Conspiracy

Moving under the best of situations is an unpleasant experience. Moving to Alaska because it’s the only place you can get a job is even more unpleasant. You’d think that witness protection means that you can start over anywhere, but when your face was on publications all over the country, there is only so much witness protection can do. So a small town in Alaska is where I ended up. A place you can only get to by small airplane. A place that is in it’s own bubble, separated from the rest of the world. A place that doesn’t get a lot of national publications.

While I have said for a long time that I needed a fresh start, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I sat by the window with my coffee and thought about the events that led me to this tiny house in the woods of Alaska.

I graduated college, a surprise to everyone including me, and then realized I had no place to go afterwards. My sister graciously offered up the apartment above her garage for me to live in. A stepping stone only, she made clear. I rolled my eyes, even though I took her up on the offer. I was the accidental child, and my sister, meant to be an only child, was 10 years older than me. She had a successful freelance career, the perfect husband, two golden children, and a dog worth more than I have ever made in my life. So it made sense that when her whole family suddenly disappeared one night, I was the first suspect.

Unexplainable things started happening around the house, seemingly right after I moved in, but perhaps I was the first one to notice them. There would be random surges of power to the house in the night, every now and again I’d wake up to an unusually bright light in my windows, the kids claimed they went to a playground in the sky some nights, plants started dying in an almost perfect circle around the house, and then there was the barn owl. It appeared randomly during the day, and it appeared almost every night. The kids mentioned if they saw the owl in the window at night they knew they were going to the sky playground. The adults laughed about the kids and their active imaginations.

But I saw the owl too. After being woken up by the bright light, I would sometimes see the silhouette of the big barn owl in my window. It never looked at me, it was always focused on the house. I would stay as still as I could, sometimes not even breathing, because I didn’t want to find out what would happen if the owl ever looked at me. I don’t know why, but for the first time in my life, I felt like not being noticed was a good thing.

I tried bringing these things up to my sister, who would either laugh it off, or ask if I was using drugs again. Her and her husband started having issues, clearly caused by the fact that they were not sleeping well. They would fight more, be more irritated with each other, leave the house less. My sister started losing too much weight, I could see her hip bones when she wore leggings, count her ribs through her shirts. One time I pointed out scratches on her back, and she dismissed it, but I caught her looking at them in the mirror concerned.

The night they disappeared, I woke up to the same bright light, the same owl. I held my breath and laid completely still, as I did every time this happened. But this time, the owl slowly turned its head towards me and let out a series of hoots. The first few sounded like a regular owl, but then it went up an octave with each hoot until the final hoot was a sound that made all the hairs on my arm stand up. Then the earthquake hit. Every item that wasn’t bolted down in my apartment got thrown onto the ground. I didn’t hear myself but I could feel a scream coming up my throat, I could feel the veins on my forehead pulse with the silent terror coming from my mouth. When the shaking stopped, I waited until my breathing came back to normal before leaving my bed. I was afraid that if I didn’t, I’d just pass out as soon as I tried to stand up. The owl was nowhere to be seen. I rushed outside to the main house, confused about why there weren’t more lights on in the neighborhood, why there weren’t more people spilling out into the street.

The main house was in the same shape my apartment was in, all the cupboards open, everything not bolted down was on the ground. I didn’t bother stepping carefully with my bare feet to avoid the broken glasses, mirrors, dinnerware all over. I ran through the house shouting for my family, and heard nothing. The master bedroom and children’s rooms were empty, but the beds looked slept in. I ran around in a terror, checked the basement, the attic, screaming their names the whole while. I finally called 911, I’m sure not making any sense because I was hysterical.

One patrol car came, but when they saw the state of the house, and me, several more showed up. I was hysterical, telling them about the owl, the light, the earthquake. What they were saying wasn’t making any sense. They told me that there was no earthquake, none of the neighbors reported a bright light, I was making all of it up. I needed to calm down and tell them what I did with my family. When they said that I completely lost it, screaming that they need to find my family. They arrested me, took me to the hospital, and sedated me. Apparently, I kept screaming about the owl in my sleep.

The next day the FBI came by my room, and asked me questions about my family, about what I had seen, made me describe the owl in detail. They took pictures of my feet, ripped up from running through the house. For hours they wanted to hear about the light, the weight loss, the playground in the sky, the owl. I didn’t want to think about or talk about the owl. Just thinking about it felt like I was sending out a signal to it, letting it know where I was.

After a week, they released me from the hospital. The FBI had taken over the investigation and told local police there was no evidence that I had anything to do with my family’s disappearance. The local police were furious, I was the easiest suspect and they were determined to make my life a living hell to pay for what they thought I had done. The FBI put me in witness protection to protect me from whoever, or whatever, took my family, and the local police. I packed up what little I had and stayed in a safe house until I found a job here in Alaska.

I hoped that it would be enough, but last night, I saw the owl. And I saw four more owls in the trees behind it.