Followed
Followed
"Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish, he'd go away"
- Hughes Mearns
It started with a story.
Three months in and the house was great. Frank said his ex-mother-in-law owned it and didn’t mind renting it out to us at a discount price. The neighborhood was nice and even though the outside looked like a dump with peeled gray paint and a slanted porch roof, the kitchen had new counters and cupboards and the whole downstairs sported hardwood floors.
And then there was the Throne Room. The last tenant was so old he didn’t want to walk upstairs to use the main bath, so he knocked out the wall between his bedroom closet and kitchen pantry and added a toilet. Now the shoe box of a bathroom got more play on the house tour than the big screen T.V. or the creepy attic.
Frank got the larger room downstairs and parking privileges for the driveway, but I got a chance to get out of my parents house. He neglected to tell me he was a Followed until three months in.
By then a few things had happened. They were little things at first. Frank’s favorite hat went missing, which he bitched about for a week or so, but then dropped. Then there was the new issue of Maxim that disappeared out of the bathroom. It started with little things—things you could forget.
---
I woke up one Sunday to the sound of my bedroom exploding.
The house party the night before left me passed out on the couch downstairs. My shirt stunk of dried beer. My head beat to the rhythm of the loud crash, followed by the thud of objects scattering across the carpeted floor. It was clear my dresser had been tipped over, but with Frank sitting in his room it wasn’t clear who did it.
Burglars were a concern, but a burglar sneaking in the second story window on a Sunday morning to knock over my dresser didn’t seem plausible. I sat up, tried to ignore the nausea, and rushed toward the staircase.
Before I could make it to the lip of the stairs another swift punch pounded the floor. Something was doing this, calling attention to itself, beckoning me. It sounded angry. Minutes passed while I stood there, looking up the stairs at the double windows near the landing.
After some time passed and it remained quiet I took a step up.
Frank grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back downstairs.
“Don’t go up there just yet,” he said. His thirty-three year old face looked double that, darkness hidden somewhere it hadn’t been before. It was like a shadow rolled over him that wouldn't leave no matter what light he was standing in.
“You heard that, too?” I asked.
“Yeah, except I know what it is,” he said. “Let’s go have a cigarette, I gotta tell you something.”
And that’s when Frank told me he was a Followed. That was his word for it, not mine. I would have just said I was haunted if it was me, but Frank claimed it had to be a ghost if you were going to call it haunted. He said it wasn’t a ghost we were dealing with, it was a Shadow Man.
“What the fuck is a Shadow Man?” I asked.
“Well,” Frank started, taking a pull from his Parliament and licking his lips before continuing, “I’m not sure there’s a technical definition for it. I only know what’s happened to me so far.”
“Which is?”
“I saw him the first time when I was six years old. I was playing in my room, you know building blocks or whatever, and I looked up and saw him on the wall, watching me. Except I can’t say for sure he was ‘watching’ since you can’t really see his face. He’s just an outline, but you can make out his hat; one of those Dick Tracy jobs, like he’s from the 40’s.”
I thought Frank was full of it, but I smoked the cigarette he lent me and listened anyway. See, I liked all that paranormal stuff, always had. I used to watch Sightings on the Sci-Fi Channel, following the story of the Heartland Ghost and all the other UFO stories they had. Believing never had much to do with enjoying a good story for me.
“The thing that makes him different from a ghost is that he doesn’t haunt a place like a normal ghost does. He follows me. No matter where I live he’s there, he’s attached to me,” Frank said with ease, like he was explaining addition instead of pseudoscience.
“All your other room mates know about this?” I asked, half joking.
“I tell ‘em all in time, but some find out on their own.”
His room was in the back of the house, but every ten minutes or so we’d hear another loud bang from upstairs. I kept imagining my room littered with glass and broken picture frames. I was more concerned with a rabid raccoon than a Shadow Man, but I listened just the same.
“Have you ever tried to prove he’s there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Frank said. But that was it.
“Yeah, what?” I asked. “What’d you do?”
“I was actually living downtown at the time, in one of those doubles on Humboldt. I was staying with Lanie, you met Lanie over at Joe’s house on St. Patty’s day. Anyway, I was staying with her at the time and she walked in one day and found all the burners on the stove on full blast. The flames kicked up about six inches, she said. The whole place smelt like gas.
