Charlie Charlie Is Watching Me

CHARLIE, CHARLIE IS WATCHING ME

Based on a real nightmare that happened in my head

By: Michelle Lee

The moon shone through a crack in the open window like a gaunt lady in an evening gown. Two children, both eight years old, huddled together in the cold winter night. Those two children were me and my dearest friend, Gillian. As we tried to warm each other, snow and wind kept creeping in through the cracks of the old house.

Here in Hell, Norway, the weather is always so cold, so many people die from illnesses. I often wonder if there are many ghosts here, all crying and shivering in blizzards, dead bodies buried far down in the snow, frozen, preserved bodies. Souls trapped in such a horrible place...

We were shivering beside each other in my old, dilapidated home; a house held together with only a few rusty nails and rotting wood. The wood is soft and it seems to breathe and snarl at you, almost as if it’s alive. It is slimy. When you touch it, a line of creamy, yellow mucus-like mold globs onto your hand in a slimy ball. It seems to move; the slime is like an animal swelling over the house like a sheet of melted plastic.

At night, the house groans and creaks, and every now and then there is a snap. Well, more of a wet flopping sound and then a piece of wood falls away from the house. It smells like moldy, stinky morning breath. I can’t believe I live here.

I don’t have money and my parents are gone. Dead. Gillian’s family takes care of me, but they don’t let me into their house; they think I am a demon of some sort. Gillian’s family owns a fortune telling shack full of sorcery potions and big pots. They pack a small bag of sorcery devices for Gillian when she comes to my house, just in case I really am a demon. Since I was found in the snow, they thought I died there and became a solid ghost.

I never wanted to be in Hell, Norway. I was on a plane with my mother and we were passing over Norway when the plane lurched backwards and crashed into the snow. We got up and looked around, all the passengers were either knocked out or dead. We staggered around a bit after a few hours of being unconscious, trying to wake people up. Nobody woke, we were alone. We stepped out of the bloody space and started stumbling to a little cluster of houses.

My mother and I were making our way to the nearest village.

“Vanessa, I see ghosts!” my mother shouted with eyes as big as golf balls. “I see your father! He’s coming to take us with him! Let’s go.” In that moment, she looked like she went mad. I thought she was crazy, but as we walked along the barely visible path, snow started to fall and soon hail began to hit the ground. The snow became as heavy as a one ton truck crushed into pieces. We couldn’t see through the thick wall of snow and we were separated. I called her name and all I heard was the crisp, white snow slipping under my feet.

Then, I heard the saddest sound: my mother called out like she was talking to someone. I heard a whisper, my father, he must’ve come back from the dead to take my mother when she died. It was impossible, but after that, I knew my mother was gone. My father had taken her to a better place, it was true. My stomach lurched with grief and I sank down onto the snow. My tears froze into salty crystals and fell upon the icy ground, breaking every time, breaking like my life and future. My father died from Diphtheria in 1910 and my mother had to go to an asylum for three weeks. Leaving me in a jail like nursery room.

I fell in the snow and at the time and I thought ‘Now it’s my turn to be killed by mother nature.’. I wiped the snow off my face and sat up. The people of the village in Norway were crowding around me. They picked me up and simply put me in a house. An old house. A girl came out of a nicer building and shook my hand. It was Gillian. We became good friends, but her family would not accept me. I have lived in that house ever since my mother died in the blizzard, there is an artificial heater blanket that Gillian’s family gave me. They invite me into their shed to have meals, but not into their house. I am excited to leave the Earth and join my parents, but what if I become a ghost? Will I see them again?

I wish Gillian could take me in as a sister, a family member, but they don’t have much money, I don’t have money as nobody ever found my parent’s wills. I cannot do anything right now except for live in a horrible rotting house.

“Vanessa, let’s play Charlie, Charlie.” Gillian whispered. I shuddered hearing the name, it made me feel like I was being watched. I pressed my back against the wall. “What’s Charlie, Charlie?” I whispered back. She told me it was a sinister game with dice, pens, and a ghost of a little boy named Charlie. We often played little, scary games on cold wintery nights for a little fright. We played and as we rolled the dice, we asked towards the darkness, “Charlie, Charlie, are you watching us?” A thin raspy whisper trailed into the room with a gust of cold wind and rain. My silky, black hair waved in the moonlight like lace on the frills of a newly sewn quilt. With raindrops like diamonds, dancing lightly on each strand. The fancy crystal dice we played with shimmered in the dim light of the moon and presented two rhinestone dots, a yes. My head blurred for a few seconds and left me with a slight head ache, as if something had entered my mind and dragged itself out again leaving a trail of wreckage. Charlie, Charlie are you there? Was one of those little games that children played to give their friends a scare. I was afraid, but I didn’t show it.

