It shall not be seen. It will not be alone.

I try not to think about the day my dad died. I talk about him with my mom though. We reminisce. We look at pictures together and every now and then I’ll notice some little detail I’ve overlooked in the hundreds of times I’ve seen them before. I’ll ask about it. She tries her best to remember, but sometimes I can see it creeping in—the memory of that day. The day my dad went into the house next door and didn’t come out. The day the fire department came and burned that house to the ground with my dad inside.

I’ve never written about that day until now. Maybe this will help me to get it out of my head. I want to forget. I hope that’s possible.

I grew up in the suburbs not too far from Philadelphia. Normal kinda cookie cutter neighborhood that people might call ‘safe’ and what they’d mean is mostly white and comfortably middle class. But when I was a kid, it just felt like home. We had moved from Long Island following a job for my dad when I was five or so, and my dad’s love of the Giants (football, not baseball) might’ve been the closest thing to danger about the place, it being Eagles country. But dad was a gregarious guy.

He kept a fridge in the garage filled with beer and the garage door was always open in the summer. My mom was, and still is, one of the nicest people I know. So by the time I really started paying attention to the interactions of my parents with our neighbors, they just seemed to fit in. Popular, I guess. Like the kids in school that would have made fun of me.

Our neighbors were nice enough. There was an old couple down the street that would spy on us through their window from time to time, but my mom said that it was about one of my sister Katie’s boyfriends driving a ‘hot rod.’ My dad just said that watching us was cheaper than cable TV and a fraction of the hassle for a pair of octogenarians. Everyone else was fine though. Pleasant and friendly. There was even a girl nextdoor that was my age. Parker Ellison.

Parker and I hung out occasionally because she was in my year and went to my school, but our ‘friendship’ was really just a consequence of our dad’s throwing darts together. Her mom and my mom were part of a neighborhood book club too. My mom called it ‘Cabernet and Closed Covers.’ Damn. She used to be pretty funny. But I think her humor died along with my dad. She loved him. And she never got to say goodbye. None of us did.

I guess that brings me to that day. But I’ll start a week before, when things in our pleasant, safe, friendly neighborhood began to feel wrong.

I was in eighth grade when it happened. My sister was a junior in high school. She was none too pleased about the prospect of sharing a school with me the next year, but, for the time being, it was spring, two weeks before break, and my parents had reluctantly agreed to let her spend the week in Rehoboth with her friend Maeve. By that spring, I was in a completely different social circle from Parker, but the summer before, my sister started ‘going with’ Parker’s brother, Dan. Katie was a junior and Dan was a senior and my dad was not happy. He had once called Dan a ‘weird little fucker with as much respect as a feral dog.’ Maybe that’s why Katie liked him.

Anyway, it was a Saturday night when things got strange. I remember that because during that time, my parents would get real flirtatious on Saturdays for some reason. They’d talk in what they probably thought was subtle innuendo, but Katie and I both watched enough TV to know exactly what was going on. My parents marched along in the we’re gonna **** parade and we, the teenagers, fled to the cheap seats.

My parents had asked me and Katie if we wanted to go over to the Ellisons’ place as my mom’s foot brushed my dad’s leg. Katie barked a decisive, “Yep.” I went to get my GameGear. Ten minutes later, we were on the Ellisons’ front porch. Katie knocked, but no one answered. I don’t remember feeling bothered by that, being that I had Mortal Kombat and six fresh batteries, but she knocked again and again.

I think I was trying to remember the buttons for Raiden’s fatality when she said, “the lights aren’t on, but the cars are all here.”

Again, my attention was elsewhere. I probably shrugged. It was nice out, I was thirteen and I had a video game. I could’ve stayed on that porch until my batteries died. But Katie didn’t have a GameGear, and cell phones weren’t a thing yet, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to make out with me, so she knocked one more time and rang the doorbell and then slumped down beside me on the steps.

She huffed and sighed and shot looks back toward our house. About a minute later, her head swiveled around behind us. I was only listening peripherally, but I heard what drew her attention—a series of soft taps that came from somewhere pretty low on the door.

