One Second Beyond Twilight
A paranormal-supernatural mystery
By:
Dallas Releford
Published by
Dallas Releford at Smashwords.com
One Second Beyond Twilight
Copyright (C) 2011 Dallas Releford
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This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, places, events, organizations, areas, or locations are intended to provide a feeling of authenticity and are used in a fictitious manner. All other characters, dialogue and incidents are drawn from the author’s imagination and shouldn’t be accepted as real.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without explicit permission from the author or publisher except in brief quotations used in an article or in a similar way.
Smashwords Edition, License notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Dedication
I would like to thank my wife Sharon for her understanding while I was writing this book. She passed away on August 18, 2010. She is dearly missed. Sharon will forever be on my mind and always in my heart.
I would also like to thank my agent and typist, Harriet Smith and Martin Smith, my advisor and typist. Their hard work and dedication has made this book much better than it would have been without them.
Credit is also due to my lawyer, Daniel C. Atwood and my financial advisor Ova Helton, Jr. for their sound advice.
I am also grateful to many other people who kept me going through tough times I have faced in the last seven months.
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ONE SECOND BEYOND TWILIGHT
(A paranormal mystery)
By
Dallas Releford
There are millions of other universes. They are as mysterious as our own universe. Physical laws of science that apply here often do not apply there. Sometimes, these universes randomly overlap into our universe and strange, horrible things happen that we do not understand. When we die we have the option of staying here or traveling to those faraway places. Death is just the next stage into another reality called the after-life. In this story, we will meet people who are already on the other side and have stepped One Second Beyond Twilight.
There was nothing unusual about the way Elton Markham worked all night and came home at eleven o'clock with his sick wife on his mind. Sheri was always on his mind. He had been taking care of her for so long he had developed a routine that was unequaled in his life. There were variations of his techniques though, no doubt about that, especially when she called him at work and told him she had fallen on the floor and didn't have enough strength left in her disease ravaged body to get herself up. Things like that broke his heart. It really did. She'd had one such incident only last week. It was a shame, a shame indeed that he could not get help for someone as loving and caring as she was. From the beginning he knew he'd have to go it alone because neither Medicaid nor the local office of Family Services was willing to help. That too was a doggone shame.
The government was willing to help everyone in other countries. However, they neglected their own people. That was okay though. He would make it and so would his wife. They'd made it this far, hadn't they?
The name on the paycheck he had in his pocket was Elton Markham. His wife's name, bless her heart, was Sheri Markham. His job as a security guard barely paid the rent but they were grateful for what they had. They'd manage. They would get through all this and when they did, they would have to reevaluate the value of their friends. Sheri would get well, beat the cancer and they would have a lot of time to travel and do other things they wanted to do. Of course, that would depend on how many books Elton could sell and so far, he hadn't sold very many.
Elton had traveled these roads with his wife hundreds of times. Sometimes, they had worked at the same place so they were able to ride to work together. Those were happy times when they both were in good health and the bills were getting paid. Those were happy times when they stopped and got a pizza and went home where they sat out on the deck and looked at the stars wondering when the good times would end. They worked in a nursing home in Springdale, Ohio where she spent her hours as a nursing assistant and he struggled as a security officer constantly hoping that he would one day be something else. His dream had always been to make enough money so she would not have to work. Even though she liked her job, the stress was taking its toll on her and he knew that it would only be a matter of time before it got to her, permanently.
Turning right on Adams and then onto Elizabeth Street, he sighed and tried to assure himself that she would be okay when he got home. It was the same nightmare every night when he had to work and leave her at home alone. That was perhaps the most painful thing for him to do, to go away to work and leave her there to suffer alone in the old dark house where ghosts of past dwellers lived. Each night as he approached the house where they lived on a dead end street he prayed that she would be okay and that he would not find her on the floor with a broken leg, or worse yet, in bed not breathing. Once he had loved the night except now the night surrounded him with a cloak of darkness that terrified him. She was alone in that darkness probably sitting in front of the big screen television watching the cooking channel. Wasn't that the way it always ended?
As he got closer to the house, his heart beat faster and a sense of intense dread immersed itself into his being as if his blood flowed with the terror he felt. Dread was part of reality and he knew that it was just one of many emotions he would have to conquer before it dominated him. He turned right on Rugg Street and in the darkness illuminated only by a single streetlight he saw the wood frame white house they had called home for almost thirty years. He knew it had been home for thirty years because they had almost been married that long. A long time to watch someone slowly deteriorate and then die, he thought. Trying hard to remove that thought from his memory he pulled into the driveway. This was it, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, he was about to see the love of his life again.