I ushered her home and as we strode on the cold, damp asphalt, she told me the history of the game Charlie, Charlie, he was a little boy that had a poor family. He lived in a small shack on the side of the road. A fire burned the shack down and he burned with it. His family died and the accidentally cremated bodies were never buried. The wind blew the ashes away across the world to be lost and impossible to find.

I came back cold, wet and alone, thinking about Charlie, Charlie. I wanted to help him and to find a way to subside his eternal pain. I felt that if I could at least find a way to speak to him and comfort him, he would go to heaven. I was young and I did not doubt the things that might not be real.

Why should he have to stay on Earth as something that exists in neither the living nor the dead world? A dead life. I felt pity for him even though I pity myself. He had such a short life and died at around my age. If I met him, maybe it would be like having a friend. I never thought of a different outcome, a result that would change my life quite literally.

Often I would butt into things and try to help people. Most of the time I would be afraid of everything. I would underestimate my bravery and fail to take a chance, or I would overestimate my strength and knowledge and get lost or hurt. I was mentally unstable, in a world of pain and fear. I was never angry, yet never calm, lingering in between the two feelings. I need to be careful, but sometimes things that are dangerous

happen to be quite near.

I repeated the rules of the game in my head. I plan to play the game again.

A two and a six is a yes. Make the cross of two pens, to summon the ghost of a little boy named Charlie. Get two dice and roll them with a whisper. On a cold night in the living room, Charlie is watching you. In the murky darkness of that room, I created the summoning all alone without my friend, and with two dice in my hand, I started the game once more, overconfident in my bravery. I whispered in the dark.

“Charlie, Charlie, are you there?” I rolled the dice and watched them as they clinked across the old wooden coffee table. I had rolled a two. Charlie, Charlie was there. My hands shook as I threw the dice. I whispered again, “Charlie, Charlie say something.” I waited in the cold ocean of fear in the dead of night. The dice displayed a six. A soft whisper in my ear. I couldn’t understand it.

A gust of cold winter wind and flakes of snow blew in, riding on the moonlight that shone through the dusty glass. I thought I heard a soft, yet aggrieved voice say my name,

“Vanessa,” it said, speaking as if my name were a curl of smoke, fading away into the moon.

I trembled with my threadbare teddy in my shivering arms. My head throbbing with a horrible ache. My deep green eyes burned with hot tears as they streamed down my cold cheeks in silvery glands shining like crushed pearls. I heard muted giggling in the corner of the room, a small flash of white shone for just a second. I kept seeing little images, replays of a family or a burning shack, screaming, crying, wailing in pain. I didn’t understand why these things were happening. The world seemed to have turned into an illusion, a trick of the light I thought. My imagination was going wild, completely out of control, spinning like a spider’s web, falling into a category that made no sense. I was gone, mad, crazy, and the only way to make myself come back to the present, was to toss those cursed dice. I had to finish this cruel, cold blooded game in order to get out of this hazy bog of insanity.

Reluctantly I threw the crystal dice and whispered shakily, “Charlie, Charlie-” A long shrill scream shook the ground and a white figure stood at the window outside, it stared straight into my slowly allaying soul. I let the dice fall out of my hand and whispered the question I feared the most, “Charlie, Charlie, are you watching me?” The two dice made a six. I curled up tighter into a tiny ball of darkness. A foul smell entered the room making my lungs feel like trash being crushed and thrown into a landfill. I rolled the dice slowly and whispered, “Charlie, Charlie, are you here?” The dice rolled a two and I got shivers up my spine. I was scared and I wanted to stop playing, but you have to ask to leave the game if you want to. I wanted to talk to him anyway so, I kept going.

After tossing the dice, the pain of hearing Charlie faded away and I was relieved of being crazed. I thought, ‘I have such a horrible life’ but, I got pictures in my head and I remembered all the poor souls in the world. The paranormal could easily make someone suffer the rest of their lives confused, tormented, and deranged by seeing so many things and hearing so many things that they shouldn’t have to experience. Imagine waking up to soft moaning in the middle of a cold, lonely night only to see a rotting lady in the corner of your room, bleeding from her fingertips and staring at you with begging eyes. Sometimes the eyes of a child see these things, they are disoriented and alone, cold and afraid. Imagine walking up the stairs and suddenly passing through a cold spot that suddenly appears to be a dead soldier, groping at the air and grabbing your shirt, blinded with trauma, begging you to help get the sword out of his kidney? Imagine sitting in your room and suddenly seeing flashing images of white and giggling behind you and in the corner of the room, seeing a child slowly being ripped apart by an invisible force over and over again for the rest of your miserable life! Why are there so many people that have to suffer the pain I suffered for much longer?

