THE ENGULFING

 THE ENGULFING

When I was in high school, I had a really good friend who lived next door to a house that was always up for sale. People would move out in the middle of the night without a word, and it hadn't had the same owner for more than six months straight for several years. One night, we were really bored, and he suggested we go explore the house next door since it had sat empty for a while. We go around back, and there's a dog door that he can crawl through, and he unlocks the door and lets me in.

The house itself is really unremarkable. It looked like it was built in maybe the 1950s and was a craftsman-style house in an older, nicer part of town (my friend's house was constructed similarly). The kitchen had a really nice built-in breakfast table set against a picture window. The house's electricity was off, but you could see the street light through the window. My friend and I sit down on the floor, across from this table, and are just hanging out, talking. Why? Who knows. All of a sudden, my friend screams, and in that instant, my vision goes black. But it wasn't that I just couldn't see; my body was engulfed in this sickly coldness from head to toe. I start screaming, and I feel my friend's hand grabbing mine and pulling me in some direction forcefully. My vision slowly comes back, and I start to warm up when I realize that we're outside under the street light; it was December, and it should have been much warmer inside that house.

Finally, I look at my friend, and he looks scared. I'm really confused and kind of panicked myself and finally ask him what happened. He says that as I was talking, a black... thing.. This figure that was all black and only had the vague shape of a girl crawled out from under the table and sat on top of me. Apparently, I started groping around with my eyes wide open, like I couldn't see, and he was so freaked out that he pulled me out of the house.

We're still friends, and we bring it up every now and then, but the story itself never changes, and it still sends chills down my spine. To this day, I've never felt such blackness or coldness in my life. It was palpable, almost sticky. For a couple of days afterward, I couldn't shake this unsettling feeling, and I could never walk past that house again. Ugh. I'm scared to get out of bed now.