Tap tap ta-tick ta-tap tap

Katie called Dan’s name and then Parker’s. But no one answered. Looking back, I don’t even think the porch lights were on. But the taps kept coming, quieter and quieter until I could barely hear them at all.

Ta-tick tap ta-tap-ta-tap

We waited about ten more minutes before we went back home. My parents had cleared the plates to the sink and taken their bottle of wine with them. I went up to my room and Katie went to hers. All in all, a pretty uneventful night. But when I looked out my window before bed (a window that faced the side of the Ellisons’ place), I saw a light on in what I assumed was the attic.

Again, I didn’t think anything of it. But now, looking back on the memory of that window and the syncopated rhythm of the tapping on the door, I can’t help but catch a chill. I probably should have been more uneasy that night; the taps came from maybe a foot from the bottom of the door. But Ellisons didn’t respond, and the only animals they had were two fist-sized goldfish in an aquarium in the living room.

The next day, Katie told my mom about the Ellisons’s porch. My mom shrugged it off and called their number. The line was busy apparently, and that was good enough for her. My dad, with his usual dry sarcasm, told Katie that she’d have plenty of time to break up with Dan on Monday. The joke became my fault somehow. I probably laughed a bit too hard. But my dad was funny too. I forget that sometimes.

I didn’t think about the house next door again until that night. Once more, I looked out of my window and saw that light on again in the attic. Only this time as I watched, I saw movement inside. A shadow. And then the curtains closed, one by one, first the right and then the left.

That was the first night I felt rattled by the whole thing. One, because of the way the curtains closed—pulled from the bottoms as if the person closing them didn’t want to be seen, and two, because of the sound that awoke me at around 2 am. The sound came from next door; a low mechanical growl that reminded me of an idling truck engine. And then for about a minute, there was a sort of shaky high-pitched whine, almost like a loud squeaky wheel.

On Monday, Parker didn’t show up to school. According to Katie, Dan wasn’t there either. She got dramatic about it at home, told my parents that they wouldn’t lift a finger for Dan if he were in trouble. My dad said that he had ‘one finger he’d happily lift for that nit-wit.’ My mom gave my dad a look. Katie called him an asshole. And then Katie spent the rest of the night crying after my dad got off the phone with Maeve’s folks. Katie got grounded. No Rehoboth. My dad didn’t take shit and Katie had crossed a line.

That night, the growling sound returned around 2 am. But this time, it wasn’t accompanied by a squeaky whine. At 2:04, I heard a quick shriek—a woman’s I reckoned. It was such a piercing sound, that I was sure my parents would have heard it. But the next morning, at breakfast, they said they hadn’t.

Later, as Katie and I walked to the bus stop, Katie turned and jogged back toward our house. She told me she was going to check on the Ellisons, but when she came back she just looked pale. According to her, she had found both of the Ellisons’ pet fish lying on the porch next to the doormat arranged in a kind of head to tail circle. They weren’t moving and she assumed they were dead, but whoever had put them there had placed each of their tails in the other’s mouth. Then she said that she touched one. It shivered and the other one did too. And then they both started eating.

What she was suggesting seemed impossible. I only knew so much about fish but I knew they needed water and I assumed that if Katie had happened upon them, they had been on that porch for a while. I called bullshit. I couldn’t bring myself to believe her, but her face…she looked genuinely scared. And seeing her fear, I probably kinda did believe.

Once again, both of the Ellison kids were absent from school and it wasn’t until Wednesday that one of my teachers said anything about it.

Ms. Carter, my English teacher, had followed our class up from seventh grade. The year before, I had tutored Parker for a semester and because of that, Ms. Carter knew that we were neighbors. She asked if I could bring her a packet from class and I said yes.

As it happened, I forgot to do anything on Wednesday. Trust a teenage boy, I guess, but I had gotten distracted by something I saw in the Ellisons’ yard when I got home from school. I was in the upstairs bathroom and happened to look out the window and I saw Parker. I think it was Parker anyway. She was wearing a purple backpack like the one she wore in school, but she looked wet, like she had jumped into a pool with all her clothes on or something. And she was crawling across their lawn on her hands and knees. She’d stop and scurry and stop and scurry, but the entire time, she dragged her face along the ground.

