Jack Follman

Like Gram and Gran’s deaths, I now had horrifying concerns about the people I was sharing my life with who were listening to old Bob Dylan records in the kitchen and probably already five drinks in.

“I don’t know what he is going to do to you, but I can’t say you don’t deserve and I don’t think anyone is going to judge either of us when they find out what you did to him and why you made him run away.”

“You have to get out. You have to get out now. Now. You are not safe.”

Tom first responded with a nervous laugh, then a hiccup, before he finally gave a soft answer.

“Something was after me. Something in that house was after me.”

I whipped around and saw nothing behind me. There was no dark figure in the room to be seen, but I could feel something there. I reached out my hand behind the couch and waved my palm around where I saw the figure on the screen, but nothing again.

That last of the wine still processing, I got up to relieve myself, but stopped as soon as I stood up next to the bed. Something was off about the room. A childish sense of fear had started to seep into my sobering mind.

Someone was in our apartment.

I immediately laid eyes upon the old man who had been in the casket, up on his feet staggering in my direction like a zombie, just about 10 feet behind me. His yellow eyes shined like a cat’s in the night and his mouth slowly dropped open as he finished another clumsy step in my direction.

Soaked from head-to-toe, I jumped up onto my feet, stood up in the knee-deep water, and looked out to the deeper water where the blue orb, looking much bigger than it had from up on the course, rested on top of the waves about 10 yards away from me.

“It feels as if her body was frozen for an extended period of time,” Beverly explained. “Not just like a few weeks in a freezer either. Like years.”

“Since like 1961?” I asked.

“That’s what would make the most sense.”

I turned myself around in the chin-deep water. I saw what froze Sam. Swimming below the surface in the deep end, going from side-to-side was a dark figure. About the size of Sam and I, whatever it was swam swiftly and seemed to have no interest in coming up for air.

Some called it snorkeling, some called it scuba diving but it didn’t matter, they were the same thing… killing yourself to live.

I didn’t want to believe this shit, but the ceiling shuddered again and I had become a little bit more open to crazy ideas at this point.