I met Debra at the Silver Curtain Cafe on University Avenue. This was long before Starbucks, when coffee shops were as unique as body art, and words like Venti and Grande hadn’t yet been appropriated by corporations intent on wiping out the stores of Main St.
Debra’s eyes and hair were exactly the same color: carbon black. Her expression was slightly askew, her eyes perpetually wide open in alarm behind thick bangs that covered her forehead. She was slight and elven, with sloped shoulders and a forward-leaning posture, as though her body was always trying to get closer to you. I told her I was looking for a place to live, and she said, her shared house was in need of a fourth roommate.
The bedroom was dim, even with the ceiling light turned on. I figured it had to be the mahogany wood-paneled walls. There was only one window and it was small. I looked forward the afternoon sunlight blasting through it. The only furniture was a narrow twin bed, a thrift-store desk and chest, and two framed prints on the walls. I had little in the way of possessions. Everything I owned in California pretty much fit in the back of my Celica.
I fell asleep that first night contented but I awoke at 3 AM, shivering, my pillow drenched in sweat. Feverishly I tied to shake off the image that still clung to me. In the dream, I was adrift in a heaving sea at night, bobbing like a cork in waves as tall as skyscrapers. Up and down I was whisked in the towering swells.
Relief came in the morning’s light—in the calm safety of our sky-lit kitchen. I drove to work with the windows down, cleansed by the fresh California air. I was excited finally to be earning real money: 20,000 dollars a year. I was a software developer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, writing code to operate the stealth cruise missile. Despite all the partying in college, I was approved for a top secret security clearance.
I got off work at 3:30 in the afternoons, ran a few miles, and cooked up some dinner. Often Debra would be in the kitchen with me. She was usually quiet. But always, those eyes. At bedtime, sometimes we’d say goodnight in the cramped small space between our doors.
I bought a Wayfair Super Bright Halogen Floor Lamp to brighten up the room, but all it did was light the corner in which it stood. I moved it around but it was always the same: the light turned dark after a few feet. It was strange, but I didn’t think much about it.
I GOT A CALL FROM MY SISTER one day, in Maryland. My father’s exploratory surgery for ileitis had turned up cancer. The doctors gave him 6 months. Dad and I were close. I wasn’t sure what to do.
Sleep continued to come in 4 to 5 hour bursts. I’d wake jangled and fearful, feeling the pounding of my heart like fists punching me in the chest. I started to sense a presence in the room with me.
I began showing up at work at 5 am, while it was still dark out. I’d drop a few quarters in the vending machine and blearily watch the coffee splash down into the cardboard cup, sometimes spilling over to obscure the images of aces and queens and jacks printed on the side. I’d sit at my computer and mindlessly peck at the keys, trying to wake up.
I was always exhausted by evening. I’d lie in bed, afraid to let go. There were three roommates within earshot, yet when my door shut, that dark ocean started to swirl around me.
I awoke one night to sound of an explosion—Bang. Very close by. I clicked on the lamp, afraid of what I’d see.
My clock radio was in pieces all over the carpet, some of them covered by one of the framed prints from the wall. The nail that had held it up was still sticking out of the paneling. I was hyper alert, my senses acute. I could actually hear my wristwatch, on the night table, ticking like a sledgehammer. In my unmooredness, and prone to the hypnogogic mysteries, I now knew beyond a doubt that I wasn’t alone.
Terrified, I jumped out of bed with a kangaroo leap straight to the doorknob (to this day I don’t recall touching the floor). I slept on the living room sofa and woke in the morning, surprisingly fresh and energized.
I waved hello to the roommates cooking oatmeal in the kitchen, and there was Debra, filling out the crossword puzzle and smiling to herself.
MY FATHER WAS ADMITTED to Sinai Hospital. I had to get home. I applied for a job back there, stretching the truth about my thin experience at Lockheed. I was hired, and afforded relocation costs. A moving van would arrive in two weeks. Since I would be decamping the house well before my 6-month lease was up, it was on me to replace myself. I put an ad in the newspaper.
The roommate-applicants came and went. Eric, a guy from San Diego who had a lion’s mane of thick blond hair that danced with his animated speech, sat with Debra and I that day at the kitchen table. He told us he was “spiritual.”
Eric said he was a douser. I imagined him ambling along in the wilderness, holding out the Y-shaped twig in front of him, looking for spring water beneath the ground.
“No,” he said. “I’m a spiritual douser. I look for energy.”
“Huh,” I said.
I wanted to keep quiet about the strange happenings in the room. I just wanted to rent the damn place, but the story poured out of me with the force of pressurized steam. I asked him if he had his dousing rod with him.
