Doctor Winters Forgetfulness Clinic- Watching from the Corners

“So, Darrell, tell me about the dreams you're having trouble with?”

Darrell looked down into the steam, seeming unsure of how to begin.

“It was a long time ago, you understand.”

“The dreams?” Doctor Winter asked, unsure what he meant.

“No, no, the things that happened in the dreams. The dreams are more recent, but they are really affecting my work. I need sleep so I can be effective at my job and these dreams are keeping me from getting restful sleep.”

The steam wafted up from the tea and created condensation on Darrell’s glasses, making him appear to be crying in slow drips.

“Let's start with what happened then,” Winter said, “Tell me about it and maybe we can help you forget it. If you can’t remember the trigger, then the dreams should stop.”

Darrell sighed deeply, clearly not wanting to relive it but willing to try.

“Well, I guess it all started with this weird obsession I had with other people's houses.”

When I was a kid I had kind of a weird obsession with people's houses.

It sounds odd, I know, but I always wanted to just go into someone's house while no one was there and just look around. I didn’t want to take anything, I wasn’t a thief, but I just wanted to look at their stuff, see where they put things, see if they liked to keep things the way I did, and just observe things without them being there. When people show you their room or their collection of something or take you somewhere that's special to them they always get nervous that you’ll judge them and, to me, that ruins the experience.

I want to observe these things in their purest form without someone standing behind me to hurry me along before I start judging them.

I can remember wanting to go into people's houses from a very young age. We would be driving somewhere or on a trip and I would see an unfamiliar house and just wonder what it was like in there? Did they have a cupboard full of mugs like my mom did? Was there an ashtray in the living room with butts in it? What color was their furniture? Did they collect knick-knacks? I would create these little houses in my mind based solely on the exterior and never get any closer to how right or wrong I had been.

I still feel that way, and I still want to look, but I’m wiser now.

When I wonder now, I remember what happened when I was eleven and know better than to go snooping.

When I was eleven, I found a house with the door open.

I didn’t set out to find a house, of course. I wasn’t casing the neighborhood for a nice house to go sightseeing in. I was on my way home from the corner store with moms cigarettes. We lived in a small town and Mom had bought a pack of Virginia Slims at the same corner store, every day, for as long as I could remember. The lady at the store, Ms. Vicky, Had known me since I was in OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, and she knew I was more likely to set my hand on fire than smoke one of moms cigarettes. So when I put my Skittles and Yoo-hoo on the counter and asked her for a pack of “Virginia Slim Long Menthols, please.” she put them in a paper bag along with the change from the ten mom had given me.

“Tell your mom I said Hi,” she said, the bell over the door tinkling happily as I said I would and took my leave.

The trip home was about ten minutes by foot, and I had drunk the Yoo-hoo about forty-five seconds into that walk. I tossed it into someone's garbage can, 'cause I wasn’t a litterbug, and had just torn open the bag of Skittles when my eyes found something I couldn’t remember having seen before. I had walked this road a thousand times, rode my bike up it half that many, and as I turned to look at the house, I don’t think I had ever seen it before in all that time.

It was fluorescent blue with that weird bubble stucco on it that was trendy at the time. It had little square windows and big metal awnings over each to keep the light to a minimum. The grass was a little tall in the yard, but not unkempt. This was Georgia, after all, and if it rained more than twice after you cut it, you’d have to cut it again. There was no car in the yard, and the whole place just looked very abandoned.

And the door was wide open.

I stopped with my Skittles in hand, thinking about that door and the idea of exploring a house with no one in it. I had never been inside a house by myself that wasn’t mine, and though I knew I shouldn’t, I couldn’t imagine another opportunity like this. This could be my only chance, my eleven-year-old brain told me. I might better take advantage while I could, It further said. I took a step off the road towards the door, then another, and another, and before I knew it, I was in the yard with the tall tickly tops of the seed plants rubbing at my legs. I looked at the door like it might suddenly slam shut, but with every step that it stayed open, I felt a little more confident that I was making the right decision.

I peeked inside and found an empty living room with the TV playing. The light coming in through the windows was enough to show me the dingy living area, but I could tell that it would be dark in here after the sun went down. The TV was playing a commercial for dog food, and the lights on the screen made me hesitant to enter. Just a quick look at the living room, I told myself. If someone comes back from the bathroom or something and finds me here, I can just say the door was open and I was worried. That's a thing a good neighbor would do, after all, and so I started quickly looking around the small square front room.

