Dear Diary 1977

Sleep took Jennifer the way it sometimes did after the worst kind of days. Completely, and without warning. One moment she existed, and the next she simply didn't, swallowed by a darkness so total and warm that it felt almost like kindness.

Then something shifted, and the darkness began to give way.

Colors bled through first, soft and unfocused, gold dissolving into white the way watercolors did when you had not waited for the page to dry. Shapes pushed through behind them, stubborn and slow, refusing to solidify into anything she could name. She tried to blink and her eyes ignored her. She tried to move and found her body somewhere far away from her, distant and unresponsive, like a limb that had fallen asleep, except it wasn't a limb. It was all of her.

Slowly, the blur began to surrender. A table materialized out of the haze, then chairs, then a window wearing a thin gray light that suggested morning without committing to it. And beneath everything, that floor. The particular, unhappy green of old linoleum, the kind that existed in school cafeterias and hospital waiting rooms and places where people sat under fluorescent lights and waited for things they didn't want.

She was standing. The realization arrived strangely, too late, like recognizing a face after they had already walked past. She hadn't been standing or had she? There was no memory of rising, no transition she could point to, just darkness on one side and this on the other, with nothing in between. She looked down at her bare feet and felt the floor beneath them, cool and smooth, every tiny ridge and imperfection in the grain pressing up against her skin with an intensity that made her breath catch.

It was too vivid. Too precise. Dreams softened things at the edges, smudged the details, left you with impressions rather than facts. This felt nothing like an impression. She lifted her gaze and understood immediately that something was wrong.

It was her kitchen. The layout was exactly right. The stove where it had always been, the sink beneath the window, refrigerator humming against the far wall in its usual corner. She knew this room the way she knew her own handwriting. And yet. The curtains were pale yellow instead of white, soft and foreign against the glass. The table was too large, crowding the space in a way that felt almost aggressive, and the chairs surrounding it were tall, backed wood, dark and straight spined, the kind that belonged in a different house, a different life entirely. She'd never seen them before. And yet something about them tugged at the edges of her memory, the way a word sometimes sat just out of reach on the tip of your tongue. The familiar in a way she couldn't explain and couldn't quite trust.

The light was wrong too. It fell from a single bare bulb overhead, no shade, no warmth, casting everything in sharp relief. It was hard shadows across the counters, across the floor, pooling thick and heavy in the corners of the room. Those shadows didn't move. They just waited, patient and dark, in a way that made the back of her neck prickle. She went very still. Her breathing had already gone shallow without her deciding to make it that way, quiet in a manner that felt less like a choice and more like instinct. It was old and animal and certain. She didn't know why she needed to be silent. She only knew, with a conviction, that she did.

Then she heard it.

Something beneath her feet. Faint but unmistakable, rising up through the floorboards like a secret the house had been keeping. It was a scraping sound; metal dragged slowly across stone. It stopped. Then started again, rhythmic and deliberate, unhurried in a way that was somehow worse than if it had been frantic. And beneath it, softer, almost swallowed by the walls themselves, came voices. More than one. Too muffled to make out words, too steady to dismiss as imagination. They were there. She was certain of it in the same way she was certain of the cold floor under her bare feet and the too bright light above her head.

Her eyes moved to the back of the kitchen, and that was when she saw the door.

Plain wood. No window. A simple brass knob gone slightly green at the edges. It stood against the far wall as though it had always been there, solid and patient and completely impossible. There was no door in her kitchen. Not there. Not anywhere near there. She knew every inch of that room and she knew, without any doubt at all, that this door did not exist. And yet here it was, real as anything, waiting for her to decide what to do next.

The sounds were coming from behind it, and the chill that moved through her started deep in her chest before spreading outward, down her arms, into her hands, settling cold and certain in the tips of her fingers. Her heart had picked up without asking permission, thudding against her ribs hard enough that she could feel it in her throat, that telltale pulse that meant her body knew something her mind was still trying to argue with.

She didn't want to go to that door. Every rational part of her was screaming it, clear and urgent as an alarm. Don't move, don't go closer, turn around and walk away right now. She had heard those instincts before, had learned the hard way what happened when you ignored them.

Her right foot lifted and moved forward anyway.

She felt the floor rise up to meet it. Watched her left foot follow. Then her right foot again, steady and unhurried, carrying her forward one step at a time with a calm that belonged to someone else entirely. She tried to stop. She threw everything she had at her own legs, wanting them to freeze, to lock, to plant themselves and refuse. They ignored her completely. She was still in there, still watching, still screaming silently from somewhere behind her own eyes. But her body had stopped taking her calls. It moved forward the way the tide moved, inevitable and indifferent, and there was nothing she could do but go along for the ride.

The door appeared to grow as she approached. Details surfaced that she hadn't been able to see from across the room such as the grain of the wood, the small scratches near the hinges, the worn patch around the handle where countless hands had reached before hers. Dust had gathered in the corners of the frame, pale and undisturbed, and at the bottom of the door, bleeding through the narrow gap between wood and floor, came a thin line of light. Warm. Amber yellow. Flickering slightly, the way candlelight did when something moved through the air nearby.