Elton couldn't believe that he had seen her just eight hours ago, or maybe nine if you counted the time it took him to drive to work and drive home. He'd talked to her a couple of times on his cell phone from work even though the company he worked for had outlawed cell phones. He kept one in his shirt pocket anyway. It was necessary that she be able to call him in case of an emergency. Sheri didn't have too many other people to depend on. When the chips were down on the ground, real friends were truly scarce.
When he pulled the old 2004 Chevrolet Malibu into the driveway the first thing he noticed was that the house was dark. She always left the light on in the front room and usually a light by her bed. The outside lights were controlled by motion detectors that came on when anyone came into the driveway or neared the house. Elton had installed them when they moved to the house in 1986. It was his way of protecting her. He had always protected Sheri every way that he could think of. With a racing heart pumping blood through his veins he felt rushed, urged to get right out of that car before it came to a halt. He'd put it in Park and get into the house as fast as he could. Something was wrong. Was this finally how it would end? Would it end with him finding her in bed, dead as a doornail or was she just sleeping. He dreaded finding out because if she were dead, that would be the end of his world.
Something deep in his mind told him that everything was all rightthat it just had to be fineso he sat there with his fingers squeezing the steering wheel wondering if the voice in his mind, the one he had named Harvey, could be right. Elton knew, as he always knew, that the only way he'd really know if Sheri was okay was to get his butt out of the car and go see for himself. He wanted, and needed Harvey to be right tonight just as he was every time Elton came home.
He was a Gemini which explained why he heard a voice that dwelled in his mind and sometimes attempted to take over his life. Harvey didn't like Sheri very much because she took so much of Elton's time and because she was constantly in Elton's mind. In fact, most of Elton's thoughts and memories were of her. It was just that Harvey was the jealous type and Elton resented him for that. Elton had learned to tolerate Harvey because there didn't seem to be any way he could get rid of him, even when he tried hard. Now, as he sat in the Malibu thinking about the past and of all the things that had happened to him and Sheri in their twenty nine years of marriage, he wished he could snap his fingers and make everything the way it should be. However, there was nothing he could do except take care of her the best he could.
With a troubled mind, and trembling hands he opened the door, got out of the car and opened the trunk. With his lunchbox in his hand he looked around him gazing into the darkness beyond the light from the security lights to see if any of the neighbors were still up. Few were awake at eleven thirty on a Friday night. Walking to the mailbox he opened the lid and checked the mail. His social security check was buried in a bundle of advertisements and the telephone bill had mud on it. Obviously, the mailman had dropped it. He was really a negligent person who clearly wasn't performing to the fine standards of the US Postal Service. Tossing the junk mail into the garbage can as he made his way to the back steps that led up on the deck he had built more than twenty five years ago, he pulled his keys out of his pocket and inserted one into the lock. Glancing at the security camera's on the wall by the door he wondered if his stomach was really as bulging as the cameras portrayed it to be. Doesn't matter, he said to Harvey. I'm not fat or overweight at all. I'm just an average sixty four year old male who has a sick wife. The work and worry has taken care of the excess weight and I don't have to worry about it. That is a funny way to lose weight though. Starving myself because I don't have time to eat right is a painful way to loose weight, I must admit although it does work quite well.
Inside, he went through the same routine he'd practiced for the last four years. The stairway was dark and so was the kitchen. He listened to see if he could hear her coughing or maybe hear the sound of the television. For a reason he never understood, unless she was listening for someone to knock on the back door, she kept the volume low on the television. Most of the time he couldn't hear it when he was sitting within ten feet of it. He loved her dearly, no matter what she did. If she spent all the money they had, which she never had actually done, he still would fuss a little and then forgive her.
Turning the kitchen light on, he put his lunch box on the counter and walked into the bedroom. She wasn't in bed. His heart jumped when he realized that the television was not on in the living room. Where was she? His cataracts prohibited him from seeing well. Hell, he was mighty lucky just to be able to drive to work, especially in the dark. Normally, she would be in the living room, sitting on the couch watching television, in the bathroom throwing up or in bed coughing. The chemo treatments she'd been taking for over three years now had taken its toll on her, bless her heart. She was one heck of a fighter and he admired her for that. The ovarian cancer had moved into her stomach and the walls of her stomach. Her doctors had told her that she would not live for a couple of years, but so far, she had proven them wrong. She had lived almost four years, to date. Bless her soul, she was a fighter with a zeal that anyone could appreciate.
Standing in the living room he looked at the couch and then searched the bedroom with his eyes. Something was wrong here. Something was different and things weren't as they should be. Was he crazy? Was his diabetes acting up again? Perhaps he was getting Alzheimer's just like Mr. Jenkins down the street. He wandered all over the neighborhood and sometimes forgot where home was. Elton had that feeling now as if he didn't belong here and that this wasn't really his home. He felt alone. Everything was unfamiliar and for a few moments he thought he was in the wrong house. What was wrong? What made him feel that he'd been here before and that he didn't belong? Was he truly in his own home and just didn't recognize it?
