It happened in a house I had never seen in my life. It was dark, dingy, and carried the smell of old, musky cologne. I remembered the shutters really well, they were the kind that you seen in horror movies, tattered, shaken, and broken around the edges. I remembered questioning why there were shutters, when the windows had blinds on the other side. I never did get an answer.
The room was dark and dingy as well; I remembered someone said that it used to be a parlor. I asked what a parlor was, and was told that it was a room that was never really used, more like a sitting area where people just walked through, knowing that there was another area that they could sit in. But the parlor was used at times, whenever there was a reason for it’s space……
Jan 14, 2010 06:18 PM
Entry #1
My first experience with this parlour room came to me through my dreams. In the dead of the night when most of my household was peacefully asleep, I dreamt of tortured souls and dark lifeless rooms. These dreams occurred frequently enough for me to worry that I was having some sort of nervous breakdown.
My life has never really been perfect. At 22, I have seen my fair share of tragedy and disappointments. I was adopted when I was 3 by a couple who I now call mom and dad. My memories of my life previous to my adoption are sketchy, but from stories and conversations I have had with Caseworkers, I know that my birth mother was a cult loving hippy. Social Services took me away from her, fearing that the abusive cult would taint my childhood. Thankfully, my thoughts and memories of this time are vague, but I have odd spaced out images of my mother. Some images in my mind are of her laughing, some are of her angry, but the time has rode away from my past life and I no longer have interest in who I was before.
My younger years are happy ones. I was placed with Susan and Phillip Lawson, my adoptive parents and for years I couldnt have been happier. These people showed me how life should be, they loved and cared for me as any parents should do. I never felt like an outside, I was theirs and they were mine. From the start, they were honest about my adoption, so there were no shock announcements when i was old enough to understand. They understood that I needed to learn who I was to grow into who i am. Or at least who I was before everything started going wrong.
Tragedy usually follows in threes. At least, thats how the old wives tale goes. But i have bad luck after bad luck. My father, the guy who taught me to ride a bike on a chilly winter morning, the guy who taught me to throw a punch, to deter the school yard bullies, my rock and my hero; died when i was 10 years old. He had been walking from work when he had collapsed with an heart attack. Medics had tried in vain to help him, but they failed to revive him. He was 49. My mother grieved for him and locked herself away, not wanting to face the world or me. I was left to handle my own raw emotion. I was 10 years old and I wanted to cry and scream at the injustice of this sudden tragedy, but my body refused to feel the pain. Eventually, my mother gained a grasp of her grief and she welcomed me into her world to share her misery, but I still failed to feel her pain. I loved my father, as i loved her, but I couldn't show it. Guilt ate away at me, but no tears fell.
My mother was never right after that, she started taking anti-depressants and drank heavily. She played the role of the mother well and I never felt unloved, but she was never completely there. When she was working, she would sneak away from her assembly line to sip at her hidden bottle of whiskey and when she was at home, she would drink herself into a stupor, before waking the next day to start it all over again. My mother was depressed, she had lost the love of her life and she failed to see what to do with her life. The future she had planned with my father had gone and now she was left with memories and 'what ifs'.
Five years after my father died, i came home from school to find my mother slumped up the kitchen wall, head on chest and arms stretched out at her side. But my mother was not drunk or asleep, she was dead. Finally realising that she could not live this life without my father, she had taken a kitchen knife to her wrists and ended it. I was fifteen and alone.
I had no other family, so I was placed in foster care. Too old to be of interest to new adoptive parents, I was in care until I was 18 at which point I was no longer a ward of court, so I was let go.
That was when I started longing for lodgings and work. I applied for many jobs, but i was successfully offered the position of house maid at a beautiful huge mansion out in the countryside.
It was this mansion where my nightmare began.