I Found A Girl’s Diary And Her Entries Are Beyond Mysterious

The thing started out pretty boringly predictable. Relationship issues, insecurities about still living with her parents in her 20s, body issues. I was actually going to quit reading but an entry finally caught my attention:

March 3, 2015

I told my dad this house was haunted. I hate always being right. Hate it, hate, hate it.

He left for business (again) but I heard someone walking around upstairs this morning. I called him and he said it was the heater, but I could tell he didn’t even believe that. The messed up thing is he wouldn’t even care. Why are guys incapable of caring about anything unless it affects their dick of bank account?

I admit I haven’t even gone upstairs since we moved in. Don’t want to go in my dad’s room (gross) and that guest room is creepy. I wasn’t the least bit surprised I heard creepy footsteps coming from up there. This whole house feels like it’s alive. Maybe my dad figured if he moved into a haunted house, he could get me to finally move out.

I’m thinking about it.

I was hooked. I started pouring over all of the rest of the entries in between sips of harsh whiskey.

March 10, 2015

Again? Again? Again?

My dad left town for work again and the sounds are back and I can’t sleep. I know complaining about not being able to sleep at one in the afternoon is kind of hollow, but I didn’t fall asleep until four last night because I hate being alone in this house so much. So now, I lie here in my pile of blankets, flicking through stuff on my phone hoping it will distract me from the footsteps I keep hearing from the upstairs that is supposed to be empty.

Each sound I hear seems to drive me further and further into madness. I want to run away but I’m too lazy and helpless, too drugged, I’ll just load up another bowl instead and try to escape, even more than I was before.

March 16, 2015

Now things are disappearing. I haven’t been hearing the sounds lately, but stuff I have been looking for since the move, I can’t find. My dad says they probably are just somewhere in the massive collection of boxes we haven’t opened yet, but I swear some boxes are simply missing. I can’t find a lot of my mom’s old stuff.

I reached the final page of the frayed diary and there was one last message.

To whom it may concern,

If you are reading this, you are my nightmare. You are the reason I can’t sleep. The reason I won’t leave my room anymore. You’re the reason I have bottles of pee collecting in my closet like I am some kind of truck driver who doesn’t actually go anywhere.

If you are reading this, I think I might know exactly who you are. If you are reading this, you fell for my trap.

Go to this address:

3116 North Pringle Street

If I don’t hear you again, I will assume I know who you are and this answered your questions.

I was drunk, didn’t have a car and it was the middle of the night, but I had to get to that address. I knew Pringle Street, wasn’t exactly sure where the address was, but thought it was probably a 30-40-minute walk in the cold rain from my place, but I had to do it. The whiskey would warm me and I would never be able to get to sleep at home with the prompt I just read burning in my brain anyway.

I set off into the night with the bottle of whiskey tucked into my jacket and the wind whipping frigid rain into my face. It was going to be a long, hard walk across the small town I called home. My only source of light was the occasional porch light of a house I would pass and the headlights of the occasional car driving in the middle of the night.

It took a little longer than I thought it would, probably because I was walking against the heavy wind the whole way, but I eventually approached the address and it appeared to be the high school gymnasium. I hadn’t been to it in a few years, but it was very familiar to me. I saw the same old victory bell I had passed so many times before sitting in the middle of a red brick plaza that sat in front of an old square building with bright green and yellow walls.

I was confused when I glanced over at the front entrance of the gym and confirmed it was 3116 North Pringle.

What the fuck did the high school gym mean? Was someone going to meet me here?

But then something I had never seen before at the old building came into focus below the victory bell. A circle of candles, flowers and wet stuffed animals rested below the gold of the bell, barely illuminated by the tall flood lights overhead.

A closer look revealed the scattered items were an unofficial memorial. Resting in the center of the candles, lined with dying flowers and water-logged teddy bears was a framed picture of me in my high school basketball uniform half-smiling back at me. Resting below the portrait was another frame containing the front of a local sports page from a few years ago that named me area basketball player of the year.

I froze and not just from the cold. My whole body felt as if it had been dunked into a bath or ice water. I was dead. I was no longer getting work assignments because I was no longer living. My roommates moved out because they no longer had a fourth person to pay rent. I was the ghost in that girl’s house.

I looked at my own hands, wondering if they would look faded and ghoulish or something, but they didn’t, they pretty much looked the same, but it was probably because I was looking at them with my own eyes. I dropped down to the ground and tears started pouring out of my eyes as I looked at one strong candle that flickered despite the heavy winds and rain, it’s wick covered safely by the victory bell that hovered above.

Now it all made fucking sense. It should have been obvious to me, but at the same time it wasn’t. I wanted to know why and some wet flowers and faded pictures weren’t going to give me any more answers. But I knew who could probably give me some answers, and I assumed she was probably lying awake in her bed in the middle of the night.

The last of my tears dropped down onto that lone survivor candle and extinguished it before I staggered back out into the night.

The walk to the house at the end of Talcott Street was not long and I was inspired to keep the pace a quick one as I needed to talk to the diary author who sent me to my dark realization immediately. In just a handful of minutes, I was at the door to her cold modern house breaking in with the key I knew they hid in a birdhouse in my hand.

I had never been back to the girl’s room, but I knew she barricaded herself in at the back of the house in what I imagined was a small little bedroom. I tip-toed in her direction in the dark, hoping her dad was still away on business and appreciating the fact they didn’t appear to have an alarm system.

The intimacy of the situation shocked me to my core when I got to her door and saw the handmade floral paper designs that announced the door I was about to knock on as “Mary’s Room.” I almost turned back and walked back out into the cold, but bit my lip and gave a quick knock.

A breathless scream answered on the other end and then a soft voice.

Dad…

I took a deep breath and answered back.

“No, it’s Brittany.”

