This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/IvankoKostiuk on 2024-09-20 12:19:12+00:00.

When I was 8 my family spent a summer living in some town called Mayor’s Income British Columbia. It’s just one of those ‘blink and you miss it’ towns along Highway 16 that’s little more than a gas station tucked into the mountains. It’s not on many maps. We moved because that’s where my Grandpa lived, and he was dying. End stage Alzheimer’s. I don’t think that’s how a doctor would put it, but that’s what it was.

My parents were not nurses (I’m still not sure where the nurse came from), but my parents just thought it was a good idea for my older sister and me to spend as much time with our Grandpa as we could, while we could. It was a nice idea, but I wish they hadn’t.

Every time we came over, there was the same routine. Grandpa opened the door as much as the chain would let him, he’d look at us, he’d look at the pictures on the mantel, then he’d let us in. Every single time. I don’t know how he trained himself to do that, but he did. There were pictures of everyone: us, my parents, the nurse, the guy who delivered the groceries, and each one had a label with the name.

In the summer, my sister and I went over every day for atleast a bit. Maybe just lunch. Maybe all day. A few times we slept over.

You ever been in a forest at night? There are some weird sounds. But every time we heard something weird, if Grandpa was still up, he’d say “it’s just a deer” or “it’s just a forest cat”. A couple of times, he said “I don’t know what that is.” And once “that shouldn’t be out there.”

The house backed up to the forest. Just trees as far as you can see covering rolling hills and mountains that looked like they went so high they just merged into the sky. Like you could walk up a mountain and go into a cloud or space.

I really, really, wanted to go play in the forest, but Grandpa said no.

Well, ok, he didn’t so much say “no” as about have a panic attack the time I brought it up, so I never mentioned it again.

I asked my mom about it when we went home. She just looked sad and told us not to go into the woods. After a bit of prodding (you know how kids can be), she finally told us that Grandpa has always thought ‘something’ was living in the woods, but mom never figured out what was supposed to be there. Just ‘something’, I guess.

So, I lied to you a bit ago. See, sometimes, Grandpa would open the door, see us, recognize who we were, open the chain, then check the pictures on the mantel. He did that a few times with the nurse too, and once when he ordered groceries. And this wasn’t like he did things out of order, this was like he recognized who we were, then remembered he was supposed to check. He opened the door and said “how are we Katy and Ivan?”, then checked the mantel. He knew our names without looking on the mantel.

But that should have been impossible. When we first started coming he did not know what time it was or what day it was and he kept trying to go to work. Thinking about it now, the part that messed me up the most was how often he would ask us where his parents were. Катерино, де моя мама? Іванко, де мій тато? Катерино, де моя мама?

Oh, sorry, I should mention Grandpa’s parents were both Ukrainian refugees and he didn’t learn English until he was a teenager. A few times, when we first started coming, he would slip back into Ukrainian. I don’t speak much of the language, but there’s a few phrases I know, and “Ivanko, where is my dad?” is one of them.

But, here’s this man who kept forgetting that his mother died forty years ago, but three months later started recognizing his grandchildren? Is that how Alzheimer’s is supposed to work?

One day he opens the door to the chain and it’s different. Like, I think he recognized us, but thought he wasn’t supposed to. He looked back at the mantel, looked at us, looked at the mantel again, looked to us. Then he looked at the couch, and there was some fucking kid sitting there. The kid shook his head ‘no’, and Grandpa shut the door on us.

Maybe it’s because she’s the older sibling, but my sister is the assertive one. I wanted to call our parents, but my sister insisted on waiting in the tree line on the side of the house (so we could see both doors) for that kid to leave. Not sure what she wanted to do after that, but I’ll tell you this: my first memory is her punching me in the face hard enough to give me a bloody nose.

The kid did end up leaving the house, but just to the backyard with Grandpa.

My sister, like I said, is the assertive one. The leader. The one with A Plan. If anyone is going to start a pyramid scheme, it’s her. If anyone’s going to go bankrupt in one, it’s me.

So my sister grabs a stick and runs up to the front door with me lagging behind. She opens the door and uses the stick to undo the chain.

The pictures were all missing. Well, not missing. The frames were there, but the pictures were all of that fucking kid. It didn’t occur to me right away, but the pictures were all of the kid in the same outfit he was wearing that day, and all of the backgrounds were from in Grandpa’s house.

My sister had me be lookout while she used an ottoman to get a closer look at the pictures. What she told me is that the labels were just ripped off and the original pictures were behind the ones of that kid. And behind the pictures, laying face down, was another picture in the same frame. And it was that kid, in the house, in a different outfit, and there was no label.

Grandpa was pointing out the different flowers in the garden (cornflowers, волошка, he had so many) and that kid turned his head 180° around like a goddamn owl and looked me right in the eyes. I screamed and think I was about to wet myself. My sister and I bolted, but not before we saw the inside of that kid’s mouth.

Rows and rows and rows of teeth straight back to his throat. Like a shark or something.

We were supposed to be home for dinner, so we just waited in the tree line for our parents to pick us up.

My sister and I never went back. We tried to explain what happened, sort of, but our parents didn’t believe us. But we were so freaked out that they thought something had to have happened. They tried to get ahold of the nurse, but couldn’t. Our parents ended up deciding that visiting Grandpa was too much for us, so they never had us go back.

My mom got her brother to come up and take over watching Grandpa. He lived in the area anyways.

Grandpa was dead a month later.

My uncle said Grandpa’s health declined fast. He almost immediately went back to not knowing people’s names or recognizing people and started speaking only in Ukrainian.

He had a doctor’s appointment and my uncle was supposed to drive him, but somehow got the new nurse to do it. He was supposed to get an MRI, but he got confused and scared. The hospital called my uncle, but he insisted he could not go because he had work. The hospital got him into the MRI, somehow, but he had a heart attack and died. My sister says it was out of spite. I’m not sure she’s wrong considering somethings I know about how Grandpa raised my mom.

That kid wasn’t at Grandpa’s funeral. We didn’t find the pictures of the kid when we cleared out his house.

Grandpa looked ‘rusted’. That’s how my mom put it. Rusted. Corroded. Like something corrupted what was left of him. I’m not sure if that’s how I’d put it, but there was something wrong with him. Something makeup couldn’t cover, and I bet that fucking kid is responsible.

There’s a reason I decided to post this.

My mom owns the house in Mayor’s Income BC. My parents decided they wanted to sell it, so my mom went up over the summer to assess the situation and start getting it ready. She called me three times one day to tell me the same story about meeting a ‘nice young man’ my age. Three times. Because she kept forgetting she already told me.

Dad talked her into going to a doctor after she got lost going to a hardware store and ended up driving into a creek. She has Alzheimer’s.