Thomas (unfinished)

My name is Thomas Avery and I am seven. I was born on October 18, 1833. My hair is blonde and my eyes are blue and I live in a big farm house. There’s a lake right out back, and lots and lots of fields on our property. My daddy is a farmer and I help him with the chores, and play with the animals when I’m not helping. 1

One time, I wanted to ride our sheepdog, Jake, like a horse, but I jumped on him so hard that he fell down and yelped and yelped until daddy shot him. Another time, I was carrying daddy’s hatchet to him, but I tripped and dropped it. The blade-side landed on one of the chickens and almost cut him in half. He ran around for ten minutes with his head hanging off his neck. It was so funny, I couldn’t stop laughing, not even when my mama came out and saw what was going on. She just screamed. 2

Once, I was playing in the hayloft and I found a bottle of kerosene. I dropped it and it made such a pretty design on the floor of the barn. I found a box of matches up there, too. I knew that after you poured kerosene into something, you had to light it, so I struck the match and dropped it on the floor. The fire made a huge “WHOOSH!” sound and it was so bright it hurt my eyes. I climbed down from the loft and ran out of the barn before the fire could grab me, but when daddy saw it, he started yelling. The animals all yelled back, the horses and sheep and pigs. Mama and my sisters came out of the house and started crying. Soon, some of our neighbors came over, and a few hours later, the fire department came but it was too late, since the fire had gotten out of the barn and started climbing up the walls. By night-time, the fire started to get smaller and smaller and finally there was nothing left of the barn but some black timbers. 3

Everyone told daddy how sorry they were, but he stayed quiet. Later that night, after mama and the girls were asleep, daddy brought me into the kitchen and asked me about the fire. Then he asked me about other things, like Jake and the chicken with its head almost cut off and other things that had happened to our animals and times when my sisters got hurt or mama’s things went missing or kids in school cried to the teacher that I’d done horrible, horrible things. 4

He asked me over and over again and I could see he was getting angry and I started to cry and say it wasn’t my fault no one wanted me to have fun and I didn’t mean to hurt anyone when I did that stuff, it was just what happened and I couldn’t help that and why, why couldn’t he leave me alone about it? And finally daddy said he understood and that I had to be stopped, that I was evil and the only way he could get right with God was to stop me so I could never hurt anyone ever again. 5

He was pale and almost shaking when he said that and I got scared. I tried to run but he grabbed me by my sides and lifted me up. I screamed and fought him but he had me too strong. He threw me over his shoulder like he’d do when I was very little and walked towards the cellar. When he walked past the stove, I grabbed one of mama’s kitchen knives off the wall and shoved it as hard as I could into daddy’s back. He screamed and fell forward and I felt myself falling fast, through the cellar door and down the rickety steps that felt like they were gonna collapse whenever you had to walk down them to get a jar of preserves. I hit a few of the stairs so hard that it knocked the air out of my lungs and made me hurt terribly. Finally, I landed at the bottom and I must’ve landed really hard because it made my neck hurt really bad and then everything was black.6

When I woke up, I was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t hurt at all, which made me happy. There was a lump lying on the floor next to me. At first I just thought it was some old clothes, but then it was a boy about my age, with blonde hair. I stepped over him and ran up the stairs. I wasn’t worried about falling through them anymore; I couldn’t even feel them creaking. When I got to the kitchen, the floor was red, like someone had spilled a whole jar of strawberry jam, and daddy was lying in the middle of a red puddle. His eyes were wide open but he wouldn’t move at all, not even when I touched him. I couldn’t feel him, though, even though his face was prickly and his skin was always hard and rough. 7

I heard a noise at the kitchen door and saw mama run in, and then my sisters, all in their nightgowns. They saw daddy and screamed. I ran over to them but none of them said anything to me. I touched them but couldn’t feel them, not the cotton of their clothes or their wet, shiny faces or anything. They acted like I wasn’t even there. 8

People came to the house the next day - neighbors and police and people I didn’t even recognize, and none of them noticed me either. I screamed and hollered and cussed the worst cusses I could think of but no one even looked at me. When I tried to pick things up to throw at people, I couldn’t feel them. I tried and tried and tried to pick things up and move them, but I couldn’t. Finally, I just cried. I went into my old room and sat in the closet and cried, but when I stopped and everything was just dark and silent, I couldn’t tell what was me and what was the dark. It was just nothing. I expected to get bored, but I didn’t. I just sat in the darkness and waited. I didn’t have anything to do, but I didn’t mind it. 9

