The Intruder
Jenna’s mother died about two years after we got married. Her father came in and found her twitching on the kitchen floor one afternoon.
She was 70. Not even that old. She had high blood pressure and had been getting these splitting headaches on a regular basis for the past five years. She’d slowly become much frailer; she’d lost her balance, and Jenna had had to buy her a Zimmer frame in the end. We should have seen it coming. She’d never gotten herself properly checked out, in spite of Jenna’s continual insistence that she should see a doctor for a full check-up. She’d always say, “I’m fine, love, this is just what happens when you get to my age”, but it wasn’t age, really, was it? It couldn’t have been.
A blood vessel had burst in her brain. It was very sudden. She was twitching on the floor as her husband called the ambulance, but she was dead by the time the paramedics got there.
At first, Jenna’s father didn’t really show any signs of being distraught by the sudden death of his wife. He was never really one to show his emotions. I was never that close with the man to begin with, but the tense silences between us were even worse now.
I did feel sorry for him, of course I did, but I have to be honest: I dreaded having to go up and visit him with Jenna.
“He’s up there all alone in that big house just outside the village. He’s never really been that friendly with the neighbours. He doesn’t talk to anyone. Just think, Stuart, what if something like that happens to you?”
Objectively speaking, we didn’t visit him often enough. It felt like it was too often, but it couldn’t have been often enough because every time we’d see him, he’d gotten worse.
He kept talking about how these mysterious intruders were supposedly sneaking into the house through the attic and stealing his wife’s things. He’d never actually seen these strange people. He told us that he woke up one night, and as he lay there in the dark on his own, he heard a sinister creaking sound coming from up in the attic. He swore that he could hear the sound of boxes being moved and whispering voices as the intruders snuck things out of the house. He couldn’t go up there and confront the intruders because he was too scared to even move. He was trapped in bed as the unseen intruders snuck away the only pieces of his wife that he still had left.
He wanted Jenna to buy him a CCTV camera so he could set it up and catch them at it, and Jenna was just exasperated by his request. Not only was it a detached house, so there was no way for anyone to enter through the attic in the first place, but his story was missing another crucial detail.
“What’s missing, Dad? You say that they’re sneaking in and taking her things, but what have they taken? Her clothes? Her pictures? Ornaments? You can never tell me what’s missing.”
*
Jenna and I started fighting a lot after it happened. I think she began to resent me because I was the last one to see her father before he died.
She was up in Manchester for a conference, and she called me up and asked me to go and check on him. He’d apparently called her in the middle of the night talking about the intruders again and she was worried that he was going to end up doing something stupid.
“Just talk to him, Stuart. It’d be good for you to go up and just talk to him. He knows you. He likes you. It’d be good for him to see a familiar face.”
I didn’t agree with her. I was never sure that her father liked me even when he was mentally cognisant, let alone now. I couldn’t exactly say no though. How do you say no when you’re asked to go and take care of a sick old man who’s lost his mind? You can’t.
I was muttering to myself on the long drive up to the village, trying to douse the anxiety that was burning deep inside my chest. It didn’t work.
I pulled up in front of the house at about midday. I was sad to see the house in such a state. The front garden was unkempt, the gate was rusted, the shed around the side still had the same tattered worn bits of paint that showed the wood underneath. It wasn’t really reflective of the stern and well-presented in-laws that I remembered from the wedding. A lot can change in two years.
I didn’t bother with the spare key. I rang the doorbell and stood there on the doorstep looking up at the glass orb of the CCTV camera. I knew it had made sense to install the cameras in the end, but I wished we didn’t have to. It felt like we were indulging the old man in his delusions, and I knew their presence would likely make his paranoia worse.
It turned out I was right.
When he didn’t answer, I unlocked the door and went inside. The lights were all switched off and the curtains were closed. I called out for him but there was no response. He was probably still upstairs in bed.
I went up to his bedroom and knocked softly on the closed door.
“Frank?” I said again. It felt weird saying his actual name. He had always been ‘Dad’ whenever I’d been around him before, because I was usually with Jenna.
After a few moments with no response, I slowly eased the door open.
I found Frank sitting at his desk. As expected, he was hunched over the CCTV monitor. It was a tiny cheap little screen that displayed the four grainy outputs from the doorstep, the back garden, the front lawn, and the one that he’d insisted we install in the attic.
“Hello Frank,” I said in a cheery voice that made me sound like a children’s television presenter.
He didn’t respond. He held up a finger and traced an outline on the tiny attic display in the upper-right hand corner of the screen.
“You see this here?” he looked round at me now, eyes bulging. “They’ve cut a door out in this section of wall. That’s where they sneak in.”
I winced and joined him by the display. I didn’t want to indulge the man, but what else are you supposed to do?
The feed was incredibly blurry, as the camera was relying entirely on its night vision function to display the blurry outlines of the dark attic. We watched the static display of the disorganised, dusty space at the top of the house, for quite some time. I certainly couldn’t make out any evidence of a secret door or passage. We were waiting for so long that, much to my shame, I did snap at him.
“Look, I can’t see anything, Frank. How about I go up there and show you that there’s no passage?”