"I had to tell her the deal at that point, except Lanie wanted more answers. I never messed with Shadow Man myself, always figured it was too dangerous, but she wanted to know.”
I was sitting on his bed. He was posted up on his computer chair, leaned forward, looking at the ground. He crushed his butt in the tray on his desk and lit another.
“And?” I asked, batting at the ball of string he placed in front of me, getting caught up in the yarn.
“She slept in the room with the crawl space door. One day before we left for work we left a recorder in there, seeing what’d pick up. We saw something on T.V. about being able to do that and figured we might get something.” Frank said.
“Did you?” I asked, looking at him while he looked at the floor.
“We listened to the whole tape, fast forwarding a little here or there, but there was nothing except static and a few normal sounds like pipes creaking. Then we got to the end of the tape, the part where Lanie got home and walked in her room to grab the recorder. You could hear her footsteps when she walked in and then you heard it talk.”
Without expecting it I got cold. The worst part was it being a Sunday morning, the birds outside chirping, the neighborhood kids splashing in a pool. Some asshole was already cutting his lawn, but who could really get mad at him when it was such a nice day?
I barely got my next question out.
“W-What’d it say, Frank?”
“It said, ‘Here she comes’ and then there was a bunch of scratching like a hermit crab started crawling away dragging it’s shell behind it.”
We sat in silence for a while until I asked for another cigarette. My nerves all felt fried, like I’d accidentally stuck a gardening shovel through an underground power line. Frank handed me another cigarette, but I dropped it when another blast pounded upstairs.
“What the fuck is going on up there?” I asked, almost pleading.
“Nothing,” Frank said. He turned towards his computer and pulled up his Facebook, clicking through pictures from a concert we’d been to a week before.
“What do you mean nothing? My whole dressers gotta be upside down up there,” I said. There was no other explanation for the huge racket that started it all off.
“Go look if you don’t believe me,” he said. “Nothing’s gonna be moved. It’ll be just like you left it.”
Later I did go look. It was just like he said. Nothing moved.
---
A couple weeks went by with nothing of note happening.
I started to grow comfortable with the idea of Shadow Man, even joking about him with Frank, yelling obscenities and blaming things on him like people used to blame everything on El Nino. Frank always told me to cool it down. He was joking, but still seemed half serious.
I found an old For Rent sign at the dollar store and taped it to the crawl space door in the upstairs hall way. Frank laughed at it, but there was something in his laugh that said he was glad it was me doing the taunting.
The more comfortable I got with Shadow Man the less he came around. I was the doubting Thomas, practically begging for a corpse to show up so I could put my hands in its wounds.
At thirty-three and twenty-two, Frank and I converted the dining room into a bar, with all the traditional fixtures you’d expect, including a dart board. We always fooled around with the idea of a pool table or a foosball game, but there wasn’t enough room. A dart board was perfect hanging on the wall. Frank took care of all the accessories, including picking up new darts every time we snapped a tip. Eventually we were down to three good darts and then one night we got knocked down to two.
It was my turn, the first two darts stuck into twenty and a double nineteen, but the third smacked into the wall, the plastic tip breaking, the flimsy fins falling out on the floor. The actual dart bounced off the ground and skidded away. We looked for it, under the table, the bar, the couches and the chairs, but we couldn’t find it. We played on with two, Frank winning on some last minute bulls-eyes. By the time we were done we’d cut through half an eighteen pack and forgotten all about the disappearing dart.
The next day I was downstairs doing laundry, all the lights on, just in case. Scooping up my basket I headed for the stairs, but something caught my eye, the way a quarter does under a car in the parking lot. In the corner of the basement, under an old cob web covered chair I found the missing dart.
Rational thinking can be a bastard when the thing you’re thinking about isn’t rational. I spent the week after figuring out every way the dart could have bounced off the floor, banked off the wall and skidded down the stairs, but even if that was possible there was no way it could have carried enough momentum to land under the chair.
