Merna was always a sensitive child prone to what adults called a vivid imagination. Before she was two years old she insisted that her bed was filled with fire and screamed for her parents to come, but of course they saw nothing and attributed it to her over hearing her mother talk about a child whose nightgown had caught fire. Yet, Merna remembered those flames, remembered wondering why they didn't burn this time, wondering where they came from.
When her mother read to her in the big chair in the living room, Merna sometimes saw a red scarf, tied in a knot fly through the transom on the front door and land on the rug. She knew that meant her grandmother was coming and was always happily awaiting her entrance when she came in minutes later.
That house was a beautiful playground for her. She had her own little porch that led off the kitchen into the backyard where she could play in her sandbox while Cappy, her English bulldog slept nearby. And then came the day when she opened the basement door and Cappy lunged at her, his mouth foaming and bleeding and someone behind her slammed that door shut. It was terrifying. After that when she rode her tricycle through one big double door in the living room and down the dark front hall at night towards the other double door on the other end, she saw shadows. Shadows that peeked at her through the staircase on her right, or poked out at her from the pantry up ahead. She rode fast after that.
The family moved the next year and she now she was a big girl sleeping in a bunk bed and sharing a room with her baby brother and sister, Merna no longer saw the flames on her covers. Now she saw three white chalky pigs with candy cigarette pink noses and eyes. They were terrifying. She remembered when their mouths dripped blood. Her blood and knew they would soon eat her. They came night after night and all her parents said was, "It was just a dream."
She had lot of dreams. Almost as if she lived two lives because they were so vivid.
Later she became a prolific sleep walker who ran shrieking through the house asking where the dough balls were and when she was gently awakened by her parents she had no idea what dough balls were, or trying to avoid the little man who stood on the landing of the staircase waiting to grab her. At night she pulled her blankets in all tight around her so nothing could get in underneath them.
Those were the moving years. In the middle of sixth grade they moved and again at the end of seventh grade, this time to a house in a tiny country town with a backyard so big they discovered a real live horse tethered in the back of the backyard. There her brother would catch huge spiders and play with them until one got away in his bedroom across the hall. They never did find it, but Merna dreamed it was dropping off her chandelier in the bedroom onto her bed and she woke up screaming in terror. Those dreams finally convinced her parents to move back to the city and even though the spider dreams continued for many years, Merna seemed much calmer and better adjusted.
She still had the occasional night terror seeing people who shouldn't be there lying next to her bed, hovering three feet off the floor, but her parents just made her sister come sleep with her the rest of those nights. And eventually Merna graduated from high school and left for college where she met a very handsome young man whose name was Angel.
Angel was such a romantic. They went on dates to see what ducks did in the rain and rented a big blue bus for a camp out with friends. He was much older than her and so when he graduated he was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam.
Merna was in love. With an angel! But her dreams returned. She was in the front pew of a dark church. Before her was an upside down cross and Angel was the priest. He was saying, "Thou shalt not honor they father and thy mother. Thous shalt commit adultery. Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's wife." There was dark chanting in the background and Merna woke up screaming. Her father came and told her to get up, get a drink of water then go back to bed and lie down on her other side. She did that and the dream repeated itself! The chanting was terrifying.
But Angel came home and they were married. He was still in the army so they rented a small Airstream mobile home to live in. Angel had to get up very early to be at the army if he wanted to live off base, so Merna usually got up and fixed him breakfast then went back to bed. At least that's what she did in the beginning. Then the one morning she woke up and couldn't move. There was someone sitting on her back and every time she tried to move they gave an evil cackle and pushed her back down! She tried to tell herself she was asleep, but she could see her bed and the walls and even the windows above her, but she couldn't move. Finally it stopped, but the next day it happened again and again.
Then she dreamed she was outside running away from whatever the evil thing was that came to sit on her back and when she woke up later that morning her nightgown was damp and her shoes covered in mud. Thankfully that never happened again.
The army time ended and Merna and Angel moved to a small Midwestern town where their adult lives began in earnest. He worked for a large company and she kept house and played tennis. Playing up to six hours a day, she often dropped into bed and slept soundly, but there were the occasional dreams. Once she thought there was a huge man threatening her beside her in bed and she woke Angel up holding an invisible knife to his throat. Another time she thought she was on the African Queen and there was the light ahead of them through the rushes. Angel heard her crying, "I see the light, I see the light." He comically replied, "Hallelujah, go back to sleep!"
A few years later Angel's mother came down to live in a nursing home near them. One night she broke her hip and had to be taken to the hospital. The next night Merna dreamed she was Angel's mother and in a car trying to find Angel and Merna's home when she hit a tree. She was so tired. So tired. So ... Merna woke up gasping as the darkness enveloped her. She wasn't Angel's mother! Angel's mother was dying! The phone ran right after that. It was the hospital saying that Angel's mother had just passed away.