I remember thinking it was funny at first, weird in that kind of confusing way that a puppy with a neurological disorder might seem cute until you really stop to think about it. By the time I had that thought about Parker, she had dragged herself across the back patio and was bumping the French doors with the top of her head. By the time I got outside, she was gone. I never saw Parker Ellison again after that, if that girl in the yard was really her at all.

That night at dinner, I recounted what I had seen to my parents. My dad was distracted with something, a story in the newspaper maybe. Katie was sullen and quiet, probably fearing another reprisal from my parents should she get wound up again. But my mom seemed bright and quietly confident in a way that I now think was probably patronizing. She said something about me being too judgmental and watching too many scary movies. When I persisted with my discomfort, she smiled in a reassuring way and told me that she’d talk to Mrs. Ellison about it at book club on Friday. That was that. I went back to dinner and swallowed the strangeness with a bite of food and resolved to put it out of my mind.

I consciously decided not to look out of the window before bed and if the growl was there that night, it didn’t wake me up.

Thursday came and went by quickly. The Ellisons were absent again, but I didn’t have English class to stir my concern and my mom’s calm rationality overtook my misgivings about Parker. Parker was home. With her parents. And she was being weird. At thirteen, it was a tidy justification for letting it go.

All of the previous days aside, Thursday was pretty normal. The attic light was on at night, but that meant nothing in and of itself. In fact, I began to wonder if the Ellisons ever turned it off. The rest of the house stayed dark as it had for days, but I suppose there’s a lot of small things a neighborhood can overlook when the problem is so quiet. I might have been completely oblivious if not for happenstance and close proximity, but Thursday seemed like a return to normal. So, after dinner and homework and video games, I went to bed.

Then at 12:30-something, Katie shook me awake in a bout of whisper-shouting hysterics. I can’t remember her exact words, but I remember it going something like this:

Katie: Wake up!

Me: Huh? What—Why are you in my room?

Katie: It’s Dan’s house. Henry (Me), I’m gonna tell you something, but you can’t tell mom and dad how I know, okay?

Her eyes pleaded for a confidante more than her words did. And she looked terrified in a way that I had never seen in her before. So I did the best a half-asleep thirteen year old can do. I half listened.

Me: Okay…

Katie: I snuck out a little while ago. Dad’s being heartless, but I wanted to see Dan. It’s weird right? What’s happening?

Me: I guess…

Katie: You guess? Your friend was dragging her face on the ground. Their phone is always busy. Dan hasn’t called and we had been talking about having—never mind—look, it’s not normal. Their mail is piling up too.

Me: They’re probably busy or—I don’t know—sick or something.

She shook her head and was chewing at her fingernail, I think.

Katie: You know their fish? The ones that were on the porch?

Me: Yeah. I remember you saying.

She winced.

Katie: I saw them again tonight off to the corner of the porch. They were so sad looking, missing fins and most of their tails. But they were still moving, flopping around and stuff. I only knew to look for them because I heard them.

Me: Katie. They’re fish. They can’t just—

Katie: I know. I know it's fricking crazy, but they were moving, and when I got close, it looked like they were crying blood and so I went to pick one up—

Fear wrung from her face and wrinkled into revulsion. It made me feel queasy, maybe out of sympathy or maybe anticipation.

Katie: As soon as I touched it, it’s body popped like a balloon. And it’s inside was full of these disgusting white little worms.

Maggots. Our mom kept a clean house. I didn’t become aware of the little things until college. And so to me and to my sister, they were as foreign as everything else that was happening.

Katie: I knocked on the door again after. This time there weren’t little tippy taps. There was a bang that shook the whole fucking door. I ran. But, Henry, there’s something very wrong going on over there. And Dan and his parents. And Parker…

She didn’t finish the thought. By the end of her explanation, she looked spent and I felt too awake to sleep. So I got up and went to the window to check on the attic light at the Ellisons’. I wasn’t expecting to see a person.

I went to get my binoculars, Katie took an interest, and less than a minute later I was staring at the back of a woman I didn’t recognize, who was brushing her hair in long monotonous strokes. Katie squinted beside me, bereft of her glasses and I guess of her contacts too.

