TV Watching

                   By David Glenn Cox

"Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it."
Gottfried Whilhem Leibniz

There are the things that we know and the things that we believe and inside of those, are the things which we think that we know and which we think that we believe. Time, the great healer goes on, but heals us like the pyramids, by wearing us down and washing us away. Smoothing over our past cares and concerns by piling on the new ones, poultices covering our wounds and on faith alone we accept it that we are getting better but its only once theses poultices are removed that we will ever know for sure. But our memories are imperfect things, is it better now than it once was? Or has my whole body become infected and there is no known cure for this, not, in this dimension anyway.

I can talk about it now, a decade has past, most of the principles in this drama have moved on with there lives. I have moved on with mine, and had packed it all away like vacation momento's from a journey made long ago. But my memory was jogged by a silly contest, causing me to open this trunk and revisit those momento’s and while looking at them, to ask myself, did it really happen? Time has decayed the emotions until what once brought terror has now been reduced to drops of ink on a page. Of my recollections, I have no doubt, but to you my gentle readers; I advise and caution you, do not open doors if you do not wish to know what is on the other side. For idle curiosity is not blameless, the answers are the answers whether we choose to believe them or not.

I offer this warning to you as a courtesy, a courtesy that I myself was never afforded. For once in you cannot get out, it must then be allowed to run its course. Leaving you to carry the scars and bury the memories as best you can. Deep enough, hopefully, that they will not reemerge and to remind you that you are changed by these things! You see the world differently now than most; the orange sun and the dark night are merely scenery in a stage play. This life on Earth goes on like one channel in a galactic cable television system and we are locked on this one channel but perhaps that is not the rule system wide.

But we live our lives one day at a time, as one grain of sand through the hourglass and we gather our knowledge the same way, one grain at a time. So that those things that in our youth that once seemed wise now appear almost suicidal and at the very least doomed to failure. But in our youthful blissful ignorance, we see these things with out questioning; questioning those minor flaws or details that could grow to become great catacyslims.

I met Val at a party; the drummer in the band that I was playing with had met Val and her sister and had brought them over to the house. The attraction between Val and I was immediate and physical, almost chemical. In almost no time at all we where together constantly, Before long she took me to meet her parents. We were young; I was twenty-three she was just about to turn eighteen. Actually, that was the reason we were there, to discuss her up coming birthday.

Her family were solid middle class folks, her father, retired military was now working in civil service, her mother, a church secretary. This peaceful picture of middle America was a cozy illusion. Val’s father had served two combat tours of Korea and two combat tours of Vietnam. It is impossible for me to say, that it was because Val’s father had had a difficult readjustment to civilian life? Today, it is called post traumatic stress but back then it was just called difficulties. As if all the demons of combat could be exorcised simply by saying, "buck up" or "tough it out."

Val’s childhood had been traumatic because of it, but she was far from a passive victim she was head strong and willful. In school she was a tough and a cross word would earn the perpetrator smeared lipstick on a fat lip. My own upbringing had not been as traumatic as Val’s but traumatic enough for us to form and immediate kinship that quickly blossomed into love.

As we sat around her parent’s kitchen table discussing cake and ice cream her dad, Jerry, got up from the table and returned with a small box. "Here," he said, "Your birthday is tomorrow and the parties not until Saturday there’s no need for you to wait."

"Daddy," she answered emphasizing the e in daddy, and opening the box she continued, "A watch? Dad, you know that I can’t wear a watch! It will just quit, just like all the other ones!"

"Well if it does," he said, I’ll take it back and get you another one,"

"Thank you daddy," she said dutifully, as she leaned over the table and gave him a kiss.

Uncomfortably struggling to fit in I asked, "Why can’t you wear a watch?"

"I don’t know, I just can’t," she answered, "They just stop, every watch that I have ever owned has stopped within a week."

"I’ve heard of people like that," I added naively, trying to fit in and to validate

Val’s comment when Jerry her dad weighed in.

"She breaks them," he added with an air of certainty, "She just doesn’t take care of them or anything else."

I felt the tension in the room rise in unbroken silence when her Mother, Meg, chimed in, in her permanent role as mediator between the two them. "Well, she’s going to take care of this one and if it breaks its got a warranty!"

Later, after we left I asked Val, "Why did he buy you a watch in the first place? If they always break."

"Just so he could win an argument," she answered, "If this one breaks, I tore it up and if it doesn’t break then he was right all along."

