What I Found in the Attic
by Jed R. Cruz

When the house was empty, Toni liked to walk around, peering into each and every room, watching the sunlight trail through the windows.  Her eyes were captivated by the little specks of dust floating in the air, little moths flocking to the light from outside.  The house smelled like the afternoon; there was no other description for it.  It smelled like the afternoon and it smelled empty.

Toni thought the house smelled different when someone else was home with her.  She thought the human element defiled the emptiness of the house, though she also thought that "defiled" was quite a vulgar and generally not nice word.  When other people were present, the feeling was akin to having a side of beef hanging right beside her in bed: wet, drippy, thick and red.  Toni had long decided before that she preferred being alone to having lots of people for company.

Today, Toni decided to explore the house from top to bottom.  Bottom to top was more accurate, actually, because she was poking around in the basement when the idea occurred to her.  After she set aside a stack of old letters she had discovered shoved into a small niche cut into the brick, she had come upon a sheaf of old photos.  They were brown and the edges fluttered away as her fingers brushed them.  Being careful not to destroy them, Toni shuffled through the photographs.

She smiled in delight!  The first photo in the stack had been taken in her room.  Of course, it hadn't been her room the time it was taken.  She noted a lot of things present in the picture that she knew weren't there now.  Her things weren't in the picture too, she thought, and frowned.  Obviously they weren't there.  She felt like she had insulted her own intelligence.

Toni recognized more of the photographs.  One had been taken in the other room.  Three photos depicted scenes down in the foyer.  A couple more had been taken in the hallways outside the rooms.  Toni's eyes took in the details intently.  The pictures looked so old.  She felt like she was going back in time.  In her hands, she held a time machine, much like the ones she had read about in her books.

Interesting as all the pictures were, the last picture captured Toni's undivided attention when she got to it.  She actually let out a small gasp when she saw it.  She wasn't even sure what she was looking at, but it had surprised her all the same.  Involuntarily tilting her head to the side, as she did this everytime she examined something extremely interesting, she tried to understand what she was seeing.

Wood was the first thing she saw.  In the monochrome yellow-brown of the photograph, the wood was what immediately stood out.  Most of the photo was wood.  The floor was wood.  The walls were wood.  The window was framed with wood.  No sunlight streamed in through the window like it must be doing now upstairs.  There was light, though it was the kind Toni couldn't rightly place.  Looking at these old brown photos, she never could seem to determine where the light came from.

After the wood, Toni saw the curtain.  It was thin; almost transparent.  It looked like it was being blown around by the wind through the open window when the picture was taken.  Toni wasn't sure because of all the brown, but she decided that the curtain must have been a rusty red in color.  The curtain certainly hung from a rod above the window, but it had been cut off.  For a brief moment, Toni wished she could stick her head in the photograph to see what kind of curtain rod it was.

Toni blinked.  She had just spotted the shoe behind the curtain.  What she first thought was a shadow caused by the light upon the curtain turned out to be a silhouette.  There was a person standing behind the curtain, although she -- Toni just knew she was a she! -- had been obscured.  The photographer must have been pretty inept to leave the window open.  Setting aside the photograph briefly, Toni looked through all the other pictures in the set.  Nothing else resembled the room where this one had been taken.

Who was this figure?  Toni had a eerie feeling as she imagined the hidden girl looking through the rust-red curtain right at the photographer.  Where was this place?  Thinking for a brief moment, Toni concluded that this picture had been taken in the attic.  It was windy, it was wooden and it was cramped.  If that didn't describe an attic, what did?

It was at that point that Toni felt like exploring the house.  She would go into each room depicted in the pictures she held and see what had changed.  She would hold out the picture in front of her, surveying the scene it held, then put it away and replace what she saw with what was there now.  In the end, she would reach the attic, and she would do the same.  Toni felt her pulse rise with excitement.

Toni bounded up to the foyer with the photos in an old cardboard box she had found.  One of the foyer photos was in the box, and she now took it between her fingers delicately.  She paced around the room, trying to figure out exactly where the photographer had stood when it was taken.  She imagined that she would see more or less the same angle in the photo, because she had seen those old cameras that had to be held at chest level.  Just right where her head would be.

She stopped walking and suppressed a grin.  She had found the first site -- solved the first mystery, her adventurous mind told her.  She held out the photo in front of her at arm's length, looking at the scene it spread before her.  Squinting a little, she set it aside and looked at the foyer as it was in the present.  She held out the photograph again.

Not much was different.  The big old wooden furniture that certainly looked very old had been here back then.  The wallpaper looked the same as well.  No, the only thing that struck her as majorly different was the man in the mustache with his bloated, ghoulish eyes.  He was sitting on the ancient couch.  The man was brown, just like the rest of the picture was brown.  His big brown coat and brown hair managed to conceal much of his brown face save for the surprised, zombielike brown eyes.  He wasn't exactly staring at the camera, but something in the way he angled his eyes told Toni that he knew a picture of him was being taken.  His mouth was slightly open, like he was concentrating.

