Uninvited

I awoke with a start in the night. My room was icy and the drapes fluttered silently in the night. A sliver of moonlight peeked through the window and splayed across the hardwood floor. I got up out of bed and shuffled my tired feet towards the window. Once at the window, I put my hands on the pane and pushed down. The pane refused to budge no matter how much force I put on it. At last I gave up and stared out my window into the dark starry night. The moon was high and brightly glowing. The stars surrounding the moon lit up the dark cloudless night sky and there was a slight chill in the air. Moving to the country after college was the best decision I ever made. Out here, it was quiet day and night. The neighbors were friendly and the livestock gave North Carolina that Southern charm feeling.

Walking away from the window I look over at the big wall clock hanging above my bedroom door. The clock showed it to be three in the morning, which meant the sun would soon be rising. Moving to the closet on the opposite end of the room, I opened it up and pulled out a modest pair of ripped jeans and an old white t-shirt. I strolled down the steep wooden stairs and into the kitchen. Breakfast was light as usual; a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. By the time I was finished, the clock in the kitchen read three-thirty. Heading out into the fields I began to tentatively work on my crops. The winter had just ended and it was time again to begin planting for the next season. I owned three pieces of fertile planting soil. Setting to work on the first piece, I plowed and sowed until my knuckles were raw. I worked through the morning sunrise and right through the high noon sun.

I was almost done turning-over the soil when I hit something hard. When the shovel it the foreign object, it made a loud clinking noise, like metal on metal. Hidden beneath the dirt, a little piece of metal shone bright against the sun. With my bare hands I uncovered the object and picked it up. It was a small silver coin and it fit in the palm of my hand. It was about the size of a quarter, but the engravings were strange. On one side was the picture of a buffalo, and on the flip side was the picture of what appeared to be an Indian chief. Pocketing the silver coin, I set back to work in the fields.

It was late by the time I returned to the house. I was drenched with sweat and the smell of the Earth. Taking off my dirty clothes, I put them in the laundry and grabbed a towel from the bin. That night I took a long shower. The water stayed warm for half an hour and I savored each moment of it. Stepping out of the shower at nine-thirty I dried off and threw on a long t-shirt. Before slipping into my bed I made sure all the doors and windows in the house were locked. Even though the neighbors were nice, I still didn’t trust them. The closest neighbor was three miles away and I didn’t know much about them. I knew they were the Harrison’s and they had two sons named Jefferson and Timothy. Jefferson and Timothy were twins and trouble-makers at that. When I first moved to North Carolina two years ago, those two boys were hanging around my house a lot. They were both twenty at that time, only two years younger than I.

At first I believed that they were nice and just wanted to be neighborly, but then I noticed that they would pick my crops at night or tip over my buckets of whey for the horses. The torture from them stopped awhile back, after I contacted the local sheriff about them. Sheriff McClellen got the boys to stop messing around in my fields and from then on I had had no problems with the twins. However, I still felt wary at night and locked up everything.

That night, strange things began to happen to me. Even though the fireplace was going, the house was chilly and no amount of blankets could keep me warm. I slept with two comforters, two quilts, and an afghan. I shivered underneath all those blankets and in the middle of the night, I got up just to make sure that all the doors and windows were shut and locked tight. Nothing seemed to be undone, and as I headed back up the stairs to my bedroom, I noticed a shadow in front of my door. I stopped dead in my tracks and watched as the shadow slid further into my door. From the closet beside me, I grabbed the shotgun my father gave me when I was little and crept back up the stairs.