Her hand reached out.

She watched it happen the way you watched something in a dream. She was present but powerless, a spectator in her own skin. Her fingers extended slowly, unhurried, and curled around the brass knob as though they'd done it a thousand times before. The metal was cold against her palm, colder than the air in the room had any right to make it, and she could feel everything. She could feel the smoothness of it, the slight glance where the brass had worn unevenly, the tiny imperfections beneath her fingertips that told her this was real, this was happening, and whatever was on the other side of this door was about to become her problem.

The knob turned, and the latch clicked with a sharpness that cut through the kitchen's silence like a stone through glass. For a breathless moment nothing happened. Then the door swung inward, slow and smooth, the hinges making no sound at all. It was recently oiled, some distant part of her noted, which meant someone had wanted this door to open quietly, and beyond it was darkness, and stairs, and the warm amber light she'd seen bleeding beneath the door now spilling upward from somewhere far below, reaching the lower steps but surrendering before it made it to the top, leaving the first few feet of the descent swallowed in shadow.

Cool air rose from the stairwell and wrapped around her like a change in weather. It smelled of damp earth and old stone, the particular smell of places that had never once seen sunlight, that existed entirely outside the world of ordinary things. She'd smelled it somewhere before, maybe in dreams, maybe in the back of a memory she couldn't locate. It felt ancient in a way that made her chest tighten.

The voices were clearer now. Two of them, maybe three, rising from somewhere below. Jennifer Meininger still couldn't untangle the words, but she could hear the shape of the conversation. Low. Focused. The tone of people who believed they were completely alone.

Her foot found the first step before she'd made any decision about it.

The wood was solid beneath her, shifting just slightly under her weight, releasing a faint creak that seemed enormous in the stairwell's quiet. She paused. Waited. The voices below continued without interruption. She exhaled and moved to the second step, then the third, slower now, more deliberate, placing her feet near the edges of each stair where the wood was oldest and tightest and least likely to betray her. She didn't know how she knew to do that. Which edges held, which boards would groan, how to move through a strange house in silence. But her body knew. The same body that had carried her to this door without her permission, and she was beginning to understand that trusting it might be the only option she had left.

She descended into the dark.

With every step downward the light grew stronger and the voices grew bolder, rising toward her through the dark like something alive. She was almost close enough to catch a word, almost. They hovered just at the edge of comprehension, the way a conversation did when you pressed your ear to the wrong side of a wall, familiar in rhythm but impossible to decode. The temperature had been dropping steadily since the first step, the air growing cooler and damper the further she descended, pressing against her bare arms with a chill that raised goosebumps across her skin.

She wanted badly to wrap her arms around herself, to hold some warmth against her body, but her arms hung at her sides like they belonged to someone else, hands loose and empty, and she had stopped expecting them to obey her.

The light was closing in now. She could see its source, a single bare bulb hanging from a wire at the center of the ceiling, swaying in some draft she couldn't feel from where she stood. It moved just slightly, just enough, and with each small arc the shadows around it swung in response, the whole basement shifting and breathing like a living thing that hadn't noticed her yet.

She stopped halfway down and looked out over the room, and it was larger than she'd expected. It was much larger, stretching away from the foot of the stairs in a way that didn't quite make sense given the size of the house above. The ceiling hung low overhead, close enough to feel oppressive, and the walls were dark stone, roughcut and ancient, the kind of walls that had been here long before the house was built on top of them. The swaying bulb threw its light in an uneven circle across the center of the room and left everything beyond that circle to the dark thick, impenetrable dark that gathered in the corners and along the far wall like it had been there so long it had learned to stay.

She became aware of what she was wearing in the way you sometimes did in strange places. All at once, and with a sudden self-consciousness that felt out of proportion to the moment. Her pajamas were pink. Not a subtle pink, not a grownup blush or rose, but the cheerful, unconvincing pink of drugstore valentines, the kind of color that looked perfectly reasonable in the fluorescent light of a department store and slightly absurd everywhere else. The set was two pieces.

There was a button front top with a small pointed collar and short sleeves trimmed at the cuffs with a narrow band of white lace that had seen too many washes to be pretty anymore, and a pair of wide legged bottoms that fell in soft folds around her ankles, the fabric printed with a tiny repeated pattern of white flowers so small you had to look twice to see them. The waistband was elastic, slightly twisted from sleep, and the drawstring had come half-loose on one side and dangled against her left hip.

The whole thing was cotton. It was soft and worn and familiar in the way that had been washed so many times it had forgotten its original shape and simply become hers, molded to her in the particular way that old, comfortable things did.

She was also, she noticed, completely without a robe. This bothered her in a way she couldn't entirely explain. Not because of the cold, though the air rising from below was cold enough. Something older than that. Something about standing in a strange basement in her pajamas felt like showing up to an important meeting in your underwear. It was vulnerable in a way that had nothing to do with fabric and everything to do with being caught unprepared.

