Someones Watching

       Have you ever been in a room in your house all by yourself and yet, not feel alone? You are suddenly alerted, by who knows what sense, that somehow there’s some other entity in the area and its eyes are on you. The hair on the back of your neck starts to stick up like someone’s duct-taped an icicle to your spine and you look around but there’s no one there.
        Usually I chalk it up to Cupcake spying on me but when I know she’s in bed fast asleep (no doubt halfway through yet another whodunit she’ll never figure out) the sensation is unsettling to say the least. It’s not just me that has sensed this... presence in our house. Our boys have told us over the course of their lives about strange experiences, sounds and sensations they claim to have witnessed. We always did the “good parent” thing and told them it was their imaginations and they better quit stalling and go to sleep or it could go badly for their video game allotment. It shut them up at the time (a skill I have long lost) but to this day they are absolutely convinced there is, well, something, but they’re not sure what, in the house.
        Even staunch Cupcake, who’s only succumbed to nonsense once in her life (the day she agreed to marry me) and is stupendously unshakeable (unless mice are involved), has had odd experiences. When asked if she had ever noticed anything out of the ordinary, she admitted to hearing some weird, inexplicable sounds when she has been sitting home by herself (since I never take her anywhere, she had to add).“Swear you won’t tell anyone,” she confided, “because they would think I was crazy. (I bit my tongue on the crazy line... too easy.) “Shortly after our black lab, KC passed away, I am certain I heard the sounds of a dog eating from KC’s metal bowl. I turned around to where the metal bowl used to sit but I didn’t see anything that could have made that particular noise. Still, I heard it clear as a bell.”
        A chill coursed through my body as if a parade had just walked over my grave.
        “The exact same thing happened to me!” I told her, my heart pounding like the stereo of a teenager’s muscle-car. “I’m not kidding! It was exactly as you described!” We both executed a creepy-feeling shoulder twinge simultaneously.
        It’s not just weird noises, either. Things go missing in our house with alarming regularity. Sure, we share our house with two sons that couldn’t remember where they put something down to save their souls. “Nope, never seen it,” they say. “Uh huh”, I think to myself.
        Still, that doesn’t explain every incident. About a week ago I was up for work early. I was the only awake person in the house. I looked for my daily pill holder thingy where I keep it on the vanity in the bathroom. It was nowhere in sight. I searched high and low. Finally, I gave up and jumped in the shower. As soon as I emerged from the plastic curtained cabinet, my eyes immediately alighted on my pill container sitting exactly where I’d left it, on the vanity the day before.
        When I relayed the event to Cupcake, I was surprised that she wasn’t.
        “Stuff like that happens all the time to me,” she admitted airily. “It doesn’t seem particularly malevolent. What’s the big deal?”
        “Well, I get creeped out when I’m on the computer and I feel as if someone has just blown air from their lips onto the back of my head but there’s no one else in the room.” I answered, watching closely to see if she was taking me seriously, a rare event.
        “I agree, that would be a bit unsettling, but, really, what can we do about it?” she pointed out matter-of-factly. “We don’t know what “it” is. Practically everything that has ever happened can be explained away. You can’t explain a gut feeling and you can’t deny it’s there but it makes for lousy evidence to take to the authorities, whatever authorities might actually take us seriously. At most we could phone one of those stupid cable “Ghost Hunter”-type shows but what would that accomplish except to make us the laughingstocks of Calmar?”
        “Okay, fair enough,” I conceded, “there is little we can do. So what do you think it is?”
        “I’m not sure,” Cupcake looked off reflectively. “Many possibilities come to mind. It could be a person who is caught in some kind of temporal shift or alternate universe. It might be an unseen observer from another planet who does things to see our reaction. It could be all kinds of things, really.”
         “I notice you didn’t suggest it might be a ghost,” I prodded.
         “Oh don’t be silly,” she chuckled mysteriously, “You’d have to be crazy to believe in ghosts.”