Toni set the photo back in her box and took out the next one.  She found the second site without too much pacing around this time.  Like the first picture, not much was different with this one.  There was the round table in both the photo and in the room at present.  There were the same number of chairs.  The display cabinet in the back of the photograph was there, too, though it was empty now, unlike in the photograph.  Toni couldn't rightly make out what was in it in the picture, though.  They looked like little salt and pepper shakers.  They were all brown.  Standing on the table was a pair a legs.  The owner had been cut off by the top of the photograph, but there the two legs were, wearing a skirt and nice shoes.  They were standing on the round table.

Toni bit her lip.  Why would a lady stand on a table?  That was a particularly hard question, because it didn't make sense at all.

She took the third photograph from her box.  It showed a window with lavishly designed curtains.  They were drawn.  This time the difference was obvious; there were no curtains in the house now.  Like the two other photos, the sign of life in this one was quite unusual.  It was a feminine hand leaning on a table in the foreground.  It had been a bit too close when the photo was taken and was a little blurred.  Toni could make out the brown nails on the brown hand.

Toni smiled to herself.  That was one room taken care of.  With a quick glance at the couch that the man with ghoulish eyes had occupied, she went up the stairs to the second floor.

She savored the warm afternoon smell as she walked into the second floor hallway.  It was very yellow from the sunlight.  Toni thought it looked almost like the brown in the photos, only a bit younger.  She reached for her photos now.

The first of the two hallway pictures had been taken right at the second floor landing.  Toni noted quite a few differences.  The small table had been moved from outside one door to outside the other door.  There was no vase on it in the photograph.  The floor was different, too; the floor Toni stood on was bare wood.  She saw a plush carpet covering the floor in the photo.  The last thing that differed were the doors and the people who stood beside them.  As she looked down the real hallway, Toni saw open doors, streaming sunlight, floating dust and not much else.  In the photograph, Toni saw that the two doors were closed.  There was a person standing beside each.  One was a severe looking woman with a bird-like nose and a very thin mouth.  She was wearing the skirt and nice shoes Toni had seen earlier.  Farther down the hall was the mustached man with the ghoulish eyes.  Like before, he wasn't exactly looking at the camera.  Both were rigid, standing as if at attention.  On the carpet lay a young woman.  She was positioned so that her head was closer to the camera, her feet pointing down the hall.  Her eyes were rolled up, looking towards the lens but not quite.  Her mouth was open.

Toni shivered; the whole scene struck her as unnatural.  She entered her room.

Now she was surrounded by her own things.  She looked at her books and her neatly made bed.  Her window was closed.  Trying not to be distracted by the familiarity, Toni found the photo that had been taken in her room.

After a minute or so of pacing, Toni found the spot she was looking for.  It had been taken across her bed, because she could see the bedposts sticking out from the bottom of the picture.  A hand was wrapped around each.  Centered in the picture was her ancient wooden desk.  To think how many people must have sat there to read or to study!  In the photograph, it was occupied by the severe looking lady.  A quick glance at her hands, which she had set down at her lap, revealed her to be the hand in the third foyer photo.

Toni went back to the hands gripping her bedpost.  Her brow wrinkled as she tried to figure out the scene the photo displayed.  No, she couldn't seem to come up with any proper story.

Setting the picture back in her box, Toni entered the other room.

She gasped quietly as she held out the next photo, because a pair of eyes had stared right back at her.  The scene before her was of a mirror.  The reflection was very dark -- probably the reason why the person taking the picture couldn't be seen.  All Toni saw clearly was the pair of eyes belonging to the young woman who sat facing away from the camera.  Her hair was long and braided behind her.  Her eyes were reflected on the mirror, and it looked like they were staring straight at her.  Toni recalled a number of old portraits she had seen whose eyes appeared to follow her every movement.  This photo gave her a similar, unsettling feeling.  Oddly, the rest of the face's features were a bit obscured by the darkness.

Toni stared at the real mirror before her.  She felt her heart pounding in her chest.  It felt like the eyes that had been reflected on them once had never left.  She wanted to run her fingers over the smooth surface to reassure herself.  She couldn't muster up the nerve.

She exited the other room and walked on down the hall where she recalled the stairs leading up to the attic were.  She had never been up there before.  She never had a reason to go up there before.  Now she had the photograph, and she lifted it up now to the yellow sunlight to look at it one more time.  Wood, rust-red curtain, shoe and silhouetted figure.  Toni put it back in her box, saving the details for when she was up there.  She found the narrow stairs leading upwards in a small bend along the sun bathed hallway.

