I awaken this morning,
but not to this house,
not to this time.
It's 1958.
The setting? my childhood home
in Grand Haven, MI,
the old brick house on Lafayette Street,
Gothic Revival, they call it,
built in 1872 on the site of an apple orchard
on the outskirts of town.
I awaken this morning
in the tiny, upstairs, northeast corner bedroom,
to the sound of snow pellets ticking at the window.
I hear the monster in the basement
rumble to life,
an immense beast
confined under the cob-webbed rafters
that support the front parlor.
They call it "the furnace,"
but I have seen it,
a massive, gray hulk
with tentacles thick as tree trunks,
stretching outward and upward from its squat body,
between the floors and walls,
invading, infiltrating, grasping,
up around the kitchen and dining room,
around the stairway,
around the bathroom and the four bedrooms.
I dread the basement,
hate every descent into it,
the open stairway through which hands can grab my ankles,
the damp, musty smell,
the dusty jars of forgotten canned goods,
the dirt floors, the waiting spiders, the creaking doors that no longer close...
but most of all, the beast,
the wheezing, groaning, belching, menacing beast
oil-eater (child-eater?),
hunkered down in a concrete depression in the center of it's own room
(four times the size of my bedroom)...
just waiting...
just waiting.
Do not ask me to enter that fearsome, basement room.
Do not lift the grate in the front hall,
large enough for a five-year-old
to fall in and down,
into the guts of the beast.
Do not place my bed
anywhere near the vent in my bedroom;
it whispers through that vent--
and watches.
I may never again be seen.
For over a hundred years,
the beast fed on the fears of children
raised in that house.
How many, like me, survived?
And where are those who did not?

Text and image © 2018 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
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