tunnel back up

     She is beuatiful, however I do not know how much of her beauty is real and how much is what she wants me to see. To touch her, to hold her, reveals an unrealness; although not an unpleasentness. Her body is soft in several the wrong places and the wrong ways, however her body is also hard in the wrong places and the wrong ways. There is a dryness to her that is hard to describe as anything other than like touching fabric; not uinlike a pillow or a thick blanket. Holding her in my arms I can tell there is no sensation of bones beneath her skin, no small hairs, the muscles and fats are uniform in shape and texture like a doll or perhaps like a stuffed animal made of foam and stuffing, and there is no pulse. I feel beneath this softness something like a shell, like all that warm comforting material is covering up a roughly humanoid shaped torso and limbs. I knew the moment i first saw her that she couldn't be human, her proportions were off; but not in an ugly way; just more so...in a manner better befitting a cartoon, anime, or video game. But; I am getting ahead of myself; perhaps I should start back at the beginning.

    I will skip over a few details, but to get to the point I bought a house. I was 26 at the time, livng in northern Maine, the town was fairly old, boasted about some Viking settlement being there like a thousand years ago that mysteriously vanished over night; if not for the local tribes and a few stones with rune writing on them marking a few old structures they'd be no record they were ever there. For a better idea, the town is not far from the St. Lawrence sea way, go east or west and you end up in Canada pretty much. I couldn't tell you which of the Wabanaki nations people were around here specifically; but the story is pretty well known. Vikings showed up, were warned by the tribes the area was sacred; Vikings vanish over night. Who you ask changes the end of that story; some Wabanaki will tell you the Vikings got spooked by something and fled, others something like a Windigo showed up and killed everyone, others they had poor fishing and no crops so left after either a plague or starvation kicked in. Eitherway the area was apparently off limits. Now the settlers naturally doing what they do, didin't give a fuck and just settled here, killed anyone who disagreed and built a town. Now ask some of the local historians and they'll tell you the Wabanaki massacred the Viking settlers after the two butted heads and made up stories of a monster or plague to placate the much better armed settlers. But whatever, that's just some background that to be honest I'm not really 100% certain really applies to my situation, because she isn't some blood thirsty monster, and this feels less like evil spirit Pennywise Steven King stuff and more like old world weird ass fairy tale stuff...to a point.

   Well stalling aside, I'll skip personal family stuff; let's just say I dropped out of college and my family refused to let me move back in so thankfully my credit was good enough to get a home loan; granted on property prone to flooding and a house best described as a fix-er-upper; althogh you could tell it was once upon a time a pretty expensive house. Upstairs with three bedrooms, although with a staircase hidden behind a door with locks on the outside top and bottom; there was a staircase on the outside that was taken down before I bought the place so the retailer tells me. At one point it had been two seperate apartments, top and bottom, so a bathroom was awkwardly installed upstairs in what clearly had been a closet at some point. She said that had been done like in the 1960's or so; but while that toilet and sink still ran (only shower was the one downstairs; so no wander this whole doublex arrangement didn't last as the house clearly wasn't made for that in the first place. But downstairs you could see marks in the wall and cieling where they had split the living room into a bedroom and a smaller living room, so not much better there. Light fixtures rigged up awkwardly, bad wiring as a result, including a light on the cieling having a very visible extension cord stappled to the cieling and wall plugged into a floor outlet. To keep this short, shitty little kitchen with the bathroom right off the kitchen too, and the washer and dryer were out in the garage...which was not attatched to the house. Under the stairs had a walk in but no real headroom closet with badly painted drywall inside it, and weirdly enough one of those outdoor entrance only cellars; two of them actually; one under the house to a dirty floor but only like four feet deep. An old storage cellar; and one on the garage; which was a little bigger and made me realize the garage was built on the foundation of a torn down barn. This had been an old farm house; according to the retailer for an orchard that was no longer there as the lot had been cleared out for the expanding town.

   Now I got this house cheap, it had been left abandoned for like five years; which if anyone knows means alot of plumbing, wires, and heating stuff had to be repaired; thankfully I was able to get some "Community Assistance" Program loans for much of that. Now I know how to do some home repair, mostly just drywall stuff and a bit of wiring. Which leads to this. Now to be clear, the storage cellar from the back of the house is a good twenty feet away from the center of the house where the staircase is, and has a dirt floor and a few old rotting wooden shelves and a few abandoned glass jars were down there; otherwise it was just dirt and brick walls. The one under the garage was about the same, but had an eerie feeling to it as it was big enough like thirty people could fit in it; and had wood beams and stacked blocks making it look like underground horse stalls; just weird. These cellars would flood by the way, one of my first big additions to the house was a water pump in the cellar under the house; the garage not so much. Padlocked it shut after one summer, about a year after a moved in looking down there after it had flooded a good foot and a half deep and heard splashing in the dark. I wasn't about to be a horror movie type victim, so I shut the doors and padlocked it. I am sure no one was down there, this was the middle of the day and just after a really heavy rain so I decided to check it out. Chances are just something falling like stonework, or dripping from the cracks letting all that water in, in the first place.

   So at this point yes, I had lived there a year without incident. No steriotypical ghost story stuff, all weird noises in the night were easily explained as the sounds of an old house in the wind, vermin getting into the walls and the little pointless attic (of all the storage space this place has the attic was one of those low ceiling ones without really having a floor just boards and insulation you could fall through if you put any weight on it). So no, nothing "spooky" going on. I didn't find out any of that local legend stuff till I looked into the history of the town later. So a bunch of work was done, plumbing under the floor, heater and air conditioner repaired, roof work, and some rewiring. I mention this because they had to lift alot of floor boards in the living room right beside the staircase to get to the plumbing as there wasn't really a basement under this house.