"But I’ve heard of that Val, I heard about people who can’t wear watches, some thing about their magnetic field."

"I don’t know what it is, they just quit, electric, wind up, self winding it doesn’t matter."

"Just take the watch then and put it in your jewelry box." I suggested.

"If I’m not wearing it he will accuse me of breaking it" she explained.

"Just keep it in your purse then!"

"It will stop in my purse, believe me, I’ve tried everything that I can think of and nothing works."

I added, "Have you tried telling him you don’t want any more watches?"

"You don’t understand," she said, "Our relationship is better now than it was, there was a time when we did not speak at all. A time when I had to move out of the house because he thought I was just a trouble maker and was just making up stories to cause him grief."

"What kind of stories," I asked.

"Well, when I was in Middle School the PE coach saw bruises on my butt in the locker room, they took me into the office and kept questioning me until I admitted that my dad had put them there. It got him in trouble with the Army, he had to go before a board of review and he could have lost his rank and they could have thrown him out and he would have lost his pension."

"But Val the teacher was just trying to do her job, your dad shouldn’t have been beating you."

"He was having a hard time, he was just back from Vietnam and coming back from that country we looked like rich spoiled rotten brats with smart mouths to him."

"But Val, he shouldn’t have beat you," I repeated.

"No he shouldn’t have, but what he needed was help and the Army only offered punishment asking for help was seen as a sign of weakness, Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. If they took away his pension the whole family would have suffered, I would have suffered knowing that I was the one responsible, but you know who was really responsible? The Army that’s who!"

"After that" she explained, "I stayed away from PE as much as I could, away from those goody two shoes trying to do the right thing when they don’t know nothing! Do you think I ever felt comfortable in there again? Being watched, afraid of every little bruise on my body, of being, that girl! I never trusted another teacher again after that either!"

"I don’t blame you for feeling that way, you were put in the middle of a situation that wasn’t your fault."

"To my dad Dave, it is always my fault, no matter what, its my fault, when I was a kid about twelve we went to visit my uncle in Tennessee he lived in a small house and my cousin Kerry and I had to sleep in the basement on the fold out couch. She was already a sleep and it was dark when I heard someone play a note on the piano.

At first I thought it was Kerry coming back from upstairs because she wasn’t in the bed. I felt the covers move and I was frozen with fear, I saw a silhouette of a man standing over the bed carrying something that looked like a child. It stopped in the door way to the outside and made a motion with its hand to me like shhh!"

"I screamed my head off, I screamed until the whole house was awake. With the whole family in the basement, I told them about what I saw, as my mother comforted me and rubbed my back. My Uncle Bill asked Kerry,"

"What did you see?"

She just shrugged her shoulders and rubbing her eyes said, "I was asleep, I didn’t see anything!"

"You had to! You had gone to the bathroom!" I explained,

When she answered, "No I didn’t."

My father rolled his eyes, condescendingly calling out, "False alarm! Hysterical female, making up stories about the boogey man!"

"After the lights went back out, I asked Kerry, are you sure that you didn’t hear or see anything?"

"Unt uh," she answered, "I was deep asleep, I was dreaming that I was flying."

"Then you didn’t hear the note play on the piano?"

"Well, I think I might have heard it but I thought it was part of my dream."

"Why didn’t you tell them that you heard it then? Now they think I’m crazy!"

"Val, I said that I might have heard it, I can’t swear to it, I heard something but it was part of my dream."

When the morning came, everything seemed to be forgotten, like it was a dream.

No one said anything more about it until breakfast. My dad passed me the biscuits asking, "Any more tall tales there Paul Bunion? Why is it," he said asking his brother, "That all the women in this family are nutty? Mom’s nutty and her mom was nutty and now the next generation is going nutty."

"He was trying to be sarcastically funny but no one laughed, I don’t think the comments about his mother or his grandmother were much appreciated. After that, anything that I had to say I told to my mom or kept to myself."

With in a few days of my conversation with Val it was forgotten, filed away like the hundreds of conversations that young couples in love have. Background information on the people who made us who we are. By the end of the week, Val’s new watch had stopped cold, dead. She returned it to her father who accepted it without comment, but there was an unspoken simmering resentment. As if she had actually broken the watch on purpose, that its failure was some sort of private message directed at him. He had it replaced under warranty and that one died as well. Then he gave Val the receipt saying,

"Do what ever you want."

