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“When I was young it came to me.”
Queen – The Night Comes Down
~
The hag had not been bothering the boy quite as much for the past few months now, giving him a little bit of a breather from the torment she had inflicted upon him. This change seemed to have started when his little sister and brother had a violent episode with her. The boy was guessing that the demonic witch’s appearance to his younger siblings seemed to somehow expend much of her energy for some reason. They said her big attempt at the front door had been directed towards him, but it seemed to have failed for the moment.
There were actually several things that had come out of that incident from a few months ago. His brother and sister had immediately told him what had happened, saying they were sure the hag was trying to get to him. The pair also told their parents about the incident when they got home that night. Soon the whole family began to understand what had been happening. The boy finally felt able to tell about what had been happening to him for as long as he could remember now. As his story unfolded, his mother began to think back to a related story of her own.
It all began when the boy was barely more than a baby. His mother’s younger sister, the boy’s aunt, had moved back from a place very far away, and she had brought something with her for her two sisters, one older and one younger. It was a game, she said. It was called a Ouija Board, and you could supposedly talk to spirits through it. It couldn’t really do that, she said, but it was fun playing with it and maybe trying to figure out how it really worked. Soon each of the three sisters had one.
The three sisters, becoming very close once again, used a board together many times with great success. They would ask the so called spirits their questions, and would be met with surprisingly accurate answers. The answers could also be amazingly helpful, telling them solutions to any of their little problems, and other positive things it added to the inquiries. At least two of the sisters suspected the others of manipulating the answers. The third sister oddly became silent about it.
Even though the sisters were very close, they couldn’t always be together. They each had their own lives to lead, and they each had their own homes, so they just couldn’t use a Ouija Board together as often as they’d like. Even though the rules on the box stated for some reason that the board wasn’t to be used by less than two people, the boy’s mother decided to try hers out while she was at home by herself. She was surprised to find that it worked!
It was shortly after that when the trouble started. At first the young woman began hearing strange, quiet voices in the house. She assumed they were from people outside, but there was something oddly different about them. Then one day the bathroom door had somehow become locked. They had to break in the small window from outside to get in. There they found a car key jammed in the lock from the inside. They suspected the baby, but there was no way he could have bent the key the way it had been when they found it.
One night shortly after that, the young woman and her husband began hearing strange knocking sounds on the walls. They would normally believe it was maybe the pipes or something, but this was a relatively new house. The knocking was clearly coming from the outside walls, but it was too late at night for anyone to be there. After that first night, the knocking continued from then on to be a problem on random nights.
On another night, not long after the knocking began, it was ended with a huge banging crash on the side of the house! It shook everything almost as if a car had crashed into the house. The woman’s husband went outside to see what had happened, but there was no sign of anything there in the freshly fallen snow. The young woman had already been frightened by the strange things that were going on, but now she was absolutely terrified. She didn’t like being in the house anymore.
The knockings were just the beginning. The problems would now only get worse. Another night, the young woman was in bed sound asleep when she was mysteriously awakened. She opened her eyes to see a horrible apparition leaning over her by the side of the bed! It was the ugliest old hag she had ever seen! It’s malevolent face was glowering down at her as if in a terrible anger!
The woman instantly knew in her heart that she was looking into the face of death itself! She thought she was going to die! She was too afraid to move, speak, or call out to her husband, who was just inches away. The only thing she could do was close her eyes as tightly and as quickly as she could. After laying there expecting the worst, it never came. So she slowly opened her eyes wondering if the apparition was still there. It was gone.
The next day, finally realizing the source of all her troubles, the young woman took the Ouija board from the closet where she had been keeping it and took it out to the trash. She remembered then that her youngest sister had for some reason buried her board in the dirt floor at the back of the basement of her parents’ house. It must have been for a similar reason. She hoped this would end the terrifying problems, but there was still to be one more thing.
It happened the very next night when the young parents were in bed asleep. Their two year old son came in complaining of nightmares. The woman told him he could climb into bed with them, and so he slipped in at the edge and soon fell fast asleep. A little while later is when the incident was to happen.
The young mother was awakened for the second time in two nights. This time was different though. Something had physically picked her up about a foot off the bed! She could feel hands holding onto her. Suddenly she was violently thrown away from the child and into her husband! Both adults were now wide awake and confused, knowing something very bad had happened, but not really understanding what that might be. The mother believed that this might have been some sort of last revenge for her getting rid of the Ouija Board.
And that was her story. The children’s mother thought it had been all over with after that last incident. The knocking on the walls had never quite ended, but she never imagined that the children were having problems. In an effort to soothe their fear, the children’s mother told them that the woman that had tried to get into the house must have been a drunken neighbor or something, but they knew better than that.
The children knew that thing was not human! And when the mother told them all not to worry, and that she would take care of this, the oldest boy knew that she couldn’t. He knew his mother wanted to protect him, but she just didn’t understand. What could she really do about it? None of them were really sure what to do. How could anyone fight a thing like this? The boy worried about what would happen next. He knew he was the only one that might ever be able to do something, and he wondered if it was all just hopeless.