A long silence.

“Come in, I guess.”

I slowly opened the door and was greeted by the dank smell of weed and buttery popcorn. I saw Mary tucked up in a big pile of blankets in the corner of her bed.

She squinted at me with bloodshot eyes.

“I know something you don’t know,” was the first thing she said to me.

“What?”

“Just sit down,” she pointed over at a black fake leather bean bag in the far corner of the room. “Over there.”

I deflated down into the cheap bean bag and looked to see Mary sitting up in her bed. She turned down the volume on the random MTV show she was watching and gave a hideous cough in my direction.

“Okay, what?” I asked.

“First thing first, you are the one upstairs, right? The one I saw under the bed?”

I just nodded, no words.

She bit her lip, looked off our eye contact and stared out her window into the night.

“You killed yourself. You probably don’t know that.”

She shot a look at me again for a brief moment, but then had to look away.

“I can’t believe I’m talking to a fucking dead person in my bedroom,” she whispered to herself, but I heard it loud and clear.

I started biting my nails.

“But fuck it, you need to know what happened,” she went on. “Do you even remember much about your life?”

I thought about it and had a numbing realization, I really didn’t. Everything I could remember seemed to be day-to-day. I had never really thought about it, but everything just seemed to be the same thing for as long as I could remember. Lying in my bed, sleeping and drinking away the time and doing some of the housekeeping work, but the only job I could really remember at this point was the one at Mary’s house.

“Not really,” I said. The answer embarrassed me and I wasn’t sure why.

“You grew up here, but not anywhere near this house. You grew up by the river with your mom where it floods every November and you have move into a fucking Red Cross tent for a week. You were a pretty average small town girl though and as you probably saw at the gym, you ended up being a really good high school basketball player and I guess that kind of shit still matters around here. But it’s not like you were going to go to the WNBA or anything or even like college, so you just stuck around here like the rest of us until you got so desperate you took one of the few awful jobs they offer to women here – cleaning houses. As you can imagine, that made you pretty depressed, would have made me, but then something made it even worse.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Why do you know all this about me?” I asked, genuinely wondering if this girl was full of shit.

“I’m getting there. I’m getting there. Fine. Question. Do you remember your dad?”

I thought and drew a complete blank.

“See, you used to know. You lose your brain’s memory when you blow it away the way you did. My dad was your dad. You knew that, but you also knew he didn’t acknowledge you as that. Your mom was no one to him, I was his only real child even if he quickly divorced my mom and I imagine it killed you inside, but you somehow lived with it for 20 years. But it would still end up being the tipping point that ends with you sitting here on my crappy bean bag.”

“What happened?”

“One day your housekeeping company assigned you here. I’m sure the house seemed normal enough, but then you saw my dad walk downstairs and he didn’t even recognize you. He asked your name and you lost it, ran out of the house without a word. My dad told me about it that night, told me your whole story, but told me you weren’t really his daughter, just thought you were. But I look at you two and there’s no way to deny it.”

Some thoughts and memories were coming back to me like they would in the days and weeks following a black out drinking session. I maybe couldn’t remember complete strings of thoughts or memories, but bits and pieces were there. Mary was telling the truth. It was kind of like trying to put together a thousand puzzles at once, I could get little clumps of the right images, but they were all disconnected from each other as a whole.

“My dad, well, our dad, asked for a different person to come the next week, but you still showed up – with a gun this time and you shot yourself in the head in the guest room upstairs.”

More and more pieces were coming back in my head. I started to remember more clear memories and I that Tuesday when I brought the gun to the house was playing like a movie in my head. I could see myself sitting down on the floor in the guest room with the gun in my hand, but I could also see a scene I think Mary didn’t remember.

“And then you started coming back apparently every Tuesday at 10-in-the-morning just like clockwork. I didn’t think about it at first, but it didn’t take that long to realize it was probably you when I heard those footsteps and sounds upstairs, noticed things going missing,” Mary continued.

I was no longer paying attention to Mary’s story. The scene that took place before me taking the gun by myself into the guest room kept playing over and over again in my head. I couldn’t believe I was capable of such a thing.

In my head I saw what I did that Tuesday before going into the guest room. I went into the room I was sitting in right now and opened fire on the person who was talking to me. I saw my shots catch her in her bed, saw them rip through her blankets.

The feeling of horrible guilt overcame me. I wanted to barf all over the white carpet in Mary’s room.

“Stand up,” I interrupted Mary.

She gave me a weird look.

“Please, just do it.”

She gave me another weird look, but then pulled her blankets down and revealed a wooly sweater.

“Take the sweater off.”

She gave me a horrified look, but followed my command and revealed what was underneath the thick sweater, a stained-red white tank top, still wet with blood around the belly.

I didn’t barf on her carpet, but began to cry upon it and look away from her as she began to plead to herself.

“What the fuck?” What the fuck? What the fuck?”

“It makes sense. No one else seems to be able to see me or hear me?” I explained, trying to reason with her, but it didn’t help, she was hysterical.

“I’m fucking dead?” She screamed at me. “I’m fucking dead?”

“Have you left your room much in weeks?” I asked.

“Shut the fuck up. You killed me?” Mary screamed at me.

I looked up and saw reflection for the first time in a long time in a circular mirror above Mary’s bed. I was wearing a beige hat with the name of my housekeeping company on it. I had been wearing it for weeks now even though I hated it. I turned my head to the side and saw a similar, but smaller red stain spread out across the back of the hat before I turned to Mary’s wide eyes staring at me from the bed.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered mostly to myself, but loud enough to where Mary heard it.

“Why? Why? Why?” She asked in a rapid-fire cadence.

I thought about it for a few moments before answering with the only explanation I could really think of at the moment.

“I don’t know. What are sisters for?”