When paranoia strikes there is little chance of convincing your brain to not see every trivial event as evidence to prove what it feels to be true. The comings and goings at odd hours of the day, the whispering tones whenever another is just an ear shot away, the faint whiffs of things that one cannot place drifting from the front door step…

They seemed quite normal when we moved in eight months ago. Since the pandemic, most people kept to themselves, and our sudden relocation to the end of a dead end street from our large suburbia home brought some level of gratitude as we watched many of those we knew lose everything during that period of time.

There was no warm welcome with cookies or pie, just a friendly nod as we left at the same time of morning to drop our children off at school during the cold winter months. We never really saw them much, as we were busy trying to create a new normal in our own lives before we tried to integrate in our new neighborhood. We never saw anyone but the mother, who had large sullen eyes and brown hair that hung down framing her fragile face; the father who was tall and lanky with dark features, and a child who was about seven years old, and yet despite her parents, was a blonde as a child could be with dashing blue eyes that seemed like they were centuries old. They all have porcelain like features, and their voices were quiet like the wind on a summer night.

Our son took to their daughter quickly, excited that there was another child his age that lived next door. They had the same teacher last year, and upon returning from his first day this fall, he was so exuberant that they again shared the same class. They liked to sit during reading time and tell each other stories. Sometimes, he could come home and share some of the tales of their imagination, leaving us in wonder of the world they had created.

It all seemed relatively normal for as normal can be.

At least until October rolled around.

He came from school, looking a little more tired than usual, complaining of a slight stomach ache. Though he did not feel feverish, I could tell that he wasn’t quite right. I was relieved when he just wanted to go lay in his bed and read for the rest of the afternoon. But it happened again the next day, and again the next day.

On the fourth day, I asked him if anything was bothering him. He said that the little girl’s stories were making him feel ill. Jokingly, I asked if they were scary, but was taken aback as tears started to drip down his cheeks. I asked him to tell me one of her stories, like he use to as I washed up the dishes prior to making dinner.

He didn’t. He said he couldn’t remember any.

That’s odd, I thought to myself. He had an amazing memory for movies and stories. When I pushed a little further with curiosity, he said that he couldn’t remember because she told them in a different language.

I asked him to try, and he sputtered out a few chant like phrases that sounded Latin or of some other ancient dialect. He began to speak them faster and faster, gaining some fluidity as his memory kicked in. As he did, the air in the kitchen became stale, almost must like, and I felt a bit dizzy. He looked me in the eyes, and he could tell that instant that I knew that something was not right.

Letting the matter drop over the next day or two, my brain began to notice things I never had before. The mother, as she left the house, always walked out without saying a word as her husband looked on from the front step. As they pulled away, the blinds would quickly close. On Tuesdays, when the trash was to be collected by the city, their bin always wreaked of a heavy stench of decay, as if their cat had died again and again only to be wrapped up a disposed of. You could smell it yards away, but again, from the naked eye nothing seemed to be out of order from a bin full of kitchen scraps and plastic wrapped packaging.

As the school year went on, my son became less and less interested in school, feigning that he was sick and didn’t want to go. I spoke to the teacher several times, but she didn’t notice anything out of sorts. He mainly stuck with the neighbors daughter, she explained, and they were like two peas in a pod.

At home, his tongue grew sharper. Chalking it up to growing up and going to a new school and missing his friends, it was easy to dismiss it at first. Steadily it grew worse, until one day he began speaking words that I couldn’t understand. They weren’t curse words, but it sounded almost like he was cursing me.

Into the new year, there was a sudden shift. He wouldn’t talk or eat, but as soon as he saw the little girl and her mother in the morning, he would nod, and they would nod back. It wasn’t a nod of a friendly hello- it was the nod of an understanding of what was about to go down.

The only problem was, I had no idea what it was.