The Two Charlies

So, I was about five years old, and my mom had been invited to a party at this big old fancy house in town. She brought me along, not realizing that it was supposed to be adults only. The host was really nice about it, though, assuring her that I'd be perfectly safe playing in the foyer by the stairs. This was back in the seventies, where parental hyper vigilance had yet to take root, and the general rule of thumb was that what didn't kill your kids made them stronger, and no one thought twice about leaving an overly curious kindergartner to play alone by herself in a strange house.

In an attempt to make me feel welcome, the guy even gave me a present that was intended for some other kid, not that I cared. I mean, when you're five, a present is a present, and I wasn't about to feel guilty for taking another kid's gift, especially when I opened it to find my all-time favorite toy ever, Weeble-Wobbles:

                           ( Petty theft is nothing. At five, I would've cut a bitch over these things.) Pinterest.com


So there I was, all alone , smacking my brand new Weeble-Wobbles against the fancy marble floor in attempt to discover how far from the floor I could drop them before they cracked open, finally freeing the oddly happy little children from their plastic egg prisons, while all of the adults had their totally-boring-party- that-I-didn't-even-want-to-go-to-anyway behind a pair of massive oak doors. Once I'd decided that even dropping them with my hand raised as high as I could reach while standing on tippie toes still wasn't high enough to break them, I proceeded to utilize the big fancy winding staircase, completely forgetting my promise to my mother that I would, under no circumstances, climb the stairs.

Methodically, I started dropping Weeble-Wobbles from every other stair and then climbing back down to see if the impact had done any damage. I'd made it about halfway up when I heard movement from upstairs. Curious and faintly hoping I'd found someone to play with, I walked up a few more steps to see who it was, but all I saw was a shadow that faintly resembled a man.

                   ( He looks like he might know how to smash a Weeble-Wobble...)   regolish.blogspot.com


In my previous post, I talked about seeing people that others couldn't since the age of three. Two years in, I'd grown accustomed enough to it that I wasn't immediately terrified of a black shadowy ghost figure. In my world, unless they were actively being mean, strange humanoid creatures were just like everyone else, which in the eyes of a little kid is a potential playmate. Up to this point, only the Crazy Hippie Lady had ever directly interacted with me, but I wasn't afraid of the others, and so I didn't hesitate to climb up the stairs towards the figure, calling out a greeting.

I only made it a couple of steps before a man's voice coming from behind me stopped me dead.
" You don't wanna go up there. That's Charlie, and he's not very nice."

Turning around, I found myself face to face with a smiling young, slim, pale man with short dark hair. " Why is he not nice?"

" He doesn't like all these people being in his house.", he answered. " He's lived here for a long time."

I was confused about why having people in his house would make him angry, but I didn't ask the young man why. Instead, I asked, " Well, who are YOU?"

The young man smiled again. " Well, my name is also Charlie and I live here, too."

I was starting to think he was teasing me. " Why are ya'll both named Charlie?"

The young man shrugged. " It's a family name. That Charlie is my great-granddaddy."

That made sense, so I nodded. " But you're nice Charlie and he's mean Charlie."

He nodded. " That's right, so I think you should stay downstairs and play til your mama comes back, okay?"

I looked back up the stairs at " Mean Charlie", who'd managed to disappear during our conversation. Without looking back at "Nice Charlie", I asked, " Well, will YOU play with me?" He didn't answer, and when I turned around, he was gone. I was disappointed, assuming he'd gone back to party with the other adults, but resigned myself to being alone, again. For a brief second, I considered going upstairs to try and reason with " Mean Charlie", but after remembering the incident with " Crazy Hippie Lady", I decided it might be a bad idea. Instead, I resorted to chucking my Weeble-Wobbles against the wall until my Mom came and got me a few minutes later.

When we got in the car, I told my Mom about the two Charlies. She gave me a weird look and replied, " I think somebody was playing a trick on you. They had a son named Charlie, but he died in a motorcycle accident before you were born." After that little revelation, I could only sit there in stunned disbelief and rising terror. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that the people who only I could see were actually DEAD, and I'd just spent the evening having a conversation with one of them.