Some memoir type story whingdings I have been tinkering with:


131

Eighteen steps. That was it. Just eighteen. She had counted them too many times to remember. The fourth one creaked like a bone when you stepped on the right, the ninth one sagged and she had been instructed never to step directly in the middle lest her foot be the lucky one to break through the wood and slice up her ankle. She lived in a perpetual state of fear of this, not for the pain but for the trouble she would be in were she to break the step.
Eighteen steps to the top where the light was. Where her sister already waited. They were not permitted to use the light at the bottom of stairs; it would have to stay on all night so they rockscissorpapered and she usually lost. One would then get to run up the stairs, illuminated by the yellow, papery glow and the other would have to go it in the dark. She usually hummed “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”; it was her anti-apparition hymn. She found that if she hummed it just loud enough that it drowned out the nervous buzzing that accompanied her fears. Going to the bathroom in the middle of the night was something she rarely allowed herself to do because then she couldn’t hum out loud, couldn’t let her Grandmother hear her facing her fears in such an infantile way.
Her sister hissed something unintelligible from the top of the stairs. It was no less frightening up top. When you made it upstairs you had to dart past the Pumpkin Room, squeezing your eyes as not to see the unearthly hanging wedding dresses, the Victorian dolls lolling on mini rocking chairs, their porcelin faces just visible in the gloom. She remembered when she had first approached them, unable to be wary, not knowing that when she lifted one up she would see that the glass eyes had become dislodged from the lids and had fallen back into the heads, leaving black voids. It was an early warning to be more careful in the house, that things were not as benign as they may seem.
Once past the Pumpkin Room you had to be careful to avoid the Pine Room on the right with it’s mammoth pine desk and white canopied bed. If you made the mistake of going in the room, of peering around the dust, you would feel an almost hesitant suspending of time, that the world had gone on and left the room behind. Shadow boxes lined one wall and on the other hung two black silhouette portraits of the girls’ mother and uncle when they were young, when the house had been vibrant and alive. Far more terrifying was what you saw as you moved closer to the bed; a crudely sketched profile, drawn in black. It was supposedly the girls’ uncle, a hapless girlfriend had sketched it twenty-five years ago as he slept, mouth slightly agape. It floated on the wall rather aimlessly as the bed had been moved for many years now.
Eighteen steps. They stretched up, lost in the dark gloom.