The first part of this story is here.

“I dare you,” it said.

I Dare You.

I knew if I turned around, that I probably wouldn’t able to see something. Of course, there was always the chance that I could see it. In my mind’s eye, I pictured something vaguely human, dark, translucent, like an abyss.

I didn’t know if it could hurt me. I didn’t know if it could do anything to me. I only had a vague idea that it wasn’t from this world, and that it was attached to this house for reasons I couldn’t explain.

See, the thing is that this thing was able to block me. I searched my intuition for some clue, but every time an idea would start to take form it would immediately leave.

Psychics Aren’t Used to This.

I’m not used to this kind of thing. I’m used to knowing things before everyone else does. I’m not used to being stuck with only my five material senses. Suddenly, this house wasn’t so nice. The silence was deafening. The dark was crushing.

I was, for the first time in my life, truly blind and truly deaf.

It was still behind me.

The trouble was that if I didn’t turn around, I’d be stuck staring at that doorway forever. If it was my doom, it was my doom, so I turned around.

Ghost? No. There was no “thing” there.

I saw nothing. I heard nothing. There was no one thing there. I realized that what it was that haunted me, that tormented the cat was the house itself, and somewhere in that mud room was the heart, the soul of whatever it was.

I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t want to move, but it’s as if my own guardian angel moved me up the stairs, into the guest room, and made me pack my things.

I locked the doors, left the key, and never came back. I missed the Grassroots Festival. I drove right past it on my way back to Buffalo.

And when I was driving away, I looked out the rearview mirror and saw nothing but a dark house staring at me.

And a cat. The cat came out, rubbed up against the post, and laid down as the night fell and I bumbled down the hilly road, never to return.

And as life would have it…

A middle-aged woman came to my storefront in South Beach, and I thought I knew her. I was sure of it. She asked for a reading, and when I met her in person, I saw that house.

As it turned out, she wanted me to lift a curse. I said I didn’t normally do that, but I was interested to find out.

Her father was a strange man, and she knew that, but not to the extent until he died. She was left a house in the Ithaca woods by Buttermilk Falls.

As she was cleaning out the basement, she found a boarded up crawlspace, and when she opened it, she found bones.

Human bones.

Her parents would pretend to fly away and let house sitters from far away come by in the summer. They would watch, and when the time was right, he would kill. Her mother felt helpless to stop it, but she helped him hide the bodies.

They were watching me that night.

No wonder the cat was fine when I was gone.