The Umns

The house was 100 years old, at least.

Perhaps to a grown-up, it might have seemed small. But to the boy, it was enormous.

He was 5 years old in the home built in the middle of a desert. The ceilings stretched upward for eternity, and the staircase leading to the second story was narrow, steep and mountainous. He could barely reach the hand rail, and his small legs weren’t quite long enough that he could take a single stair in a single stride.

That trek was made multiple times a day, though; the boy’s room was on that floor, past the cabinet full of dolls, past the sewing machine that wasn’t electric, past the fire place in the great room. His was the last door on the left.

There were fireplaces, old and drafty, in two of the rooms downstairs in addition to the one outside the boy’s room. His family kept them stoked during the winters, and they warmed the bricks of the century-old home well.

Summers, though, were a different story altogether.

The boy didn’t know how an air conditioned house could feel during the height of a desert summer. He only knew it was pleasant to sit near the window where his dad had installed a portable unit that sucked in the dry heat from outdoors and transformed it into a cool, albeit minor, breeze.

The summer months were spent downstairs, as the rising heat was far too much to bear even at night.

Autumns and springs, though, were perfect throughout the house, and those were the times the boy explored. The old house held many secrets, including a tiny door in a closet that the child had only peeked into once or twice. His father had forbidden him from entering, and the boy’s imagination was constantly alight with what could be hidden inside. No doubt, it was staircase leading down to a hidden chamber where people held secret meetings and conjured fantastic plots of revenge and deceit.

It might have also have been a crawl space that offered access to a few pipes leading to the adjacent bathroom. The boy was never able to investigate properly before his family moved on to a small, far more sensible house.

There was also the man who wandered the rooms at night.

Most definitely not the child’s father, this gentleman in the tall hat was unseen but for his silhouette against the drawn curtains in the dark, a dim, orange glow cast by the streetlamp across the street providing just enough backlight to see the stranger walking and standing.

The child’s mother told him the man he saw in the upstairs rooms was just a dream. The boy remembered long ago, as measured in the years of a small child, his mother telling him that dreams were just pictures in your head when you’re asleep. They can’t hurt you, and they’re not real.

Having only encountered “pictures” in his family’s photo albums, the little boy imagined these images as literal photographs in his imagination. Some of them were lined with white borders, like the Polaroid photos his father sometimes took. Those were the good pictures, the child knew, because you got to see almost instantly how the image turned out instead of waiting until a roll of film was all used up and then dropping it off at a photo developing stand across town. Those were the lesser photos, because it took days and sometimes weeks before you could look at yourself in the picture.

For the child, the silhouetted man didn’t seem like a picture in his head. He was getting old enough to tell when something happened in his dream and when something happened when he was awake. The man came, at least the boy was fairly certain, during those waking times when the sounds of the old home were amplified as the living slept.

But that man never did any harm, so the child didn’t worry.

There really was only one thing that actually worried the boy. Unfortunately, it was something that happened almost every night without fail after his mother and father had sent him to bed and they retired to their own room downstairs.

It was the Umns.

The Umns were not a part of the house. They were an outside force. And every night, as the city went to sleep around them and the radiance from the streetlamp lit the east-facing rooms with a soft and comforting amber glow, they came.

They made their presence known only with the sounds they made.

Those noises echoed around the home, a conversation, no doubt, that was muffled through the walls. The things babbled to each other sometimes raising their voices, though no distinct words could ever be heard. Just that maddening, muffled ranting, like a group of people were engaged in lively conversation down a hall and behind a closed door. The child could never understand the chattering that encircled the house, so the only way he could think to identify them was to call them by the sounds he heard: the Umns.

In a chorus of garbled noises, the Umns gathered outside the house. The child didn’t know how many there were, but he could tell they walked around the old house over and over in some sort of enigmatic game. The boy guessed they were as tall as the home, if not taller, and probably would have been mistaken for thin, gnarled, black trees by passersby. Though it was odd how there were no lights from passing vehicles when the Umns were about.

They mumbled and circled, surveying the house, even trying to peek into the windows of the second floor. The boy had sense enough to draw the curtains closed before bed. He somehow knew that if the Umns could ever see him - or if he looked at the Umns - then he’d be theirs.

Whether they meant to kill him or take him away to wherever they go during the daylight hours, the boy didn’t know.

One thing they never did, though, was attempt to force their way inside. They only gathered, and circled, and mumbled. It was terrifying.

They knew the child was inside. They knew he could hear them. They knew their presence caused distress, and maybe it was an emotion they fed on. The boy never found out what it was they wanted from him or why they tormented him night after night.

The child’s parents didn’t believe, of course. Parents stop believing in the things that go bump in the night as soon as they’re old enough to stay up past bedtime. The boy guessed parents replaced those beliefs instead with workdays and cooking and evening television. They believed in keeping the house clean. They believed in going to stores. Perhaps it was that disbelief that kept the monsters at bay. Maybe something cannot exist if you stop believing in it,

He didn’t know how to stop believing, though. It’s not easy to stop believing in something when it refuses to leave you alone. When the sun was high in the sky and the street was bright and smattered with cars and occasional pedestrians, the child almost believed that he could stop believing.

