Jack Follman

Tom first responded with a nervous laugh, then a hiccup, before he finally gave a soft answer.

“Something was after me. Something in that house was after me.”

I whipped around and saw nothing behind me. There was no dark figure in the room to be seen, but I could feel something there. I reached out my hand behind the couch and waved my palm around where I saw the figure on the screen, but nothing again.

That last of the wine still processing, I got up to relieve myself, but stopped as soon as I stood up next to the bed. Something was off about the room. A childish sense of fear had started to seep into my sobering mind.

Someone was in our apartment.

I immediately laid eyes upon the old man who had been in the casket, up on his feet staggering in my direction like a zombie, just about 10 feet behind me. His yellow eyes shined like a cat’s in the night and his mouth slowly dropped open as he finished another clumsy step in my direction.

Soaked from head-to-toe, I jumped up onto my feet, stood up in the knee-deep water, and looked out to the deeper water where the blue orb, looking much bigger than it had from up on the course, rested on top of the waves about 10 yards away from me.

I turned myself around in the chin-deep water. I saw what froze Sam. Swimming below the surface in the deep end, going from side-to-side was a dark figure. About the size of Sam and I, whatever it was swam swiftly and seemed to have no interest in coming up for air.

Some called it snorkeling, some called it scuba diving but it didn’t matter, they were the same thing… killing yourself to live.

I don’t really know if I was surprised or not that Chase killed himself at the time. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was depressed or not. You could say I loved him in the good Christian way a cousin loves a cousin they see a few times a year, but that was about it.