The couch wasn't the same one Sheri always sat on and the brass bed in the living room was gone. In place of the old 40 inch television Sheri had always watched was a sixty inch Sony complete with an extravagant sound system. The old coffee table was not in its usual place. It had the Sony flat screen television sitting on it. Even the paint on the walls was new and different. New carpets covered the floors and the curtains had been changed. Even Sheri was gone. Where was she?
Memories flooded his mind like the Mississippi River flooding rich farmlands. When she went to bed she usually coughed. That led to more coughing and then the terrible bouts of vomiting. She spent more time in the bathroom than she did in bed. The cancer was getting worse, and he knew it, because she could barely keep anything at all on her stomach. He wondered how much longer she had to live and tears filled his eyes.
Elton sat down on the couch and put his head in his hands. He realized the truth just as tears flowed from his eyes and searing pain flooded through every cell in his body. He knew the truth now. He knew the terrible truth that he could never accept unless he was home.
Sheri died a year ago on August 18th, 2010. The other terrible truth was that today was August 18th, 2011. Sheri had been dead a year today.
1
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ONE SECOND BEYOND TWILIGHT
It was past midnight before Elton Markham finally pulled himself togetherlike he thought Humpty Dumpty might have done in a magical momentbrushed away the tears and told himself that YES, he was in the home they had shared for almost thirty years and YES, he had been fantasizing again because he could not face the horrible truth of his wife's death. He was a broken soul lost in the past and with no future. Grief was a monster that gave you nothing and took everything leaving an empty heart where love had dwelled. It wasn't the diabetes that plagued him and it wasn't Alzheimer's sneaking up on him, it was just the stress of everything that had happened to them piling up on him like a deluge of hail from the sky. It was the same stress he had felt for the last four or five years. Every morning of each new day he laid there for a long time trying to remember everything before he even put his foot on the floor. He had to convince himself that terrible things had happened before he could even begin a new day. However, sometimes, it was too much for him and he lapsed into a stupor where he thought that nothing had happened, that Sheri was still here with him and that everything was going to be all right. It never was all right since she died. And, it would never be the same again.
Mixing reality with fantasy was a deadly combination like mixing sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate to make gunpowder, and Elton knew that as well as he knew that he was running from the truth every chance he got. He had known she was dead except he just couldn't get it straight in his mind that she was really gone. It wasn't something that was easy to accept. He could never forget her, no way. Her death was something he was not willing to accept and that was that.
Tonight was like most other nights when he came home from work and faced the harsh reality. By midnight he'd relived their lives since the day they got married in 1982. That was a lot of information to cram into anyone's mind, much less an aging senior citizen who was already under enough stress to send him plummeting into virtual insanity. Elton was a lost explorer traveling through a land where few had been before and where few wanted to go. Death was the only master and it was heartless and cared nothing for its victims. Grief took all the love you once had and mailed it to another universe in a black envelope without a stamp on it. Some people managed to keep the love they had so carefully grown and nurtured locked safely away in their hearts and minds after their loved one was gone. Elton had managed to keep his love for Sheri fresh and clean like a spring rain, so far. He had vowed that he would never forget her and he'd never get married again.
The house was dark even with the light in the living room on and the table lamp on the stand by the bedroom door burning like a dim candle in a dark desert. This fact brought visions of Sheri sitting in front of the television with only the light in the living room on. What misery she must have suffered in those days before her unfortunate demise, he conjectured before finally getting up from the couch and changed his clothes. He loathed the uniform he wore because he had wore it so much when she was living. It was the job that had taken him away from her most of all. The security company he worked for wasn't human oriented. For every day he had to miss to take care of her they made him work a make-up day. They were to blame for some of his anxiety. That was for sure.
When he was back into his civilian attire againa green polio shirt and jeanshe walked through the darkened room and stepped out into cool August air. It hadn't rained for two months, just like it hadn't rained during the time she was the sickest. The air had been dry, the earth parched and the sky was always cloudless. He remembered that most of all about the final days and it brought more tears to his eyes. Sometimes, the temperature index had been over 105 degrees.
He could remember her clearly and every memory was like a hot, flaming arrow shot directly into his throbbing heart.
He paid for memories of her with pain. Lots of pain.
The one thing he tried not to remember was the day she died. That had too much finality to it.
In the darkness, he sat down in a chair on the deck and attempted to remember how it was and how it all began. Feeling as if he was being watched, a common fear since even before she'd died, he sat there searching the darkness with his eyes wondering if someone or some thing was really watching him or if it was just his imagination. He knew Sheri visited him sometimes. He could never see her. Hoping for at least a glimpse of her, he let his eyes probe the darkness always upbeat because he thought he might see her, if he looked hard enough.
