Chapter 3
WTF?! and Conversations with Roy
I am awakened by the sound of static. Then no static. Now more static. I’m only half awake and I don’t know what’s happening. I see Paul get up and turn the TV off, but a few minutes later it’s back on again. It turns itself off and on several times, Paul turns it off and comes back to bed and again it goes on and off. I had taken some Benadryl before bed so it still doesn’t sink in that the TV is turning on and off by itself. Paul unplugs the TV and we go back to sleep. I wake up the next morning with a vague memory of it; however, for Paul it is a very clear memory. “I don’t know what was happening last night,” He says to me the next morning. “The TV was turning itself on and off. Do you think the power was flickering?”
“No,” I say to him, “none of the clocks are out. Something like that would have knocked at least one of them out. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought you were changing channels or something. This house is just freaky.”
“Well, it’s only temporary,” he says. He’s now turned on his mantra and his thinking off. I, on the other hand, am unable to dismiss it. We have now lived in the Voodoo House for 3 weeks. I have avoided going outside for fear of what Burned-Out Car Guy might try to say to me and for fear of being caught in the middle of a drug deal gone bad on the other side. Now it seems the weirdness was following me inside the house. There’s a coldness in one of the rooms upstairs that’s unexplainable. It’s the same room where I watched from the window as Burned-Out Car Guy, aka Roy, mouthed the word “bones” to me. You never really feel alone in the house either, and not in the good way. My children don’t know what’s going on, but it is obvious they feel whatever it is. Arden doesn’t sleep at night. She runs around the 2nd floor and comes in my bed almost every night. Julien does sleep, but if he is awake, he doesn’t want to be in his room at all. The faster he gets out of there and downstairs, the better he is. We all enjoy any time that we have during which we are not at Voodoo House.
Later that evening, after a lazy Saturday wherein I have refused to do much of anything in my lethargic malaise, I decide that it’s time to venture back outside the Voodoo House. I am bound and determined to find out what happened here that tends to make it so fucked up. It’s become my new obsession. Paul is obsessed with ignoring it and I am obsessed with getting to the bottom of it. I see the red light glowing in Roy’s window. I hear a noise from his backyard. It seems that he is tending to his cars again. I walk slowly up to the fence. He is talking to the cars. “It’s alright. I know. You’re safe now.” He says. I have no idea what it means. “No. No. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. It’s all over.” I gently knock on the gate.
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