He grumbled and didn’t really take me seriously.
I dug the ladder out of the garage and manoeuvred it through the house and up to the hatch in the ceiling that led to the attic. He sat watching the monitors while I climbed the ladder, removed the lid, and hoisted myself up into the dark and dusty attic.
I switched the light on. I saw the camera hanging from a beam, trained on the stacks of boxes by the section of wall with the supposed door to the secret passage. I went over to examine the wall. As expected, I found nothing, no grooves in the wood at all. I looked up and straight into the lens that Frank was presumably watching me through and gave a thumbs up.
I then went over to the camera and wiped away some dirt that had built up on the lens. That was probably what had been causing Frank’s delusions about the feed. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be; he was probably just seeing things.
I went back downstairs and closed the attic lid behind me.
“Were you up there?” I heard him call from his room. “I couldn’t see you.”
I sighed and went to join him by the display where the attic was dark again. I took control of the mouse and clicked to rewind through the footage, expecting see myself dusting away the lens played in reverse.
I was confused, because I just kept rewinding through solid footage of the dark attic. I didn’t appear once. I fast-forwarded, rewound, and I jumped back and forth along the day’s footage, but I didn’t see anything. It must have been some sort of glitch. It must have stopped recording or skipped a bit because this was definitely today’s footage, and yet I didn’t appear on it once.
It was strange, but of course, I didn’t tell Frank this. I put on an assuring face.
“I was up there, Frank. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
He didn’t seem convinced.
I made my excuses to leave, but I hadn’t managed to lessen his obsession with the attic. He was still watching the monitor as I saw myself out.
*
A neighbour found Frank at the bottom of the garden one morning. He must have stumbled out in the middle of the night. He’d gotten himself tangled in the bushes and was stuck out there in just his pyjamas in the bitterly cold November evening.
We waited until the spring to clean out his house. We had to wait because Jenna just couldn’t handle it. She’d grown up in that house and she kept bursting into tears as she realised that all those happy memories were about to be replaced with an incredibly tragic one: the removal of the last fragments of her parents’ lives.
I volunteered to do her Dad’s bedroom. She stayed downstairs while I went up with some boxes and started clearing away his things.
The CCTV monitor on the desk caught my attention. It must have been turned off by someone when the house had been abandoned.
I can’t explain why, but I felt this strange desire to turn it on and look through the attic feed.
I sat down and loaded up the system. I found the folder of dated files for the attic. I scrolled down and found the point where the cameras had been switched off. They appeared to have been switched off the week that Frank had died. Had they been switched off the day he died? I couldn’t remember, as there had been a number of people milling through the house that day.
I loaded up the last hourlong block of footage. The time display told me that it was about midnight.
I fast forwarded through the static footage with no movement but the occasional moth, until I suddenly had to stop. I felt a chill as I paused the file. I could barely believe what I was looking at. I pressed play again.
Frank shuffling through the attic in his pyjamas. I couldn’t make any sense of it. I’d seen how frail the man was. There was no way he could have climbed up the ladder, no less retrieved it. Had he even climbed up the ladder? There was no sign of light from offscreen where the lid must have been ajar.
Frank stepped over and around the junk with much more dexterity than I would have expected, so I felt that he couldn’t have been sleepwalking. It almost looked as if he was being guided through the dark.
I watched him slowly make his way to the oft-mentioned section of wall at the centre of the frame. It was as he reached the wall that I gasped, realising I could now make out the grooves in the wood. The grooves that hadn’t been there before. It could only have been about three feet high, but there was definite outline.
Frank then got on his hands and knees and pulled at the section of wall. The door to the secret passage opened. He didn’t enter the dark opening immediately. Instead he turned to his right as if he were conversing with someone.
After a moment’s hesitation, Frank turned back to the passage and slipped inside. He left the section of wall open behind him.
I stared at the monitor for some time before I was startled by a brief flash of static, involuntarily clutching the desk when the screen came back to life.
I was mortified as I saw the hazy outlines of a shadowy figure appear on-screen beside the open passage door. It was just hazy outlines. But it almost seemed to look up at the camera before crouching and elegantly slipping inside the passage.
The door was immediately pulled shut and the attic was nothing but dust and darkness once more.
After a few seconds of silence, the feed cut out. The camera had been shut off.
I sat there in silence for a while. I didn’t know what to think. I could barely take in what I’d just witnessed.
The tension was broken when I heard Jenna calling up to me. She was asking if I wanted to break for lunch.
I said I’d be down in a minute.
I clicked back to the folder. I highlighted that last file.
I hesitated.
Then I hit delete.
I went downstairs and joined Jenna for lunch. I tried to keep my composure as best as I could. She didn’t suspect anything.
I’ve never told her any of this. I don’t feel good about lying to her, but I have my reasons.
I don’t want whatever this was to be the last memory of her father.
Originally published in Paranormal Contact: A Quiet Horror Confessional from Cemetery Gates Media — available on Amazon
Listen to the dramatized version on my podcast Abnormal Stories
https://play.acast.com/s/625864f58ef2de0015f5bf87/625de191bd6de10015b83173