Toni was surprised to discover that the attic was dark.  Someone had boarded up the window, which was the one source of natural light as far as Toni could tell.  She could see the yellow sunlight struggling to enter through the gap along its sides, and from the weak light, she managed to find a small pull-chain that turned on the attic light.

Her vision was filled with eyes.  Big, oval ghoulish eyes, and they weren't brown at all.

When Toni remembered to pick up the box she had dropped in alarm, she stepped forward for a closer look at the odd, disturbing portrait.  The larger-than-life mustached man with ghoulish eyes appeared to scrutinize her as well.  Toni once again remembered the portraits with moving eyes and the mirror downstairs.  Suddenly, Toni wanted to go back down.  She wanted to run downstairs, three steps at a time, and jump into her bed.

There were hands gripping the bedposts.

Toni wanted to leap down to the foyer, past the round table where the severe looking lady had stood.  She wanted to run past the couch where the man with ghoulish eyes had sat.  She wanted to go back down to the basement.

She wasn't in the basement, though.  She was up in the attic, and in her hands she held the photograph of the rust-red curtain.  Yes, she had climbed all the way up here.  Why not go ahead and look at the picture, like she had done with the others?

Cramped as the attic was, and looking even a lot smaller because of the staring portrait, Toni had little difficulty finding the right spot.  She saw wood.  The window was boarded up.  She saw the spot where the shoe must have been.  In her mind, she imagined the rust-red curtain fluttering in the wind.

Such an odd family.  The mustached man with the ghoulish eyes must be the father.  The severe looking lady was his wife.

Toni put the photo back in her box.  She clicked off the light.  The ghoulish eyes remained, staring at her in the dark.  She climbed back down the narrow stairs to the yellow, sun-baked hallway, where the man and lady had once stood while the young woman -- the daughter? -- lay in the middle.

She remembered that there were two pictures of the hallway.

Toni searched in her stack for the other one, deliberately not looking at any of the other pictures.  She wasn't even sure if she wanted to see this one.  She knew she was going to, however.  She had no choice.

Toni saw the same hallway, of course, but this photo had been taken from the other end, where she was standing now.  The man and the lady were not present in this picture.  Neither was the young woman.  In fact, the only notable thing in this photo was the hand that curled around the door to her room.  Was the owner trying to pull herself out?  Maybe she was beckoning to someone.  Toni didn't want to know.  She wanted to replace the photographs and forget that any of this had ever happened, but her room looked too inviting.  She desperately sought comfort.  Toni entered her room.

A father, a wife and a daughter.  The family who previously lived here must have been insane.  The man with his ghoulish eyes, the woman who liked to stand on round tables and the daughter with the long braided hair, lying along the hallway with her mouth open.  Toni's mind was filled with images.

Her eyes found the spot which the hand had curled around.  Her hands gripped the bedposts, the way the hands in the photo had.  She drew them back and glanced back at the photos.

Maybe she had been imagining things, because the hand in the hallway photo wasn't there.  She saw, however, the backs of the man and the lady.  They were looking at the door to her room.  Toni was sure of what she saw, though, and her hands trembled with confusion as she shuffled through the rest of the pictures.  The man in the foyer was gone.  The woman on the table was gone, and so was her hand.  In the first hallway picture, the man and the lady were staring at the closed door to her room.  The daughter was gone from both the hallway picture and the photo taken at the other room.  Toni flipped to the photo taken in her room.

She had found the daughter.  The eyes stared at a spot not quite towards the camera.  Toni found out what she was looking at.

Screaming, Toni leaped out of her bed and ran out to the hallway where the man and the lady were waiting.  Eyes shut, Toni ran down the hallway to the stairs leading down, but in her confusion, she had gone the wrong way.  When she opened her eyes, she was met by the narrow staircase leading up.  They led up to the dark where ghoulish eyes awaited her.

Toni searched for the attic photo in the sheaf she held, tearing and damaging most of the rest.  Her mind tried not to register the fact that the man and the lady were now looking at the very spot where she stood.  Finally, she came to the attic photo.  The rust-red curtain was now still, although the person behind it was still there.  Toni saw herself standing by the open window.

Toni made her decision.  She climbed the narrow staircase.

Ghoulish eyes welcomed her as she clicked on the light.  Toni hobbled to the spot where she had seen herself standing.  It was warm and pleasant here.  She felt exhausted, and she lay down on the nice wooden floor.  She knew that she was safe.  She knew that when she woke up, she will remember nothing.

Toni didn't understand what had happened to her.  There are many things she didn't understand in the world.  What are we?  Where are our souls?  What form of beings can toy with our very existences?

Souls can be seen.  Souls can be captured.  Souls can wither and rot, but not quite die.  The empty husks that remain are simply there to tempt those who have already been damned in the past.