Foot Steps

Day 118

Readers seem to like the stories of when I was young so here's another.

Every Saturday. I think it was at one o'clock in the afternoon, my friend Cliff and I would watch a horror show called Sir Graves Ghastly. It was a movie matinee with a kid friendly vampire host. Elvira Mistress of the Dark was a few years away or else my childhood could have been very different.

Anyway. Cliff and I would move the furniture in his parents basement and cover it with a heavy blanket. It had to be heavy to cut out as much light as possible from the basement windows, the darker the better. We would pull the blanket from the chairs to the television, like a tent. We used our shoes to hold the blanket in place because it would slip off the slick plastic surface of the TV. Then when we watched Sir Graves creature feature it would be even scarier.

Remember this was in the early 70's so these are old "B" horror movies mostly from the 50's and 60's. I loved the vampire and werewolf movies. Yet one of my favorites is a movie called "The Skull" with Peter Cushing. That skull floating through the air gave me nightmares. I loved it.

It was not uncommon for my brother and I to stay overnight at grandmas and grandpas house. This was a small older, two bedroom house. Off the kitchen, leading down into the basement, was a squeaky set of wood steps, about twenty in all. There were several storage closets and an original coal furnace that had been updated to natural gas. When the furnace came on and the element started to heat up, it would make this loud pinging sound with about a two second pause in between. The old duct work would amplify the sound. As the element got hotter the pinging sound came louder and closer together. Until it was finally hot enough and the fan would come on and the pinging would stop.

After watching horror movies in the afternoon my imagination was pretty fertile. So when I woke up, at night, in that small quiet house with the creaky stairs. And I heard a slow noise like a step and then another step, like something hard walking up the stairs. Like a bony foot, that belongs to a bony skeleton, of what used to be a human being. A skeleton with an evil grinning skull and hollowed out eye sockets, slowly climbing the stairs from the basement. Climbing faster and faster until it got to the door at the top of the stairs. I would swear I could hear it jiggling the door knob but it couldn't get a good enough grip to open the door.

I would wake up sweating (because of the heat being on) and rollover with the covers pulled up over my head until my bladder forced me out of bed and to the bathroom. I would realize there was no skeleton and go back to bed. Soon, I would fall asleep. Until the furnace came on and the footsteps started again.

Until tomorrow,

Ken