Ghost Stories - There is a Light - The Apartment #2

The room itself wasn't especially anything. Just a small, square bedroom with a closet and a little alcove for a toy chest, a clanky hissing radiator for winter heat and the one window in the room overlooked the front lawn of the apartment building so there were no creepy trees or dark woods beyond.

When I was older I remember having friends who lived across the street from the graveyard where they filmed the original 'Night of the Living Dead' and I would think, How bad would my childhood nightmares have been if we lived there?! 

Anyway, the room was fine, as long as it was day time and I was awake. It was in my dreams tha the room came to life. The thick orange curtains, more specifically, or, perhaps, what lay behind them in that realm.

But those were dreams, so I won't count them as a "ghost story". Still, at some point, I realized they were connected to the waking world somehow. There was a portal. Had to be, right? As long as the two worlds stayed separated I was fine.

That's when it started.

I can remember a dozen or so of my favorite things from, this period in my life. The old red Playskool record player (45s only!), my original Star Wars toys, my giant me-sized teddy bear, the wood rocking chair that had a music box attached to it's rail, my collection of plastic batting helmets from the ballpark.

Now any of these seem ripe for the telling of a ghost story right? In such story, perhaps the record player would play on it's own or the rocking chair might start rocking just enough to elicit one or two tones from the music box beneath it. . . but those sorts of made for movie things never happened.

But there was my night-light.

Oh I loved that light.

It was actually a light box that hung on the wall between the alcove and the closet door and I could see it clearly from my bed which faced it. It was the size of a sheet of paper but a bit longer. On it was an image of a little boy sitting up in his bed with striped walls behind hi, and a nightstand that had an old bell-on-top style alarm clock sitting on it. the clock was larger in proportion to the rest of the scene and the face of that little clock was actually a working clock.  The light itself came from the clock face. At night, when mom turned out the lights, the clock cast a pale glow that lit up the room just enough to see the end of my bed and the few feet around the night light in every direction. Of course, that tends to make everything else a little darker in the room so I made the effort to look only at the light when I felt a little frightened. ( Could not avoid those old black and white monster movies as a boy!)

The clock hands were silhouetted by the light and I would stare at that light until I fell asleep. It never took long as I have always been a go-til-you-drop kind of kid, high metabolism, crash and burn sleeper. Still am.

I'd wake from those occasional nightmares to find comfort in the light being there on the wall. I knew I was back in my room and safe.

Then, one night, not sure when or at what age but definitely single-digit young as I think I outgrew that clock by 9 or 10 years old, something changed. By then I was feeling a little more threatened by the nightmares as they had worsened and so there were nights that went to bed and did not want to fall asleep. So I would stare at the clock, at the light, and tell myself that I was safe.

That's when it happened. One night, as I was staring at the clock, probably repeating one of the many mantras I had made-up to keep me safe, the light began to. . . fade.

As I stared at the clock, it was becoming dimmer the longer I focused on it. Less of the room seemed to be lit by it and I felt an ominous feeling as it progressed, moving closer towards black.

Let's keep in mind this was NOT a battery operated clock. It plugged into the wall and the bulb was not a dimmer bulb but the standard 15 watt nightlight bulb of our youth.

So it shouldn't have been able to dim. Yet it did.

And my eyes, as all of our eyes do in the dark, should have adjusted in the opposite direction. By nature, it gets easier to see the longer we are in the dark but in this case, the room itself, like the light, grew darker, disappearing as I watched.

At some point I'd close my eyes and bury my head under the pillow and, eventually, I would fall asleep.

It did not happen every night. even nights where I stared at the light like any other, it would sometimes stay bright.  There was no rhyme or reason to it but one thing that was consistent was, when it happened, I'd always have a nightmare that night. In them, the heavy rusty orange drapes would move, billowing out and a deep voice, un intelligible, would speak to me from beyond the window.

I've written here before about how that all ended. A dream where the roof above my bed opened and thousands upon thousands of tiny gold, spinning "snowflakes" fell over me as I sat up in bed. I woke, still able to feel them falling on my skin, like tiny pine needles pinching at my entire upper body. I never had another nightmare in that room again afterwards.  Not one.

To this day, when I think of that dream, or of the gold snowflakes in particular, I can conjure one right in front of my face. Spinning and hovering about six inches away. I have, since those days, taken it as a sign I was "protected" somehow.

I still do.

Next time: The nosebleeds . . .  and the apartment building and it's darkest corners