Open Your Eyes

Something around you doesn’t want to be seen. I know your eyes won’t let you, but you have to pay attention. Look for a boarded up window that you somehow never noticed one of the boards is a little too new. Or maybe it’ll be a hidden alleyway conveniently placed in an overlapping gap between buildings. Even a manhole weirdly on the grass instead of in the road. Whatever it is for you, no matter how hard, I am begging you, look there.

When I was younger, maybe 16 years old, my family and I spent a summer on an estate that we inherited from a great aunt who passed away or something. It was out in the middle of nowhere, way too far from the nearest civilization. You know, like one of those places where instead of the 50 stars in the night sky there are 50,000.

Anyway this property was massive. Somehow a single woman had a huge house with three barns, a silo, and land that seemed to go on forever. But of course, she died and we were left with the disgusting task of cleaning it up and getting it ready to sell.

I have always been a city person. I need the perpetual sirens, trains, engines, and gunshots at all hours of the night to feel at peace. In the country, there was none of that. Instead, the insects were the only reprieve in the silence screaming at me to stay awake through the night.

The other thing about being that far out? There’s absolutely nothing to do. This massive beautiful house was miles from the nearest cell service, and the old bag didn’t have a single computer or TV in any of the hundreds of spiderweb filled rooms, let alone Wi-Fi.

So what does that mean for a 16 year old ADHD kid drowned out by silence at 2AM in a creepy, abandoned, probably haunted, four story mansion? It’s time to explore.

Most of the house was pretty boring. I opened every door and every drawer in every room, except for the room my parents were sleeping in, no need to wake them up.

The kitchen had kitchen things. The bathrooms had bathroom things. The closets had clothes or blankets or towels or the occasional board game and photo album, but they conveniently lacked the hanging skeletons I hoped to find.

Disappointed and burnt out, I decided to use the hundreds of blankets and build a fort in my room. I’m going to be here for three months, might as well make the best of it, right?

On the fourth floor there was a closet overstuffed with tons of the perfect kind of blanket for a blanket fort - soft, lightweight, and huge. I grabbed as many as I could carry and started heading back down the stairs to my temporary bedroom on the second floor.

That’s the moment everything changed. I couldn’t see the uneven steps, and if it hadn’t been for all of the blankets, I’m sure I would have broken an arm. I misstepped and fell down a flight of stairs, landing upside down on a pile of blankets right under a…

A painting…

That I didn’t see before…

I must have climbed those stairs at least 20 times by now but somehow I never noticed this painting. It looked like an angel jumping off of a cliff while a woman sunbathed on another one with some dead people laying on the ground below her. I know I would have noticed this painting because there was nothing else in the house even remotely artistic. And this was huge! It had to be at least seven feet tall.

I sat up, still entranced by this somehow terrifying and beautiful painting that I, even while looking directly at it, couldn’t get myself to fully focus on. My head was fighting to look away, to pick up all of the blankets and forget that I’d seen this painting, but I fought the temptations. This was the coolest thing I’ve seen in the whole house and I would not lose my opportunity to go further.

I stood up and got closer to the painting, inspecting the brushwork, feeling the cracks, and looking at the faded frame. That’s when I saw the hinges.

On the left side of the painting, at the top and the bottom, there were two hinges that had to be hundreds of years old, completely rusted over. On the right, there was a small button connected to a handle. I pushed the button and the painting shuttered. Something clicked behind it, and dust fell as the painting creaked open.