Val soon moved out of her parent’s house and in with me, I was surprised that her parents accepted the idea so easily. Val explained it as, "My mom likes you and thinks you are a good influence on me, my dads just glad to have me gone."

I answered, "So, I’ve got her fooled then, don’t I?"

"Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard, my dad thinks you’re a jerk and a perfect match for me!"

I let the comments roll off my back, we were at that age where most young people have issues with their parents. I had issues with my parents, I too received the condsending comments but with Val there was something that seemed deeply rooted. But everyone’s relationship with their parents was different and they were always very nice to me.

My lease was up in August and Val and I decided that we should rent a place of our own. Our finances were slim and so our choices limited. We only had my old Chevy station wagon to get around in and on her day off Val found an old house on Perry Street near down town. It was comparatively large and relatively clean but was it very old and had seen better days. My roommate Joe had not been able to find anything and asked if he could stay with us until he did, and it was no problem as we were all friends.

Moving day or moving half day arrived and being young and owning little the job was accomplished quickly by using my station wagon and Joe’s big Chrysler that he had knick named the Southern rail. Joe had two kittens that he brought with him, small cats really, in betweens, more cats than kittens but still qualifying for the name. To keep them out of the way and to keep them from running off Joe had put them in the dining room. A good sized room with fourteen-foot ceilings, a swinging door into the kitchen a regular door into the hallway and pocket doors into the living room.

The doors and the moldings were once finely stained oak but carried generations of paint, a poor mans coverings over the house’s once proud better days. Like the homes trim, in the corner was its lone piece of furniture, a sideboard. More practical than elegant, with five drawers and a large door on its left side. It was old and over painted as well but we were young and without accessories and so accepted it gladly. As we relaxed, and Val began to put things in order Joe got up to let his cats out of the dining room.

He returned saying; "They’re gone! I can’t find them!" Only Joe was panicked, I didn’t put any special weight on it, curious kittens that had found a way out. But upon investigation the mystery deepened, three locked windows and three doors. A Houdini like scenario, where could they go? Perhaps they had been let out by accident? We each fanned out around the house each calling, "Here kitty, kitty" I went out the hall door and back towards the master bedroom.

The master bedroom door was closed, so I considered it a fool’s errand but went in anyway, The room was dark, the walls were covered in dark green paint. Even with the light on the room still seemed dark, its obsolete single bulb ceiling fixture was both too small and too weak to supply the room. The room was cooler than the rest of the house, but rather than being surprised, I took it with a note of approval. These old Southern homes in pre air-conditioned America where ten months of warm weather was normal were constructed with coolness in mind.

Tall ceilings, huge floor to ceiling windows, six of them in all, and the whole structure built on pilings raising the house four to five feet off the ground. The construction caught any cool breezes and surrounding the house, trees were abundant as the yard was full of over grown tall oaks. So well, had the architects and nature done their job that in the backyard no sunlight reached the dirt unmolested.

I closed the door and returned through the dinning room back to the living room. Joe was becoming despondent as we had exhausted all of the obvious possibilities.

"Joe," I said, "I’ll start looking outside, if they got out they couldn’t have gone far."

I went out the front door and off the porch, the house was located near the street and close to the ground, as the house appeared to be built into the side of a hill. Only a few pieces of lattice still survived covering the pilings on the side of the house. As I looked around the pilings under the dining room I heard Joe cry out, "Son of a bitch!" his tone was of shock and surprise not of joy or relief. I ran back into the house to see Joe holding one kitten in each hand.

"Where were they?" I asked,

"They were in that sideboard!" he explained, "One in one drawer and one in the other."

"Huh, now how the hell do you suppose that they did that?" I asked shaking my head.

We began to look the sideboard over, thinking that maybe the back was out of it or the kittens had found some other flaw or defect in it but we were stumped. Pulling it away from the wall we found it solid, its builders had done their job well. Not only was there a back in it, it was heavy, the drawers were old and stiff. The drawer’s wooden tracks worn and deviated making them barely functional. The original builders had constructed the sideboard so that each drawer was an independent compartment. This only exacerbated the mystery, of how kittens could get shut up inside separate sticky drawers.

It was certain however, that they never would have gotten out by themselves. Joe began to ponder the mystery; and he began to suspect foul play and finally said so.

