Quick note: I heard this story originally from my mother: a very shrewd woman and not someone prone to consuming idle gossip. I can’t say that I know all the facts in this case with absolute certainty, but I know my mother believed the story; and that is not something I take lightly.
Jack’s Toys
It all starts with a man named Jack Miller: A man who died suddenly and whose older brother found himself the only candidate available to come guard Jack’s suddenly empty home.
Jack had lived alone and consequently he died alone in a luxurious house just outside a small, isolated town located high in California’s Sierra foothills. By the time he was forty, Jack had made himself quite rich, but nobody liked him much. He was greedy and selfish, and when he died of a stroke at the modest age of forty-nine, he left no heirs and no friends. His early death came as a considerable shock to his older brother and to his mother, who had never expected to outlive her youngest child.
Jack’s brother, Keith, was the exact opposite of Jack in many ways: generous and kind and well-liked with many friends in the area. When Keith got a call from the local Sheriff explaining the situation, and that no deputies could be spared to guard Jack’s house through the night, Keith had reluctantly agreed to watch his late brother’s home.
They weren’t particularly close, but Keith had gotten along with his brother better than most people had; probably, in part, because Keith had never been afraid of Jack. Keith had never been afraid of much of anything. Jack had been big and strong and a bully, but Keith had been even bigger and stronger; and he had just laughed good-naturedly whenever his little brother had tried to intimidate him.
Long story short: Keith made the long drive out to his brother’s place because he knew that word of Jack’s death would be all over town by now. Everybody knew how much wealth Jack had hoarded, and some of the locals wouldn’t be above a little attempted burglary on an empty house; not if they thought they could get their hands on a $500 gold watch, or even a fifty dollar bottle of wine.
Keith reached the house around sunset and apparently just in time. Some teenagers were parked in the driveway, and they took off quick with lots of swearing when Keith approached them.
After that Keith did his best to make sure it was obvious that someone was watching the house: turning on all the outside lights and leaving his own car parked in the middle of the driveway just inside the lower gate. The less appealing the place looked as a target, the better.
Then he settled in: planning to stay awake as much as he could through the night and to take naps when he couldn’t keep awake any longer. Tomorrow he’d have time to make arrangements: get some old friends to help him move the most valuable stuff through town and into storage. Hell, make a conspicuous display of moving a bunch of empty boxes if they had to. Get all the locals talking about how Jack’s place must be “completely cleared out by now.” Then Keith could relax — Tonight, he would have to watch.
After a moment’s thought, he made his plan to sleep in the living room: both because he couldn’t quite bring himself to sleep in the bedroom where his brother had died a few hours earlier, and because it would make it easier to keep an eye on the front door.
Thankfully, after a short search, Keith managed to find some camping supplies out in his brother’s garage. He grabbed a sleeping bag and a bed roll and made himself comfortable on the living room couch. He smiled bemusedly at the name labels Jack had sewn into everything; even though the man had lived alone and never loaned anything to anybody. Jack had been like that even as a child: never one to share his toys…
EARLY early the next morning (so I am told), just after dawn, the mother got a call from Keith. The conversation, as I understand it, went essentially as follows:
“Mom!? It’s Keith. … I’m sorry Mom, but I’m not going back into Jack’s house. I don’t care if people steal everything he ever owned; I don’t care if we burn the place to the ground with everything inside it! In fact, I think maybe we should do just that!”
(a long pause)
“I tried to nap for just a little bit early this morning. Sometime around 2AM I finally dozed off. But something kept waking me. I checked outside: I thought maybe there was someone out there making noise, trying to break in, but I didn’t see or hear anybody. Eventually, I got back to sleep; but it happened again. Something startled me awake. And this time I was convinced that somebody was in the room with me. I couldn’t see anything, but I just had that feeling like someone was watching me. I got up and shone a flashlight around, and there was nothing, nobody. So I went back and crawled into the sleeping bag a third time; but before I lay down, I made sure every light in that room was on. I could feel something wasn’t right, but I told myself I was doing it to make sure that anybody outside could tell the house was occupied, … then I just lay there quietly, not sleeping, waiting to find out if I would hear anything.
Mom, I never did hear anything or see anything. But I FELT it. With the room fully lit so I could see every inch of it, I couldn’t see ANYBODY. I couldn’t HEAR anybody. But I could feel… With me staring straight through empty air, I could feel hands grabbing at me… hands pulling on Jack’s sleeping bag, … HIS hands… trying to get me out and take his damn sleeping bag back for himself!”