But then things were calm again for a couple of months. Frank and I fell into a rhythm of playing darts, drinking beers and smoking cigs in the bar after work. We left the light off, opting for the glow of the giant Miller Chill light up bottle hanging on the wall instead. Combined with the string of Christmas lights we had pinned up around the ceiling it gave the ambiance of any other hole in the wall bar you could go to.
We did that and for a while forgot there was someone else living in the house.
---
Frank left for his night shift at noon and I didn’t have to be out the door until one to be on time for mine. That meant he showered first, and I took up occupancy of the upstairs bathroom an hour later. We both played loud music while we showered. The I-Pod dock sat on the bathroom sink, and I popped mine on before walking back downstairs to grab my cell phone in case someone called.
When I came back up the stairs I froze. The “For Rent” sign I taped up as a joke was backwards, the door to the crawl space ajar just enough for a small slice of darkness to hang over my head while I looked up at it. Music started to blare from the I-Pod dock louder than it was capable of playing. It was a song I didn't know.
I couldn’t move for fear I’d catch something from the corner of my eye, or turn into the bathroom doorway and see something silhouetted on the wall. Worse than the fear of seeing something was what it might do to me, slipping from the wall and sliding up my arms, in my mouth and inside me.
The I-Pod stopped, skipping like a CD might, but a MP3 player shouldn’t be able to. The glitch forced the song to repeat in rapid succession the end of one word and the beginning of another. When it combined Shadow Man's message became clear.
“De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil...”
I stood listening until I couldn’t stand it anymore, but instead of making it the rest of the way up the stairs I turned around and ran back down them and out the front door, trying to scream, but finding my breath caught somewhere below my vocal cords.
I called Frank later that day and told him I was out. To my surprise he understood. I guess this wasn’t the first time he’d had it happen to him.
---
I moved home for a couple weeks, bunking in my old bedroom at my parents before moving out into my own place. My mom called me the second day I was in, asking if I’d moved her blow dryer, but with my short hair I told her I’d never used it. She let me know she couldn’t find it.
My third day in the new apartment I couldn’t find my wooden spoon to stir my boiling pot of spaghetti noodles and I started to get the feeling I was being followed.
(originally published in Down in the Dirt Magazine in 2010. Revised 2016.)
"Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish, he'd go away"
- Hughes Mearns
It started with a story.
Three months in and the house was great. Frank said his ex-mother-in-law owned it and didn’t mind renting it out to us at a discount price. The neighborhood was nice and even though the outside looked like a dump with peeled gray paint and a slanted porch roof, the kitchen had new counters and cupboards and the whole downstairs sported hardwood floors.
And then there was the Throne Room. The last tenant was so old he didn’t want to walk upstairs to use the main bath, so he knocked out the wall between his bedroom closet and kitchen pantry and added a toilet. Now the shoe box of a bathroom got more play on the house tour than the big screen T.V. or the creepy attic.
Frank got the larger room downstairs and parking privileges for the driveway, but I got a chance to get out of my parents house. He neglected to tell me he was a Followed until three months in.
By then a few things had happened. They were little things at first. Frank’s favorite hat went missing, which he bitched about for a week or so, but then dropped. Then there was the new issue of Maxim that disappeared out of the bathroom. It started with little things—things you could forget.
---
I woke up one Sunday to the sound of my bedroom exploding.
The house party the night before left me passed out on the couch downstairs. My shirt stunk of dried beer. My head beat to the rhythm of the loud crash, followed by the thud of objects scattering across the carpeted floor. It was clear my dresser had been tipped over, but with Frank sitting in his room it wasn’t clear who did it.
Burglars were a concern, but a burglar sneaking in the second story window on a Sunday morning to knock over my dresser didn’t seem plausible. I sat up, tried to ignore the nausea, and rushed toward the staircase.
Before I could make it to the lip of the stairs another swift punch pounded the floor. Something was doing this, calling attention to itself, beckoning me. It sounded angry. Minutes passed while I stood there, looking up the stairs at the double windows near the landing.
After some time passed and it remained quiet I took a step up.
Frank grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back downstairs.
“Don’t go up there just yet,” he said. His thirty-three year old face looked double that, darkness hidden somewhere it hadn’t been before. It was like a shadow rolled over him that wouldn't leave no matter what light he was standing in.
“You heard that, too?” I asked.