As a cool breeze brushed his face he remembered that they had met when two friends, husband and wife, introduced them in 1981. Their names were John and Becky Staul. John had worked for Elton as a security officer at a toy manufacturer in Oakley, Ohio and Becky had worked with Sheri at a nursing home as a secretary. Sheri and Elton had instantly connected and that resulted in several dates and Elton eventually moving in with her. Their intention was to find out if they could live together without mishap. She'd been married before. She lost her first husband to cancer a couple of years before meeting Elton. They got along, the two of them, and managed to live on their meager salaries. Six months later, in October, they were married. Elton got a job as a security officer at the nursing and retirement home where Sheri and Becky worked. Things had gone well for almost twelve years. In 1990, Elton earned his degrees in computer science and left the nursing home. From that day on things began to crumble and the mountain trembled.
Elton found out that breaking into the computer field was difficult and he stumbled through many jobs before he found suitable employment. During those hard years Sheri stood by him constantly encouraging him no matter how bad the situation got. She always had faith in him and he had faith in her even when he didn't have faith in himself. Somehow, they both had made it and were reasonably happy. There was no doubt in his mind that she loved him and that she would always love him, no matter where she was or would be. She had taken him in, almost a complete stranger, and fed him with love and food. How could he ever forget her or betray her in any way? He knew he could never do that and didn't even want to consider it.
He had always wanted to be a writer since he was twelve years old when he wrote his first novel, called, SOMETHING WHISPERS, a story about his young life and an alien being. He didn't think much about that first attempt and meant to rewrite it some day but there never seemed to be enough time to do so. In 1995, he had started a part-time business writing computer technical books and editing books for other companies. He'd done well and they managed to get the house fixed up they had bought in 1987. Elton remembered when they used to work the same shift, three until eleven, when they used to come home, sit on the deck and look at the stars. He also remembered weekends when John and Becky would bring the kids over and they'd fire up the grill. Those were good memories and not all of their lives had been agonizing. Times were so good that he had wondered when it would all end. He had hoped it would never end, but there was no way he could ensure that.
In 1988 they had built Ronald Reagan Highway almost in front of his house. The noise bothered him and sometimes he could not sleep at night because of it. Before the highway came, it had been quiet and they had been able to hear the songs of the crickets and other creatures in the cool woods nearby. Elton and Sheri had enjoyed many cool nights on the deck before the road came. The construction and the noise had driven the animals and the insects away. Now, he could only hear a few crickets that braved the noise and the smog from the vehicles traveling on the highway nearby. Things had changed. Nothing would be the same ever again. Not for him anyway.
After the destruction of the woods many things changed. In 1995 Sheri got Bells Palsy. Her face was swollen and they feared she'd had a stroke. The doctor had told them that it would eventually go away so Elton got on the internet and read everything he could about the illness. Somebody said that love and care would cure the ailment. So, he massaged her face and neck and gave her all the loving care he could muster. In a few days, it was gone but the scar and the fear was there. Things had changed and were continuing to change. Once you were on that roller coaster it was difficult to get off without getting hurt. Life came with no guarantees. Once it started, sickness was hard to prevent.
Working a full-time job, most of the time, he wrote several novels and sent them out to publishers. Every manuscript came back with a rejection slip attached to it. Feeling the brute force of rejection and despair he kept on writing hoping to write the one that would earn them enough money so Sheri would no longer have to work. That was his dream and his objective. It was that dream that kept him going through disappointment and bad days. It was her encouragement and faith in him that kept him going. It was her wish that he continued writing that kept him half-way going now. The love he had always felt for her helped him to get out of bed every morning and face a new day.
Sheri had a sister and brother-in-law. They lived in West Virginia. Her sisters name was Harriet Jones and her husband was called Martin. Sometimes, they visited. Elton could remember their visits as being pleasant and they almost always went out to dinner. They still came to see him because he couldn't travel to see them. His diabetes was taking a toll on his eyes.
In 1998, Elton became sick and went to the doctor. He was diagnosed with colon cancer. The operation took seven hours and he was in recovery for six hours. Sheri stood by him through the entire ordeal. That had been in April of 1998. A tornado had passes within two miles of the hospital when he was there and within three miles of his home. His wife had been at home by herself. She had gone to the basement and then went on to work that day. The tornado came through at about five thirty in the morning when most people were sleeping or getting ready to go to work. He called her from the hospital and was relieved when she answered the phone. It seemed to him that when she needed him the most he was not there. Those memories plagued him often. He felt sorry that he had been unable to be with her to give her comfort and help if she needed it. He was in the hospital for three days and it took him almost two weeks to recover. During it all he worked with a laptop on his bed and a telephone nearby. Sheri worked and came home to take care of him. Years later, he would do the same thing for her when she got cancer.
