I’m back at my keyboard again happy to report that I am alive. Really starting to lose my mind here not knowing if this house is alive or haunted, but it wants me dead. I can only assume this of course but I know that it wants to consume me and make me a part of it.
While troubleshooting an electrical problem with (you guessed it) a ceiling fan, I put on a brave face and climbed into my attic to check out the electrical box that the fan attaches to. I tried doing this from below but the box got wedged and wouldn’t come undone. I am deathly afraid of the attic – I can hear something moving about up there all through the night. I once dismissed it as a raccoon or something on the roof, but sometimes I see the ceiling bulge down and know its something between the rafters.
I spent several minutes standing on my ladder and rotating in place with my flashlight shining it around the surfaces and watching for any movement. Of course there was nothing up there that I could see other than the blown insulation and the gray dust that hung in the air drifting in the beam of my light and from the few vents that speckle the wooden supports and plyboard above me. I hesitated several more minutes before ascending all the way up leaving the noises of normal air below me and engulfing myself in the stifling heat of an attic in early summer.
It was almost peaceful with all the silence. The thin planks of wood that stretched between the ceiling joists helped me make decent time from the entry to the slanted and thinning eves portion of the crawlspace. It would become pitch black each time I would mistakenly use the flashlight to move some of the insulation and buried it – the vents providing zero reprieve. The seconds of extreme blackness seemed like minutes as I would shift my weight to remove the light from the fluff and reinspect my surroundings. I was dripping sweat like I never had before, sticking my shirt to my back and drenching myself. My one splayed hand and two kneed approach to getting from my point A to my point B was taking too long.
I just managed to get to the light electrical box thing when the board beneath me cracked and I quickly got to a safe beam – not wanting to fall to my demise, through the ceiling and into the kitchen. Disorienting as it is up there, it began to spin slightly clockwise, and though I perched my torch on the rafter beside me and I squatted on all fours, vertigo set in and then the fun began.
The attic exhaled and boards creaked all around me as the attic-top descended and tried to crush me where I “stood”. I could see the opening I crawled from only minutes before, not more than twenty feet away. The light that shined up from the promising cavity hit the boards and was absorbed into the grain – without my flashlight I would be in a slow labyrinth of rafter trying to make it back to the cooler air. More disheartening was the flicker of shadows below the attic doorway dancing on the press board and shingled layer above me. I was the only one home, there shouldn’t be anyone down there.
Deciding to forget the risk of falling through I just moved full throttle to the entry, planning to take my chances with whoever was below me. Sight eluded to blindness and I shoved my flashlight down to stabilize me with each bound towards the horizontal door. My attic didn’t want me to leave – halfway to the opening I witnessed the light below diminish as if it were falling away or the attic was blasting off. More grunts from the planks around me only kept me leaping forward and I reached the hatch and slid down the ladder face first and let my legs crumble on top of me raining gray insulation into my eyes.
I righted myself and reached up to grab the handle on he crawlspace cover and pulled it across to seal in the dusty glutton that is now my attic. In an almost vacuum-like seal the cover came to its normal resting spot with a slight sucking sound. Collapsing my ladder and pulling it away from the opening seemed to spur the rooftop into a frenzy and it moaned for several seconds. I can only imagine what kind of contorting and emissions it was making outside the house.
Suffice to say, I am not finishing the installation of that fan.
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