A mustard yellow couch took up one whole wall, and it looked prickly. It was like the couch my Grandma had in her “receiving room” and there was a scratchy throw tossed over the back of it to really bring it together. There was a divet in the couch too, right in front of the tv, and it appeared that someone had spent a lot of time making it. On the wall closest to the kitchen was a flimsy bookshelf that held some magazines and paperbacks on the bottom and middle shelf, and a bunch of those weird-looking figurines on the topmost shelves. I think they were called “Precious Moments” figures, and whoever lived here had about fifteen of them that I could see. They had set the ones with animals in them at the forefront and I wondered if that was why they liked them best? They all looked chipped and secondhand, none of them appearing new, and the kids they depicted looked discolored with age or old cigarette smoke.

Speaking of, there was a TV tray next to the couch, and on it was a teetering ashtray full of thick yellow butts. They weren’t Virginia Slims, and the filters said Marlboro on them in little gray letters. Someone had made a little mountain out of them and it looked like if you dropped one into the opening left in the center, it would smoke like a volcano. There were some pictures on the wall, a man fishing with a kid about my age, a man laughing with a group of people at a theme park, and two men working on an old car, and they too looked yellowed and kind of washed out. The frames were dusty and the glass looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time.

As I took these things in, I couldn’t help but feel like something was watching me. I kept looking around, prepared to see someone standing there watching me intrude, but I never saw anyone. It was a feeling, like when you think there's a bug on your arm or when someone pretends to crack a make-believe egg on your knee. It's just something you feel, but you don’t know why you feel it. It’s the same senses that kept your ancestors alive, but that we have forgotten in our perceived safety.

As I finished looking at the living room, no one having come out to challenge me, I decided to go check out the kitchen too. Sometimes in TV shows, people found their neighbor hurt or something, and I wondered if someone was hurt inside and needed me to call an ambulance. That was a lie, I suspected no such thing, but I wanted to see more of the house before I was discovered. I expected any minute to hear a toilet flush or hear a door close and hear the telltale sound of footsteps coming from the back of the house. They would find me in their house and ask me what I thought I was doing or I would run out before they saw me and that would be the end of my adventure, but I wanted to see how far I could get before that happened.

The kitchen looked a little like the one at my house. The floor was covered in black and white checked linoleum, but where ours was shiny and often waxed, this one was peeling and faded. The countertops were chipped and dull, the lustrous black Formica looking greasy and sticky. There were cans on it, open cans that crawled with little white worms, and there were more in the trash. The label declared it Chili, and it looked less like the kind you ate alone and more like the kind you put on hotdogs. There was a light in there, a single round globe speckled with fly corpses, but it did little to reach the corners. The corners looked very dark, almost unnaturally dark, and as I walked around to inspect the little table and the mostly empty cupboards, I could feel that same crawling feeling of being watched. The pockets in here were deeper than the ones in the living room, and it was easier to believe that someone might be watching from them. It almost felt like I could see someone in the dark there, but I couldn’t be sure as I looked to the next hallway and tried to decide if I dared?

The hallway beyond was cast in various stages of darkness. The first few steps were shadowy, but I could still see the stiff brown carpet that covered the floor. After about five feet, however, it was shadowy to the point of being hard to tell what color the walls were. I could see a door midway down the hall, a bathroom, I assumed, but beyond that was little more than the inclination of a door. The longer I looked, the more I could feel something staring at me from that darkness, and the less sure I was that I wanted to go in there. The same feeling I had gotten in the kitchen and living room was back in force, and the longer I stared, the more I felt like I could see something else in that darkness.

It was human-shaped, though probably not human. It seemed to hang in the murk of that hallway, the dark converging around it as my eyes tried to make sense of what I was seeing. It looked for all the world like a child's interpretation of darkness, the thick squiggles that often decorate a picture of a dark room. I had taken a single step into that hallway, my foot seeming to be gone as it passed from the semi-lighted kitchen to the hall, and I took it back as I backtracked for the living room.

I had seen enough to know that satiating my curiosity might be the end of me.

I left the door open and ran for my house, not feeling safe until my own door was between me and the unknown entity that resided there.

I told my mother what had happened because I honestly didn’t know what else to do. Mom was an adult and might very well be able to make sense of all this. She would smile and pat my head and tell me how I had been silly and that I shouldn’t let my imagination get the better of me. She would explain it in a way that my child's mind could understand and it would all be okay.

Instead, she called the police and asked if they would do a well check on the house? Mom had been an emergency dispatcher for about fifteen years before finally leaving to be a stay-at-home mom, so she knew what to say to get them to go have a look. They said they would and when Officer Buck came by a few hours later, I just figured he was in the neighborhood and wanted to say hi. He and Mom had been friends since High School and he and Dad bowled together and were part of the same Moose Lodge so it wasn’t uncommon to see him at the house. I expected he would ask me to go play somewhere so he and Mom could talk about “boring stuff” but he asked me to stay today so he could ask me some questions. He wanted to know what I had seen in the house and how far I had been and whether I had smelled anything or seen anything that scared me? I told him about the crawly feeling and how it had felt like someone was watching me and he thanked me for my honesty and said I had been very brave to try and check on something like that but, in the future, if I suspected someone might be in danger I should call the police station and tell someone.