The white figure vanished and appeared in front of me. It was a ghastly figure with deep, dark, vacant holes rather than eyes. A ripped white robe and a mouth with no teeth. It’s eye sockets dripping with blood and ash. My shaking eyes set free crystal drops, that landed with a tap on the table, Charlie stared at me and I felt as if dark, icy fear seeped into my blood and froze my life into a little cube that slowly melted as if I were being exposed to too much radiation.

I understood now. The pain he suffered was too much to solve with a simple conversation. I was wrong and I made a mistake. When I played the game with Gillian, he thought that I was there to help him, meaning, giving him my soul to fly him to heaven. He was not even close to human anymore, he was an animal, a devil, a living piece of darkness. A shadow of what he used to be.

It cracked it’s neck downwards and instead curved it’s mouth into a grin that shot pain into my stomach like an over poisoned arrow. He asked in a deep, oily voice,

“Lend me your soul and I’ll set you free.” I knew what he meant. He wanted to take my soul and send me to the underworld, freeing me of the world but not of pain, freeing me of the burden of my life but, leaving me with a hole where my heart once was, leaving me to saunter the Earth, trying to find a way to fill that hole. “Meaning, you kill me.” I muttered, my eyes glued to his bloody hand. It had a mark on it, it said, ‘Vanessa’. It nodded, slowly making his neck creak like a rusty hinge.

A cold gust of wind and icy rain blew in my face. My lips slowly froze, from peach to blue in color as he anxiously waited for me to answer.

I whispered, vacuously reviving my foolish thoughts of bravery, “You won’t take me away.” I whispered. Raising my voice, I shouted at him, shouted at a ghost, a murderer,“I don’t want to die! I’m too young to die!” I had heard the sentence before, “I’m too young to die.” when my parents were watching a movie when I was around six years old. My nose started to bleed as Charlie let out a long sad wail. Cold, but burning, Soaking wet, but, dry and cracked. Like an Ocean wreathed in fire. The ghoul silently and solemnly vanished.

I shook violently with tears in my eyes, little drops made of pure fear. A woman sobbed some where in the distance and a small child screamed it’s last scream. The smell of smoke and burning flesh trailed through the window. I rolled my dice and whispered, “Charlie, Charlie, is that you?” The result was a two. The ghost of Charlie reappeared with blood dripping from a knife in it’s hand, it licked the knife and a look of hunger appeared in it’s empty eyes. A smile curved on his blood splattered face. Charlie, Charlie vanished with foggy words lingering in the air, “I’ll be watching you.” Then in the cold and dark of the room, I vanished too. Charlie, Charlie didn’t take my soul, he took my life. My blood froze on the wooden flooring as I silently prepared to slip away from the world. What else could I do.

I knew why I had to die, yet I am still alive. Had I not left the real world, I would have been a mere cold spot, an image of my death, not truly entering the paranormal world, but I did, I left and was not taken. I remain in the world between heaven and Earth. Is this third world hell, is it a place worse or better, bitter or sweet, am I lucky or unfortunate? What do I know about my own life? How much time must I spend here, forever, a few days, a month, am I even truly here? I am confused and angry, my limpid body seems to be held together only with the threads of fear and rage, the world faded away, and I was swarmed in darkness with a thousand voices welcoming me to the the spectral world of spirits.

I woke on the cold floor of the living room and found a knife in my cold heart. A sort of painful relief washed through me. Though I never much cared for my life, it was composed of loneliness and grief.

My mind stopped it’s play of flashbacks and I looked down at my throbbing hand. A message carved into the back of my hand with a knife read, “Now you’re dead too.”

I had gone on a fool’s errand, an unfeasible task. My pride and bravery greatly overestimated, who am I to be so wrong about myself, who am I to cause my own death? The only way to help him, was to take his unbearable grief and bury his forever lost ashes.

I sat up, my body would not follow. I fell through the floor, cold, wet, unhappy, angry and frightened. I floated upwards, making the floorboards silently screech. I was not alive, but I was existing. The bridge between the living and dead.

Still, I am a lonely ghost, a soul rejected by heaven with a pain in my heart that will never diminish. In a frozen world in which I will suffer eternally, against my will. I continue his murderous plans at curfew, a cruel revenge I have taken out on the world, a burden that I have chosen upon myself. If you want to be killed to take my place, come at midnight to my bloody living room. I will be waiting for you, to give you your life clearing broom along with a carving on the back of your little hand and a knife piercing your hateful, black heart. You shall sweep away life as if each life were a leaf, drifting in on Autumn's chilly winds. Killing every living soul that enters this place, feel nothing as you pierce their hearts with a knife and carve a bloody message on the back of their cold, pale hands. Vanessa, Vanessa are you there...

THE END