"Dave, I think Val might have put the kittens in the side board."

"Joe," I answered, "Why would she do that? She loves the kittens, she wouldn’t ever do anything like that to a small animal."

"But somebody did Dave, and you and I were moving furniture, that only leaves Val and I know I’m a fifth wheel around here."

"Joe, Val loves animals and she is not known for her subtlety if she had a problem with you staying here she would say so. This is a three-bedroom house; we have plenty of room for you and the kittens. Besides Val was busy just like we were and anyway she had no reason to go into dinning room in the first place. Maybe, I offered "The drawers were already open in and we didn’t notice that the cats were in them, maybe it was just an accident."

With no other evidence, and Val’s denial and the explanation that she hadn’t been in the dining room Joe was forced to let the matter drop. At the time I resented Joe’s accusations, I could understand his anger and frustration but there was absolutely no reason to suspect Val of anything so mean spirited. I personally chalked it up to the pandemonium of moving day. Just as we can’t find things that were are certain are in a particular box, the mind is overloaded with inputs and corrupted by a strange environment.

Val and I began to set ourselves up in the master bedroom; Joe chose the middle bedroom. The bedrooms were set in a straight line on the right hand side of the house, as was the fashion of theses 1920’s style Southern homes. Our room had it’s own bathroom, which abutted the main bathroom in the hall, then Joe’s room in the middle then the unoccupied front bedroom facing the street.

The darkness of our room with its one bulb became even more oppressive when night fell, "Like holding up a candle in a cave." Val commented, "After we get some bedroom lamps it will be much better." But the size of the room and the shortage of electrical outlets made me wonder if it was even possible to adequately light the space. We did enjoy the room’s coolness and were grateful that we never were required to open the windows even on the warmest nights.

A brief word about living in the South, we have here what are commonly called tree roaches. While roaches in the North might be the size of a prescription pill a good-sized tree roach can easily reach two inches long and an inch wide. And because they like to travel great distances and they come equipped with wings under their hard shells.

Their over ridding ambition in life it to get inside human homes as they find the food sumptuous and the living easy. Their most common plan of attack is to flatten themselves out and slip in between the window screen and an open window or to search out any defect in the screen. Their first order of business is then to start a small family of several thousand siblings.

The beneficial aspects of being able to keep the windows closed cannot be under rated. Our bedroom had a back door that led out to a screened in porch, which was also a favorite point of entry for the tree roaches. We never used it though, as there was nothing out there and nothing to see and we didn’t need the breeze.

With in a week of moving in, long before it began to feel like home to us and as we laid in bed a terrific electrical storm hit. We listened to the wind blow and the rain pound down on the roof in blissful ignorance, never thinking of the tons of green lumber swaying over our heads in our ancient dry rotted cocoon. Then a flash of light through the windows, a holocaust and a simultaneous crash! "Wow!" I said, "That was close!"

My comment was superfluous as it was obvious, I tried to look out the back window but it was far too dark to see anything. Joe had apparently slept through it, as we did not hear from him. The storm began to die down but the rain continued, there was nothing to be seen or done about until morning so we snuggled under the covers and went to sleep. Around midnight we heard Joe cussing loudly and got up to check on the commotion, "God Damn it" He fumed,

"What is it Joe?" I yelled through the door.

"Water! Fucking water every where!" He threw the door open and said, "Help me move my stereo and my records." Joe had a great stereo and a huge record collection and from the ceiling the water dripped on both, as well as on his bed. I really wasn’t surprised that the roof leaked but I was surprised that it was so localized, just in his room.

We spent the next hour helping to relocate Joe to the front bedroom, a room left vacant because of its proximity to the street and its four large windows. Windows that we did not have curtains for, so I reminded Joe, "Don’t forget your robe or you’ll be putting on a show for the morning commuters!" Joe looked back half smiling and half tired, too tired in fact to tell me what he really thought but his face told me all that I needed to know.

In the morning the pressures of getting to work over rode all other concerns, it wasn’t until I picked up Val from work and returned to the house that I could begin to investigate the storm’s damage. The family in the house next door were sitting on their porch. The matriarch of the family, Mrs. Stokes was a widower with a house full of over grown children who asked, "Have you seen your back yard?"

"No, why?" I answered,

She stood and pointed around back offering only, "Go look!"