Now, it was just quiet and lonely on the deck all by himself and he couldn't even see the stars anymore. The exhaust fumes from the vehicles on the highway clouded the sky and the lights from streetlights blotted out the stars.
When they first moved to the house on Rugg Street Sheri told him one day that she could hear footsteps in the attic when he was gone. Elton had never been superstitious and didn't really believe in ghosts. They had moved their bed up into the room upstairs. There was barely room for anyone to stand upright but they had little space downstairs so they learned to live with it. Elton had completely forgotten about Sheri telling him about the footsteps until one night he was trying to catch a few extra winks while she was at work. It was about eight at night, in the summertime when he had dozed off. He was awakened by the sound of someone talking and footsteps on the stairs. Thinking that someone had broken into the house he jerked awake and grabbed a baseball bat he kept for home defense. Searching the house he could find nothing. However, after that he always had the feeling that he wasn't alone up in the attic and that someone was always watching him.
Attributing it all to his active imagination, he had gone back to bed. Nothing else happened that night. When his wife came home at eleven o'clock he told her about what he'd heard and that he thought someone was watching him. She revealed that when she was in the basement that she was sure someone was down there with her and that someone was watching her. Years of working in a technical environment and in security had taught him to never jump to conclusions.
"Maybe it's just squirrels in the attic or in the walls or something," he explained. "Let me take a look up there tomorrow and I'll check out the basement too."
She'd agreed. They had gone up the stairs together. Nothing else happened when they were together. It was when they were alone that the disturbances happened most often.
Matters got progressively worse as time passed. One of the neighbors, a senior lady with the name of Margaret Hanson said she'd lived next to the house Sheri and Elton had bought since she was in her early twenties. She was a school teacher. She was about seventy-two when she told Elton one evening that an old man had owned the house for many years. He had died in the house. Apparently, she hadn't liked him and Elton thought she was an excellent judge of character. The old lady said that the man had been evil, that he was involved with gambling and gangsters in some way. He had lived there during the heyday of the gangsters in the 1930s. That thought had sent shivers down Elton's spine and made him wonder if something wasn't wrong with the house.
Elton told his wife about what she said and carefully checked the attic and basement. He could not find any indication that animals had gotten into the house. As far as he could determine, there wasn't any logical explanation for what they had heard.
Unable to sleep in the attic they had moved the bed back downstairs. Those incidents had occurred in the early days of their relationship, in the 1980s. Sheri had heard that if you place a cross or a crucifix in the location of the disturbances that the events will stop. So, she placed them all over the house, especially in the basement and the attic. For a while, it seemed to help, except they never were without the ghost, or whatever it was, completely.
One night while Sheri was at work Elton was working at this computer in the bedroom downstairs. He was working on a computer program that he was going to use at work for the security department. It was about six o'clock and still light outside. It was in the summer. He could remember that he appreciated the air conditioner in the window near him. The temperature outside was over ninety degrees. He smoked then. A cigarette was in an ashtray on the desk near him. The curls of smoke arose almost to the ceiling. Suddenly, he noticed that the swirls of smoke were moving away from him toward a dark corner of the room. Terrified, he was attentive as the smoke took on the shape of a human except there was no facial features that he could recognize. Elton was paralyzed from his head to his toes.
"Stop smoking or suffer the consequences," a distant voice said with a slight echo effect to it. Then there was mad laughter that faded slowly into somewhere else.
The smoke dissipated just as quickly as it had been formed.
For a long time Elton thought he had been dreaming and that the fear would go away. By the time his wife got home from work, he had convinced himself of it. Except, there was doubt every time he looked at that dark corner. He never was the same after that.
The crosses seemed to help. They had lived there for several months before his wife told him about strange happenings at work. That incident first happened in July of 1989. The nursing home where they worked had once been a home for unwed mothers meaning that many women had died there and sometimes their babies died. In the late summer of 1989, nursing assistants on the third floor of the Nursing Care Unit, or hospital, began saying they had seen a ghost glide across the hall or corridor of the Alzheimer's care unit. The ghost was described as being about five feet four, had long dark hair and wore a white flowing gown. They claimed that they had only seen her for a split second. One second she was there and the next second she disappeared into the room across the hall.
At first, Sheri was skeptical but as more of the nurses, and even temporariesemployees who had only been employed there a few hourssaw the apparition she became convinced that they were seeing something. As the weeks progressed more and more people claimed they saw the lady. Elton had told his wife not to tell anyone when she saw it because the nursing home might claim she was inducing a panic. Elton wondered if any of the residents had seen the ghost. Several of the RNs saw the fleeting figure and Sheri came home one night excited. She said that it was real because she had been standing at the end of the hall when she saw the figure glide from one room to another one. We figured that when the home had been the Home for Unwed Mothers, this woman must have been the mother of a baby that died at childbirth and she was looking for her baby. Many women lost babies in those days. Many babies and mothers died at the home so there was a pretty good chance that with so many souls floating around it was likely that someone would eventually see at least one of them.