He corrected me again. “It’s a divining rod,” he said. “It’s in the van.”
Looking at him, I saw the answer to my problem standing in front of me.
“Get it,” I said. “Please.”
While he was gone, Debra’s eyes became luminous. I had been noticing how often she looked bored. But not now.
“It’s actually called a witching rod,” she said.
“Is that so?” I said.
We stood in the doorway of my room, Eric with his two slender copper rods hanging loosely from his fists, and Debra and I huddled behind him, the pallid afternoon light seeping in through the window and lighting nothing.
“Obviously that’s not a branch,” Debra pointed out, taking in the rods.
“It’s not the tool,” Eric said as he stepped into my room. “It’s the person holding it.”
He let the rods lead him forward, his look expressionless as he came up against my meager possessions. When he got to the closet, he stopped. The rods swung inward and crossed.
“Are you doing that?” I said.
“Of course not,” he said.
“Well, what does it mean?” I said, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stir.
“It’s a ‘no’ to the question I just asked,” he said.
“What question?”
“Shh,” he said, as he moved in the direction of my bed.
He squatted down and stared into the dark space beneath the narrow mattress. He held out his fists. Immediately the rods swung apart, as if repelled, and then froze in a V shape, vibrating. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Eric’s eyes closed. He continued to hold out the rods. Then, suddenly they swung inward and struck with a ping. Then whisked apart again. Then it happened again: the rods moved in and out rapidly, like they were… alive.
“What is it?” I said, leaning forward, feeling the ersatz courage that comes when you’re not alone.
“There’s a negative energy vortex under the bed,” Eric said.
Under the bed?
Perspiration had sprung up on his forehead. He wiped it off with his forearm. Debra and I pressed in closer and we all crouched together, feeling the charge of excitement that results when you’ve punched through the temporal world into a space that is clearly not empty.
“Maybe it’s a nodal point,” Debra offered. “Where ley lines come together.”
“No,” Eric said. “I know what this is.”
He stood up. “Come on,” he said and led us out and down the hallway, back to the kitchen. I was both relieved and terrified. Relieved that it wasn’t me. Terrified of what might be around me.
He set the rods on the countertop and leaned back against the sink with his arms crossed. “There’s a person connected to that vortex,” he said. “It was created by a death.”
I was so sleep-deprived I wasn’t sure what was real and what was a dream. All I could do was stare at him.
“There’s an entity that’s come through,” he went on. “It’s no wonder you’ve been stressed, with that thing down there.”
“Thing?” I said.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Debra’s smile.
I have no memory of what else was said in the kitchen that afternoon, nor how Eric left or even who eventually rented the room. That’s all lost to me. Debra wandered off. As for me, I’d had enough.
I tiptoed back into the room and gathered up my things, even as I wondered if I might be swallowed up into some Twilight Zone. Then, right before I left, I turned around.
I bent low and peered under the bed. I didn’t expect to see anything. At least nothing other than the stained, oatmealy carpeting, which is why I’ll never forget what I saw. Even in all these years since, and probably for the rest of my life, I have to live with the consequences of that decision.
It was faded, what I saw, back near the wall. I wasn’t even sure it was real. The eyes, staring at me—big, saucer-shaped yellow eyes, blinking methodically and not wavering from mine. I felt I was caught. Then, the rest of the face came into view, like an old photograph taking shape in a darkroom pan.
The face was haggard and toothless, the mouth opened wide in the shape of an “O”—dark and bottomless. It seemed to be shouting, soundlessly. I could sense repetition in its exclamations, though I couldn’t make anything out.
I was frozen, staring at the ghoulish apparition. I couldn’t move. I wanted to speak, or scream, I’d lost all control.
The face flickered like a film in an old projector—tick, tick, tick, tick. It grew fainter and fainter until … it dissolved away. The vertical line where the walls came together resumed its stable place in reality again.
I managed to get to my feet. I grabbed my two suitcases and sprinted for the hallway, and then I ran into the kitchen, right smack into Debra, my face surely absent of color. She placed her hand flush on my chest and looked at me and said something that must have been on her mind for months: How disappointed she was that we hadn’t spent more time together. I stared at her for a confused few seconds, I told her my father was dying and I really had to go.
I got in my car and drove to my boss’s house to sleep down in their basement for my remaining days in Palo Alto. But I didn’t really sleep. I just lay there, with the lights on full blast and the TV too. Anything to avoid having to relive what I had experienced in my last moments in the dark place beneath the bed, anything to keep up the resolve to push that thing back down and just keeping pushing.