As Val continued to converse with Mrs. Stokes I walked down the remnants of a long ago forgotten gravel driveway. The garage had been lost decades before and no artifacts of it remained. I reached the back of the house and at first, I didn’t see it until my eyes focused on the differing hues of greenery amongst the canopy.

The crash that we had heard the night before had been a lightening strike of one of the giant oaks in the back yard. At the back of the property, were thousands of pieces of oak bark scattered out in a blast pattern across the dirt.

A tree, that two men could not have put their arms around at its base had been felled in a single bolt. Easily over a hundred and fifty feet tall it had been felled but had not fallen, the mass had been hung up by one single small branch perhaps six inches in diameter. The bulk now hung precariously by that single branch directly over our bedroom, the leaves of the furthest reaches of its most tender branches a scant six inches from the roofline. As I began to understand the enormity of the situation I went around to the front of the house and retrieved the land lords phone number from the nightstand in the imperiled bedroom.

Using Mrs. Stokes phone I called the landlord, a retired attorney who owned hundreds of these run down properties. As I explained the situation, Mr. Reese didn’t get excited, it was clear that at his stage of life that he was set on coast. To me, a young man his casual attitude was troubling, didn’t he care that his property was in immediate danger of being smashed to atoms? Looking back now, I can more fully appreciate his position today, had that tree crushed the house to toothpicks he would have received a handsome insurance check.

As it was, he would have to dole out the money to have that oak monster dismantled and costing him even more because of the trees partially felled condition. We would come to learn that Mr. Reese was legendary figure around the town. Once after his minister had given a heartfelt sermon about the need to build a new sanctuary, Mr. Reese stood in the congregation and immediately pledged a check in the amount of one thousand dollars which he placed in the collection basket. A check that would later bounce higher than the newly proposed steeple.

He was stopped one night by police, suspected of driving under the influence, as the officers were questioning him he explained that he was not well and due to his age he was incontinent. He asked for permission to use the restroom at the service station near where he had been stopped. The permission was granted and an officer escorted him to the rest room and waited patiently at the door. Mr. Reese emerged from the restroom and told the officer, "Thank you, I feel much better now!" He burped and handed the officer an empty half-pint bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey.

Looking smugly at the officer he then asked, "Can I call someone to pick me up now? I shouldn’t drive in this condition." The policemen had been bamboozled and knew it; they couldn’t prove that he had been drinking before they pulled him over because he had destroyed the evidence by drinking after he had been pulled over.

But he drank outside of the car and inside the restroom so that they not only couldn’t charge him with DUI they couldn’t charge him public consumption either because they didn’t see him drink it. They couldn’t even charge him with public intoxication because he had asked to be driven home before the officers had properly investigated him.

Reese then asked the officer to park his new Lincoln town car handing him the keys. Then asked, "Do hold on to the keys for me officer, for safe keeping. I’ll pick them up from the desk sergeant tomorrow." His cab soon arrived and he bid the officers "Good evening," leaving them standing there wondering, should they tell anyone about what had just happened?

Mr. Reese had his own network of contractors to repair his properties. These are not people that you would ever meet anywhere else, without license, without skills and in some cases without tools. Mr. Reese assured me someone would be over tomorrow to take care of the tree. For the night Val and I would move our mattress and sleep in the living room. This didn’t put us completely out of harms way but the angle of the monster made this room the safest. For Joe that was enough and he went to stay with his parents.

There we were in a three-bedroom home, run out of all three, sleeping on a mattress by the front door. Mr. Reese was as good as an attorney’s word, three days later two of his Reese brand contractors showed up to remove the tree from its precarious position. Without ladders, ropes, helmets or safety equipment of any kind and armed with only two chain saws, courage and dumb luck they began to assault the tree by climbing it from its trunk to the summit, clearing a path through the branches with their saws. As I watched, one of Mrs. Stokes sons, Kevin came out to watch with me.

He commented, "That looks dumb as hell."

Smiling, I answered back, "You think?"

Kevin added, "Maybe I should go ahead and dial nine one so as not to waste time when they kill themselves."

But as God protects fools and drunks and these boys qualified under both categories they were double indemnified and banked heavily upon this policy. Working from the top back they cut the branches until they had cleared the roofline of the house. It was only because his saw had run out of fuel that he had come down from his perch. His partner was clearing the brush by throwing it over the chain link fence into the overgrown vacant lot next door. As the lead man returned with his saw there was a huge crack, as the supporting branch let go and then a thunderous crash as the oak monster hit the ground.