During the next several years more people saw that woman. However, the sightings became less reported as people became used to the appearance. Nobody wondered what the woman wanted. Did she have a specific reason for appearing so often? Occasionally, Sheri mentioned the woman in white and Elton nodded his head and made a small comment. He neglected to tell her that he'd had his own ghostly experience a few months after he started working at the home.
It was a little after midnight when Elton was patrolling the Independent Living Unit where residents that were able to care for themselves lived. There were four floors in the building. He usually went up to the fourth floor, patrolled it and then moved down to the next floor. As he walked out of the stairway and onto the third floor he saw an elderly resident with a walker moving down the hallway from the direction of the elevator. She was not familiar to him. Elton spoke to her as they passed each other in the hallway. After she had passed him he wondered why she was up so late and turned around to ask if anything was wrong. When he looked back, she was gone. There were two doors to apartments between him and the stairway he had just used. The resident had not had time to get to either of the apartments and most certainly didn't have time to get to the stairway. She would have had a difficult time walking down steep stairs with a walker and alone. Where did she go? Who was she? After thirty years, Elton still did not know the answers to those questions.
Elton recalled these events as he sat alone on the deck because he was attempting to remember when the first time was he really began to believe in ghosts. He supposed it was about the same time that Sheri began to believe. That must have been during the first week they lived in their new home. That was the week they began hearing strange noises they could not explain.
During 1984, they took a short trip to Kentucky to visit family. Elton, still weary from hearing noises he could not explain left a tape recorder running in the attic while they were gone. The tape recorder, a Radio Shack circa 1984 model, had a voice activated feature on it. It would have to be exposed to sound in order for it to record. At that time, Cross County Highway had not devastated the neighborhood. Another gift from their wonderful state government. Most of the neighbors were quiet and there were not many children around. He wondered what they would hear when they returned home.
Elton had not really been surprised when he listened to the tape. There were eerie sounds of people talking, screaming and sometimes, laughing. It sounded as if they were off in the distance, perhaps at the bottom of a well, or in Hell. Some of the conversation he could understand and some of it was not understandable. There was the sound of children playing and the sound of wind whistling past the microphone although the tape recorder and the microphone had been in the attic. Elton played the tape for his wife and they both agreed that it was strange, to say the least. Elton put the recorder in his office and it was soon forgotten. They never discovered the source of the strange voices.
In 1988, they bought two cats. Sheri loved animals, especially cats. They named the one with black and white fur Sabrina. The black cat was called BC, meaning "bat cat" because his ears resembled those of a bat. When the frisky animals got older Elton noticed that they would sit on the coffee table and stare into open space as if they were watching something he could not see. Sheri mentioned the fact to him several times. He did not have an explanation for her.
"Animals can sense and see things that humans can't see or hear," she had said. "Perhaps they see a ghost or two."
Elton was alone on a Wednesday night when his wife was at work. In those days, they rented several Beta or VHS movies and watched them. He was alone in the living room watching Flashdance when Sabrina jumped up on the coffee table and sat on her haunches licking her paws after eating a delicious bowl of tuna. Suddenly, her attention was drawn to something or someone in the middle room where the bed was located. Thinking that Sheri had returned home from work because she was sick he jumped to his feet and looked at the cat. Sabrina definitely recognized the being in the other room. When Elton had gone into the front room, there was nobody in the room, that he could see.
After checking the entire house and the basement he wandered out into the back yard and discovered that only his truck was in the driveway. Her car was not there. What had the cat seen? A few moments later, Sheri called him from work. She was on her lunch break. He told her about the way the cat was acting and she agreed that Sabrina had seen something. But what had she seen?
The first ten years of their marriage had been wonderful. With both of them reasonably healthy and a little money coming in, they were able to enjoy themselves. There were problems. Each time it seemed that they were able to put their heads together and come up with a solution. In the early nineties things began to change. Sheri's health got worse and she began going to her doctor on a regular basis and he began prescribing more medicine for her. In 1997, Elton had an operation for colon cancer and survived. A few years later Sheri had a cancerous cyst removed from her right shoulder. The trend was becoming clear. They were going down hill.
During those days strange things happened at random and occasionally it was enough to draw their attention to the event. A single red rose had been left on the deck near the kitchen entrance. Who left it and why? Items were moved or turned up missing. Unusual sounds were heard in the attic or in the basement. Creaking boards in the ceiling and distant voices in the night added to their anxiety. Most of the time, Elton and Sheri were so engrossed with their health issues, work and problems at home that they did not pay much attention to what was going on around them or attributed the disturbances to natural causes. It is always easier to write something strange off as something normal. Some things defy explanation anyway.
