Intuition (Part 1)
Aged Eleven:
Melody Lowe took a bite from her chocolate bar, looked out of her car window and, to her dismay, saw very little. There were a few scraggly trees, several shrubs that had seen better days, and yellow grass (which was really much closer to straw) covered the bumpy ground. Her dad was driving, her mother snoring lightly in the passenger seat, and her sister, while bobbing her head in time to whatever loud up-beat rhythm was blasting from her ear-buds, was trying to paint her nails. Though this seemed like a stupid enough thing to do in a moving vehicle anyway, Melody thought it was especially idiotic since they were not on your typical asphalt road.
The path they were traveling on was not solid concrete, or anything like it. It was gravel, in the looser sense of the word. In actuality it was closer to pebbles and stones and dust with the occasional rock thrown in for good measure. This road was bumpy. And while Melody was having trouble keeping her teeth from clacking and her head from bumping into the side of her door, her moron of a sister was trying to paint her nails. Not even her fingernails, but her toenails. The bottle she clutched reeked of chemicals, and Melody was sure that if the gooey liquid spilled onto the seat, it would burn straight through, just like acid. Her sister looked up.
“What are you staring at, dork?”
Melody glanced away, but Cherry, her sister, kept talking. Melody was amazed that her sister could speak naturally in this earthquake-drive.
“Huh? Tell me. Oh, I get it. You want me to paint your nails? Or how about your nose?” Cherry started waving the brush in front of Melody’s face. Melody grimaced at the stink, and put her hands up in front of her eyes and nose.
“No!” she whined. Her dad peered into his rearview mirror.
“Cherry! Melody! Your Mom is resting here! Calm down.”
Cherry went back to her toenails, and Melody went back to staring out the window. Her hand was tingling. She looked down and saw that Cherry had managed to brush her right thumb. It felt like it was burning. She thought about her daydream from earlier. She’d thought the polish would burn like acid. She told herself it was all in her imagination. And it must have been, because the strange sensation went away.
About an hour later, Melody finally saw a house looming out over the vast nothingness of the fields. She tried to sigh, but only managed to bite her tongue instead. Her relief slowly turned to panic as they drew closer to the building and she saw that one side of the roof had caved in. How, she had no idea, but the fact of the matter was that there was a gaping hole on the right side of the house. Melody checked her watch. Even though she detested the thought of it, it occurred to her that they might have time to drive back along the path, and the highway, to the last town they had stopped in. Maybe there was a hotel or an inn they could stay in for the night. With disappointment, she found that it was almost six- there was no chance of her father driving back in the dark. The sun was already setting, lending a giant shadow to the wrecked house, which, if possible, made it even more menacing.
“Maybe it snowed and the weight collapsed it,” her father muttered from the driver’s seat. Cherry rolled her eyes.
“I doubt that any of us cares much about how it happened, Dad.”
Her mother shifted in her seat and coughed. Her father reached over and rubbed her shoulder.
“Helen? We’re here,” he said and stopped the car. Helen sat up and looked at the old shack that was allegedly their new home.
“What happened?” she asked quietly and opened her door.
“We don’t know. I think it was probably the snow… The blizzards here in winter are hell.”
“But… where will we stay?”
“I don’t think we have much choice. It’s too late to drive back.” Melody’s father confirmed her suspicion.
She glimpsed the old house in her peripheral vision, and suddenly a wave of fear so strong it made her nauseous washed over her, and an incredibly powerful sense that she had been in this exact situation before. And the next second it was gone, though the fear still gripped her like a vice. But the nausea had left her.
She had frozen with one leg out of the car. She pulled it back in, and shut the door with a slam.
“Melody! Come on out here!” Her father called from the front of the house where he had joined her mother, but Melody shook her head and yelled, “No!” Her dad came back to the car and opened the door. And Melody knew what she was going to say to him. But not in that way that the brain normally forms words and then sends them into our mouths and out into space. Because she didn’t just know what she was going to say. She knew what he was going to say.
Mel, we’ve come all this way. No use arguing. I know it’s a little scary, but we don’t really… have a choice.” She thought his words as he said them, and before she knew it, she had answered.
“I cannot go in there. Please do not make me go in there,” she said, and started crying. Her father put his hand on her knee, alarmed.
Mel, what is it?
“I don’t know, I just can’t go in there,” she paused, realizing that she had just answered a question he hadn’t had time to ask. He didn’t seem phased though.
