The Haunted House (pt. 5)

I did not linger long after that revelation which had sent my mind into a strange spiral of agitation. The others were curious and wanted to take another photo of me but I declined and made lame excuses as to my sudden exit.  Part of me wonders if it was simply my usual flair for the melodramatic, a need to seem enigmatic as opposed to dull, that made me act so but more likely and more memorable was the palpable fear that began to build in me and drive me back to the house with haste, one that made me imagine that any other picture taken of me would surely show the exact same phenomenon.

The problem that then ensued was that I had a very difficult time finding the stairway at the bottom of the cliff.  I walked past it many times before retreating, each time convincing myself again and again that I had indeed gone too far, but there was something so unfamiliar about the location of the stairs that kept me from accepting that I had reached my goal.  Perhaps I simply had not taken note of my surroundings enough to recognize them again upon my return, but even as I started up the steps I remained in doubt as to whether they were truly the right ones and am embarrassed to admit that I even turned around a couple of times once I had convinced myself that I was wrong.  The twists and turns that they took just did not seem correct to me at the moment and it took the descending despair of my mood to finally force me up to face whatever unknown territory might lie ahead.

Now I know that it was the culmination of what had started with that strange picture that was clouding my thoughts so.  The tension had been slowly rising and a weird panic was gripping me at the base of my consciousness.  It was eased little when I finally came to accept that I was on the right stairway after all and that the rooftop that I could see above the plant line was the roof of the house I needed it to be.  But then it all fell back and much deeper when I realized that the thing that was bothering me about what I was seeing was that there was no light coming from the back of the house, the lights that I had left on when I had started out on this trek to the beach.  The darkness continued to the top of the stairs and beyond and was not dissipated at any point all the way to the house and even inside.  I stood at the top of the flight and stared into the darkness of those windows and tried to tell myself that perhaps a simple power failure was to blame, but knowing that I had no alternate light source made that less of a balm for my creaking nerves.

And then the real terror started.  From within the pit of that darkness came a pin of light, one that slowly intensified before it began to float about inside.  I was a statue of fear with only my eyes in motion to follow the movements of that bright point when a new depth to internal darkness was plumbed as I recognized that the motions were identical to the ones that I had first spied back on the beach.