Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Within These Walls...

I always tell people my house is “in the country,” but I feel like that’s sort of a lie.  It is, pretty much, in the country.  But it’s also on a main highway that is busy at all hours of the day and night.  So we’re not out in the middle of nowhere.  But…we are cutoff from society, for the most part. 

Our nearest neighbors are across the street, but since our street is actually a busy highway, it’s not like we can just run across the road and ask for a cup of sugar or an extra egg if we need one.  Our neighbors to our west are on the other side of the marsh and a mini-forest.  We can’t even see their house.  Our neighbors to the east of us are close-ish.  If I stood outside and yelled SUPER loud, they could probably hear me- only if they were outside too, though.

I’m telling you all of this to highlight the fact that the only noise we ever hear, besides the insanely loud road noise, is our own.  Lawnmower?  Ours.  Snow blower?  I wish.  Kids being loud and crazy?  Those are definitely ours.  It’s important that you understand this before I tell you what happened to me yesterday.

Yesterday, I had the day off (thank you, Presidents of yesteryear!)  I was home alone, and after spending the morning working on things around the house, I decided to get dressed and go to the store.  I was in my room, half naked, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a chainsaw firing up outside my bedroom window.  A CHAINSAW.  OUTSIDE MY WINDOW.  I almost shat myself.  True story.  With shaky hands and my heart in my throat, I tiptoed to the window in my room that was furthest away from the noise and peeked through the blinds, fully expecting to see Leatherface staring back at me. 

It was my landlord.  He’d come over, unannounced, to chop down the remnants of a tree that fell during our last major windstorm.  Oh, that Bob….

I was thinking, as my pulse slowed back down to a normal pace, about how long it’s been since we’ve had an “incident.”  It’s been at least a couple of weeks.  That’s gotta be a record.  Be careful what you wish for, right?

Last night, I was cleaning up the aftermath of my 14 year old’s birthday party.  We’re talking soda splattered on the walls, food crushed into the floor, holes in the walls, broken glass (P.S. He is NEVER having another slumber party).  As I was cleaning the floor for the tenth time, I noticed that him and his friends had been so rowdy, they’d knocked loose a couple of floorboards that had apparently been cut out of the flooring and replaced years ago.  (Important fact: When we moved into the house last spring, I pulled carpet out of the upstairs bedrooms that had been therefor decades.  So whatever was underneath it had been there for a good long while.) 

I removed the pieces of floorboard, and what I found set my heart racing instantly.  What was hiding under my son’s bedroom floor was a multilayered contraption of weirdness.  Two boards, nailed together so that one was facing north/south and the other was facing east/west, sort of like a cross only not really.  I believe they were nailed together like that so they would be impossible to remove from under the floor without removing all of the nails first.  On top of the criss-crossed boards was an old, dusty manila envelope, folded over multiple times.  On top of the envelope were four smaller strips of wood, all nailed down.  I had to pry them up, one by one, to get to the envelope.

I was giddy, wondering what I would find.  An old love letter?  A murder confession?  Money?  Savings bonds?  Photos?  Gaaaah!  I was so excited, my hands were shaking as I finally broke the envelope free from its shackles.  What I found was…..unexpected.  Baseball cards from the 1950’s, one of which looked like it had been cut from the back of a cereal box.  These weren’t some young boy’s hidden treasures, however.  Each card was folded into teeny, tiny pieces, and had a nail going right through the player’s head.  Ummmm……???

I don’t even know what to say.  Was it some sort of weird baseball ritual?  A voodoo curse?  I have no idea.  I did Google the players today, Eddie Joost of the Philadelphia Athletics and Jim Pendleton of the Milwaukee Braves.  They both lived long, seemingly happy lives, and only died within the past few years.  (I’ll be honest, I expected to find that something horrible happened to them both in 1952, which is the year I’ve deduced the cards were hidden under the floorboards.)

Add another mystery to the list.  We’ll file this one under “WHAT THE HECK?!”  Seriously, I have no idea what to think.  This has got to be my strangest discovery to date, aside from maybe the old arcade games in the barn.  It just makes me wonder….what else is hiding within my walls and under my floors?   And what’s hiding in the attic?  Oh, did I never mention that?  Yeah, we totally have an attic.  What’s in it?  I can’t tell you…..because none of us have ever been up there.  Cue the Twilight Zone theme song…..     

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