I don’t think she means any harm. No one else has been bothered by her though, so I’m not even sure if she’s actually there. The diary said that she had died in the house. Something about snapping her neck after being pranked down the stairs by her younger brother. I can’t even imagine if I pulled a prank on Stanley, and he got hurt because of it. I don’t know what I’d do.
It all started when my dad lost his job. My parents decided to go all savings friendly and rented this house. The house, let me tell you, is something from a horror story. It’s on the corner of a block in the middle of nowhere. Tall, dark trees surround the house and line the driveway. It’s got two floors with tattered window shades and old wall paper on the inside of all the rooms. I’d never seen it before the day we drove up and stopped in the driveway. I had no idea what my parents had gotten us into.
The moment I walked inside, there was a musty, old, dank smell in the foyer. A set of stairs were in front of me and two hallways wound into darkness to my left and right. I chose to go up the stairs and claim my room before my brother decided to.
The staircase was one of those elegant, white, spiral staircases that rose to the second floor or wound down into the darkness of the basement. Going up the stairs, I remember thinking to myself that there were a lot of chips in one section of the tall white railing at the bottom of the case. At the top of the stairs, there were three bedrooms and a bathroom, just enough for my brother and I to have our own rooms and not share again. I claimed the bedroom that faced the back of the house, towards the more wooded section of the house. I don’t know what it was, but I was drawn to that room. My room had an old, pink, flowered wall paper on the walls, with white lining around the ceiling and the floor. And something else.
There was a doll in the corner of the room. It had one eye, the other tattered and hanging by a thread, her head was cocked to one side like she was trying to listen to a conversation. She had on a ratty old pair of doll overalls with a pink shirt underneath them. I opened up my closet and tossed her inside. There was no way I was going to have that in my room.
I went downstairs to get the rest of my bags and bring them upstairs. But when I came back up, my other suitcase was opened wide. It looked as though someone had opened it and searched through it for something.
“Stanley! Don’t touch my suitcase!” I yelled. He came running over to my room to see what I was talking about.
“I didn’t even do anything yet! What do you mean?” He whined.
“I went downstairs to get my other boxes and when I came back up, my suitcase was wide open. Don’t touch my stuff and I won’t touch yours.”
“I still don’t know what you mean, but okay,” he said over his shoulder as he stalked back to his room.
The thing about Stanley is that he’s a very ‘misunderstood’ teenage boy. He’s not a social butterfly but he likes to pull pranks on people; personally I think it’s the way he copes with his unsocial self. He’s thirteen years old and thinks his biggest problem is that he’s barely five feet tall. His dusty blonde hair is usually never brushed, but people don’t usually notice him for his hair, it’s usually his eyes. He’s got these gorgeous bright blue eyes. They’re like looking into the ocean on a clear day.
I turned back around, into my room, and see the doll on my bed. I let out a small gasp and stalk over to the bed and chuck the doll into my closet again.
The next day when I was unpacking, I heard all these weird noises coming from just outside my window. I opened and didn’t see anything but the noises were still there. I left the window open and walked back to my suitcase.
Two days later, I was in the attic cleaning it out with my dad. He went downstairs for a bit to get some water and get some fresh air outside and I stayed upstairs. I was throwing stuff out in the closet when I saw something on the ground.
I bent down to pick it up and saw it was a book. It was a small, brown diary the size of my hand. It had writing on the front but it was so worn I couldn’t tell exactly what it said. The only letter I could make out was an ‘M’ on the front of the small brown book.
When I opened it up, I saw it was filled with small, elegant handwriting. All the pages were filled and each began with an address to “my love”. I looked to the last page and saw that it said,
“My love,
I cannot begin to describe to you the reluctance of this desire. I know we have lived in this house since our family came to be; but I can withstand the truth no more. The fact that she died in the house is too much for me. I can’t do it anymore. Today I will tell you that we must move. I cannot stand the thoughts any longer. I am so sorry.”
I felt a shiver down my back. I looked behind me and didn’t see anything but I could almost feel a presence in the room. Nothing else happened that day but I kept the diary with me, reading from it when I had spare time. I finished it one day about a month later.
The entry in the book that spooked me the most was about halfway through,
“My love,
Today, was the worst day of my life. I cannot express the feelings I’m currently having so I will just have to tell you what happened. Theresa died yesterday. Bobby was pulling one of his pranks again. I don’t know what went wrong. I was downstairs making lunch when I heard a crash from the staircase. I ran over as fast as I could and saw Theresa lying there. Bobby was screaming from the top step. I called 911 but knew it was too late. Her neck was broken after she had fallen down that many stairs. Please come home soon.”
I was sitting on the couch one day reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and suddenly felt a breath on the back of my neck. I screamed, my dad came running over to the living room and asked me what was wrong.
“I felt something on the back of my neck,” I said. He gave me a funny look, like I was tired and hallucinating or something. “I don’t know, maybe I just imagined it. Sorry for scaring you.”
He walked away shaking his head and I went back to reading my book.
Within the next week, I had been pranked about five times by Stanley. The worst of the pranks, as in the messiest, was when he balanced a bucket of dirty water on my bedroom door; which proceeded to spill all over me when I opened it the rest of the way. Every time I would yell at him, and every time he would just laugh about it and go back to his room.
One day, his pranking went a bit too far. He yelled for me from the bottom of the stairs one day to come down to the kitchen. He said that one of my friends was on the house phone downstairs. It was a Saturday afternoon and I heard my mom leave to go to the store, the door thumping shut after she walked down the steps. I came running out of my room and started to race down the stairs. Suddenly, too late, I saw a thick, green, slimy goo covering each stair all the way down.
I was already falling by the time I realized what was going to happen. I prepared myself for the moment, wondering if Theresa had thought the same thing on her deadly tumble down the stairs. Pulled from my thoughts, I felt a great rush of air that pushed me back against the stairs and abruptly ended my fall. I saw a flash of a spirit, I'm assuming Theresa, fly down the stairs and pick up the bucket of goo, the final torture from my brother’s prank, and toss it onto Stanley’s dumbfounded figure.
I could see the ocean in his eyes fade a little bit as the realization of what his prank could have done soaked into his head.
From that moment on, even now, Stanley's stopped his little pranks. I think he finally realized what could really happen if something went wrong; I also think that he doesn't understand my encounter with Theresa, because he's had a couple of random scares from her in the past month. Things that she lets me know she did.
Her signature move is leaving the doll, her doll I presume, on my bed right next to my pillow.
Oh look, it's there again. Let's go see what she did now.
