Saturday, November 8, 2008

The House Down the Street

Every neighborhood has a house that seems to harbor some aura of mystery. Sometimes it’s unfounded and only the product of overactive imaginations but sometimes there is some force of evil that lives within. Often, the truth about what goes on inside such a house only comes to light too late.

When I was a little girl, there was a house on our street that all the kids were afraid of. It was a really old two story house with clapboard siding that was peeling badly. The shutters were huge and the ones on the second story in the front of the house were usually closed. There was a fence around the house and a huge front porch that wrapped around the entire front.. The shrubs in the front of the house were overgrown and the grass was always high.

At night the house was pitch dark except for the faint light you could see through the front windows. The house was so creepy and so sinister that you felt like it was watching you when you walked by. .

During the day, you could occasionally see someone peering out the lace curtains at the windows downstairs but you couldn’t see their faces clearly. We knew that an old woman lived in the house with her son who was a little strange. Neither of them came out very often. They had their groceries delivered by Clarke’s Grocery on the corner. The kid that worked for the grocery store said that he had instructions to knock and leave the groceries at the front door. Back then it was very common to have an account with the grocery store and to call up and charge your groceries and have them delivered.

One day my friend Kay and I were walking past the house and Calvin, the son, came from around the side of the house and yelled at us. We ran away screaming like two crazies. Later when we told the rest of the kids, they all wanted to go back to see if he would come out again. Kids are so daring. Kay and I were afraid to go back there so we went home.

That night around 7:00, there was a knock at the front door. My mother answered and it was Timmy’s mother. Timmy was one of the kids that wanted to go back to the house earlier that day. He had never come home for supper and she was worried. None of the other kids had seen him since that afternoon. My mother made me tell her what I knew.

Timmy’s mother, Mrs. McAllister, left to go down to the house which she said belonged to Mrs. Davis. She was worried about Timmy but didn’t seem to think that anything could have happened to him at the Davis house. She said that Mrs. Davis was just an old lady that couldn’t get around very well.

My mother called Mrs. McAllister later to see if she found Timmy but there was no answer. The next day, all the kids were talking about Timmy and his mother and saying that they were missing. We went to their house but no one answered the door. This went on for a week and finally, we decided that we had to find out what happened to them. We knew that we had to go to the Davis house.

We walked up to the gate and opened it and slowly walked up the front porch steps. The boards in the porch creaked with every step we took. We noticed that there was an area on the side that had been dug up and covered over with fresh dirt. The sight of this caused me to shiver inside. But there were six of us and we thought that no way could Calvin grab all six of us and if he grabbed one, the others would run for help.

As we approached the door, the lace curtains moved and we knew that someone was watching us. I wanted to run right back out that gate but stayed as Christopher knocked on the door. No one came and he knocked again. Finally, we heard someone making a shuffling noise from inside the house and we expected the door to open soon. Still, no one answered the door.

We decided to walk around to the back of the house and that’s when we saw the shovel covered in red leaning against the side of the house. It looked like blood. About that time, we heard the front door opening and we all ran in different directions screaming as we ran.
We met up at the corner and made sure that everyone was accounted for. I told them that we should go for help and we walked over to Clarke’s Grocery Store. Mr. Clarke laughed at our story and said he was sure that there was nothing wrong. Mrs. McAllister and Timmy had probably gone to visit her sister in Macon.

None of the parents would listen to us. They all said that we were just being silly and should stay away from Mrs. Davis’ house and stop bothering her. Well, that was fine with me. I sure didn’t want to go back there but I still wondered what happened to Timmy and his mother.

It’s been a long, long time since I grew up and moved away from there and to this day, I still don’t know what happened to them. They never came back to their house and Mrs. McAllister’s sister came and moved their things out of their house. The police went to the Davis house but couldn’t find any proof that anything sinister had happened there. Mrs. Davis and her son, Calvin, claimed that they had never seen Timmy or Mrs. McAllister. She also complained to the police that the neighborhood children were annoying her by knocking on her door and running away. The police officer told us to stay away. We asked about the place in the yard that had been dug up recently and he said that Calvin had buried the family dog there and the blood that we saw on the shovel was really red paint that had partially peeled off.

Eventually, Mrs. Davis died and Calvin moved away. He’s probably living in some other neighborhood today and hoping that some unsuspecting person will come to visit. He’s very tall, probably six feet or more and has one eye that sort of looks off in a different direction and very thick and dark hair. He doesn’t speak much and walks with a strange limp. So if you have a strange house in your neighborhood and the person living there fits this description, I wouldn’t go there alone if I were you. It just might be Calvin living right there in your neighborhood.

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