The Burning Side

Chapter 5

Bree slipped the recorder from her pocket and checked to see if it was still recording. It wasn't. The power was off. She turned it back on and saw the battery was still full. Hopeful that she had recorded the words from the charred corpse creature, she skipped the recorder back several minutes. When she pressed play, she heard her own voice asking EVP questions. She skipped ahead to thirty seconds from the end and pressed play again. To her great frustration, she heard her last few EVP questions, a long silence, and a crackling right before the recording stopped. She must have bumped the power button when she shoved the recorder into her pocket.

Tears streamed down her face once more. She didn't want to hear that thing's voice again, but she wanted others to be able to hear what she had. She wanted the proof to show Jason that there was a need for worry. The black gooey substance and burned bacon bits on the floor in the kitchen wouldn't be quite as compelling to Jason without the recording of the creature's voice to accompany it.

Bree tried to recall what the creature had said. She thought it had been something about how the corpse was like that because of "her." To whom was it referring? And what did it mean when it said, "...like this?" She considered the possibilities. It could have meant it was dead because of some woman, or maybe a woman was the reason it was stuck haunting her house. As she pondered the creature's words, she remembered that the angry shadow man in her dream also spoke of a woman. Could they both be referring to the same person? She knew she could be making connections that didn't actually exist, but she was trying her best to make sense of the madness that had quickly become a part of her everyday life. After all, what else was she going to do while sitting alone in a parked car?

Her attention returned to the recorder. She rewound it with shaky hands and began reviewing her EVP session. The basement session yielded nothing other than Bree talking to herself. When she listened to the upstairs session, however, she heard a whisper that was unfamiliar to her. She listened to it over and over again, trying to decipher what was being said. She couldn't tell if it was a male or female voice, but finally she understood the words. The disembodied voice was saying, "The attic." Bree was puzzled by those words. What attic? There was a widow's watch, but no actual attic of which she knew. She thought about the EVPs that were captured on the paranormal investigators' show and remembered that not all of the disembodied voices they recorded said things that made sense to the investigators. She listened to the rest of the recording but didn't hear anything else.

As time passed, Bree's fear abated slightly and she decided it was probably safe to get out of the car. She didn't know what time it was exactly, but she estimated that Jason wouldn't be home for at least another two or three hours. Her best option for passing the time was tending to the yard and flower bed. Weeds were choking out most of the flowers that had popped up around the porch, and several sticks and branches still littered the yard from the last windy day they'd had. She set to work collecting branches first, keeping a wary eye on the house each time she passed near it.

When the yard was clear of debris, she moved on to weeding the flower bed near the porch. Though she didn't want it to, her mind worked the entire time her hands did. She couldn't understand why the entity in her home seemed to be singling her out. She was the one who spent the most time in the house, true enough, but even when Jason was home the activity centered on her. Jason hadn't had one thing happen to him. He was the one who discovered the man in the mural, but it meant nothing to him when he saw it. She felt it was an attack on her and he just happened to be the one to find it first. Why was it even doing these things? What could it possibly be trying to tell her, and why? She considered that it might not be trying to communicate with her, but instead was trying to frighten her. Judging by the form of its manifestations, it seemed to her that the entity had malicious intentions. But why did it hate her so much?