Things that go bump in the night

No matter how many times I tell myself that there's nothing down there, I still get a chill that travels the length of my spine whenever I turn my back on the cellar and start to climb the stairs back to the main level of the house.

I've only lived here for two years or so.  We're still getting to know each other, the house and I. 

It's totally irrational, I know.  But, it's a gut-aching, shivering, shaking, why-am-I quaking moment every time I start that ascent from the subterranean soul of my maison d'etre.  

She's a cozy old cape, with doghouse dormers, a single-car garage, white aluminum siding and a deck out back.   The cellar should hardly be a creepy crawly habitation for things that go bump in the night.

And yet, I can never turn my back on her without feeling that she's going to follow me, silently, right up those stairs, her dead waxy eyes with the pupils blown waiting right behind the last trailing wisp of hair on my head as I hurry up the unevenly spaced risers.  If I were to turn my head, she would most assuredly reach out with bony fingers and mouth agape, whispering incomprehensible nothings to herself as she dragged me back down to the blackness that is her native abode.

In order to turn off the light down there, I have to close the door.  The switch is on the wrong wall and as a result, I need to put myself into the black before opening the door to make my hurried exit.  

Lights out.  Darkness.

Darkness peopled by a hundred different exquisitely chilling creatures.

They scurry quickly with sharp teeth flashing, hungering for a bit of foot or calf.

They long for the taste of shredded flesh.

She's not there, I tell myself.  There is no beastie with a taste for your demise, snorting away the hours, waiting for the opportunity to lacerate your liver.

She walks alongside me throughout my days.   

I know her.  

She knows me.

And yet my rationality fights against her existence.

And nonetheless, she takes my hand and walks with me up the stairs from the cold, dark, soulless cellar.