Sheri got very sick in 2007 and after a battery of tests, it was determined that she was in the late stages of ovarian cancer. She bravely fought it for almost four years before finally dying from its vicious, brutal attack. Elton worked and took care of her until he was almost exhausted. He worried constantly about her when he had to go to work and leave her alone. One of the things they discussed was installing security cameras and connecting them to the internet so her sister could see what was going on at their house and Elton could watch Sheri from work on the Internet. Four cameras were ordered and installed at strategic locations. The monitors were installed in the office located in the external garage. She passed on before he had time to make use of them.
Alone on the deck at the rear of the house, he felt loneliness drift over him like a blanket of cold water. Every time he thought about Sheri and the things that happened to her, his heart broke all over again. The cameras were a story by themselves. When he thought back to the days before and after her death and what he saw on those cameras he shuddered. He still wondered if he hadn't just been dreaming and hadn't seen all the things he thought he saw on those cameras. The cameras were infrared and had night vision. They could see in absolute darkness. They could pick up spider webs so thin the human eye could not see them. He had learned that the hard way. Small insects looked as big as rats when they were exposed to the IR beams from the cameras.
A few nights before she died, Elton was out in the office working on a book and Sheri was in the house watching television when the motion detectors on the cameras began to activate. Darkness was just beginning to swallow the light and twilight was coming when he noticed strange globes on the cameras that monitored the rear area of the house and the deck. They varied in size from small to large and they pulsated. Most of them were about the size of a dime held at arms length. Hovering over the deck like bumble bees or wood bees, they appeared as if they were waiting and watching. Mesmerized by what he was seeing, Elton rushed to the deck just as darkness came and saw nothing. Thinking they were gnats or maybe even spiders hanging from spider webs he canvassed the area carefully. He could see nothing. The camera could see them. He could not.
Walking back to the office, he sat there and watched them for a long time wondering what they were and what it all meant. They were just hovering there like ghostly hummingbirds. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
What were they waiting for?
As darkness slowly won the battle between day and night, more of the weird globes appeared on the other cameras. That told him that it wasn't something wrong with any particular camera. The cameras were picking up something he could not see. As he watched, long translucent tubes appeared on the screen. Some of these had pulsating globes and circles inside them. Were these tunnels into another universe he was seeing? Were the globes souls of departed ones including humans, animals and insects? That was the only explanation he could think of that made any logical sense. He could still remember how horrified and confused he was as he watched the tubes hang in the air like translucent ropes that led from nowhere to nowhere. Then Elton had a terrible thought, one that horrified him more than anything else ever had. What if those were the souls of people, animals and insects that Sheri had known or had contact with in her life and they were here to welcome her into their world? How likely was that? Too likely, he thought as he remembered some of the conclusions he had come to in past years concerning life in general. It truly frightened him.
Did their presence mean that she was going to die soon? He hoped she would not die, that she would recover and he prayed that she would be well again. Were the mind, soul and spirit all the same thing? Did the mind, soul and spirit dwell in the brain of all beings and when they died it simply left the body? That was the conclusion he had reached a few years ago and now it seemed to him that it fit this situation perfectly. That meant that the souls of all the people who had ever died were here on earth or in some other part of the universeor in another universe altogetherand that they were invisible to human eyes. Cats and other animals could see them sometimes and so could the infrared night vision security cameras. That fact had burned itself into his mind until he went into the house to see if his wife was okay. Sheri was sitting on the couch watching television. She was much worse and he knew it. She had been unable to keep food on her stomach for the last several days. Deep in his mind, he knew she didn't have long to live. He felt sad and sat there talking to her for a long time. Now, as he looked back on that night he knew he should have talked to her a lot more than he had. He should have been there in that house talking to her instead of being out in the office writing books. He would never forgive himself for his stupidity.
As he thought about the next few days of August, 2010 tears came to his eyes and he could hardly think at all. His heart felt like a raw nerve shredded in a meat grinder when he recalled that Sheri had fallen several times, could not get up and he had to call for assistance to get her into bed or onto the couch. One time they had taken her to the hospital for a few days and drained excess water from her body. The next time she fell was the last time she was ever in the house. He was getting ready to go to work when she needed to go to the bathroom. She had been so weak for weeks that she could not get to the bathroom without assistance. He wanted to stay home and care for her but she said she would be all right. He knew deep down that was not the case. While trying to help her to the bathroom she slipped and fell. Elton was so weak he could not get her up so he called Hospice. They came and took her to the Hospice Center in Blue Ash. She died twenty four hours later while Elton was at work. Sick and exhausted he had been sent home and walked in through the back door just as Hospice was calling him to notify him that she had passed away. Even now, he felt heartsick because he had not been there for her when she died.
