Mehr

I always found it strange that the particularly eager to sell couple I bought my house from left a chair in the master bedroom.  Of course, saying master bedroom is a little much.  There really isn't a single thing that set it apart from the two other bedrooms in the house, besides its position at the end of the hall.  It didn't even have its own bathroom.  Given the size of the house, though, that wasn't really an issue.

I don't know why I didn't get rid of that chair as soon as I moved in.  It really matched the paintjob, I guess.  I sat in it from time to time, without much issue.  It was a run of the mill chair in almost every respect.  Black leather stretched over a nicely manufactured frame with little oak legs.  Nothing special.  Besides the fact that every night, I could feel somebody watching me from it as I tried to sleep.

Every time I was about to fall asleep, the feeling would come back.  The rational part of me said to just close my eyes and ignore it.  It wasn't anything anyway.  It couldn't be anything.  But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't just pull the covers over my head and go to sleep.  I'd always crack an eye open and turn to look at the chair.

Nothing.

Like always.

I'd jump every once in a while, thinking the chair had moved from its original position, or that I saw a dark figure out of the corner of my eye.  But come morning, after I fell asleep between bouts of chair watching, tape-measure and camera in hand, I'd find everything just as it was the night before.

This went on for weeks.  While possessed chairs tend to be something you remember, more often than not, I'd laugh at myself about it once the sun came up and forget about it until nightfall.

Why I didn't just sleep in a different room, or throw the chair out, or, most sensibly, torch the whole house and never stop running, I'll never figure out.  I just thought I had some sort of responsibility at that point.  It might have been a chair host to some presence with ambiguous goals, but it was my chair, dammit.  I wasn't going to pass it on to somebody else.  Unlike a certain two somebodies.

And then, one day, the chair disappeared.

-

If you'll notice, I said presence.  I didn't say ghost, or spirit, or chair-demon.  I said presence.  There was never anything in that chair, I'm sure.  Nothing physical or incorporeal.  Except when I sat in it.  But besides those very few times, there was nothing sitting in that chair.  Whatever was watching me, and something definitely was, it never existed.  I was being watched by something that didn't exist.  By something that couldn't exist.

Like a lie.  A lie so preposterous that nobody with any amount of sanity could ever believe it for a second.  Even with a lie like that, though, there's still that "What if?" floating around in the back of your mind.  You never give it serious thought, but it's there.

I was being watched by that "What if?"

I looked everywhere for it the morning it disappeared.  I couldn't think of too many places I could've hidden a chair that size.  After a good hour of searching the house, I called up the local dump to see if I had sleep-disposed of it.  I hadn't.  Whatever business the presence in the chair had with me, it had finished.

Days passed, turned to weeks, turned to months, turned to years.  My memory of the chair eventually got pushed to the back of my mind.  I had bigger things to worry about.  Jen from accounting, say, or Nikki from the small-town coffee shop across from the Starbuck's.  The thought of the chair would come back to me from time to time, but I never dwelt on those thoughts.  That chair was probably never there, I told myself.  The anxiety of buying my first house must've seeped into my dreams.  I couldn't find any marks relating to it on my old tape measures, I couldn't find any pictures of it in the old For Sale ads, I couldn't find a single friend who remembered me mentioning a chair in my room at any point.

When I remembered by this point, I'd laugh at myself like those mornings after.

I should've known better.

-

I moved to the city about a year ago.  I'd gotten a new job and the commute from that small town was just a little too far for my likes.  So I found a small apartment a few blocks from work.  Perfectly normal bachleor pad.  One bed, one bath, affordable rent.  I was still in my twenties and had no reason to look for anything more long-term just yet.

The first couple months went by as usual.  I worked on the weekdays, went out on weekends, made some new friends, met couple girls, never anything special.  And then one night I came home and found the chair again.

It was like it never left.  It just sat there in the corner, looking perfectly at home, staring at my bed.  It looked like it was expecting a hug.

I'm changing my room's paint scheme tomorrow.