But without fail, night would come. His parents would sleep. The Umns would arrive, laughing and barking and coughing and singing off-key melodies, all of it sounding as though it were being filtered through a pillow.

The silhouetted man never seemed to care about the Umns, and the boy wondered if ghosts can stop believing, too.

And so it went. On, and on, and on. Had it been happening for years? The boy didn’t know and had no real way of measuring the time. A child’s day is equal to several days in an adult’s life. They are living at a different speed than grownups, and what may have seemed like a year in the little boy’s life could have easily been just a month or two.

However long it was, it drove the small child to the brink of insanity.

His parents, oddly enough, were the ones to finally save him, though it wasn’t exactly their intention to free their son from the exasperating situation he was plunged into every night.

No, their goals were practical, and their ambitions were for things like air conditioning and a roof that didn’t need repairing after every winter.

It was over when the family moved.

The Umns stopped coming when the boy settled into his new and more sensible house. They didn’t follow either because they didn’t know the child had gone, or perhaps they now had no way to find him.

There were other things that found him there, of course. It wasn’t so easy to stop believing in the things that come to a person’s window in the dead of night. But the Umns were not among them.

As he grew, the beliefs were pared away, bit by bit, until he became a man who believed in things like mortgage payments, and mowing the lawn, and buying small, cheap gifts for his neighbors every Christmas.

All that time later, though, there were still a few beliefs that held fast that he kept quiet. He believed there was a man who was not his father who roamed his childhood home at night. He believed that small doors hidden inside closets can lead to wondrous places - even if those places are simply crawl spaces. And he believed in the Umns.

On nights when things are especially quiet, and the ambient noise from outside filters in through the windows and the cracks under the doors, he wonders. He wonders if there’s a child on the second story of the old house who lies awake at night, listening to the muffled noises of the tall and mysterious creatures, waiting for them to tire and leave so he can finally go to sleep.

***

It was later, much later, when the man, still a boy at heart, returned the house.

He happened to be driving on the interstate past his old hometown when the overwhelming draw of nostalgia harnessed him tightly. It held fast and would not let go. It didn’t matter that he’d been driving nearly all night, and the sun was just about to rise. It didn’t matter that his family was expecting him home after his days-long business trip to a neighboring state. It didn’t matter that he was tired and homesick and ready for the road trip to be over and done with until the next one inevitably popped up.

The only way to unleash himself from the trap would be to undo the knot at the source, he knew. His car took the exit automatically; he didn’t have control. Eventually, it stopped in front of his old home.

Dawn was just breaking, though the sun had yet to crest the eastern horizon. It was just light enough to see some of the details of the structure inhabited by a far too imaginative child so many years ago.

Years had passed, and the house still stood. It was smaller, now, and plainer than he remembered. The new owners had repainted the exterior to a gaudy lilac color, which the man did not believe fit the architecture at all.

But other than the color of the home and its relative shrinking, everything else was the same - with one exception.

Directly beneath the second-story window, where his one-time childhood bedroom was located, was what appeared to be a series of cracks. They stood out against the light purple, looking almost as if black vines had sprouted from the window. The man squinted dim light and decided to get a closer look. He glanced around him to make sure no one would see his momentary trespassing.

He stepped onto the property and up to the home. Despite the desert climate, the grass was dewey, and he could feel it dampening the sides of his sneakers. Soon, he was as close to the house as he could get, with only some boxwood bushes standing between him and the outer wall.

The house was silent. Whomever lived there now was probably still asleep. If he were in his own house at this moment, the man speculated, he certainly wouldn’t be awake at this ungodly hour.

He gazed upward.

No, those weren’t cracks. They appeared to be scratch marks - made by something with long and misshapen talons.

The window itself was open. He could see the curtain panels drawn open to either side fluttering slightly in the morning breeze. Except, no, the window wasn’t open.

It was broken.

He could see now some of the jagged glass still remained in the window frame. Instinctively, he looked down toward the ground to see if he could spot the broken glass. He reached a hand to the boxwood bush and pushed it aside as far as he could.

Behind it, there against the wall of the house, was a gnarled, black, hardwood plant. It was leafless and looked almost dead, though its bark was smooth and hard, like the flat and sharp keys on a piano.

It stood about 3 feet high.

Unlike the plants around it, though, it hadn’t gathered any morning dew. It was as if it had been placed there just moments before the man had arrived.

The oddest thing about this little tree, though, was its shape. Its base sprouted from two separate points in the ground, the two growing upward and intertwining into one solid trunk. That trunk, again, split off into three branches at the top. Two of the branches reached out to either side and then bent back inward. The third, directly on top, curled into an almost bulbous shape, leaving only one small opening near the center. The man could see the lilac wall through it.

The sky brightened just a little bit more.

The man saw the blackened plant was in the perfect shape of a little boy, his hands covering his face, and his mouth opened in a frozen scream.

As the sky brightened a bit more, he saw the marks on the grass where the morning dew had been wiped away. They were long and narrow, like the footprints of a giant stick figure man, perhaps. Dozens of them. All leading away from the little boy-plant.

The man knew then what would have happened if he dared open the curtains to investigate the Umns.