Sometimes Merna heard her own mother's voice. It always had something to tell her. Sometimes it said it was time to get up and it always was! Another time it said her brother's wife had just had a baby and it was a boy! The next day her mother really did call her and tell her the baby boy was born at 3 AM.
Merna joined a dream group where they shared their dreams and discussed what they might mean, but people noticed that Merna seemed to have dreams very similar to her best friend's dreams on the same night. Since they all wrote their dreams down when they occurred this was oddly synchronistic. But when the dream group experimented by sleeping in a circle on the church floor, it happened again and this time Merna shared first before anyone else. These dreams were unique because they were totally unlike any other dreams Merna ever had and meant really nothing to her, where they mean something very personal to her friend.
Then one day, like many families, Merna and Angel wanted a fresh start and went house hunting and the minute they walked into the house they were sold. They knew this was where they wanted to finish raising their family. The children were 12, 14 and 19 and this house was exactly what they wanted with its two family rooms, five bedrooms and four baths. There was a big screened in porch and a huge in-ground pool. It could not have been more perfect. The fact that a pigeon pooped right on the owner's head as he showed them the pool was a fore-shadowing they totally ignored.
Moving day was punctuated with a resounding boom that took everyone by surprise. It turned out to be a duck that had flown into the dining room window and knocked itself out. The whole back of the house was windows and patio doors that reflected the pool and shrubbery of the backyard and all kinds of birds were constantly flying into them. Some of them recovering and others dying right there below the windows.
Some people said that because the children were teenagers that was why trouble began to manifest itself in their lives, but Merna had a sense this wasn't so. The house was beautiful and life seemed as though it should be perfect. It was not.
The downstairs bathroom was in the very heart of the house. They called it the Bordello bath because of the flocked red velvet and gold wallpaper. Merna always planned to redo it in wedgewood blue and whit, but that never came about. A night owl, Merna was often downstairs long after everyone else was in bed and she often had a sense that she was not alone. She chalked it off to late night jitters, but one night while she was shampooing the family room carpeting she glanced up to see someone watching her from right outside the bathroom. At first she didn't think anything of it. There were always at least five people in this house and sometimes more. But later she glanced up and thought she saw them again. This time she wondered why they didn't just come on into the family room or kitchen, so she called out. "Don't just stand there. Come in." No one came. No one was there. She checked all the bedrooms only to find everyone sound asleep in their bed. It was a little unsettling.
Also unsettling was coming down in the morning and sometimes finding the front door unlocked and wide open. The first few times she blamed their daughter. She thought she had come in from being with friends and carelessly left the door open all night, but her daughter swore it wasn't her and there were many times when Merna knew her daughter had been home all night. Yet, still that door was wide open in the morning.
Merna had other strange experiences that she couldn't quite explain, but they were so ordinary that she didn't think about them for a long time after they started. She would be sitting in the family room and hear the garage door go up. That meant Angel was coming home, or one of the kids had used the keypad to let themselves into the garage, but it would be later before anyone came in. Someone always did come in, eventually, so Merna began opening the door and checking when she heard the door go up. The garage was always dark and the door completely closed until the second time, ten minutes or so later, she would hear the door go up again and this time someone would come in from the garage for real.
One night Merna went to bed early. She was reading a good book and her favorite place to read was in her big four poster bed. Propped up on pillows and engrossed in the story, she saw Angel come into the bedroom and open the closet door, then walk in and close it. She didn't give it a second thought. He often did this if the patio door drapes were wide open as they were that night. But he didn't come back out. At first she thought nothing of it, but when it had been way too long, she called out asking him what he was doing in there? He didn't answer. After asking several times, she became angry and got out of bed to go see. Throwing open the big double doors to the closet she was met by no one! Angel wasn't I there. That made her heart leap in her chest and she ran downstairs where she found him totally absorbed in his computer. No he hadn't just come upstairs and gone into the closet. He was fully dressed and he looked totally confused.
The house was beginning to have an atmosphere that Merna found slightly creepy. People frequently mentioned seeing someone out of the corner of their eye in the hallway door by the bathroom, or the basement door would just open up in spite of being latched. Birds continued to throw themselves into the dining room and kitchen windows and odd birds would appear sitting on the tall fence around the pool. There was a rag tailed hawk that like to sit on the fence and stare at the house for hours, a possum that came in under the screened in porch to lick the grill and occasionally dead birds appeared in the trash can where she kept the extra bird seed in spite of the lid being closed after each use.
