The House and the Father

A few years ago, I bought a used home from my priest, Father Jacobs. My original house had burnt down in a terrible fire and it just so happened that his home was up for sale at the time. He had been looking for another house for quite a while and I had the fortunate luck of timing so we made an arrangement for me to move into his new home, for a cheaper price, after he moved out.

It wasn’t long before I was just about settled in. The house was quite nice and in good condition despite being lived in for so many years. I could tell that he had taken great care of his former home and I was reaping the benefits of it. The home was also very quiet and it felt relaxing to live in a home like that.

But unfortunately a few short weeks after I moved in, there was a bad snowstorm that came into town. It halted the ability for the town residents to do anything outside, including travel or even just walking outside. The snow had piled on so much that it blocked doors and even windows. At this point I was stuck in my home for a while.

For the first couple of weeks, the home was perfectly fine and I didn’t have any problems; the home was still very relaxing and peaceful. But after a while I noticed these strange thumping noises in the walls throughout the house. It would happen on and off over time and it sounded like people knocking on the wall from the outside. It was rather unsettling but I figured that maybe some wild animals had gotten inside due to the snowstorm. It was either that or maybe some bad piping but there was nothing I could about it at the time. Travel outside had come to a complete halt and calling someone to take a look at it in the middle of the storm wasn’t practical. I figured I was better off waiting until everything blew over. So I just tried my best to ignore the sounds and go about my business as usual.

But as days went by, it seemed like the thumping had become louder and more frequent. At this point, I had become uncomfortable and it was so bothersome that I decided to check on it. So I took a look all around the house, examining each and every part of the walls to see if there was anything that would indicate what was causing the noises.

It was only then that I noticed some unusual markings all over the walls. There were different circles all over the walls and each one was of a different shape. In each one, there were two small dots just above the center of the circle. I wondered if they had always been there but I hadn’t noticed them before. But there was nothing else about the walls that seemed out of place and there wasn’t anything that told me of what was causing those strange sounds.

So I decided that I would just wait until the storm blew over and have someone else check it out. There wasn’t anything I could do about it then and so I did my best to shrug off the strange occurrences. This was fine for a while but as time went on, the noises only got even more frequent and they were amplified in volume. It had become even more unsettling than before and I did my best to distract myself with the day’s events.

Then one morning I had awoken from bed and was getting ready. I was going about my day as usual when something compelled me to look closely at the walls. Perhaps my unconscious had noticed it before I did, but I’m not sure. What I do know is that upon close inspection, the markings seemed more defined somehow and they were more noticeable. I pondered why this was; I thought maybe it was just the stress getting to me and that the walls were just the same as before. But then another thought dawned on me; maybe all of the walls had been damaged by whatever it was that had caused that thumping inside. But I couldn’t imagine what could have possibly had any great effect on the walls like that and so it seemed almost silly. But it was certainly one of the few rational explanations that I could come up with. After that I just kept on with my day and I went to bed later that night.

But sometime in the early morning hours, I was awoken by both the sudden increase in volume of the thumping in the walls and some strange guttural noises. The thumping had turned into a constant banging and it seemed to surround me from all sources. The walls felt even more imposing now and I practically jumped out of bed, to my feet and ran out of my room and down the staircase. It was dark as there were no lights on anywhere in the house and I was in such a hurry to get down to the first floor that I hadn’t even thought about turning them on. But I needed to see what was going on and so, in the living room, I flipped on the light switch.

Fear then began to consume me and adrenaline shot through my veins. The sight before me, on the walls, was so utterly disturbing that the fear kept me frozen in place for a few moments. I now understood where the noises had come from and what those markings were. They weren’t circles, they were the outlines of people’s faces and the dots, in the center, were their eyes. It wasn’t obvious before, but now somehow, dozens of them had pushed through the wall and were now making those guttural noises.

I screamed in terror and ran towards the front door. I was shaking and I could barely unlock the doors. I opened the first door with ease, but the glass door was supposed to push outward. But no matter how hard I pushed, the door wouldn’t open. The snow had piled on so much that it was completely blocking the door.

Then in my moment of terror, I noticed a faint message now displayed on the glass, in red.

“Father isn’t who you think he is”