Chapter Four has arrived...

Sammy sat straight up in his bed. He felt it rumbling a bit on his floor. Some plaster dust from the ceiling fell near his feet then the shaking stopped. He turned over on his bed and tried to go back to sleep. The bed and room rumbled more violently, dropping a huge chunk of plaster onto the floor. “Whack!” He sat up again. He thought it might be an earthquake, but earthquakes almost never happened in the Buffalo area. He looked around the room and adjusted his eyes to the dark. All was quiet again. The wind in Buffalo could feel like an earthquake at times and shake a house to its foundation. He listened for the cold, howling sound of Father Winter blowing through the night. The room was silent still, and Sammy could barely feel the drafts from the old window. Not wanting his imagination to get the best of him, he slipped under the blankets on his bed and closed his eyes. The tremors started instantly. This time the bed was shaking so much that he had to hold onto the sides to stay in it. He didn’t dare make a sound. He couldn’t close his eyes. As a matter of fact, it was almost as if someone else was holding them open. “Definitely an earthquake!” he thought. Then, as if by some sort of magic, the bed began to spin slowly with Sammy in it. “What the heck is going on?” he thought as he clung to the frame looking all around him at the spinning room. The bed spun a little faster, pushing aside his dresser and some of the items in his bedroom. Then the strange noises began. He could hear a distortion of voices speaking and all manner of clocks ringing and clanging at the same time. The noises got louder as the bed spun faster and faster. Sammy was overcome with fear. Nichols or not, he was in a total state of fright. He tried to scream for his mother, but strangely no sound would come out of his mouth. He tried again. Nothing. He gripped the bed with all of his might and tried to close his eyes. The bed circled like a top spinning out of control on an old table. The unrecognizable chatter of the voices and the sound of clocks clanging grew to a deafening pitch. He felt like he could die any second.

“STOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!” he screamed as hard as he could with his mind. Suddenly, all went calm. He looked around his room. Surprisingly, everything looked the same. No plaster was on the floor and the dresser was back in its original position against the wall. He couldn’t figure out what just happened. The first thought that came to his mind was his mother and the girls. He sprang out of bed, but when he did, everything felt a little different. He had a warm and fuzzy feeling in his body and his mind was calm and tranquil. He took his father’s wristwatch from his pocket. 2:31 am. “This is peculiar,” he thought as his feet hit the floor. He couldn’t feel the cold hardwood at all. As he walked, he felt nothing in his feet and legs at all. He was moving for sure, but the sensation of the cold floor was missing. He had walked through the house a million times in his life, but never like this. As he moved room to room, he felt something was different. Everything looked like it had been before he went to bed, but something certainly felt different. He walked to the room where his mom and the twins slept and there they were, sleeping calmly. He wondered how they could have slept through such ruckus.

He walked into the kitchen and turned on the faucet. It worked just fine. Then he turned on the lights in the kitchen. The room lit up. “O.K… so maybe I was dreaming” he thought as he moved about the kitchen looking at everything. One of the girls had left a sippy cup on the table. He picked it up and rinsed it out in the sink. While rinsing, he noticed something strange. He didn’t feel the water running over his fingers. He tried hot water. Nothing. “Weird” he said to himself. He thought to go try a shower. Instantly he was standing in the shower with his clothes on. “Whooooaaaa…. Really freakin’ weird!” he said to himself. He couldn’t figure out how he got there except for the fact that he thought to try taking a shower to figure out why he couldn’t feel water against his skin. How could a simple thought lead to this? Sammy took his clothes off and got into the shower. He turned the cold water on first and couldn’t feel it at all. Then he turned on the hot water and he couldn’t feel that either. He didn’t feel the sensation of being wet, even though he was standing directly under the shower with full pressure. “How can this be?” he said. He stood under the water for nearly five minutes in a trance like state trying to figure out what was going on with his body. He could feel nothing. He started to panic and a strong sense of anxiety crept into his mind. He thought he might be very ill, or maybe, maybe…he was dead.

Instantly he was back in his bed. He gasped for air and sat straight up. He felt like he just woke up. He wasn’t wet at all. “This is getting strange,” he thought. He pulled the wristwatch out of his pocket. 2:31am. He tapped it to make sure it was working. Within twenty seconds it switched to 2:32am. Strange indeed. Sammy had spent the past ten or fifteen minutes roaming his house, playing with water, taking a shower, and freaking out… and time had virtually stopped.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and dropped his feet to the floor a second time. It was ice cold to the touch. He crept into the kitchen. The lights were on. He could hear the shower running in the bathroom. “What the…?”