Katie: That’s a light on, right?

Me: Yeah.

Katie: How is it only light on the top window?

Me: It’s the attic.

Katie: No. That’s Dan’s parents’ bedroom. They have two windows on this side.

I scanned my binoculars down to the window below the lit one. Dark. Or—

I had never looked at it this closely before at night, and in all my years of seeing their windows, I had never given much thought to the internal structure of their house. But the window wasn’t dark. Not completely. It looked almost as though it had been painted black with little cracks where the light shone through.

Me: So they have a loft or something?

Katie: No. Just a low window and another, maybe eight or nine feet above it.

Eight or nine feet. I remember my brain trying to slow as it was pushed toward an unsettling reckoning. I lifted my gaze quickly towards the woman in the top window, but now she wasn’t there. Just light and an emptiness that traversed the property line and found its way to the bottom of my stomach. I watched and listened to the sound of Katie’s uneasy breaths and then

Tap ta-tap tap

Quiet. Close. Katie whimpered and my hands shook my distant view into a blur. The taps were coming from outside my window.

I never saw the source of the tapping and I thank god for those binoculars blinding me from what I might have seen pressed against the window in the dark. But Katie was nearsighted and Katie screamed and this time, my parents absolutely heard.

My mom came running. First to Katie’s room then to mine. Katie mumbled incoherently and I stayed silent, wishing I were asleep as Katie shook in my mom’s arms and sobbed.

The next day, Friday, Katie stayed home from school and Parker was absent and I lied to Ms. Carter and told her I had given Parker the packet. I would, I told myself. Or I’d try. Katie hadn’t told my mom what she saw outside my window and when my mom asked me, the sanest truth I could conjure was, ‘she got scared.’ But she had seen something. Something bad. And the entirety of that day, I itched to find out what.

When I got home from school, Katie was nowhere to be found. My dad arrived not too long after and I mentioned the packet for Parker, not wanting to delve into the prior night before talking to Katie. My dad said that he had planned on going to ask Mr. Ellison for a quick round of darts before my mom went to book club. He would drop off the packet. And he was my dad; he didn’t get scared. It seemed fine. He had said, “be back in two shakes, buddy.” He smiled. It seemed fucking fine. He’d go knock on the door and Mr. Ellison would answer and the whole weirdness of the past week would dissolve in the presence of a capable adult. I was so sure of that.

So, I watched him walk over, across the front lawns and up the front stairs and onto the front porch and just out of view. That was at 4:32 pm, a time I remembered for some reason, a time I’ve repeated so many times to police and therapists, that now, the mere sight of that time on a clock fills me with dread. Because it was the last time I ever saw my dad.

Katie arrived home a few minutes later looking spread-thin and tired. I asked her where she’d gone and she answered with a single word: “walking.” As much as my curiosity about the tapper had distracted me all day, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her about it. If you had seen Katie, slumped down on the floor at the foot of the couch, staring despondently off into some empty distance, I think you would have understood my reservation. So instead of asking, I told her that dad had come home and that he had gone next door.

I was just making small talk, but Katie’s head shot around to me and I could see panic in her eyes. She mumbled something and then stood and bolted out the front door. I followed, but by the time I made it to our front steps, Katie was already on the Ellisons’ porch. She knocked and the door must’ve been ajar, because the next thing she did was step inside.

I waited and watched and barely ten long breaths later, she stepped out, leaned her hands on her knees, and vomited onto the porch. As she stumbled down the stairs, she looked over at me through a mask of terror so deeply etched into her face that the sister I knew was barely recognizable. I will never forget that face. Eyes so wide that her irises were untouched by the surrounding eyelids, skin so pale that the broad spatter of blood across it looked almost artistic in contrast.

I ran to her. She dragged her feet across the ground and shook almost to the point of convulsing. And before she collapsed onto the Ellisons’ lawn, she inhaled a quivering bottom lip and whispered, “It shall not be seen. It will not be alone.”

The door to the Ellisons’ place slammed shut and I searched Katie for a wound, but found only blood and a freckling of maggots. It wasn’t her blood. She was uninjured. But still I screamed for help. No one came. No one stirred. And so, I dragged Katie’s limp frame to our front walk and ran inside to call the police. And then I waited and I held my big sister and listened to the sound of her ragged breaths.