“Yeah, except I know what it is,” he said. “Let’s go have a cigarette, I gotta tell you something.”
And that’s when Frank told me he was a Followed. That was his word for it, not mine. I would have just said I was haunted if it was me, but Frank claimed it had to be a ghost if you were going to call it haunted. He said it wasn’t a ghost we were dealing with, it was a Shadow Man.
“What the fuck is a Shadow Man?” I asked.
“Well,” Frank started, taking a pull from his Parliament and licking his lips before continuing, “I’m not sure there’s a technical definition for it. I only know what’s happened to me so far.”
“Which is?”
“I saw him the first time when I was six years old. I was playing in my room, you know building blocks or whatever, and I looked up and saw him on the wall, watching me. Except I can’t say for sure he was ‘watching’ since you can’t really see his face. He’s just an outline, but you can make out his hat; one of those Dick Tracy jobs, like he’s from the 40’s.”
I thought Frank was full of it, but I smoked the cigarette he lent me and listened anyway. See, I liked all that paranormal stuff, always had. I used to watch Sightings on the Sci-Fi Channel, following the story of the Heartland Ghost and all the other UFO stories they had. Believing never had much to do with enjoying a good story for me.
“The thing that makes him different from a ghost is that he doesn’t haunt a place like a normal ghost does. He follows me. No matter where I live he’s there, he’s attached to me,” Frank said with ease, like he was explaining addition instead of pseudoscience.
“All your other room mates know about this?” I asked, half joking.
“I tell ‘em all in time, but some find out on their own.”
His room was in the back of the house, but every ten minutes or so we’d hear another loud bang from upstairs. I kept imagining my room littered with glass and broken picture frames. I was more concerned with a rabid raccoon than a Shadow Man, but I listened just the same.
“Have you ever tried to prove he’s there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Frank said. But that was it.
“Yeah, what?” I asked. “What’d you do?”
“I was actually living downtown at the time, in one of those doubles on Humboldt. I was staying with Lanie, you met Lanie over at Joe’s house on St. Patty’s day. Anyway, I was staying with her at the time and she walked in one day and found all the burners on the stove on full blast. The flames kicked up about six inches, she said. The whole place smelt like gas.
"I had to tell her the deal at that point, except Lanie wanted more answers. I never messed with Shadow Man myself, always figured it was too dangerous, but she wanted to know.”
I was sitting on his bed. He was posted up on his computer chair, leaned forward, looking at the ground. He crushed his butt in the tray on his desk and lit another.
“And?” I asked, batting at the ball of string he placed in front of me, getting caught up in the yarn.
“She slept in the room with the crawl space door. One day before we left for work we left a recorder in there, seeing what’d pick up. We saw something on T.V. about being able to do that and figured we might get something.” Frank said.
“Did you?” I asked, looking at him while he looked at the floor.
“We listened to the whole tape, fast forwarding a little here or there, but there was nothing except static and a few normal sounds like pipes creaking. Then we got to the end of the tape, the part where Lanie got home and walked in her room to grab the recorder. You could hear her footsteps when she walked in and then you heard it talk.”
Without expecting it I got cold. The worst part was it being a Sunday morning, the birds outside chirping, the neighborhood kids splashing in a pool. Some asshole was already cutting his lawn, but who could really get mad at him when it was such a nice day?
I barely got my next question out.
“W-What’d it say, Frank?”
“It said, ‘Here she comes’ and then there was a bunch of scratching like a hermit crab started crawling away dragging it’s shell behind it.”
We sat in silence for a while until I asked for another cigarette. My nerves all felt fried, like I’d accidentally stuck a gardening shovel through an underground power line. Frank handed me another cigarette, but I dropped it when another blast pounded upstairs.
“What the fuck is going on up there?” I asked, almost pleading.
“Nothing,” Frank said. He turned towards his computer and pulled up his Facebook, clicking through pictures from a concert we’d been to a week before.
“What do you mean nothing? My whole dressers gotta be upside down up there,” I said. There was no other explanation for the huge racket that started it all off.
“Go look if you don’t believe me,” he said. “Nothing’s gonna be moved. It’ll be just like you left it.”
Later I did go look. It was just like he said. Nothing moved.