Much more had happened, especially after her death except Elton could not bring himself to think about it much longer. For an entire year he had grieved and worried himself over her passing and fought hard to cope with her loss. He knew he had to face the future except he had been unable to give up the past. There was something deeper to everything that had happened and he intended figuring it out if it took him the rest of his life, no matter how long that might be. Sheri had wanted to be cremated and she wanted her ashes scattered over the sand at Myrtle Beach. Her sister and brother-in-law had complied. Her life and death had a deep meaning somewhere because of the globes and other strange things that had happened. Some of them he did not want to remember and he had tried to shut them out of his mind. Most of the time he was unsuccessful. It was too horrible to forget.
Someone had left another rose on the step by the rear entrance on the deck a few days after she died.
The rose petals were black splattered with splotches of red.
The globes hovered over the deck for two nights after she passed and then they appeared over his neighbors deck for a few nights. Joe Dancer, his neighbor had passed away more than three years before Sheri died. Had he come back to join Sheri?
Since then the globes and tubes had been a constant annoyance. Elton figured out that some of them were indeed tiny spider webs and that made him feel a little happier and a little sad. What if they all were just spider webs or insects? That theory had been disproved when the cold winter winds, freezing rain and snow blasted the area. There wasn't an insect that he knew of, including spiders that had the stamina to survive such cold conditions. Still, they persisted.
Elton had always felt that a darker force was at work here, in the home he had shared with a wonderful woman for thirty years. What was it and had it caused the death of his wife? Were such things possible in the other world? Could beings in another world influence humans and things in this world?
Several incidents pointed a finger at something evil that had caused them. Sheri had always loved animals. She fed the birds, squirrels and other critters every day. A few months before she died, the squirrels declared war on the house and just about everything else. While they were still being fed they tore up garbage cans, boxes and ate holes in the roof of the house and garage. Even after a neighbor repaired the damage they still chewed through the wood and made the attic their home. Not only did they wage this war of destruction two years before she passed away, they continued their costly attack for another year. The only reason their advance was halted, perhaps temporarily was because Elton, with the help of cats and the neighbors, killed most of them and fixed the house so they couldn't get in. At some point after her death they destroyed the deck. The deck planking was hard wood and he could not figure out how they chewed into it except they did.
Shortly after she died he was in the living room sitting on the couch checking boxes of items she had purchased and never opened. Most of them had been ordered from QVC.com and other online retailers. One of the boxes he opened contained scissors and knives. While he was inspecting the items one of the sharp scissors jumped out of the box and fell on the floor. Startled, he picked it up and took it to the cabinet drawer in the kitchen. When he returned it was on the coffee table in front of him. He was sure that Sheri would never do something like that, so, who did do it?
There had been other incidents, some of them quite memorable like the one he had called the spider web incident. Sheri had been cremated, true to her wishes, and the urn containing her ashes had been placed on a shelf in the living room near the front door. Two of the security cameras portrayed a long rope-like translucent tube extending from inside the house, out the front door and around the house where it disappeared over the garage. Several cameras, located in different places showed the same thing so he knew the spider web was not in front of just one camera. One night after many frustrating hours of deliberation and fear, he took a water hose and sprayed the area around all the cameras. When his work was completed the tubes were still there and didn't seem to be bothered by the water at all. Sometimes, he could actually wash the spider webs away, except this one did not seem to be a spider web. Elton had thought that it extended from her urn to another universe. He still tinkered with the idea that the tubes were passages from this world to some other world and the pulsating globes he saw inside the tubes were spirits that were using the tube to leave this world. If so, had Sheri passed on from this world and to a better place? He didn't know for sure. At that time, he felt her presence strongly and he thought she was looking after him making sure he was doing okay.
The incidents had happened before her death and afterwards. Sometimes, he still noticed things that didn't seem right. A cold spot developed in the living room in the exact spot where Sheri sat on the couch and watched television. He'd had the couch replacednot because of the cold spot but rather because the old one wasn't very comfortableand several chairs also. Elton had wanted to keep familiar things around him that belonged to her without drowning himself in memories of her. A man could only take so much. He had made a promise to her that he would write a book about her suffering and experiences hoping that it would help other women. Sitting alone on the same deck they had shared a few months ago when they were talking and watching the stars, he felt that he was not alone. Was she here now?
Elton did not have a way to gauge whether it was his imagination or if she really was there. He could sometimes sense that she was near and that brought pains of sorrow to his heart because he could not talk to her or touch her. He had never actually seen her on the security cameras. However, some of the globes exhibited traits that made him think they were Sheri's spirit. If she was out there, she had not attempted to make contact with him unless the orbs were trying to communicate with him. They had hung over the house, near the garage and over the deck. The strangest incident he had yet experienced was the night the butterflies came up out of the ground. That was a show that would have made the Ringling Brothers proud.