The fire truck arrived first, within a minute or so of my mom. A squad car followed and not too long after, an ambulance. I felt safer amidst the congestion of emergency vehicles, but the lights attracted the unwanted stares of our neighbors through parted curtains and cracked doors. They were unwilling to help, but more than happy to watch.

Meanwhile, I told my mom and the officers everything. It sounded crazy leaving my lips, and it probably sounded crazy to them, but the blood on my sister’s body wasn’t so easily ignored or dismissed.

Then I watched once more as another person knocked on the Ellisons’ door. A cop. He seemed surprised when the door creaked open. He drew his pistol and he walked in cautiously with his partner following after. The door closed softly behind them and for the umpteenth time, I waited for the next thing to happen. A shout. A gunshot. Anything. But as dusk darkened the street and the flashing lights lit the leaves of the trees above, there was only silence and a pall of uneasy anticipation.

The next squad car to arrive wasn’t alone. An officious, pug nosed little sergeant barked orders at a group of five other officers. They went around to the back of the house and staged on the front porch and a youngish officer—Hadley or Hawley or something—waited with us and took my statement. The other officers marched in, guns drawn and looking grim.

More silence. After what felt like quite a while, Hadley radioed for a status, but no one answered. I remember her taut smile at me, reassuring as a crumpled obituary, as her eyes searched for answers in the opacity of the unknown. None of the officers returned, but I learned quickly that in a smallish town on the outskirts of a large one, seven missing police officers is more than enough to bring the rest.

As it happened though, it was one of the firefighters who had been paying the most attention to my numerous recountings of the events of the past week. So in the false midday illumination of a police spotlight, he climbed a ladder to the window where I had seen the woman brushing her hair. The window I had thought was the attic, but wasn’t. A window that now looked dark.

The firefighter shattered the window with an axe—the kind with a red head and an axe blade on one side and a spike on the other. A cloud of what I thought was dust coughed out into the white light bathing the side of the house. He swatted at the air and light streamed out of the broken window and as I watched the cloud of dust disperse, I realized with a sudden yank to my stomach that it wasn’t dust at all. It was flies—hundreds or thousands of flies.

The tight fissures of light that I had seen with my binoculars in the window below now made perfect, horrible sense. The window wasn’t painted black. It was teaming with an inky swarm. My skin crawled and I noticed a look of bewildered detachment contorting my mom’s simple worry about Katie into something worse. That was when it all hit me. My last anchor point of familiarity had failed and the wrongness of everything suddenly felt very present.

As the flies cleared, the fire fighter looked into the window and made a sound not dissimilar from a baying hound. He dropped the axe and it fell, burying its head into the ground just feet from a gawking police officer. The cop didn’t really seem to notice and I couldn’t blame him, because as the firefighter descended the ladder, flies began to billow from the window like coal smoke and then settled like snow onto the ground around the house.

The persistent buzzing bled into a uniform hum which muted quiet conversations and the sound of the firefighter’s breaths as he reached the ground. But he was clearly heaving as he threw off his helmet, sweat beading on his brow as the same look of visceral fear I had seen in my sister hung from his pallid face. He shook his head. Then he knelt on the ground next to the ladder, hands straddling the handle of the axe he had dropped. And then, without a moment of discernible hesitation, he slammed his forehead down onto the spike of the axehead and his body slumped.

My mom’s shriek cut through the buzz and I suddenly felt so distant from the moment, alone and cold and submerged in nausea that crept up my throat and left my guts feeling bottomless and vacant. The firefighter twitched and only a few moments passed before his body was shrouded by a blanket of flies.

That is where the clarity of my memory ends. The part I hope to erase with this narrative by committing it to a digital page so that my mind can be rid of it. The rest, I remember through the vague and choppy lens of trauma.

After the firefighter killed himself, my mom hugged me as EMTs continued to try and rouse my sister. I remember there being heated conversations shouted over the din of flies by important looking people. I remember red containers and the smell of gasoline as firefighters doused the base of the house. I remember the brilliant flash of the road flare and how quickly the fire caught. I remember the look of defeat in the eyes of a dozen first responders as the Ellisons’ house burned. And I remember the moment the roof began to creak and pop as blistering heat licked at my face.