They had two Himalayan kittens who loved to play upstairs in the bedroom, but when she brought them down to the kitchen and the family room, they would crawl in under the cabinets and refuse to come out.
The children began to act out. Some of it was typical teenage stuff, but there seemed to be an aura of anger that hung over everyone's head much of the time. People were on edge and very temperamental. The cockatiel was not. He loved to be allowed to fly free. If he was out on the screened in porch he could be easily contained by simply holding up a perch and he would land on it, but not in the dining room. There he would perch on the silver teapot and chitter and chatter and squawk, then fly madly into the air before returning to the teapot to do it again. He refused to come if he was in that room.
After hours of counseling and dealing with all kinds of problems with the children they decided to move. This decision came when their daughter came home to find Angel filming a young woman in her parents bed! He swore he would be faithful from then on and built them a new house on the lake to prove it.
Of course the new house was really just a final step towards a divorce. Like many people they honestly believed they could make a clean start and everything would be okay. It was fun designing their dream home and it truly was beautiful, but people seldom really change and what had been love now became distrust.
Merna bought a lovely condo overlooking a lake surrounded by evergreen trees and settled in to begin living alone for the first time in all her fifty years. It was strange having the children all grown and away, but her new home was like a miniature version of the house they had built. It had two bedrooms and a balcony upstairs complete with a bathroom that had a jetted tub. Downstairs was a living room with a brick fireplace, a dining room and a good sized kitchen, plus a bathroom/laundry room. There were French doors off the dining room to a deck facing the lake. The only problem here was the flushing toilet downstairs. It never flushed on its own while Merna was down there, but at night it would sometimes flush three or four times. It gave her the oddest feeling that she was not alone. This was exacerbated by waking up and feeling someone cuddled up behind her back with an arm around her. It was a comforting wonderful feeling, until she remembered that she lived alone and no one should be in her bed besides her. When she had that thought, the arm gave her a quick hug and disappeared. Then she felt terrified. Was it sleep paralysis again? It felt so real.
Eventually deciding to move closer to her siblings, she sold the condo and rented a succession of homes over the next few years. Each one was very old with darling little quirks like a stained glass window in the closet, or being located on a farm next to a huge sunflower labyrinth, or not so darling quirks like being besieged by thousands of slugs that would find themselves on the handle of her storm door, or crawling up her bathtub, or the walls of her house. There was a small sink hole by the back door and no matter how many times her landlord filled it up it sank down to hold hundreds of squirming slugs! She put salt around all the interior walls and saucers with salt in them under the four posts of her bed to deter them.
But in general there was nothing unnatural in any of those homes, except for the country one. Every so often that house, which had been an original homestead house, would be filled with the scent of an old lady's powder. Strangely enough, instead of frightening her, Merna often felt a sense of comfort when that happened. As if she were once again a child visiting her grandmother and great Aunt Lete.
Time passed. Merna moved again and again. She couldn't seem to settle down and stay in one place more that a year or two, but none of these home contained anything out of the ordinary. She could walk in the dark basements or big closets without any fear at all and she slept comfortably in her bed at night.
Until she moved into her last apartment in the city. There she began having screaming night terrors and finding herself leaping out of bed in the middle of the night. Several times she began experiencing sleep paralysis again and once during those times, she looked over and saw an old woman standing on the other side of her room looking at her. The woman was wearing a head scarf tied under her chin and had on old fashioned clothes, a shawl and a long skirt. Merna looked at her for the longest time trying to convince herself it was a dream, but the woman seemed very solid. Eventually Merna blinked and the woman disappeared never to be seen again.
Just before she moved out of that apartment she was working on her computer one afternoon. It was broad daylight. Her computer was in her lap and she was typing away when she saw a young man standing on her right side. He was stocky and about five foot eight or so. He had very pale skin, reddish hair and an enigmatic look on his face. He looked so natural that it took a minute for her to realize that no one else should be in her apartment. She looked away and when she looked back he was not there. It wasn't scary, but it was very very odd.
Merna moved one last time, to a high rise for people over 55. She had a lovely apartment and there was a comfort in being able to hear other people, or smell their cooking, or pass them in the elevator, because she could just tell herself these were her neighbors and not something unique to her senses. Her dreams were still very vivid. It was as though she lived several lives. One awake and the others while sleeping. That could be both comforting and sweet, or terrifying, depending on the experiences.
Merna knew she was approaching the end of her life as she knew it, but because of all her experiences, she thought that there was probably something much different than the heaven Christians all believed in. Perhaps there were multi-verses, or different layers of being, or something she could not yet imagine. She wasn't sure, but she was certain that life was richer and rarer than most people ever suspected.
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