nature, though this surprises me not, since they were usually odd, distorted recollections of my terrifying trek across the muddy hillside path. In these dreams I was always trying to make my way back to the large house, running in fear from an invisible thing that was chasing me. But this did not go on forever. As the days passed the frightening dreams, at first vivid, became vague, and the time I spent trapped in them became shorter and shorter.

Interestingly, too, I noticed that with each successive dream, the thing chasing me seemed to weaken: At first it was always just behind me, but I noticed, each time I had this recurring dream, that it fell back more and more, as if unable to keep up.

At some point I decided that my mind’s unwillingness to forget the experience must be blamed, at least in part, for any lingering aftereffects, and that I must put a conscious effort into blocking such thoughts out. This turned out to be successful, and my life did return to normal, as I learned again to grapple with the blessed problems of ordinary days and nights.