The roof’s collapse brought a scream from my mom. She screamed his name—dad’s name. Ben. And in that name, I heard the weight of her grief, and the death of her happiness and an inhuman resonance like shattered love.

Now, I just I want to forget it all so that my final memory of my dad can be exhumed from a waking nightmare of charred wood and glass taps and pale terror and swarming flies.

I don’t know what hid within the Ellisons’ home and I doubt I ever will. I don’t know why my sister was allowed to leave. Eventually she woke up. But she’s never spoken of what she saw. Two years of catatonia gave way to paranoia and intermittent psychosis. She took medications, but ultimately heroin was the one she clung to. To say that she survived the house next door would only be a half truth, but the last time I saw her, she was at least drawing breath.

My mom still holds out hope for Katie. She researches war ravaged soldiers who have come around to meaningful lives. She goes to NA meetings to understand. She prays to agnostic deities of her own design, woven together from self help books and Eastern philosophies. And on certain days, she looks at old photos with me and tries to remember the good times so the bad ones don’t seem so real.

Today was one of those days.

I was jotting down memories about my dad and Katie as I taped old photos to pages in a journal. My mom flipped through an iPad, squinting as she zoomed in on photos I’d managed to digitize. She stopped on one of my dad and me with our heads close together and our chins resting on a table. We were both looking to the left and grinning like idiots. It made me smile and my mom said we looked so much alike. I guess we did.

She sighed and I felt a tingle of dread, hoping that his death would stay far away from the moment. It did. Instead, she asked a decidedly normal maternal question: she asked whether I was seeing anyone. I wasn’t, but I always answered the question as though my love life was kindled by some likely prospect. She nodded and swiped. The next photo had been taken at the beach. My dad was in trunks, flexing his biceps as Katie and I dangled from his arms.

I chuckled and said, “just like Mr. Universe—ya know—if it weren’t for the gut.”

My mom returned a playfully chiding look and a soft smile. And then she continued on, humming quietly to herself as she perused. I moved onto a faded Polaroid of Katie and me in the woods with a little yellow tent blurred into the background. Katie was beaming with a pair of marshmallows in her mouth that made her look vaguely like a goofy hippopotamus. She was maybe seven or eight. I was beside her looking annoyed at something.

As I tried to remember stray details of the outing and of a sister who had once smiled with so much easy glee, my mom began to muse aloud.

“Why is this one here? Not that I mind of course.”

She turned the iPad and I watched a short video selfie that I had taken with my phone and, I suppose, had mistakenly added to my shared album. It was maybe ten seconds long and recent—sometime earlier in the week I reckoned, and I was on the sidewalk in front of my house.

“Mistake?” I offered. “Want me to get rid of it?”

“No,” she responded. “It’s nice. A bit of new to shake up all these grainy old snapshots.”

I shrugged and continued trying to recall a camping trip from decades prior. I was about to turn to my mom for input when she said, “Henry, who’s that?” She was squinting and then she handed the iPad to me.

“Uh. Me...” I said.

She was still looking at the video.

“No, Henry, I mean—“

She laid the iPad flat and zoomed in on the background. I stared at the video and suddenly I felt as though my body had gambled all of its blood on a losing hand. The video was playing on repeat. Ten seconds. I watched it again and again as my mind tried to flee from what my eyes were seeing. It was one of the windows in my house. Where I live alone. But in that window, I saw something that churned up an old horror I’ve tried desperately to calm—it was the back of a woman, brushing her hair in long monotonous strokes. My mom squinted just like Katie had so many years ago and I swiped the video away.

Look, I don’t want to remember all of this stuff. But now, my mind has grasped onto a small detail, a cryptic thing uttered in abject terror. Something I had once thought of as nonsense; a product of fear seeping meaninglessly from a battered psyche. But now, I’m not so sure. After seeing that woman in my window today, miles and years away from where the story began, Katie’s terror stricken words have begun to feel like something more.

It shall not be seen.

A warning.

It will not be alone.

And a promise.

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