Mom walked him to the door not long after that and they whispered about something while I went and watched cartoons in the living room. I had already basically forgotten the fear and uncertainty I had felt in that house. I was a kid and nothing ever lasted very long in my mind. I had already moved on to more important things like Mumraw’s latest scheme on Thunder Cats and how Cobra was going to destroy the GI Joes today.

Mom came and sat on the couch with me, hugging me a little as she stroked my hair, but I didn’t think anything of that either.

They bulldozed that house a few weeks later. I watched them destroy it from the seat of my bike. My friends called out to me, wanting me to come and ride with them, but I was trapped by the sight of that strange house as it was flattened. It was weird to realize that you might be the last person to truly see and experience a place, though I would learn I was far from the last many years later.

I had been having some weird dreams lately and that was the only reason I remembered it at all. I walked through a house I didn’t know, my vision seeming to be on rails as I moved effortlessly through the dingy space. I saw a living room with a tv showing snow, a kitchen with counters covered in dark brown juice, and then stopping at a pitch-black hallway. There's something in there, I can feel it, and as it zooms in, I can hear a high-pitched ringing begin to build until I finally wake up.

I asked Mom about it, figuring she might remember, and she got this look on her face that made me instantly regret asking.

“I was hoping you’d forgotten about that. Your Uncle Buck was afraid it might traumatize you, but I told him it seemed like you really hadn’t seen anything.”

“I didn’t, not really,” I said, not sure what to say, “but I definitely felt something in that house, something that scared me. What was in there? Why did they tear it down all of a sudden?”

“The man who lived there was a shut-in. He paid someone to go get his groceries, to go cash his social security checks, and basically never left the house. Buck said when we called for a well check, they went in and found him dead in the backroom. He said the flies were so thick that the EMTs had trouble getting him out. They were in the corners of every room and they were a real nuisance. They had to demolish the house because the room had a lingering smell and the flies just never quite stopped gathering there.”

I was glad she told me, but I’m not entirely sure what to do with this information.

As the dreams get more persistent, I’m not sure how to get past them, and every night it's always the same.

As he finished, Darrell opened his mouth and let the spongy mass slop into his coffee cup. He sat placidly for a few minutes, blinking his eyes very quickly, and Winter took the opportunity to whisk the cup away before he came to. She added the contents of the cup to a mason jar, washing the cup and setting it by the sink before seating herself and staring at Darrel expectantly. He would assume he was coming out of a trance, just as she wanted, and he wouldn’t question much besides whether or not it had worked.

Humans were far too eager to forget the things that brought them pain in one form or another, something that Doctor Winter used to pay her bills and live comfortably.

Darrell shook his head thirty seconds later and looked around.

“What happened?” he asked groggily.

“We succeeded in freeing you of your burden. Don’t think about it too much, it might hurt you more in the long run.”

She was showing him out when her phone rang. Winter looked down and saw it was Juliet, her receptionist, and picked it up on the third ring. She was probably letting her know that her next client was here. Business had been busy lately, and Winter had never been happier for clients to help. Rent was going up next month on the office, the summer months were always more expensive on the electric bill, and fancy dinners did not, as a rule, pay for themselves no matter how cute your girlfriend was.

“Dr. Winter, someone is here to see you, someone who isn’t on the list.”

Pamela furrowed her brow, “Tell them that without an appointment I can’t help them too,” but the door opened as a man in a dated suit walked into her office. Juliet was right behind him, telling him that he had to fill out forms and insurance papers, but Winter gritted her teeth as she told the fiery receptionist that it would be okay.

“Tell my next client I’ll reschedule them for first thing tomorrow and it will be free.”

“Free?” Juliet asked, looking shocked.

“Free,” Juliet repeated, “Apologize profusely, but tell them I’ve had an emergency come up and I must take it.”

Juliet nodded, closing the door behind herself as the man in the pinstriped suit took a seat on her client's couch.

“Such generosity,” he commented, grinning hugely at her as he rested his leg on his knee.

“No such luck, you will pay me for my lost time and trade, as is fair.”

When he smiled again, the gold of his glasses seemed to glimmer, “How little you have changed over the years, sister.”

Dr. Pamela Winter shook her head, unimpressed with the so-called untouchable figure that was the Warden of Stragview Prison, “I have changed much, brother. It is you who have changed little. Get to the point, please. Like you, I do have other matters to attend to.”