The lead man stood stunned, appraising his role in the potential disaster. His partner accepted it with an unperturbed attitude of, "Hmm, how about that." Although I said nothing about it, I thought it odd that the branch would finally let go after a ton or more of the weight had been removed, as if it were just holding on to it long enough so as to not hit the house. With the tree on the ground the Reese brand contractors saw their job as done or perhaps they just assumed that they had pushed their luck far enough for one day. I was just glad to have it on the ground myself and had no more concern for the backyard then the contractors did.

Val and I moved our mattress back into the back bedroom as I asked, "Does it ever strike you that this room is depressing Val?"

She answered, "Yeah, I know what you mean, it’s cold like a tomb. Even with our furniture in it, it still seems empty."

"Once Joe moves," I suggested, "We could move into that bedroom if you like?"

"I don’t have any curtains big enough for those windows," she explained "And besides Joe’s not out."

"Is that a problem Val? He didn’t have a problem with letting you move in with us."

"No, its not that, just that I don’t like that room either, being right on the street"

But Joe was out; he came back later that weekend and collected his things. I told him, "I hope you don’t feel like you have to go Joe, you are welcome to stay Val has even told me so."

"It’s not Val" he explained, I just don’t like this house and don’t want to stay here.

I don’t feel safe here and besides you two need to be alone."

I didn’t feel like Joe was being completely honest with me, there was some friction between he and Val. Some friction that I could understand but something else as well, I couldn’t understand his comment about his safety until much later. In any case Val and I were alone in our first home together, we celebrated with a big meal which made Val sleepy, I put her to bed and watched TV in bed with her while she slept.

She began after about an hour or so to roll around and talk in her sleep. I tried to hear what she was saying so I could tell her about it in the morning. At first she mumbled and I couldn’t make it out then, "Nein! Ich bin hier fremd, mir ist angst ! ich muß sagen sie nicht! Nein! Nein! mir ist Angst, mir ist Angst!" My blood ran cold it was as if she were possessed. I leaned over towards her and grabbed her shoulder, saying quietly, "What? What did you say?" she looked at me with clouded over half open eyes and my first thought was to run screaming into the night. As she then spoke to me, "Es tut mir schrecklich leid, mien liebchen."

How do you deal with such things? Your lover speaks in a foreign tongue in her sleep! My one-year of sitting cluelesly in Frau Sittig’s classroom had educated well enough to know that German was far too complex for my tiny brain, as I strained my mind to understand what she was saying, the only part that I really understood was the last. Excuse me or my apologies lover, I grabbed a pen and wrote it down phonetically while it was still fresh in my mind. Of course nein was no, and angst was fear but the rest of it was a mystery.

I told Val about what had happened in the morning, she thought I was pulling her leg. "I was born in Germany" she explained, "While my dad was in the service there but we moved back to the states when I was only two, so I never learned to speak German."

"Well Val, you spoke it well enough last night!" I grabbed my notes and began to read it back to her, "Sound familiar at all?"

"Not a word of it" she insisted.

I was unnerved and concerned by Val’s foible, but I myself had a storied history of odd behavior while a sleep. I once took all the sheets, blankets, pillows and pillowcases off my bed while I was asleep and folded them all neatly and stacked them in the center of my parent’s living room. I awoke cold and shivering several hours later on a bare mattress confused by my predicament. My mother commented that she liked me better when I was asleep, that I was never that helpful when I was awake. So how could I condemn Val? My house was indeed glass as well.

These events come scattered across the days and weeks, a mosaic of one stone at a time. The shower stopped working in our bedroom, the drain stopped up, the faucets began to leak. And finally the few electrical outlets failed as well, without any logical reason. We decided finally, under the pressures of comfort to abandon the master bedroom for the middle bedroom. Concerned about the roof leaks we brought only the bed and the TV and only gradually more for as God as my witness it never leaked another drop of water in the remaining term of our lease.

Ok, young and stupid I was, but I had begun to do the math on this house. The empty back master bedroom had become even more oppressive to enter, to retrieve belongings we’d left behind. There were no sounds or spooky manifestations only the oppressive feeling that your were intruding into someone else’s space. The faucets stopped dripping just as the roof stopped leaking in the middle bedroom. One by one these things can be easily explained away but as each stone is laid down in the mortar a truer picture begins to appear.