So …

I was back in the little house on Todd Circle in Laurinburg that I bought after the divorce, and for some reason I’d redone the back bedroom into a painting studio. I was working at the easel — painting something bright and colorful and abstract — and suddenly the easel floated off the floor.

I looked down and there were these vivid yellow cross things (they looked like crossed school rulers lying on edge) pushing up through the floor, then sliding down through the wood again and out of sight. Very solid looking, but they left no marks or holes in passing. I moved the easel because I didn’t want to have it float up again and dump my painting; then I stood on top of the place where the easel had been. And the yellow cross thing pushed up through the floor again beneath my feet, accompanied by three or four others scattered through the room. It lifted me right off the floor.

Puzzled, but not yet afraid, I walked out of the bedroom into the kitchen. My mother was there, sitting at the table and drinking tea, and my two older kids were playing on the floor — both were really little again, about the ages they were when we first moved into the place.

"Did you notice anything … funny … about the floor?" I asked.

"Yes," my mother said. "Your house is haunted, and you have a dead guy buried under your bedroom."

I woke up, chilled. See, when I first moved into that house, I got rid of the carpet in that back bedroom (my room) because it was this dirty, hideous, bilious, green, … well, anyway. I rolled it up and dragged it outside. On the floor, hidden under one edge of it, I found about six Polaroids of a young man’s crotch. The young man was slender, dressed in jeans, sitting. But the photos were taken of waist to thigh only, from a couple of different angles. Um … bulge shots. At the time I thought, "Ewww, who were the creepy people who lived here?" and dumped the pictures.

But I crawled under that house all the time to work on the damned furnace. It was an old oil furnace, required restarts a couple times each winter. I never crawled down to the end under my bedroom. But the dirt under the place was mostly sand, very soft.

And now, ten years after I last lived there, I wonder … was WAS up with those creepy photos? And was there anything under my bedroom?

Last night I dreamed I had an audience with the Queen of England, and out of gratitude, she gave me a gift — an adjustable paper ring, white, stamped with red ink that said “Compliments of the Queen of England.” She then sat in a throne above a long line of cars and threw similar white paper rings into the back of each as the car drove by her throne. Royalty on the drive-thru plan.

Further, I dreamed that Matt and a score of calendar hunks, dressed in red bikini briefs, were doing a beefcake dance down a giant spiral staircase. Stranger yet, the beefcake and the Queen of England were connected in a way that was incredibly logical and sensible in the dream, but that I can’t get my mind around now. (Unless I was responsible for bringing the all-male cabaret to the Queen of England, for which she was grateful … but I know that wasn’t it.) I’m left this morning with a weird sense of “What the hell?”

So …

My 19-year-old daughter, my younger son and I are sitting in my office, which is a loft at the top of the stairs. She’s working on her book (which she would never be doing in my office, but let that go), he’s sitting on the floor drawing, and I’m sitting on the floor right at the top of the stairs critting her romance novel manuscript. One of those rotating fans on tall poles is blowing. (We don’t have one of those upstairs, but let that go, too.)

My son starts to sing something — a typical little kid song — and my daughter turns around and says, “That’s really creepy. I was just writing that song into the story.”

I laugh. “Must be the upstairs ghost talking to him.”

The fan starts to blow harder — hard enough that a few of the pages that I’ve been working on for my daughter go fluttering down the stairs. She jumps up to retrieve them.

The fan blows even harder — now it’s beginning to scoot me across carpeted floor, toward the stairs, though my son, sitting right in the path of the fan, is untouched by this wind. At the last instant when I can still reach him, I shout my son’s name, reach out and grab the hand he holds out, and then yank him free of something that has him anchored to the floor where he’s sitting. I hurry both of us downstairs.

Upstairs, the wind turns into a gale, and above it a disembodied voice shouts, “Hey, bring him back here!”

I woke up at this point, fifteen minutes before my alarm went off. Am sitting in the office now, with the tiny floor fan blowing behind me, and I have to tell you I thought twice before I turned the damned thing on.