The Invisible Wall

So, here we are, at the third "scary story" in Pearl's little "tell a scary story" game that she came up with this year. First, I wrote a funny scary story in which I frightened my friend Steve in an otherwise empty church. The second was a work of fiction that I apparently unwittingly stole from Drag Me to Hell. The third and final work is the true story, and most likely what Pearl had envisioned when she started this thing. It will probably be short, but since it's true, it might be more powerful. Enjoy.

I will say, now that I've finished it, this was the only one of the three that actually creeped me out while writing it. With that in mind, I hope you enjoy it.



My mother is a great weaver of tales. She likes to talk and she likes to tell you a story. Sit with her long enough, and she'll regale you with exploits from my childhood, like when I hit a raccoon late one night in the car my father had bought three days earlier. Or maybe she'll tell you the tale of the night I left the cast party of the high school musical in order to try and have sex with become better friends with Olivia Chambers. Or maybe she'll tell you the tale of my younger brother and his first wife, or my aunt and my grandmother arriving at our house on the day my sister was born, or of the day my uncle severed a vein in his wrist trying to open a window at The Lake. Or, better yet, she'll tell you of the time my aunt farted in front of my prim and proper grandmother (their mother-in-law) and how it sounded just like someone had stepped on a duck.

She loves to tell stories. These are some of her favorites and get dragged out at every holiday or family gathering. If you sit around her long enough, she'll hold court and tell you each and every tale she has, no matter how inappropriate or embarrassing.

Except for one. This one, she rarely talks about. And when she's done with this one, she usually has to wipe her eyes, and not from laughter. She wipes her eyes out of fear, the fear of what might have been.

It was Halloween night back in the mid-60s. My mother was about fifteen or sixteen, which would make her younger sister about fourteen or thirteen. My Aunt Margarite, being the youngest, also had the longest leash. My mom's older sister, Victoria, was probably either already moved out or off at night school learning to become a nurse. Sometime around midnight, my grandmother tasked my mother with finding my Aunt Margarite.

My mom and her best friend, Elaine, went through the downtown of our sleepy little town, searching for Margarite in order to bring her home, but to no avail. They went down past the river, by the rows of churches that sat there dominating the landscape, and then worked up the hill on the far side of town. There was no signs of Margarite. There were plenty of signs of the havoc left in her wake, but of my aunt, they saw not a thing.

Having come to the top of the hill, they stopped near the grain silos for a smoke. After taking the break, they worked back west and toward home. They came to my great grandmother's house and stopped in for a moment, to see if Margarite was there. No luck, but she had been by in the not too distant past, apparently. As they left, my mom and her friend decided to move down the hill toward home, hoping that my aunt had shown the common sense to finally finish with her Halloween fun and head off for bed.

As they came to the alley that ran behind my great-grandmother's house, my mom's friend had an idea.

"Let's head down here and cut out toward the edge of town," Elaine suggested. "Maybe she'll be out here at one of the gas stations. We can cut down the river road and back toward home if we can't find her."

My mom agreed, and so they began the walk down the alley. As most alleys are, it was poorly-lit and narrow, lined with garages, sheds and residual outhouses, vestiges of a day in the not-too-distant past when the town had no plumbing. And, of course, being the middle of the night, it was quiet.

They chatted quietly as they walked, thinking nothing of it, looking around for any signs of my aunt. As they walked along, suddenly, they were stopped. Some invisible force was holding them in place. They could not move; they could not push through it.

My mother, at this point, gets a strange look in her eye as she recounts the details. She trembles visibly a bit. The hair on the back of her head stood up as she suddenly felt an evil, malignant wave wash over them. She looked at Elaine; Elaine looked at her.

"Let's get the hell out of here," my mom said. They backed away for a few feet, then turned and ran. They came out of the alley and immediately turned to go home. A few minutes later, they were at the house. Margarite was already there.

Elaine stayed the night, not wanting to walk home with some supernatural occurrence fresh in her memory, and thought of being out alone with whatever created that sense of pure, unadulterated evil was enough to make her almost weep. That night, they sat up and talked most of the night, falling into a fretful sleep in the predawn hours. When they woke, they did not speak of what had happened in the alley the previous night. It was light out; it was a brand new day, and hopefully whatever had been there was gone.

Two days later, they found the body of one my mom's cousins stuffed into one of those old outhouses in that alleyway, her throat slashed, and, as my mom puts it "unspeakable other damages to her body." She was of an age with my mom, well-known throughout town, and very well-liked, and by all accounts that I've ever heard, very pretty and very friendly.

To this day, the murder is unsolved.