I got out of the closet after a while and saw that my room was empty: no more bed or clothes or pictures of my family. I walked out into the hall and saw that the walls were blank, only some pale spots where pictures used to hang. I looked into all the rooms and saw that they were empty, too. I looked all over the house and there was nothing there. I opened the front door but as soon as I walked outside, I felt like I was walking through a strong wind. It spun me around and then I was back in my house. I tried leaving a few more times but the wind always put me back in the house. When I looked out the window, I saw that it was sunny out, no clouds in the sky or anything. I opened the window and tried to climb out but the same wind snatched me up and put me back in the house. I tried to get out through every door and window but a strong breeze would anyways spin me around so that I was in the room, instead.10

I went back into the darkness, this time in a closet in my parents’ room. When I came out, I saw that the room was full of furniture: a big bed with blue blankets, a dresser, nightstands on each side of the bed, and a little table under the window with a flower vase on it. The walls had new paint on them, a color that was almost white. There was a picture on the wall across from me. It was of a family: two parents, a boy who looked older than me, a boy who looked my age and a girl who looked younger. There was a calendar next to the photograph. It had a picture of a collie on it and said that it was April and the year was 1990. 11

Then I heard voices and lots of fast footsteps and the door burst open. The two younger kids from the picture had run into the room. 12

“Give it back, Evan!” the girl whined. The boy had a rag doll and was holding it high in the air and the girl was standing on her tip-toes to reach it.13

“No!” Evan yelled. “You cracked my skateboard!”14

“I was just playing with it!”15

I yelled at them a few times, but they didn’t notice me. Then I walked over to them and, thinking as hard as I could about the rag doll, I grabbed it out of the boy’s hand and threw it towards the open bedroom door. The girl squealed in delight and picked it up, hugging it close, then she ran away. I could hear an echo as she ran down the stairs. I wanted to leave the room, too, and look at the rest of the house, but the boy, Evan, was in my way. He was looking at me and I knew he couldn’t see me but it felt like he almost could, he was standing still and staring so hard. I stared back, thinking really, really hard again, and then I said “Hi, Evan. My name’s Thomas ” His mouth fell open and he turned and ran, his footsteps echoing down the stairs, too. I followed him, but stopped when I saw all the pictures on the wall down the staircase. I recognized Evan and the girl, the older brother and the parents in some pictures.16

“Mom! Mom, there’s a ghost in your room! His name is … Tony or something!” I heard Evan saying from the kitchen. When I got down there, I saw that it was full of shiny chrome things and bright decorations and a big white humming thing that looked like an icebox. Evan was standing next to the blonde woman, who was taking dishes out of the sink.17

“I told your father not to let you watch The Shining,” she mumbled. “It was just your imagination, honey.”18

“No it wasn’t! It took Hannah’s doll out of my hands and threw it!”19

“Well, that just teaches you not to take your sisters’ things.”20

“But she broke my skateboard!”21

I walked into the kitchen to look at everything more, but as soon as I did, I heard daddy yelling at me and saw him pale and shaking, accusing me and being evil. I got so scared and angry and screamed at him to stop. It went back to being bright and clean and I could hear Evan talking to his mother, but when I saw a knife lying on the counter, I felt angry all over again. It was only after I picked it up and threw it across the room that I realized I’d actually felt it in my hand. Evan and his mom were staring at the knife from across the room. She laughed a high and nervous laugh and walked over then picked it up and put it in a drawer.22

“Well, maybe this ghost wants to do my dishes for me.”23

“See, I told you it was a ghost!”24

“There are no such things as ghosts, Evan, honey. It was just a breeze. She turned around and shut the window over the sink. “It’s always colder in here than the rest of the house, anyway.”25

Evan shrugged and left, and I left, too. I turned left and saw that they had painted the dining room walls the same almost-white color and the floorboards were shiny and new. The dining room table was covered with a pale, lacy cloth and had two candles set on it in glass holders. When I walked closer to it, I recognized the way the table legs were carved and realized that it was the same dining table that my family and I ate at when we lived here. I looked over the table again and the whole room had changed. It was dim, the candles were half-melted stumps of wax and the table didn’t have a cloth over it but was covered with dishes of food, and our plates and mugs. There were benches on the long sides instead of chairs, but daddy had a chair at the front of the table. I saw him, mama, my sisters and I, our heads all down and our hands together like we were praying. 26