She hadn't been prepared. That much was certain.

What Jennifer Meininger saw made her eyes widen with shock, and she almost screamed out loud. Kristy’s father was standing in the middle of the cellar, stripped to the waist. His powerfully muscled chest glistened with sweat and rippled as he flexed his arms and torso. He was wearing a tight pair of Levi’s trousers which clung to his bulging crotch, and Wolverine leather tan cowboy boots. He was a younger version of himself, appearing to be in his late twenties, not the seventy year old man Jennifer knew.

In one hand he held a flogger. Cowering in front of him was a pretty twenty eight year old woman with shoulder length strawberry red hair. She was dressed in a skimpy cotton gown. Jennifer then recognized that it was Kristy Blair, his daughter, and her lifelong friend. Jennifer's brain registered something strange. Something impossible. She looked at Kristy’s father and then at Kristy. Then back at Kristy’s father. They stood side by side and they looked the same age.

He should have gray at his temples. Lines around his eyes. The weight of old age in his face. But he did not. He looked young. Too young. He looked like he was in his late twenties. Maybe thirty at most. The same age as Kristy. The same age as Jennifer herself. It was impossible. He was the father and Kristy was the daughter. There should have been twenty-five years between them. A generation. The natural order of age and time.

But here they stood. Equal in time. The were both young and vital.  Jennifer's mind tried to make sense of it. She tried to find an explanation. Any kind of reason. But there was none. The wrongness of it sat heavy in her chest. It was not just strange. It was eerie. Unnatural. It violated something fundamental about the world she understood.

She stared at them. At the impossible sight. The feeling that crawled up her spine was not fear. Not yet. It was deeper than fear. It was wrong. Pure and absolute. The kind of wrongness that told her she was seeing something she should not see. Something that should not exist. Kristy’s father’s eyes glinted with menace. They were pitch black and were smoldering with evil as he stared at her.

As soon as her father ordered her to strip, Kristy gave a soft sob and began to fumble with the buttons of her dress.

Kristy Blair was wearing the kind of outfit that belonged so completely to a specific moment in time that it almost hurt to look at. The way old photographs hurt, not with sadness exactly, but with the strange grief of something irrecoverable. She had on a sundress in a shade of dusty rose that had probably been called something more exciting on the price tag, the fabric a soft polyester that caught the light in a way cotton never did, the skirt falling just above the knee in a ripple of ruffles along the hem that swayed when she moved.

The neckline was scooped and trimmed with a narrow ruffle that matched the hem, and beneath it she wore a fitted white t-shirt with short sleeves, the kind that girls layered under everything that year because the magazines had decided it was the thing to do. Around her waist, cinched over the dress in the casual, effortless way of someone who had done it a thousand times without thinking, was a wide macramé belt in cream and brown, knotted in an elaborate pattern that must have taken someone a very long time to make.

The father's heart was pounding with lust, his temples throbbing, a strange unearthly fire taking possession of his senses. With a roar of impatience, the father strode forward and gripped the front of Kristy's dress, ripping it to shreds with his bare hands. He tore the clothing right off her back until it lay in useless strips at her feet. She whimpered, but she acquiesced and let him rip the garment to pieces, leaving her completely exposed beneath the icy basement air.

Rudy Blair's evil eyes raked over the beautiful body of his twenty-eight year old daughter. Her big eyes were green and filled with terror, the irises wide and darting nervously as she watched him approach. The full pink lips of her mouth were sensuous and slightly parted, glistening with a fine gloss of perspiration as she tried to catch her breath. Her face was a portrait of delicate vulnerability, framed by soft, pale skin that flushed pink as fear flushed through her veins. Her body was a masterpiece of soft curves, with full jutting breasts capped by strawberry red nipples that stood erect against her pale flesh.

A tapering, slim waist leading down to wide, soft womanly hips and long, slender legs that trembled slightly as she tried to steady herself. Rudy Blair’s piercing black eyes darted hungrily between her legs, his gaze lingering on the intimate apex of her thighs. He grinned, a dark and predatory expression that sent a shiver of dread down Kristy's spine. She had kept her puckering pink pussy shaved, the delicate skin bare and inviting, though he paid it little mind as his attention was already fixed elsewhere.

With a guttural growl of raw lust, he reached out with his free hand and dug his fingers deep into the soft, tender flesh of her perky right breast, squeezing with agonizing force. His fingers dug cruelly into the translucent, resilient flesh, causing the mounds to bulge outward violently and spill out between his knuckles like heavy dough. He twisted her breast with sadistic delight, turning her flesh around his fingers until a small, pathetic whimper of pain finally escaped from Kristy's trembling lips.

A savage, salacious grin twisted his handsome, brooding features, his eyes darkening with desire. He released her mauled breast, his fingers leaving bright red handprints and deep indentations in the tender, bruised flesh. He stepped back to admire his work, his chest heaving as he leaned down, his voice dropping to a gravelly roar.

"Bitch, get on your hands and knees!" he commanded, his authority absolute.