My great uncle died recently.  I was never really close to him—he was my great uncle, after all, but my dad asked me to come with him and some other family to clean out the house, since Uncle Frank never had any kids of his own.

I guess a little background information would be good.  Uncle Frank, along with most of us, lived in southeastern Virginia, on an old plantation house.  It’s across the street from a little family cemetery, and most of it is surrounded by state wildlife reserves.  He didn’t have any neighbors, so my dad took me to visit him a lot.

Uncle Frank raised baby trees and sold them to nurseries, and the rest of his enormous yard was overgrown grass and a bunch of produce-bearing trees and bushes, so most of my visits were picking blueberries to take home or watching from the rope swing while he and my dad cut down trees. There was a forest behind his house, which I had only ever been in to investigate deer.  Up until his death, I don’t remember going inside the house since I was ten.  I don’t remember much about it; just two things.

It was cluttered and dirty and miserable, with insulation and roofing fallen all over the place; and a whole room in the back was boarded up.  My dad told me it was haunted, with a whole back story about how the plantation owner’s daughter was shot sometime during the Civil War and he hanged himself out of grief.  I’m pretty sure I believed it; I want to ask him about it again, to see if he actually believed it or if he just made it up to scare me.  I probably won’t.

Anyways:

A week or so after Uncle Frank died, we went to clean out his house—it was my dad, his sister, a cousin of mine, and me.  The yard was overgrown as ever, and being June in Virginia, it was unbearably hot and humid.  Mosquitoes and dragonflies swarmed around the house.  My aunt only half-joked that we should just burn the place to the ground.

I brought my digital camera with me that day on my dad’s request, and I went around photographing the lines of trees, the old cars in the backyard that had been overgrown, and the house, so we could sell everything.  Then I joined everybody else inside.  We worked until two o’clock in the afternoon, when we took a break because it was getting too hot and my dad—a surveyor—wanted to check the floors because they were damp and soft.  By that time we had cleared out a bunch of junk—lots of old kitchenware and clothing.

When we got back at around four, I pulled my cousin aside and asked if he wanted to check out the haunted room.  He said yeah—by that time neither of us believed it was haunted; we just assumed the floor was rotted or something. 

So, while my dad and aunt worked on clearing my great uncle’s bedroom, my cousin—Tom—and I found some screwdrivers and worked on prying the boards from the door.  They came off with a little bit of ease—Tom did most of the work—and we just had to bang on the door with our shoulders before it flung open.  I nearly stumbled into the room, but I caught myself on the doorframe, luckily—the floor opened directly into the crawlspace beneath the house in the middle of the room.

Tom and I surveyed the area and decided that I should try to walk around the rim of the room, since I was lightest, and see if it was sturdy.  I walked beside the wall like I was on a balance beam, and when I reached the very back, I told him it was safe for him to follow.

We both turned on our cell phones, as the windows were all boarded up, and looked around.

“No nooses,” I noted.

“Or ghosts.  Maybe you should take a picture and make sure they don’t only appear on film,” He raised his eyebrows and wiggled his hands around.

“It’s digital,” I said, but I took a picture of him, mid-spooking, and made sure there were no phantoms from the 1860s behind his shoulder.  Of course, there weren’t.  We continued goofing off in the room, ignoring our cleaning duties, for fifteen minutes.  I took dozens of pictures. We pretended to be ghost hunters.

It started getting too dark in the room, so we took to getting the plywood from the windows.  I set my camera down on a shelf.  We threw the plywood uncaringly into the muck in the hole, but it was only a second later that my dad and his mom came to get us, so we could pick up some food from 711 and then drive home.

It wasn’t until we’d already driven up to civilization and picked up our dinners that I remembered I left my camera at Uncle Frank’s.  Tom offered to come back there and get it with me, since I didn’t want to by myself; it was already getting dark outside.

This was the first and only time I’d been to Uncle Frank’s house at night.  It was unbelievably creepy; the overgrown grass and mounds of hay, the darkness, the constant chrrrrrrps of a billion bugs.  Tom, ever the Eagle Scout, kept a floodlight in his car, which we brought into the house with us.  I led the way after deciding I’d rather have Tom behind me with the light, and I half-jogged into the back room, but I didn’t enter.  My bright teal camera wasn’t sitting on the shelf; it was partially sunken into the crawl space’s grime, which the floor and walls had been splattered with.  I prodded Tom to fish it out for me as I held the lamp.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have opened the window,” he suggested, positioning and then re-positioning himself for the best way to get my camera.  “Some kids must have come in here.”

I shrugged and mumbled, “Yeah,” even though the window had been broken for years, and anybody who would have tried to crawl through would have tracked blood in.  “Or they got here /under/ the house.”

He wrinkled his nose, partially from picking up my camera, partially from the thought of anybody willingly putting themselves in it. “Maybe they took some pictures,” he said, eyebrows raised, delicately holding the camera so the least amount of mud possible got on his hands.  I’m not a curious person, but I walked up to him and looked over his shoulder anyway.  Tom clicked through the pictures—he didn’t think of simply going backwards.  The yard, the trees, the car, the house, all the pictures that we took of each other.  Then one that was completely black, as if it was held to something at close-range.

And another.  

My arm held the lamp limply at my side as I watched for the rest of the photographs.

The next one was pointed towards the ceiling—we both looked up—but something dark brown was in the corner.  After that, something yellow.  Then something that looked like the inside of a mouth.  Yellow, again, and white.  I’m not sure about Tom, but I got a start at the next picture.

It was something brown, or red, an outline that looked mammalian but with skin like a reptile. 

“Let’s go,” I whispered urgently.  Tom kept clicking through. “I’ll leave you,” I lied, already halfway across the room.

He looked, for a moment, like he was about to comply, but he didn’t get a chance to follow me; he was suddenly pulled downward with a scream I never thought I would hear coming from him.  I dropped the floodlight—it didn’t break, or even turn off, thank God—and ran over to help him.  I grabbed him by the arm and tried to pull him up, but Tom was only making matters worse, screaming and flailing and yanking.  I shrieked for him to cooperate, but he didn’t.  As I tried to pull him up by the wrist, I managed to get a look at what had him. It was yellow and white and red and brown—skin that was colored and textured like infected scabs, eyes that looked more like they were painted on than anything.

Finally, Tom managed to yank his leg from the creature and we both ran out of the house with everything we had.  He didn’t bring the camera and I didn’t bring the floodlight, but we were both only focused on getting into his car—which we did manage to reach.  The headlights didn’t show anything abnormal, but we spent a good couple of minutes scouting through closed windows on locked doors until Tom gathered himself enough to drive away.

He drove straight towards the city, but didn’t go anywhere near our houses.  Tom drove around for at least two hours, both of us silent, as if he was waiting for the sunrise to stop.  Around ten, we stopped at a very well-lit gas station and I looked at his leg; it had mostly stopped bleeding.  I convinced him to stop at the hospital, where I called my dad to lie that I got home safe, and where I fell asleep in the waiting room while the doctor gave him stitches and the first of a series of rabies vaccinations.  He told the doctor a fox bit him.

Tom and I haven’t talked about the incident, but I know I think about it at least every day.  I’ve put duct tape around my curtains and try not to even look outside at night time; I’m careful never to look up in case something comes in the skylight.

I saw Tom a few days ago, the last day before he went to college.  He’s paler than usual, but his mother didn’t mention anything about disease, and he’s had the entire series of vaccines.

One thing I noticed about Tom, though; the wounds on his leg has healed, somewhat.  But from my memory, the scabs are covering far more than was injured that night.  He’s been picking at them, too; they look infected.