“No! Stop!” I cried. I grabbed the lacy fabric and pulled it as hard as I could. I felt it tug when the candle holders fell over, and then I heard them thud and crash on the floor. 27

The blonde woman rushed out and looked at the table, then down to where I was standing. She looked right at my hands and I realized that I was still holding a corner of the cloth up. Her eyes followed as I let go and it dropped to the floor. She swallowed a few times, then looked at the windows. They were both closed. 28

“Evan, honey?” she yelled, her voice nervous again. “Did you bring any animals into the house?”29

“No, mom!” he yelled back from somewhere else. 30

“What about Hannah or Derrick?”31

“I don’t know, mom!”32

“You didn’t see anything running around the house?” one of her hands reached out and she touched the wall. She looked sick, like she might fall over. 33

“No, mom!”34

“Nothing. It was absolutely nothing. Just… a draft or something. Old houses are full of weird things,” she was whispering to herself, harshly, as she started to pick up the table cloth. She put it back on top of the table and then left. She came back with a small pan and a little broom and brushed the broken glass into the pan. When she was done, she yelled out, “Kids, be careful. There’s broken glass on the dining room floor!”35

I walked around the house for the rest of the day, amazed by everything the family had brought into my house and trying to guess what all of the stuff was. There were lots of glass squares in boxes. One was small and they put plates of food into it to get heated up. Some of them had music coming from them, like a phonograph without a horn. Two of them had words running across the glass and were connected to flat squares with letters on them. I pressed a square with the letter “W” on it and saw a little green “W” pop up against the black of the screen, like a typewriter. I slowly pecked out “I am Thomas Avery and this is my house” on the keys. I waited, but no one else came into the room. 36

Several other boxes I found around the house showed all kinds of things on their screens: people, animals, faraway countries, things I remember seeing only in books. I saw the father looking at one in one room, and the older brother with his back turned to one in his room. Other than the boxes, things didn’t look all that much different from when my family lived in the house, just brighter and happier. 37

I went back downstairs and saw the woman back in the kitchen. Evan and Hannah were sitting at the small table, eating sandwiches. I heard heavy footsteps above my head and a man, the father, walked into the kitchen. 38

“Have either of you kids been messing with my computer?”39

Both of them shook their heads. 40

“What’s wrong with it, honey?” the woman asked.41

“I found a message typed on it… from someone named Thomas Avery. He said that this is his house.”42

“Probably just junk-mail,” the woman said.43

“No, Jill, it had been typed on my Word Processor, like someone had been in the room and actually typed it on my computer.”44

“Yeah, and all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, too,” she giggled.45

“I’m serious. It kinda spooked me. I hope it’s not a hacker or anything.”46

Jill said something else, as she turned towards the ice box, but I didn’t understand it. The ice box was sitting right next to the basement door and when I walked into the kitchen, I saw my father’s body lying next to her feet. The shoes she wore were white and spattered red with blood. She started to say,47

“What do you think Derrick will want…” but Evan started talking, too.48

“Mom…” his voice was shaky. “Mom… you’re standing next to a dead guy.”49

“What?” she yelled, turning around quickly. My father’s body was still there; I was surprised she hadn’t tripped over him. The blood was creeping across the floor towards the chairs. Evan was staring at it and moved his feet when it got close. Hannah and the father were staring at him. 50

“Evan… what did you say?” his father asked.51

“There’s a dead guy lying on the floor right under mom. He’s got a knife sticking out of his back. There’s blood everywhere.” He spoke slowly and his voice was shaky like before, like his mothers had been when she was cleaning up the broken glass. “And the candlesticks, they got broken when the table cloth got pulled off the table!”52

“What?” Jill coughed. “How did you know about that?”53

“He did it. He pulled the table cloth off because he was angry… the table reminded him of when his family lived here!” Evan’s face was red and it looked like he was going to cry. Hannah looked like she was going to cry, too.54

“Who, Evan? What are you talking about?” his father yelled at him. 55

“Thomas! Thomas Avery!”56

I walked over to Evan and stood right in front of him. His eyes were wide and tears were falling down his scrunched up, red face.57

“You can see me?” I asked.58

“Please go away, Thomas,” he croaked, sobbing. “You’re bad… please go away.”