The incident which I am about to recount occurred quite a long time ago when the three of us were at the Monocliff's camp. By three of us I mean myself and my other two friends with whom we shared many moments throughout our lives. It was a friendship built on the rock solid grounds of trust and compassion which brings together the souls sinking in peril. It was a friendship made of red marble stones and polished white by all of us who knew too well the surrounding grounds of the forsaken fortress. And the fortress such as our friendship was, had been impregnable. Would we ever part, each one of us knew, and it would never need to be spoken, that we would meet again. This friendship is not what this story is about.
Supernatural forces exist in all their power and dominance. We can see them around us and we can feel them on our way to routinely places such as school, college or work. We can feel them stronger when we are alone, for then there is nobody beside us to distract us from sensing their existence. We can feel them stronger yet when we go to church, for church itself is a holy place, a place where many forces dwell. We can feel them strongest though when we commit a sin, for a sin is a mark on the soul a guide for the forces to seek us out and find us even in the most remote of the places. From the forces of god there can be no escape. These forces are not what this story is about.
There is a world that exists beyond ours into which only some doors from our world lead. Some call this world their heaven. Some call it their hell. For some this world is a land of dreams. For some it is just simply another parallel universe. There are some who even call it “The Fourth Dimension”. It is a world created by our own stupidity and maintained by our own stupidity. Some believe that this world could be just as real as ours. This world is not what this story is about.
The three of us lived in a small stony shack by the cemetery and they called it “camp”. The whole class was divided into groups of threes and each one slept in its own stony house. I myself did not protest. Being twelve years of age I already felt old and tired, a typical pre-pubertal behavior. The only thing I regretted was the gender discrimination. Why did they put me in with two other boys? I understood perfectly well that we slept in different beds. Hey, I would not even mind the same bed, but why a pair of boys? I mean, if they had put me in with a pair of girls, now we are talking. They could give me nightly backrubs, make me fresh coffee in the morning, wake me up with kisses, brush my teeth while I'm still in bed and who knows all the kinds of wonderful stuff girls can do? Nobody! Noone!
Several nights I could not sleep.
One of these nights I peered into the foggy horizon and saw a distant figure looming far far away. The figure approached slowly and in several minutes while I stared at it I became sure of one fact: the stranger approached our house. Soon I could make out the features of this person. It was an old woman, a hunchback with an ugly wicked face. She did not slow down as she bumped into our window. And soon, way too soon her frightening face was right up against mine.
With a yell I jumped back and with widening eyes saw the woman open her mouth wide like a wild hungry beast. Anger was in her eyes. She angrily beat on the window with her wrinkled firsts and spoke to me but I could not make out the words, for the window was closed. I knew then that this was the end of me. Whoever this woman was, her eyes said she wanted to kill me. I had completely forgotten my sleeping roommates until the moment the banging stopped. I roused them hastily but the woman was gone.
The next morning the camp supervisors did not believe me at first but then some other boys reported an old woman trying to break into their rooms and they slowly nodded. The adults spoke quietly to each other and in the end decided to take no action. They told us we were just having bad nightmares from some rotten berries we ate in the forest the other day. I made a long and not an uninteresting speech to the supervisors about all that I thought of them and their bitches of mothers, whereas they just laughed and kindly brushing my fuzzy hair told me to shut my yap and to work hard on restraining that ass of a temper of mine for the next ten years of my life at least.
That night all was quite for a long time. Eventually I fell asleep but then I suddenly woke up from a sound of fierce beating on the glass. I cautiously peeped out of the window and met the ugly face of that old woman! She began saying something to me but I was already rousing my roommates. The two of them took a while to wake up because their brains coincidentally went way past the rapid-eye-movement sleep into the deeper, slow, sleep and they woke up feeling groggy. Their grogginess however vanished completely when they saw the image that haunts me still in the worst of my nightmares.
The old woman was now angrily screaming at us, her voice consumed by the shut window, her face consumed by the night. I tried to squeal but my throat was choked. Presently we all sat on the floor huddled together staring at the window and on the other side the woman was screaming and cursing with her every breath. Among her speech we could not make out a single word, so tightly shut the window had been. Then she turned sharply and vanished and was never seen again.
