It’s high time we had another tale of high strangeness on this blog. Today’s hackle-raising account comes courtesy of author David V. Stewart.
This sort of thing actually inspired one of my books – Eyes in the Walls.
At my old house one time the attic light came on by itself, and I had to go up there with a .357 and check every corner of the massive thing.
When we moved in we found a weird Rube Goldberg machine hidden in a corner of the attic, along with a pile of beer cans.
Needless to say when that light was on my imagination went wild.
It was nothing in the attic.
It turns out the pull switch on my light was stuck, then got unstuck because of a temperature change or something, which made it click on.
At least that’s the working theory.
What did we imagine?
Well we imagined that somebody was living secretly in the attic. We had a big pull down trapdoor in the garage. We saw the light leaking out around the edges and freaked out.
Why would someone be in our attic?
What if it was the kid who used to live here?
The kid who built the Rube Goldberg machine in a hidden corner, who stacked up beer cans in the crawl space.
There was a post in the garage where his mom and dad measured him each year. They stopped at year 10.
But we knew the person we bought the house from had lived there 30 years. she got a divorce at some point because the deed was changed – we always figured that was when the measuring stopped, the divorce.
But what if it was something else?
What if the kid went missing?
what if something else happened and he snuck back in to live in his old house, but kept it a secret from his mom.
Maybe his parents tried to kill him.
Maybe there was something really really wrong with him…
We also found these little sculptures of shotgun shells glued together to make funny geometric shapes, like something out of a Lovecraft story. when the previous owner moved out she left all these things behind and never searched the attic or crawl spaces.
Anyway all these weird possibilities went through my mind as I stalked over the rafters with a maglite in one hand in my Colt Python in the other.
Sometimes I would hear the exhaust fan kick on in the attic. I thought it was automatic…
Maybe the kid was getting too warm.
Maybe they were places that I never found.
Anyway the idea ultimately inspired this book, but the ending is not what you think!
What do you think was behind the strangeness in David’s attic? Post your theories in the comments, read David’s book for his answer, and be sure to check in on the Combat Frame XSeed: SS campaign. We’ve added some hot-ticket perks, and round 3 of polling to pick our Series 5 trading cards is underway!
Vote for your favorite mech, claim your sweet perks, and support indie science fiction!
Read and enjoyed Eyes in the Walls. The scariest monsters? The adults who wanted to ply the protagonist with drugs.
Timbers show passage. Dusty for nothing, compressed dust for intermittent, clean for frequent, clean and glossy for frequent and prolonged. Look for a path, a route, where there are no cobwebs, or where to either side the cobwebs have become roped and stuck back to the timbers – this is contact and brushing aside. You should also be able to smell sweat – the smell of a person with a different diet and bathing habits is distinct.
If it doesn't sweat, or brush cobwebs off itself, well then, at least you know it's not alive.
I hope that helps.
'Eyes' is DVS at his creative peak. A truly absorbing story. Spiritually resonant as well.