“Mel, you’ve got to come” … with me. Her mind finished the statement before he could. She started screaming that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, go in the house, but her father ignored her cries, picked her up, and carried her inside. He was whispering soothingly in her ear as he lifted her, “There is nothing to be afraid of. You’ll be fine. I’ll take care of you.”
Slowly, she uncovered her eyes and peeked out from his arms. They were inside the house. He had taken her into the living room, and, though she clutched tightly to his hand, he set her gently on the couch, which looked old, and creaked under her weight, but stayed in one piece. She allowed her gaze to flit around the room, and pinched herself on the arm. She was awake… she was alive… she would be okay.
Helen came in through a doorway and sneezed, making Melody jump. Cherry came in through the same doorway, laughing at her sister’s reaction.
“What’s the matter, spaz? Is the old house freaking you out?”
Melody glared at Cherry. She has no idea what is going on. This place is bad, Melody thought. But she couldn’t put her finger on it. What exactly was bad about it? It seemed nice enough, for a little shack in the middle of nowhere.
Mr.Lowe had inherited the house from his Great-Aunt, who had died suddenly in this very living room of a heart attack. Maybe that’s it, Mel thought, the house is haunted. Apparently the house had been passed on in their family for generations, but rather than leave it to her own children, or even her adult grandchildren, the woman had left it to her great-nephew whom she had seen no more than three times in her life. Mel’s father had called it fate, as their lease had been up on their townhouse, and they really had nowhere else to go. Mel rubbed the cushion of the old couch despairingly with her polish-stained hand. Ha-ha, she thought, nowhere is right.
Melody’s father looked at Helen and sighed. “Don’t worry,” she said, “the roof that fell in was part of the garage. The house is intact.”
“Good. Then we should be able to sleep just fine tonight.”
Melody sucked in a lungful of air and opened her eyes wide. She hadn’t thought about that. She was supposed to sleep in this place?
“There are only two bedrooms, I’m afraid,” her mother was saying, “so until we can get a contractor out here to figure out adding a room on, you two will have to share.”
Melody released the breath gradually. If Cherry was with her, nothing would try to hurt her. Right?
After a meal of cold sandwiches and root beer, they started taking their suitcases out of the car and making themselves at home. When Melody had hopped over the last porch step warily, she saw her father lean down beside the car and examine something. He picked it up and tucked it into his pocket. Melody didn’t bother asking what it was.
The others had finished unpacking, and sat in the living room watching the ancient television. Her parents had sold most of their own things when they heard that the house was furnished, but the few things they did have were arriving in a delivery truck driven by Jack’s (Mr. Lowe’s) brother, Hank. With a start, Melody realized that they would actually be living in this house. It had not been real to her until that moment. The fact that they were really going to be eating their meals, spending their days, sleeping and, in essence, depending on this house had not come to mind until that moment.
And perhaps that is why, at that same moment, the same feeling of nausea came once more, and with it the intense fear and feeling that she had been here before. She looked around frantically; searching for something familiar- but the problem was that in this state, everything seemed familiar. And, again, her mind started predicting what would happen before it did, anticipating the voices coming from the other room, and exactly what they would say.
But before, she had heard her father’s voice in her head right before he had spoken. This time her mind was a whirlwind, as she processed both what her ears were hearing through the paper-thin walls, and what her brain was anticipating. Though difficult to describe, it sounded to her something like this:
I hate all these commercials.
“Oh, this show is so funny! Stop here, Dad!” Cherry’s voice sounded. There was laughter.
Can we get cable or satellite here, hon?
“I hate all these commercials,” Jack growled.
I don’t know.
“Can we get…” Helen started.
Cherry, could you grab me a beer from the cooler?
“…satellite here, hon?” she finished.
“I don’t know. Cherry, could you…” Jack began, his voice tight for some reason.
Hey, isn’t that the guy from that old comedy, the one with the hippo?
“… cooler?” He finished.
“Hey, isn’t that the guy from that old comedy, the one with the hippo?” said Helen.
That was how the conversation sounded to Melody: an array of voices all talking at once, interspersing with images of them talking. Melody shook her head.
“It’s just a dream!” she shouted, but a second after she gagged from the nausea. She shook her head, clutching her ears, and jumped up and down, humming loudly, trying to shut out the voices. And, amazingly, it worked. She stopped jumping. The feeling was gone. She finished unpacking, her hands quaking.
♦ ♦ ♦
Next part coming soon! Tell me what you like and what you don't.
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