The Turning Point

In the sweltering summer of 1987, I was living with my husband and three kids in a drafty old farmhouse on the outskirts of a small town in upstate New York. The house had been in his family for generations, and every floorboard groaned with the weight of history. I was a mother-in-law then, staying with them to help with the kids while my daughter recovered from a difficult surgery. The kids were at school, and I was up in the boys’ room, making the bed of the youngest, Tommy. As I smoothed the quilt, I noticed his portable CD player and a stack of cassettes on the nightstand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the whole thing twist slightly, as if a hand had nudged it, and the corner of the CD player pointed directly at our old golden retriever, Max. Max had just come home from the vet that morning, still groggy from surgery to remove a tumor. He was lying in his usual spot on the braided rug, his tail thumping weakly. It was as if something was marking him, and my blood ran cold. That night, Max passed away in his sleep.

A week later, I was down in the cellar, which was more like a damp tomb, using an old wringer washer to do the mountain of laundry. The lightbulb overhead flickered, casting dancing shadows on the stone walls. I was folding a pile of towels when I got the unmistakable feeling that I was not alone. The air thickened, and the tiny hairs on my arms stood up. I started talking to myself, a nervous habit, saying, ‘Oh, good heavens, I’ll be down here all night at this rate. I’ll have to come back later and finish the rest.’ I hoped that if something was lurking, it would think I was leaving and maybe follow me up, but I made it to the top of the stairs and never went back down. From that day on, I took the laundry to a laundromat in town, even though it was a hassle. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house itself had turned its attention to me, and I knew that if I ever went back into that cellar, I wouldn’t come out the same.