---
A couple weeks went by with nothing of note happening.
I started to grow comfortable with the idea of Shadow Man, even joking about him with Frank, yelling obscenities and blaming things on him like people used to blame everything on El Nino. Frank always told me to cool it down. He was joking, but still seemed half serious.
I found an old For Rent sign at the dollar store and taped it to the crawl space door in the upstairs hall way. Frank laughed at it, but there was something in his laugh that said he was glad it was me doing the taunting.
The more comfortable I got with Shadow Man the less he came around. I was the doubting Thomas, practically begging for a corpse to show up so I could put my hands in its wounds.
At thirty-three and twenty-two, Frank and I converted the dining room into a bar, with all the traditional fixtures you’d expect, including a dart board. We always fooled around with the idea of a pool table or a foosball game, but there wasn’t enough room. A dart board was perfect hanging on the wall. Frank took care of all the accessories, including picking up new darts every time we snapped a tip. Eventually we were down to three good darts and then one night we got knocked down to two.
It was my turn, the first two darts stuck into twenty and a double nineteen, but the third smacked into the wall, the plastic tip breaking, the flimsy fins falling out on the floor. The actual dart bounced off the ground and skidded away. We looked for it, under the table, the bar, the couches and the chairs, but we couldn’t find it. We played on with two, Frank winning on some last minute bulls-eyes. By the time we were done we’d cut through half an eighteen pack and forgotten all about the disappearing dart.
The next day I was downstairs doing laundry, all the lights on, just in case. Scooping up my basket I headed for the stairs, but something caught my eye, the way a quarter does under a car in the parking lot. In the corner of the basement, under an old cob web covered chair I found the missing dart.
Rational thinking can be a bastard when the thing you’re thinking about isn’t rational. I spent the week after figuring out every way the dart could have bounced off the floor, banked off the wall and skidded down the stairs, but even if that was possible there was no way it could have carried enough momentum to land under the chair.
But then things were calm again for a couple of months. Frank and I fell into a rhythm of playing darts, drinking beers and smoking cigs in the bar after work. We left the light off, opting for the glow of the giant Miller Chill light up bottle hanging on the wall instead. Combined with the string of Christmas lights we had pinned up around the ceiling it gave the ambiance of any other hole in the wall bar you could go to.
We did that and for a while forgot there was someone else living in the house.
---
Frank left for his night shift at noon and I didn’t have to be out the door until one to be on time for mine. That meant he showered first, and I took up occupancy of the upstairs bathroom an hour later. We both played loud music while we showered. The I-Pod dock sat on the bathroom sink, and I popped mine on before walking back downstairs to grab my cell phone in case someone called.
When I came back up the stairs I froze. The “For Rent” sign I taped up as a joke was backwards, the door to the crawl space ajar just enough for a small slice of darkness to hang over my head while I looked up at it. Music started to blare from the I-Pod dock louder than it was capable of playing. It was a song I didn't know.
I couldn’t move for fear I’d catch something from the corner of my eye, or turn into the bathroom doorway and see something silhouetted on the wall. Worse than the fear of seeing something was what it might do to me, slipping from the wall and sliding up my arms, in my mouth and inside me.
The I-Pod stopped, skipping like a CD might, but a MP3 player shouldn’t be able to. The glitch forced the song to repeat in rapid succession the end of one word and the beginning of another. When it combined Shadow Man's message became clear.
“De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil...”
I stood listening until I couldn’t stand it anymore, but instead of making it the rest of the way up the stairs I turned around and ran back down them and out the front door, trying to scream, but finding my breath caught somewhere below my vocal cords.
I called Frank later that day and told him I was out. To my surprise he understood. I guess this wasn’t the first time he’d had it happen to him.
---
I moved home for a couple weeks, bunking in my old bedroom at my parents before moving out into my own place. My mom called me the second day I was in, asking if I’d moved her blow dryer, but with my short hair I told her I’d never used it. She let me know she couldn’t find it.
My third day in the new apartment I couldn’t find my wooden spoon to stir my boiling pot of spaghetti noodles and I started to get the feeling I was being followed.
(originally published in Down in the Dirt Magazine in 2010. Revised 2016.)
No comments have been added yet.
